A university board in Sweden is suppressing research on immigrant income.
A new study of migrants to Sweden found something that will surprise no one: immigrants from some countries end up making significantly more money, on average, than immigrants from others.
Country of origin matters a lot, and it matters at least into the second generation.
Andreas Ek, a young professor at the University of Lund, reported earlier this year in the Journal of Political Economy that, if you ranked average incomes by country of origin, the average immigrant from a country at the 90th percentile earned three times as much as one who came from a country at the 10th percentile. In statistics jargon, that’s the “90/10 income ratio”—and a 3x wage difference is big. For reference, the 90/10 income ratio for IQ—a span of about 40 IQ points—predicts just a 1.5x to 2.2x wage difference.
