I theorize immigrant employment as a case of occupational segregation and investigate earnings and segregation of recent-immigrant Latinos relative to native workers. Analyses of greater Los Angeles 1980 and 1990 Census 5% PUMS demonstrate increased marginalization of immigrant Latinos in “brown-collar” occupations (where Latino immigrants are vastly overrepresented among incumbents). During the 1980s earnings inequality grew between recent immigrants and native-born whites, blacks, and Latinos, even controlling for group differences in labor market characteristics. Yet pay inequality did not rise between whites and native minorities, suggesting deleterious processes particular to immigrant Latinos. Analyses of occupational dissimilarity demonstrate that native minorities are less segregated from immigrant Latinos than are whites; and segregation of recent-immigrant Latinos from native workers intensified in the 1980s, but segregation from earlier-immigrant co-ethnics remained fairly constant. A number of low-level occupations in Los Angeles are now clearly identifiable as brown collar.
Panel analyses of occupation-level data derived from Los Angeles census data elucidate both the limited labor market success of recent-immigrant Latinos and their potential impact on natives. The author investigates (a) trends in representation of newcomer Latinos in occupations that started with relatively undesirable characteristics and (b) pay degradation (for natives and immigrants) in occupations with strong overrepresentations of newcomer Latinos. Recent-immigrant Latinos increasingly concentrated in poorly paid, irregular occupations where same-gender coethnics were already overrepresented. For men, these were fields with low experience requirements; women's shifts appear unrelated to skill, suggesting increased occupational closure. Importantly, deepening marginalization of newcomer Latinos in brown-collar occupations was accompanied by depreciation in median pay for both immigrant and native incumbents, suggesting an occupation-level contributor to newcomer Latinos' decreasing relative earnings as well as an avenue by which immigrants may adversely affect native workers. Thus far, national, cross-sectional studies of pay penalties associated with ethnic composition have produced ambiguous results. Longitudinal analyses of one ethnic and/or immigrant group in a single local labor market increase understanding of the relation of earnings to minority composition in general.
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