How technological change and globalization are driving higher wages of immigrants married to natives.

Recent waves of immigrants into the US have tended to have lower wages compared to native-born workers, something that can be at least partially attributed to native-born workers’ generally better communication and interpersonal skills. In new research, Delia Furtado and Tao Song find that the wage premium for immigrants married to native-born Americans has risen from 1.4 to 10.3 percent over the past 30 years. They argue that this increasing wage premium has been driven by changes in technology and globalization which have resulted in larger payoffs to the people skills of immigrants married to natives relative to those married to other immigrants.