Immigration policy debates currently focus on restricting immigration in favor of the highly skilled with the assumption that highly skilled immigrants will be better able to join the labor market and contribute to the economy. However, few studies empirically test the impact of immigrant selection policy by comparing labor market outcomes of immigrants from a single origin in multiple destinations. Fewer still address how race (specifically blackness) may impact the utility of these selection policies. This paper fills this gap by determining Ethiopian immigrants’ labor force participation, occupational status, and self-employment in the United States and Israel—countries with and without immigrant selection policies respectively. We find that Ethiopians experience similar labor market disadvantages relative to the native-born in both countries. These results indicate that rather than selection policy being the driver of labor market success, racial discrimination likely plays the largest role in determining Ethiopian (black) African immigrants’ labor market incorporation in both places.

当前的移民政策辩论集中在限制移民方面，以高技能人士为前提，并假设高技能移民将更有能力加入劳动力市场并为经济做出贡献。但是，很少有研究通过比较来自多个目的地的单一来源的移民的劳动力市场结果来通过经验检验移民选择政策的影响。很少有人讨论种族（特别是黑度）如何影响这些选择政策的效用。本文通过确定埃塞俄比亚移民在美国和以色列（分别有和没有移民选择政策的国家）的劳动力参与，职业地位和自营职业来填补这一空白。我们发现，相对于这两个国家的本地人而言，埃塞俄比亚人经历了类似的劳动力市场劣势。