In addition to the family-level context of the decision-making process to migrate, the literature has discussed the implications of interethnic marriage for immigrants’ assimilation. It has been argued that the extent of interethnic marriages can serve not only as an indicator of ethnic relations and intergroup social distance, but also as a proxy of assimilation by immigrant groups (Qian and Lichter, 2007), sometimes referred to as “the final stage of assimilation” (Gordon, 1964).
Becker (1973) developed a model of the marriage market in which the final outcome in the search for a partner would encompass some similarities within couples in terms of certain traits, including ethnic background. The similarities between spouses are a result of
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Based on this theory, a majority man or woman marries a minority spouse (intermarriage) under the condition of socioeconomic status gains. That is, members of an ethnic group exchange their low prestige by offering a high socioeconomic status in return. Some empirical findings support this theory by showing that black husbands trade their socioeconomic status with white wives (Heer, 1974; Monahan, 1976; Shoen and Wooldredge, 1989) and that highly educated migrants have higher levels of intermarriage (Dribe and Lundh, 2008), while other studies do not support it (Rosenfeld, …show more content…
There are several reasons why marriage choice may influence labor market outcomes of immigrants. First, immigrants married to native-born spouses assimilate faster than comparable immigrants married to foreign-born spouses, because spouses play an integral role in the human capital accumulation of their partners, and native spouses are more productive in their own labor market. That is, marrying a native is likely to improve an immigrant’s language abilities and knowledge of the host country’s customs and social norms (Furtado and Trejo, 2012; Nekby, 2010). Moreover, given that social networks play a vital role in job acquisition, the social network acquired through marriage may be essential in determining the quality of jobs that immigrants possess (Nekby, 2010; Furtado and Theodoropoulos, 2010). Finally, marriage may affect the wages and employment rates of undocumented immigrants, if marriage to a native may bring with it the legal right to work in the host country (Furtado and Trejo, 2012; Chi and Drewianka, 2014). However, it has been argued that the relationship between intermarriages and assimilation is spurious because intermarried immigrants are a selected subsample from the population of all married immigrants (Kantarevic, 2004) and may possess some unmeasured attributes that affect earnings positively (Furtado and