"Immigration Blues" won the New Letters award for fiction from the University of Missouri at Kansas City in 1977. In 1978 it was listed as an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories. In 1981 the second edition of Scent of Apples, the book in which the story appears, received an American Book Award from New York's Pre-Columbus Federation.

Anthony Tan, writing in Silliman Journal, calls the stories in Scent of Apples "emotionally poignant" and says "Immigration Blues" is "a story of understated pathos and the very human and selfish motive of marriage for convenience." He also notes that all the stories in Scent of Apples share the common themes of "exile, loneliness, and isolation."

Tan argues that the stories fall short of greatness because the characters are left groping in states of isolation, denied a moment of illumination that would enable them to make sense of their lives...