Immigrants and Human-Capital Investment

The following question is approached theoretically and empirically: Why do immigrants invest more in human capital than the native-born, and how do investment patterns vary by type of immigrant? It is found that greater immigrant human capital investment is due to the lower opportunity costs of investment by immigrants lacking US-specific skills and the role of untransferred human capital as a factor of production for destination-country skills, as well as the higher return to investment spending from the complementarity of foreign and US human capital. This theoretical insight is supported by direct evidence of human capital investment and by empirical analyses.