This paper investigates the occupational characteristics of natives and immigrants
in the United States. Occupations are characterized by a vector of task usages (analytical,
interactive, and manual) that describe the activities performed on the job.
Immigrants on average perform fewer analytical and interactive tasks and more manual
tasks than natives, and these differences are larger for women than men. The
task usage gaps between natives and immigrants have widened significantly since 1970.
These gaps remain (but shrink) when comparing natives and immigrants in the same
age and education group. Lower English language proficiency and living in a larger
ethnic or language enclave increase the task usage gaps. While immigrants’ task usages
tend to assimilate to natives’ with time since migration, newer immigrant cohorts have
experienced significantly slower occupational assimilation than earlier cohorts. These
results have potentially important implications for recent findings of slower economic
assimilation of recent cohorts.