Immigrant Exporters, English Dominance, and International Trade

Ivan Light, Min Zhou, and Rebecca Kim

University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract

Investigating the relationship between immigration, middleman minority status, transnationalism, and U.S. foreign trade, the authors assembled a census-based data file that contains aggregate-level variables for 88 foreign born groups by national-origin between 1980 and 1990. They regressed immigrant characteristics and immigration volume upon time-lagged import/export statistics from the same 88 nations between 1985 and 1995. Results show the independent influence on exports of immigrant entrepreneurship, transnationalism, and middleman minority status. But these variables, exhaustively derived from the existing literature, had no effect on U. S. imports; they only affected exports. The authors propose that the discrepancy between imports and exports arises because of the dominance of English as a world business language. In this situation, foreigners need no help from immigrants when they export to the United States; but native-born, monolingual Americans need the help of bi-cultural immigrants when they export. The empirical results suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs enhance the United States' exports, and thus reduce the United States' balance of payments deficit.

 

Immigrant Exporters and International Trade

Disaporas are ethno-national communities scattered around the globe but in contact with one another as well as with their homeland (Armstrong, 1976; Cohen, 1997: 185). The putative homeland constituted the hub of the ethnic diaspora. Thus defined, a diaspora was and is a geographical structure that mainly characterized middleman minorities (Cohen, 1971). Middleman minorities are historic trading peoples that undertake commercial functions wherever they reside (Light and Gold: 2000: 6-8). Only middleman minorities had the cohesiveness to endure prolonged residence in diasporas without acculturation into host societies (Kieval, 1997). Current research on transnationalism (Lever-Tracy and Ip, 1996; Lie, 1995; Chik, 2000) returns to many of the concerns that animated older research on historical diasporas, but, by emphasis upon process rather than structure, opens the field of study to groups that are not historic middleman minorities. Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton define transnationalism as "processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement." Immigrants who build such social fields they dub "transmigrants."

Transmigrants are resident in at least two societies between which they shuttle frequently enough to remain active participants in both, but full participants in neither. This life style enables transmigrants to become comfortably bi-cultural. In an era of globalization, it is often claimed, transnationalism is easier to maintain than it was earlier (Cohen, 1997: 176). Before globalization, so the argument goes, immigrants just assimilated to host societies; in the United States, assimilation meant English mono-lingualism within three generations; Canada may have been less assimilationist. In the United States, assimilation was less than fully voluntary. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, repeated campaigns of Americanization vilified foreign language speakers, belittled foreign cultures, and deprecated hyphenated ethnic identities (Higham, 1988). Iimmigrants assimilate more slowly now than earlier. Nonetheless, in the United States, resisting assimilation still means resisting English mono-lingualism (Portes and Hao, 1998).

In the past, diasporic communities routinely exploited the opportunities for international business that diasporas afford (Cohen, 1971; Light, Bhachu, and Karageorgis, 1993: 38-43; Moallem, 1996; Laguerre, 1998). Middleman minorities were frequently international traders too. This involvement arose because bi-cultural people, who have, additionally, international social networks, have serious natural advantages in trade promotion (Collins, 1998: vol 2, 398-399; Lever-Tracy, et al., 1991: xi, 113). First, such people more easily notice the business opportunities that cultural frontiers generate. Second, such people have the international social capital that supports international business (Fukuyama, 1995; Walton-Roberts and Hiebert, 1997; Wong, 1998: 95). For example, movie theaters in China until recently did not serve popcorn, which is not a traditional Chinese food. Noticing an opportunity, Chinese students abroad initiated the exportation of popcorn to China whose movie theaters now sell popcorn.

Globalization now offers diasporas to transnationals, who are not historic middleman minorities, thus expanding the share of immigrants who can notice and exploit international trading opportunities (Cohen, 1997: 176). As globalization knits world markets, opportunities for trade increase as does the importance of trade (Wolff and Pett, 2000: 35). In the United States of America, the share of exports in national income rose from 4 percent to 7 percent between 1950 and 1990. The share of merchandise exports in the output of manufactured goods, a more revealing ratio, increased over the same period from 6 percent to nearly 20 percent (The Economist, 1997), and other countries have seen comparable changes. Exports now account for more than 20 percent of U.S. economic growth. Exports create more than 11 percent of the Nation's jobs (Rondinelli, Johnson, and Kasarda, 1998:75).

For these reasons, Silj and Cross (1999: 135) declare that transmigrant entrepreneurs no longer promote a "second-rate form of capitalism" as Weber and Marx believed (Light and Gold, 2000: 6-7). Instead, they claim, transnational traders are "the forefront of new economic ties."

If so, tranmigrant entrepreneurs presumably caused some of the United States' increased international trade since 1970, as Kotkin (1996) claims, but the evidence is still only fragmentary. A generation ago, Swamy (1981: 142) already declared international migration "a major global economic force" that the trade literature "cannot continue to ignore." Farrell (1993:84) raised the same complaint. Unfortunately, despite all this sage advice, proof is still lacking. Therefore, we must still piece together the evidence that links trade and immigration in the United States. Case studies report that immigrants are active in international trade. For example, Min (1990) found that the modal occupation of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs in Los Angeles was importing from Korea. Similarly Tseng (1996, 1995, 1994: 180) discovered the substantial role of Taiwanese immigrants in the import/export of computer hardware and software between the USA and Taiwan.. Yoon (1997: 43) declared also that, "international trade is one of the fastest growing business opportunities in the Asian American community." Even journalists (Torres, 1997; Takahashi, 1998; Romney, 1993; Lesher, 1998) have now caught up with this story.

Although case studies opened this problem for exploration, a major contribution, we seek general relationships between transnationalism, migration, and international trade, not just individual cases. The first systematic evidence bearing on trade and immigration that we found was that of Dicken (1992: 448), who noticed that international labor migration from nine countries in 1981 was associated with increases in the sending countries' earnings from merchandise exports in 1988. However, the only truly general research linking immigration and international trade is the doctoral dissertation and subsequent journal publication of David Gould (1990, 1994). Gould modeled the merchandise imports and exports of the United States and Canada as a function of immigration received from sending countries. Merchandise exports "consist of government and non-government shipments of merchandise (goods, not services) to foreign destinations" (Bailey and Bowden, 1985: 9).

An economist familiar with the sociology of ethnic business, Gould proposed that immigration increases foreign trade for several reasons. First, immigrants obtain cultural fluency in the country of destination, thus reducing transaction costs for any international trade. Second, immigrants import familiar consumer goods from their countries of origin. In his study of 47 immigrant sending nations and both Canada and the United States, Gould (1990: 145) found "a strong positive relationship between bilateral flows of exports and immigration and a weak positive relationship between immigration and bilateral flows of import." Gould also found a positive relationship between the volume of immigration,, skill levels of the immigrants, the immigrant group's average duration of settlement abroad, and lagged increases in trade volume. That is, in both Canada and the United States, the more and the better skilled the immigrants from any country, and the longer they had resided abroad, the more the international trade that later developed between the

Social sciences also had no paradigmatic reason to expect a direct relationship between immigration and trade. Social science could explain a direct relationship between diasporas and trade, or, if globally minded, between transnationalism and trade, but social science had no explanation of a direct relationship between immigration volume and trade. After all, even if globalization has increased transnationalism, all immigration is not yet transnational. Additionally, the social science research tradition expected a positive effect of transnational entrepreneurship upon both imports and exports, not just on exports as Gould reported. Indeed, having reviewed the literature, we conclude that social science still cannot provide any explanation for this result, a limitation this paper will begin to rectify.

Very much in Gould's debt for his pioneering work, we have broadened the hypotheses beyond those Gould tested in order to access the social science research issues his work opens up. Following Gould, we stipulate that immigrants import familiar goods from their homeland, a practice Gould called a "preference effect." We also agree with Gould's assessment of the transaction cost advantages of bi-culturalism. However, in addition to replicating these points, already tested by Gould, we wish to test three other possibilities. First, we hypothesize that more entrepreneurial immigrant groups and historic middleman minorities will impact imports and exports more than less entrepreneurial immigrants or non-middleman minorities. This difference arises because middleman minorities have cultural traditions of entrepreneurship that other minorities lack. Whatever advantages of cultural marginality all transmigrants share, and net of class composition, middleman transmigrants have the additional advantage of historic endowment in entrepreneurship as well as transmigrancy and should, for that reason, outperform non-middleman transmigrants. This hypothesis contradicts the common opinion that cultural variables do not permit prediction (Portes and Rumbaut, 1990: 73).

Second, we hypothesize that, net of middleman minority status, immigrant entrepreneurs promote bilateral foreign trade with their homelands. Therefore, immigrant groups with high entrepreneurship should impact foreign trade more than less-entrepreneurial immigrant groups and out of proportion to the sheer volume of immigration from their homeland. Even a few immigrant entrepreneurs can find and fill opportunities in foreign trade; large numbers of skilled immigrants and even larger numbers of unskilled will not contribute additionally to this purpose once the immigrant entrepreneurs are in place. The quality of the immigration matters, not just its quantity.

Third, we hypothesize that bi-cultural immigrants increase foreign trade net of middleman minority status and net of immigrant entrepreneurship. Bi-cultural immigration of non-middleman minorities is virtually synonymous with transnationalism. Immigrant bi-culturalism increases trade net of immigrant entrepreneurship because bi-cultural immigrants can obtain trade-promoting management jobs in firms owned by native-born Americans. Indeed, broker firms already exist that feed bi-cultural immigrant employees to American exporters.

Fourth, we hypothesize, following Gould, that the volume of immigration from any country will increase the United States' trade volume with that country net of entrepreneurship effects, middleman minority effects, and transnationalism effects. Replicating this finding would suggest that Gould's transaction cost effects depend on the quantitative volume of immigration whereas the separate effects of entrepreneurship, middleman minority status, and of transnationalism depend upon qualitative features of the migration. That is, a migration stream might be large, but lack entrepreneurs; or it might be small but rich in entrepreneurs. In the first case, any effects on trade would stem from the sheer size of the immigration stream; in the second, they would stem from the entrepreneurship of the immigrants. Obviously, a complete explanation would require one to invoke both the qualitative and the quantitative features of migrations.

In summary, our research combines the hitherto separate debates about the effects on trade of immigration volume, of transnationalism, of middleman minority status, and of immigrant entrepreneurship. This merger permits us to evaluate the entire debate, not just one feeder tradition. Second, the research design permits theoretical discrimination. If the four variables affect trade, as we hypothesize, we can measure the size of their relative effect. If a variable has no effect, the failed variable may be discarded in subsequent theoretical discussions of these issues. Any of these findings would strengthen and specify the current literature's theoretical inventory. Third, if all we find is immigrants importing food products from their homeland, yielding a larger imports bill, we have not found these interesting theoretical effects in this phenomenon. Therefore, it would be possible for empirical results to contradict all our hypotheses, and that negative possibility is a desideratum of research design. Finally, our results are policy-relevant because they affect the economic case for immigration.

Data and Methods

We assembled a census-based data file that contains a set of aggregate-level variables for 100 national-origin groups from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census of the Population (5% PUMS) and time-lagged import/export statistics from the same 100 sending nations between 1975-84 and 1985-94. We utilized OLS analyses to examine how bilateral foreign trade is affected by immigration and immigrant characteristics and to test our four hypotheses discussed above. The dependent variable for the import model is the percentage change in imports from each immigrant-sending country in the ten-year period 1985-94 relative to 1975-84, the baseline. Likewise, the dependent variable for the export model is the percentage change in export during this same period. These two dependent variables quantify changes of raw and unadjusted dollar volume of mercantile trade in the decade. Our OLS regression models predict that change in imports or exports is a function of the volume of immigration, immigrants' transnationalism, immigrants' middleman status, and immigrant entrepreneurship.

Our measure of the volume of immigration volume is the absolute change in the total number of foreign born persons within each sending country's cohort between 1980 and 1990. That is, we subtracted the number of foreign born persons from each sending country present in the United States in 1980 from the number of foreign born persons of that country present in 1990. In effect, we related this measure of the change in immigration volume between 1980 and 1990 a lagged change in trade volume between 1985-94. This lag imposes the causal sequence -- "immigration causes trade" rather than its plausible opposite -- "trade causes immigration."

We measure transnationalism by the percentage of immigrants from each sending country who were "very fluent" in English in 1990. Immigrants "very fluent" in English are presumably very fluent as well in their native language. True, immigrants "very fluent" in English include some people from English-speaking countries whose native language is English. These immigrants might be monolingual English speakers rather than bi-linguals. Mono-lingual native speakers of English could be transmigrants to the extent that English speaking countries have significantly different cultures. For example, Americans do not understand cricket, and the British do not understand baseball, but both nations are English-speaking. Someone who understands both games is to this extent bi-cultural even if that person is a mono-lingual English speaker. Nonetheless, language is an important component of bi-culturalism, and mono-lingual English-speaking immigrants are just to that extent not bi-cultural. To eliminate contamination from native speakers of English, we added a dummy variable called "English speaking country." Using English-speaking country as a control variable, we are able to distinguish true bi-cultural bi-lingualism from monolingual fluency in English.

We wish to measure the immigrants' English language fluency, a communications competence, not the immigrants' educational attainment. However, in our data set, having three or more years of college education exhibits a correlation of .67 with high fluency in English. To exclude higher education from our measures of English language fluency, we include college education as a control variable.

Overseas Chinese are historic middleman minorities (Lim and Gosling, 1998). The overseas Chinese are the only middleman group our data could identify. We use the percentage Chinese speaking in each sending-country to measure Chinese cultural influence in that country's emigration to the United StatesOur measure of immigrant entrepreneurship is the self-employment rate of each immigrant group in 1990. Self-employment rate is the standard measure of entrepreneurship (Light and Rosenstein, 1995: chapter 2).

Possibly trade reflects the political status of sending countries, not just the volume and qualities of the immigrants themselves. The United States awards most favored nation (MFN) trading status to most countries, but not to all countries. We encode MFN status as a dummy variable such that those never excluded were coded 1, and those ever excluded, 0. Non-MFN countries generally sent few immigrants to the United States. Of no interest to our model, MFN status protects against spuriously attributing to model variable variation in trade volume that really arose from political status of sending countries.

Entrepreneur visa programs began in the United States in the 1970s. They were gradually expanded, and their requirements tightened. Entrepreneur visa programs permit entrepreneurs to obtain priority visas, ahead of non-entrepreneur co-nationals, provided they agree to invest in a business in the United States. Canada and Australia also operate entrepreneur visa programs (Wong, 1997: 330-332). Therefore, we encoded the entrepreneur visas issued to various countries between 1992 and 1995. These data included immigrants from former socialist countries. In our regression models, we introduce MSN status and entrepreneur entry visas as our control variables to exclude their effects from contaminating our hypotheses.

(Table 1 about here)

Results

To examine the relationship of immigrant characteristics and volume to changes in imports and exports, we utilized two OLS regression models -- an imports model, and an exports model. The imports model predicts change in imports; the exports model predicts change in exports; but the predictors are identical in both models. In essence, both models predict that change in imports (or in exports) to any country relative to the baseline is a function of change in immigration volume from that country, of the English fluency among the immigrants from that country, of the middleman minority status of the immigrants from that country, of the rate of entrepreneurship among the immigrants from that country, and of the control variables. The models test our four hypotheses.

Table 2 presents OLS regression coefficients for our imports and exports models. Our results show some marked similarities to those of Gould. First, like Gould, we find a much stronger impact of immigration volume and of immigrant characteristics upon exports than upon imports. However, whereas Gould found a weak positive effect of immigration upon U.S. imports, and a strong effect on exports, we find almost no effect on imports. Adjusted R2, which is .340 in our exports equation, is .067 in our imports equation.

(Table 2 about here)

However, unlike Gould, we also include the self-employment rate of the immigrants in our model. Self-employment better measures entrepreneurship than does skill-level, Gould's variable. Our data show that as immigrant self-employment rates increased, U.S. exports to their countries of origin also increased. However, immigrant entrepreneurship did not increase U.S. imports; immigrant entrepreneurship only increased U.S. exports. Although we know that immigrants import foreign foodstuffs and remit money to their homelands, these practices did not increase aggregate imports from the sending countries. Our results indicate that, net of the volume of immigration, and net of human capital, immigrant entrepreneurs only increased American exports to their homelands.

Language fluency is a cultural issue. Immigrants' fluency in English increased American exports to sending countries; but immigrants' fluency in English did not increase American imports from the sending countries.

To test this interpretation, we examined the effect on exports and imports of hailing from a non-English speaking country. Gould (1994) had found that immigration from English-speaking countries increased exports less than immigration from non-English speaking countries. Our results paretially replicated Gould's, but were more extreme. Net of educational attainment, just coming from an English speaking country reversed the expected positive effect of immigration upon exports. Instead the effect was negative for exports as well as imports. Regardless of their specific national origin, Chinese-speaking immigrants increased exports to their sending countries. This increase was net of immigrant entrepreneurship and of immigrant fluency in English. Moreover, this effect is the single most powerful we observed. Since the overseas Chinese are a historic middleman minority, the robust effect of Chinese speaking on exports confirms and strengthens the presumptive role of cultural traditions in promoting international trade. The effect of speaking Spanish at home on exports, while positive, is much weaker than is the effect of speaking ChineseThe most favored nation (MFN) legal status of sending countries did not affect American exports or imports to those countries. However, the Entrepreneur Visa program increased both imports and exports. This increase came net of self-employment rate, and really reflects another measure of entrepreneurship's impact on foreign trade.

College education has a consistently negative effect on exports, but no effect on imports. This control variable is intended to clarify the status of English fluency

Discussion

Our models had mixed success. On the one hand, just as expected, transmigration, middleman minority status, and immigrant entrepreneurship all increased exports. The volume of immigration had a positive effect on exports, but it did not reach statistical significance in our data as it had in Gould's. On the other hand, the same four variables had next to no effect upon imports. The failure of our imports equation sharply contrasts with the success of the same equation in predicting exports. Why not? A plausible answer appears when one considers the embeddedness of transnational immigrants in the United States, a novel issue that existing international trade literature does not substantively address at all. One explanation derives from the size and centrality of the American market. Because the American market is so vast, no foreign country can ignore it. . Just because of relative size, Italy needs to understand American culture a lot more than the United States needs to understand Italian culture. All players simply must learn how to penetrate American markets coute que coute. American exporters have not faced any equally dominant external market, even Japan's.

Second, the dominance of English as the world's business language relieves Americans (and other native speakers of English) of the necessity to learn foreign languages even while it equips foreigners with the capacity to understand English-speaking societies. The cultural result is an international one-way mirror that permits outsiders to look into the United States while preventing Americans from looking out. Already speaking English, Italians and Chinese can sell to Americans without the assistance of coethnic immigrants inside the United States. Speaking only English, Americans require the assistance of Italian or Chinese immigrants in order to penetrate Italian or Chinese markets. This consideration explains why transmigrants promote and encourage American exports, but have a negligible effect upon American and, in Gould's data, Canadian imports.

Third, the United States discourages foreign language skills on the part of its population. On the one hand, the United States makes monolingual English speakers out of immigrants in three generations (Portes and Hao, 1998) Even major corporations suffer the adverse consequence of linguistic and cultural insularity. Linguistic incompetence, has caused major American corporations to make numerous, absurd, and widely celebrated marketing errors in foreign countries (Hoffman, 1996; Ricks, 1983). For example, when Coca-Cola first rendered its product name in phonetic Chinese, the much-advertised result translated as "female horse stuffed with wax." Again, when Pepsi-Cola introduced its advertising slogan ("Come alive with the Pepsi generation") into Taiwan, the result translated as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead." If American major corporations can make these absurd marketing mistakes, well documented in the archives of business, nothing protects small and medium firms from comparable marketing failures.

If Americans were fully exploiting all the export opportunities that the world economy already affords American products, transmigrant entrepreneurs could find no untapped export markets to fill. However, the identification of untapped export markets does not depend upon massive immigration, although that is a minor factor. The main resource is transmigrant entrepreneurs. Specifically, the location of export opportunities depends upon three characteristics of immigrants: English fluency, their entrepreneurship, and their Chinese language fluency. First, immigrants' high fluency in English is characteristic of transnationalism, not of assimilation, so our data indicate a role of transnationalism in supporting American exports. Second, beyond transnationalism, export-stimulating immigration depends upon immigrant entrepreneurs including, but not limited to, those foreign-born entrepreneurs who were admitted to the United States through investor visa programs after 1990.

Conclusion

A long case study literature has reported that transmigrants have advantages in international trade, but no comprehensive data were available. Taking this case study literature seriously, and building on Gould's pioneering effort, we have comprehensively reviewed immigration and bilateral trade. Our review supports the existing literature's general results, showing that immigrants' English fluency, their middleman minority status, and their entrepreneurship expands American foreign trade to their homelands. However, our results transcend the existing literature too in some surprising respects. First and foremost, replicating Gould, we find that transmigrant entrepreneurs expand exports, but not imports. This imbalance is not apparent from the case study literature, which could not detect an aggregate effect; nor can Gould's transaction cost advantages explain it. Since transmigrant entrepreneurship increases exports, but not imports, we conclude that the failure of immigration to increase American imports probably arises from the transparency of the American culture to foreign business interests. Transmigrant entrepreneurs cannot expand American imports because import markets are already saturated.

Second, we find that immigration's effects upon exports are both general and specific. That is, transmigrants' bi-lingualism and entrepreneurship generally increase exports to all non-English speaking immigrant homelands, not just to some or a few. Case studies could not obtain so general a result. Therefore, the case studies could not show whether the international trade involvement of immigrant Israelis, Chinese or Koreans resulted from the unique entrepreneurial qualities or situation of Israelis, Chinese, or Koreans rather than from general advantages in trade that transmigrants enjoy. Our data show that immigrant immigrants' English fluency and entrepreneurship increased American exports across the board, a general result.

On the other hand, the strong effect on exports of Chinese language fluency does imply the well-known entrepreneurial character of the Chinese (Reid, 1997: 33-36) rendered them uniquely and exceptionally capable of finding export opportunities in the U.S. economy. Here the data suggest that the historical entrepreneurship of the Chinese, a classic middleman minority, accentuates their export achievements in this country. If so, and to this extent, we have predicted economic performance from known cultural background, contradicting the claim that cultural variables cannot predict behavior. However, China's language and culture are especially difficult for Americans to penetrate. Therefore, the specific effect of Chinese language competence may reflect the uniquely difficult Chinese language rather than or in addition to the proverbial entrepreneurship of the Chinese.

Third, transmigrant entrepreneurship stimulated American exports. Vast numbers of monolingual non-entrepreneur immigrants will not compensate for the absence of the transmigrants and entrepreneurs. On this point, our results differ from the findings of Gould (1990, 1994), who did find a significant effect of immigration volume upon exports.

Finally, novel policy ideas emerge from these empirical results. Except for immigration's role in remittances, policy sciences were, before Gould, unaware of immigration's lop-sided support of exports to non-English-speaking countries (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998:8; Durand, Parrado, and Massey, 1996: 423-424; Diaz-Briquets and Perez-Lopez, 1997: 411). Now this awareness is dawning (James, Romine, and Zwanzig, 1998). Apparently the United States does not generate enough bi-cultural entrepreneurs from its assimilated, native born population fully to exploit export opportunities within existing currency ratios. That is, even given the existing value of the U. S. dollar relative to other currencies, the export success of transmigrants implies that United States could export more if native-born, fully assimilated Americans had more foreign language skills and foreign culture knowledge (Reuber and Fischer, 1997). If so, cultural change offers a policy alternative to currency devaluation, currently the only remedy for chronic export surpluses. Cultural cosmopolitanism could mitigate the destructive combination of poor instruction in foreign languages, linguistic assimilation, and English-only social movements that generate a monolingual native labor force (Baron, 1990: xix, 15). Of course, no unilateral policy measures can undo the linguistic dominance of English in world business. This dominance promotes, encourages, and compounds the United States' linguistic insularity. Nonetheless, even given the world dominance of English in an era of globalization, and its baleful effects upon American export competence, the United States' balance of payments imbalance is unnecessarily large because of linguistic insularity.

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Table 1

Description of Variables

Variable	Description	Unit of Analysis	Mean Value	N
Growth in exports	Increase in exports between 1975-84 and 1985-94 (Exp85-94 / Exp75-84)	%	24.0	88
Growth in imports	Increase in imports between 1975-84 and 1985-94 (Imp85-94 / Imp75-84)	%	72.7	87
Immigration change	Net growth of immigrants admitted by region and selected country of birth between 1980 and 1990 (Census90 - Census80)	N	65269	99
English fluency	Coded 1 as speaking English very well for immigrants as of 1990	%		100
College education	Three or more years of college by country of birth for immigrants aged 25-64 as of 1990	%	54.7	100
Self-employment	Self-employment rate of immigrants admitted by region and country of birth as of 1990, aged 25-64 in the labor force	%	10.1	100
Chinese-speaking	Coded 1 as speakig Chinese at home as of 1990, 0 as non-Chinese spoken at home	%	5.3	100
Spanish-speaking	Coded 1 as speaking Spanish at home as of 1990, 0 as non-Spanish spoken at home	%	17.5	100
Most favored nation status	Coded 1 as having the MFN status	N	11	100
Entrepreneur entry visas	The number of entrepreneurs entry visas issued by country or origin, 1992-95	N	15.5	100
English-speaking nations	Coded 1 as English-speaking nation,1 0 otherwise	%	27.0	100

1 English-speaking countries were defined as countries that have English as their official language. They include: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leon, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Fiji, Tonga, Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Trinidad/Tobago, Belize, and Guyana.

Source: US Census of Population: 1980 and 1990 (5%-PUMS); Directory of Trade Statistics Yearbook, 1995.

Table 2

OLS Regression Equations Predicting US Imports and US Exports, 1975-1994

(Standard errors in parentheses)

 

Predictors	% Growth in US Exports	% Growth in US Imports
Immigration change 1980-1990	.849	-.306
	(.538)	(1.536)
College education	-3.447**	-2.710
	(.885)	(2.523)
Immigrant Self-Employment Rate	6.028*	-2.200
	(3.243)	(9.271)
English-Speaking Country	-132.273 **	-217.985*
	(39.754)	(113.485)
Speaking Chinese at Home	2.160**	1.459
	(.873)	(2.500)
Speaking Spanish at Home	.745*	.605
	(.420)	(1.244)
Fluent English	3.966**	4.387*
	(.875)	(2.496)
MFN Status	.463	-1.066
	(.366)	(1.105)
Entrepreneur Visa	.826*	3.143*
	(.486)	(1.390)
Intercept	-124.003	-35.550
	(66.492)	(190.641)
Adjusted R Square	.340	.067
N	88	87

* p < .05 one-tailed test; ** p < .01 two-tailed test.

Source: Source: US Census of Population: 1980 and 1990 (5%-PUMS); Directory of Trade Statistics Yearbook, 1995.

Appendix 1

Nation-States Included in the Analysis

 

Europe (22): Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Soviet Union Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia

Asia (28): Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, China (including Hong Kong), Cyprus, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, Yemen

Africa (13): Cape Verde, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda

Oceania (4): Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga

North America (2): Canada, Mexico

Caribbean (14): Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Trinidad/Tobago

Central America (7): Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama

South America (10): Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela

Notes

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