Legal status is a growing dimension of inequality among immigrants in the U.S. Scholars have suggested that the legal status with which immigrants enter the country stratifies their short- and long-term opportunities for labor market integration. However, much quantitative immigration scholarship modeling the relationship between legal status and labor market integration treats legal status as static. In reality, immigrants change statuses dynamically throughout their lives. This article uses a dynamic conceptualization of legal status, as well as nationally representative data and regression and propensity score weighting techniques, to examine whether five initial legal statuses are associated with divergent labor market trajectories even after those statuses change. I find that initial legal statuses—which I refer to as starting points—are associated with ordered differences in immigrants’ occupational positions immediately after immigrants change status to lawful permanent residence. These differences persist over time. Five years after all immigrants share lawful permanent residence, employment visa holders maintain more prestigious jobs; immigrants with family reunification and diversity status are in the middle; and immigrants with refugee status and undocumented experience have less prestigious jobs. This article demonstrates aggregate, longitudinal patterns of stratification among a nationally representative sample of permanent residents. The findings suggest the importance of modeling legal status as a dynamic rather than static category to reflect the continued influence of legal status starting points on immigrants’ labor market integration.

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Adverse life course events associated with unemployment can negatively affect individuals’ future labor market prospects. Unauthorized status, and subsequent unauthorized employment, may operate similarly, marring immigrants’ labor market prospects even after they change legal status. However, it is unclear how and why any durable disadvantage associated with prior unauthorized status operates differently by gender. This is an important shortcoming, given that legal status and gender overlap to influence both migration and stratification. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of lawful permanent residents, we find durable disadvantage associated with prior exposure to unauthorized status, especially among women. Men with prior exposure to unauthorized status experience persistent occupational disadvantage over time relative to men who were never unauthorized. However, women with exposure to unauthorized status experience widening occupational disadvantage over time relative to women who were never unauthorized. Human capital and legal processes help to explain this pattern.

In the United States, the integration experiences of immigrants depend partly on whether they are recognized as refugees or economic migrants. Unlike economic migrants, refugees receive federal resources to help find employment, raising important questions about the role of such government support in migrants’ labor market integration. Our analysis of nationally representative data from the New Immigrant Survey shows that despite early access to government-funded employment services, refugees actually experience employment declines the longer they live in the United States. Drawing on 61 interviews with resettlement experts in refugee-serving organizations across the country, we highlight three interrelated structural weaknesses in the federal refugee resettlement process that help account for these employment declines: (1) retrenched resettlement funding, (2) a logic of self-sufficiency prioritizing rapid employment in generally undesirable and unstable jobs, and (3) siloed networks of refugee-serving organizations. Our findings have important implications for immigrant integration, the welfare state, and the ways that nonprofit organizations shape inequality.