Earnings mobility of first and "1.5" generation Mexican-origin women and men: a comparison with U.S.-born Mexican-Americans and non-Hispanic whites

"This study addresses the following questions: Are Mexican immigrants closing the earnings gap with greater time in the United States, compared to U.S.-born Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites? What factors are most important in determining their earnings? How are earnings determinants different for women versus men, and those who came to the United States as children, versus those who came as adults and those born in the United States?... With greater time in the United States, male immigrants achieve average earnings comparable to U.S.-born Mexican Americans, but not to non-Hispanic whites, controlling for human capital variables. With greater time in the United States, female immigrants approach the number of hours of paid work of U.S.-born women, but not the earnings received per hour. Gains in earnings associated with age, time in the United States, and English proficiency differ by gender, reflecting structural differences in the labor market."     

Determinants of employment of recently arrived Mexican immigrant wives

The work force participation of married, Mexican-origin immigrant women who came to the US in the 1980s was investigated. Determinants of employment utilized in this study are the women's human capital stock, household resources, and labor market structural factors. Nine hypotheses were derived from the analytical model and were examined through logistic regression. Findings showed that all human capital resource and structural labor market factors were significantly related to employment. On the other hand, four of the five family household factors namely: the age and presence of children in the household, husband's income, husband's employment, and non-labor income were significantly related to employment. Furthermore, the positive factors indicating the likelihood of being employed in 1989 for Mexican immigrant wives are: 1) being 25-54 years of age; 2) higher educational levels; 3) speaking fluent English; 4) lower levels of husband's income and non-labor income; 5) employment of husband in 1989; 6) absence of children under age 6 at home; 7) lower non-Hispanic female unemployment rates; 8) higher work force proportion employed in immigrant female-dependent occupations; 9) lower proportions of the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) population being of Mexican origin; and 10) smaller MSA populations.     

Immigrant and native fertility during the 1980s: adaptation and expectations for the future

Many immigrants have come to the US since the mid-1960s. The demographic effects of this phenomenon may be seen in both the changing racial and ethnic composition of the population and in the increasing contribution of immigration to sustaining population growth. Given the current below replacement level of fertility in the country, US population growth depends increasingly upon the entry of new immigrants each year and their subsequent fertility. Over much of the 20th century, immigrants had consistently lower fertility than native-born women. This situation changed, however, since the 1970s with the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from countries with high fertility. Studies based upon the US census have shown that, despite considerable variation according to country of origin, recent immigrants have higher fertility on average than native-born women. Moreover, the gap between immigrant and native fertility levels appears to have increased during the 1980s. By 1986, immigrant women aged 18-44 had about one-quarter child more than similarly aged native-born women. This article compares both the fertility behavior and expectations for future childbearing of foreign and native-born women in the US with the goal of analyzing the sources of the growing fertility gap between immigrant and native women, and exploring the extent to which immigrants adapt their fertility once in the US. Data are drawn from the 1980 US Census and the 1986 and 1988 June Current Population Surveys. The author found that the immigrant-native fertility gap increased during the 1980s, not because immigrant fertility increased, but because fertility dropped at a faster rate for natives than for immigrants. The relatively high fertility of immigrants compared to natives can be explained by compositional differences with respect to age, education, income, and ethnicity. The two analyses of adaptation, however, yielded different results. The synthetic cohort analysis, which traced the fertility behavior of a fixed cohort of immigrants during the 1980s, found little evidence of adaptation or assimilation, except for immigrants from southeast Asia. On the other hand, the analysis of fertility expectations suggests that although immigrants expect to have higher fertility than similar natives, they tend to adapt their fertility goals over time, both within and across generations.     

Migration to the US and marital mobility

When immigrants enter the US they typically access a marriage market with a larger supply of educated spouses compared to the marriage market in their home countries. Absent any selectivity bias, this access should increase the likelihood that migrants ‘marry-up’ in terms of education. We combine survey data on British and German immigrants in the US with data on natives in Britain and Germany to estimate the causal effect of migration on educational mobility through cross-national marriage. To control for selective mating, we instrument educational attainment using government spending on education in the years each person was of school-age. To control for selective migration, we instrument the migration decision using inflows of immigrants to the US during puberty and early adulthood. We find strong selectivity effects that work against the positive prospects of the US marriage market. All migrants give up spousal education in exchange for US entry and assimilation. Migrant men also give up spousal education because they cannot compete with native men as bread-earners. Migrant women have some advantage in the US marriage market, as they can compete with native women in home production.     

Labor market outcomes of immigrant women in the United States: 1970 to 1990

42% of immigrant workers in the US are women. Data from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 US censuses are analyzed in the study of differences in labor market outcomes between US-born and immigrant women, and among immigrant women born in different countries or regions of the world. There was little difference between US-born and immigrant women as a whole in 1970. However, over the next 20 years, immigrants women's labor force participation rate and weekly earnings relative to natives became lower, and their unemployment rates became higher. By 1990, the wage gap was 14%. At the same time, the share of self-employed women and the amount of time worked among employed women were almost the same for immigrant women and the US-born throughout the period 1970-90. Immigrants born in the UK, Canada, Europe, Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, and the Middle East have had steady or improved wages and unemployment relative to US-born women. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America have experienced relatively high unemployment and low earnings, with the wage gap reaching 35% in 1990. Disparities in the number of completed years of schooling explains a substantial share of the observed differences in labor market outcomes.     

Improved legal status as the major source of earnings premiums associated with intermarriage: evidence from the 1986 IRCA amnesty

Exploiting a natural experiment, this paper uses the 1990 US Census data and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act amnesty to investigate the major mechanism through which intermarriage influences immigrant earnings. My strategy involves comparing international marriage premiums received by two groups of Mexican immigrants who arrived before and after the cutoff date of eligibility. Both groups face similar language and culture related obstacles and have to adapt themselves to the new environment, except that unauthorized Mexican workers who arrived before 1982 could obtain legal status through the amnesty while those who arrived after the cutoff date obtained legal status through marriage to a US citizen. Instrumental variables estimates show a significantly larger intermarriage premium for Mexican immigrants who migrated after the cutoff date and no statistically significant intermarriage premium is found in the pre-1982 group. The 35 % premium gap indicates a large effect of intermarriage on immigrant labor market outcomes, operating primarily through an improvement of legal status.     

Do Immigrants Catch‐up with the Natives in Terms of Earnings? Evidence from Individual Level Data of Canada

This article analyses differences in dynamic transitions into and out of any of the five hourly wage quintiles and quintile zero (unemployed and non‐employed people) between immigrants and natives for the period 1993‐2004. Using Longitudinal Level data from Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) for men aged 25 to 55, we investigate how unobserved heterogeneity factors and initial conditions may affect individuals’ propensity to stay in or leave any of the wage quintiles. We also consider a dynamic multinomial logit model with the random effects approach. Empirical results show that state dependence exists in all hourly wage quintiles. Moreover, education, experience, marital status, immigrant minority status, and age at immigration are significant factors determining hourly wage differentials between immigrants and natives.     

The second shift: assimilation in housework time among immigrants

Using the 2003–2014 American Time Use Survey, this paper studies the assimilation in housework time among married US immigrants. The gender gap in housework time narrows from first to one-point-five to second generation, where assimilation is driven by a decrease in housework time of women, particularly of those from countries with low female labor supply. The findings are robust to including couple’s working hours and number of children, indicating that there is assimilation in the burden of the second shift—household work—in addition to that in immigrants’ labor market outcomes and fertility rates.     

Challenging transitions? Assessing the occupational mobility patterns of US immigrants by gender

This article uses the New Immigrant Survey to assess the occupational mobility of US immigrants. Estimates from OLS and Heckman selection models show the occupational mobility of immigrants follows a U-shaped pattern: immigrants arriving in the United States see their occupational status decline before it gradually improves. However, even 9 years after coming to the United States, the occupational status of immigrants remains lower than prior to their arrival in the country. Our findings also suggest that immigrant women with higher occupational status tend to move more often to the United States than immigrant men. Conversely, immigrant women are more likely than men to experience career interruptions after migration. Finally, occupational employment growth rates (defined as the growth rate in the number of jobs for an occupation) have a positive impact on both men and women immigrants' ability to recover their occupational status, though the impact appears to be greater for immigrant women.     

EXTENDED STRATIFICATION:

This article outlines a theoretical system of extended stratification in order to account for differences between immigrants and natives in (1) the amount of time individuals devote to paid work and (2) the number of family members participating in paid work. The basic argument is that immigrants with a frame of reference that includes being socialized in a relatively poor sending society tend to have greater work incentive than natives who have been socialized in a richer host society. This variation in work incentive obtains because the economic rewards achieved through additional work are evaluated more highly by groups that have as their frame of reference a comparatively poor society. According to this argument, the intergroup difference in work incentive should obtain even when economic need is held constant. We derived two hypotheses and tested them with a comparative analysis of immigrants and natives, including native coethnics of the immigrants. At the level of the individual and of the household, the findings are largely consistent with the hypotheses.     

Overlooking/Looking Over Neoliberal Immigration: Amnesty Policy in the ‘Nation of Immigrants’

In the self-proclaimed ‘nation of immigrants’, a struggle for power plays out in US immigration law. This article examines such a struggle in the context of rising neoliberalism. As president Ronald Reagan set out to revolutionize America with the deregulation of the economy, privatization, and the globalization of capitalist democracy, pundits claimed that the country was experiencing a Mexican illegal immigration crisis that pivoted on Mexican women's fecundity and abuse of social services. Yet along with punitive provisions, the first US law to directly address undocumented migration, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) included an amnesty programme widely praised as a democratic watershed for the undocumented. Consequently, ‘multicultural’ immigrant men and women seemed to be embraced, while in the same breath disciplined through discourses of respectability and criminality that secured both a pool of cheap immigrant labourers and minoritized citizens. More specifically, two strains of ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse that circulated around amnesty during the law-making process affectively (and effectively) framed America as the globally exceptional guarantor of democratic rights, inclusivity, and equal access to economic opportunity for citizens. On one hand, discourse that welcomed and celebrated an abstracted immigrant subject who was free to succeed on the basis of individual hard work was coded as the epitome of Americanism. On the other hand, discourse that welcomed explicitly racialized and gendered immigrants who were free to succeed on the basis of their hard work was coded as emblematically American. In this case respectable tokens of multiculturalism (i.e. immigrants of colour and especially immigrant women of colour who upheld traditional family values) evidenced American inclusivity. This article argues that both strains of ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse naturalized a relationship between citizenship, freedom, and free markets and thus powerfully masked the exploitative social relations key to neoliberal economic arrangements.     

Is it Race,Immigrant Status,or Both? An Analysis of Wage Disparities among Men in the United States1

The intersection of race and immigrant status forms a unique social space where minority group members and immigrants are afforded or denied the privileges that are routinely accorded to native-born, non-Hispanic whites. Yet recent research on the intersection of race and immigrant status is inconsistent in its findings, limited to a small number of racial groups, and does not account for the geographic distribution of racial/ethnic groups. In this paper, we shed light on the intersection of race and immigrant status by answering two questions: (1) Do racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes vary by nativity? and (2) Do native-immigrant disparities in socioeconomic outcomes vary by race? Using 2000 Census data linked to metropolitan area and sending country data, we find that racial disparities are similar and significant among natives and immigrants (Question 1). Asians, blacks, and Latinos fare significantly worse than their white counterparts in both the native and immigrant populations. Furthermore, our analysis of native-immigrant wage disparities by race reveals that the immigrant experience is considerably worse for Asians, blacks, and Latinos (Question 2). These groups also receive fewer wage returns to years spent in the U.S. and their wage disparities are magnified by the percentage of immigrants in a metropolitan area – whereas all whites receive a wage premium when living in an area with a larger share of immigrants. The results suggest that race and immigrant status work in concert to uniquely influence the social experience of immigrant minorities in the U.S.     

Gender differences in immigrant health: the case of Mexican and Middle Eastern immigrants

This article draws on theories of gender inequality and immigrant health to hypothesize differences among the largest immigrant population, Mexicans, and a lesser known population of Middle Easterners. Using data from the 2000-2007 National Health Interview Surveys, we compare health outcomes among immigrants to those among U.S.-born whites and assess gender differences within each group. We find an immigrant story and a gender story. Mexican and Middle Eastern immigrants are healthier than U.S.-born whites, and men report better health than women regardless of nativity or ethnicity. We identify utilization of health care as a primary mechanism that contributes to both patterns. Immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born whites to interact with the health care system, and women are more likely to do so than men. Thus, immigrant and gender health disparities may partly reflect knowledge of health status rather than actual health.     

Marriage: for love,for money…and for time?

Married couples enjoy meaningful economies in time, often choosing to specialize where one spouse focuses on market work and the other on household production and childcare. Using data from the American Time Use Survey 2003–2008, I estimate significant marriage effects upon time use. Most married women gain 33–34 min of leisure each weekday when compared to single women. While marriage does not lead to more leisure for husbands, it allows them to allocate time away from home and towards market work. Lower-income couples work more at home and for pay, and spend less time in leisure than their single counterparts. The temporal and financial gains from marriage for most people are inconsistent with its declining prevalence.     

The Employment Status of Immigrant Women: The Case of Sweden1

This article presents an exploration of the employment status of various groups of immigrant women in the Swedish labor market in the period 1970–1995. Since employment is one of the key components for the integration of immigrants, it is interesting to study what factors determine whether or not immigrants become employed after entering Sweden. Numerous studies have analyzed the labor market integration of immigrant men, whereas the integration of women still has received less attention (Ekberg, 1983, 1991; Hammarstedt, 2001; Scott, 1999). This study can be seen as a contribution to an increase in the knowledge of the labor market integration of female immigrants in Sweden.     

Hearth and Home: The Living Arrangements of Mexican Immigrants and U.S.-Born Mexican Americans

Utilizing data from the nationally representative, 1990 Panel Study of Income Dynamics—Latino Sample, this paper examines the living arrangements of Mexican heritage persons in the U.S., comparing immigrants to U.S. natives. Mexican immigrants are most likely to live with extended kin and unrelated persons upon recent arrival to the U.S. As time in the U.S. increases, such arrangements become less common. Three competing explanations for this pattern are addressed. While economic resources and life course stages are clearly linked to household formation for immigrants and U.S. natives, the findings indicate limited support for an acculturation hypothesis.     

Self-employed immigrants and their employees: evidence from Swedish employer-employee data

We present a study of the employees of self-employed immigrants with unincorporated firms in Sweden using matched employer-employee data from 2014. Non-European immigrants are more likely than natives to have employees in their firms. Furthermore, immigrants, especially non-European immigrants, are more likely than natives to employ immigrants in their firms, and non-European immigrants are most likely to employ recently arrived non-European immigrants with low education in their firms. Males are more likely than females to have employees in their firms, but self-employed females are more likely than self-employed males to have female employees. This is the case for all immigrant groups as well as for natives. We conclude that self-employed immigrants play a role in the labour market integration process since they create employment opportunities for immigrant groups that have difficulty entering the labour market.

     

Undocumented Latina immigrants in Orange County,California: a comparative analysis

"This article examines a unique data set randomly collected from Latinas (including 160 undocumented immigrants) and non-Hispanic white women in Orange County, California, including undocumented and documented Latina immigrants, Latina citizens, and non-Hispanic white women. Our survey suggests that undocumented Latinas are younger than documented Latinas, and immigrant Latinas are generally younger than U.S.-citizen Latinas and Anglo women. Undocumented and documented Latinas work in menial service sector jobs, often in domestic services. Most do not have job-related benefits such as medical insurance.... Despite their immigration status, undocumented Latina immigrants often viewed themselves as part of a community in the United States, which significantly influenced their intentions to stay in the United States. Contrary to much of the recent public policy debate over immigration, we did not find that social services influenced Latina immigrants' intentions to stay in the United States."     

Religious and Secular Voluntary Participation by Immigrants in Canada: How Trust and Social Networks Affect Decision to Participate

Participation in voluntary associations is an important part of an immigrant’s integration into a host country. This study examines factors that predispose an immigrant’s voluntary involvement in religious and secular organizations compared to non-immigrants (“natives”) in Canada, and how immigrants differ from natives in their voluntary participation. The study results indicate that informal social networks, religious attendance, and level of education positively correlate with the propensity of both immigrants and natives to participate and volunteer in religious and secular organizations. Immigrants who have diverse bridging social networks, speak French and/or English at home, and either attend school or are retired are more likely to participate and volunteer for secular organizations. Further, social trust matters to native Canadians in their decision to engage in religious and secular organizations but not to immigrants. Pride and a sense of belonging, marital status, and the number of children increase the likelihood of secular voluntary participation of natives but not of immigrants. These findings extend the current understanding of immigrant integration and have important implications for volunteer recruitment.     

Education,immigration and occupational mobility: a short-term analysis

The author examines the relationship between education and occupational status for immigrants and natives in the United States by analyzing the short-term occupational mobility of selected members of the 1965-1970 immigrant cohort. The effects of race, ethnicity, age, and family and marital status on this relationship are considered. The relationship between short-term mobility and the emigration of the foreign-born from the United States is also studied (SUMMARY IN FRE, SPA)