Compare methods

	Immigrant Earnings Assimilation	Spatial Assimilation Model
Field	Migration Studies	Migration Studies
Family	Regression model	Regression model
Year of origin	1978	1985
Originator	Barry R. Chiswick; George J. Borjas	Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A. Denton
Type	Earnings regression with years-since-migration profiles and cohort correction	Locational-attainment regression of residential outcomes
Seminal source	Chiswick, B. R. (1978). The Effect of Americanization on the Earnings of Foreign-Born Men. Journal of Political Economy, 86(5), 897-921.	Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1985). Spatial Assimilation as a Socioeconomic Outcome. American Sociological Review, 50(1), 94-106.
Aliases	Earnings Assimilation Profile, Years-Since-Migration Earnings Model, Chiswick-Borjas Cohort Method, Immigrant Wage Catch-Up Analysis	Locational Attainment Model, Residential Attainment Regression, Massey-Denton Spatial Assimilation, Spatial Assimilation Theory Test
Related	3	3
Summary	Immigrant earnings assimilation analysis asks how the wages of the foreign-born evolve relative to comparable natives as immigrants spend more years in the host country. Barry Chiswick's 1978 study established the canonical approach: regress log earnings on years since migration and human-capital controls, and interpret the upward years-since-migration profile as evidence that immigrants acquire host-country-specific skills, language, and labor-market knowledge, eventually 'overtaking' similar natives. George Borjas's 1985 critique exposed a deep flaw in reading this from a single cross-section: the positive slope could reflect not within-person growth but a decline in the unobserved quality of successive arrival cohorts, so that earlier, higher-earning immigrants merely make recent arrivals look like they are catching up. Borjas's remedy was to track fixed arrival cohorts across repeated cross-sections — synthetic cohorts — disentangling genuine assimilation from compositional change. The method thus has two layers: a within-survey earnings profile and a cross-survey correction that separates true wage growth from shifts in who is arriving. It remains the foundational empirical framework in the economics of immigration.	The spatial assimilation model, articulated by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton in 1985, treats where immigrants and minorities live as a measurable outcome of their social mobility. Its core proposition is that as group members acquire human capital and cultural familiarity — rising income, more schooling, English fluency, and longer settlement — they convert these gains into residential mobility, moving out of co-ethnic enclaves into suburban, majority, and higher-quality neighborhoods closer to members of the dominant group. The model is operationalized as a locational-attainment regression: individual residential outcomes are regressed on acculturation and socioeconomic predictors to see whether the expected spatial payoff materializes. Crucially, it doubles as a test of discrimination, because if a minority group earns a smaller residential return on the same income and education than the majority, the shortfall signals barriers that pure assimilation cannot explain. Massey and Denton used this logic to show that spatial assimilation operated for some groups but stalled for others, especially African Americans. The framework became the workhorse for studying how socioeconomic advancement does or does not translate into residential integration.