Abstract
This paper estimates the effect of obtaining US citizenship on individual-level measures of productivity for foreign-born doctoral recipients from US universities. Becoming a US citizen results in the removal of barriers such as access to public sector occupations and to some sources of government-sponsored research funding which are hypothesized to increase the productivity of foreign-born scientists. We utilize panel data from the Survey of Doctoral Recipients from 1993 to 2013 and individual fixed effects models to control for selection bias in the naturalization decision. Our results indicate that becoming a naturalized citizen increases wages and several measures of academic productivity. In support of our argument, we find that foreign-born workers who naturalize are more likely to utilize research funding from a government agency, but not more likely to work for the government post-naturalization.
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Source: Current Population Survey Data 1994–2015
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Notes
The number of foreign-born students rose from 7724 to 13,739 compared to US citizens which rose from 19,002 to 23,796.
Exact numbers are 68% for a five-year stay rate in 2011 and 68% for a 10-year stay rate. These are higher for graduates from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, with 79% five-year stay rate for computer science and 77% five-year stay rate for computer/electrical engineering.
After graduation, students have 17 months to obtain employment under a H-1B visa. The H-1B visa permits working in the USA for 3 years (renewable once), and the worker must be sponsored by the employer for permanent residency to remain in the USA beyond this period. Note that there are exceptions to this pathway, including marriage to a citizen.
These stylized facts are also present in our sample, as displayed in Table 2.
We are thankful for a comment from two anonymous referees that noted that some groups are exempt from these requirements such as individuals 50 years of age or older and permanent residents with tenure of 20 years or greater.
The fees for naturalization have risen over the period studied (1993–2013), from $90 to $595 (see Gelatt and McHugh 2007). There is a sharp increase in the year 1999 (from $95 to $225), and another spike in 2008 from $330 to $595 due to backlogged naturalization applications and the introduction of a computerized application process.
Note that though 1993 is the beginning of our sample period for the analysis, 1994 is the first year that the CPS asked respondents about naturalization.
It is important to note that the skill composition and skills possessed by immigrants are critical in the analysis of the effect of immigration on innovation. For example, studying the general pool of immigrants in Italy, Bratti and Conti (2018) find no effect of immigration on innovation even after separately estimating by skill level. This finding implies that the results for the USA may be driven by the prevalence of immigrants trained in STEM fields.
Thus, higher citation counts are typically an accurate indicator of a highly innovative patent.
However, we note that while Borjas (2007) finds limited displacement effects for the average doctoral student, he does find negative displacement effects for white native male students in particular.
This is equivalent to about 10 years.
Foreign-born workers who marry an American spouse can obtain citizenship after 3 years of permanent residency. Though we cannot observe the actual pathway to citizenship, we only observe 5% of naturalized individuals become citizens before the five-year residency requirement.
We thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
We use a log transformation of the dependent variable in our preferred specification rather than a count data model because our empirical strategy uses high-dimensional fixed effects. As a robustness check, we estimate a negative binomial model and specifications with log (Y + 1) as the dependent variable with qualitatively similar results.
In this case, the fixed effects model is equivalent to a first difference specification.
Due to the smaller sample of individuals who report applying for a patent (143 employed in academia, 436 employed in private industry, and 20 employed in the federal government), we do not report estimates by academic/industry subsamples for the effect of naturalization on patent applications.
Note that 67% of our academic subsample reports the receipt of government funding at at least one time period, compared to only 39% of private industry employees.
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Crown, D., Faggian, A. Naturalization and the productivity of foreign-born doctorates. J Geogr Syst 21, 533–556 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-019-00301-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-019-00301-6