In today's fast-changing urban labor markets, skill formation is crucial to long-term income security and occupational advancement. While most studies emphasize the skills that workers acquire through formal training and educational programs, a less understood but equally important concern is how workers acquire skills through informal means and then how they demonstrate and defend skills for which they have no formal credentials. This is especially important when considering the labor market participation of less-educated immigrant workers with limited formal training and credentialing support. How do these immigrant workers develop, demonstrate, and defend their skills in receiving community labor markets? What factors facilitate or hinder these processes? How might skill formation be institutionalized in order to enhance immigrant labor market incorporation? In this paper we examine these questions through a study of Latino immigrant workers in North Carolina's construction industry. In particular, we focus on the role that immigrant skills intermediation, and the informal learning processes it supports, play in the formation of emergent pathways for developing, demonstrating, and defending immigrant talent in mainstream labor markets. We conclude that informal intermediation by established immigrant workers can facilitate immigrant skill development and demonstration in mainstream labor markets and thus provides an important pathway for advancing the labor market status of less-educated immigrant workers.

Nominally, the wave of protests by undocumented immigrants that swept through France in the late 1990s successfully challenged the restrictive Pasqua immigration laws. However, despite appearances, the mass movement was at base a labour protest: undocumented workers demonstrated against immigration laws that undermined the way they navigated informal labour markets and, in particular, truncated their opportunities for skill development. Furthermore, it is proposed in this article that examining social movements for their labour content can reveal erosions of working conditions and worker power in informal sector employment. A case study of the Paris garment district is presented to demonstrate how the spread of 'hybrid-informality' made legal work permits a prerequisite for working informally and relegated undocumented immigrants to lower quality jobs outside the cluster.

This article examines informal training and skill development pathways of Latino immigrant construction workers in two different urban labor markets: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We find that institutional differences across local labor markets not only shape how immigrants develop skills in specific places but also determine the localized obstacles they face in demonstrating and harnessing these skills for employment. To explain the role of local institutions in shaping differences in skill development experience and opportunities, we draw on the concept of tacit skill, a term that is rarely incorporated into studies of the labor market participation of less educated immigrants. We argue that innovative pathways that Latino immigrant workers have created to develop tacit skill can strengthen advocacy planning efforts aimed at improving employment opportunities and working conditions for marginalized workers, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike.

IntroductionIf you had taken a walk through the residential neighborhoods a few blocks south of Center City Philadelphia in the fall of 2005, you would have seen a bustle of construction activity. Every third house would have been girded with scaffolding, and the whine of electric drills, the percussion of hammers, and the crack of masonry being stacked would have overwhelmed the everyday sounds of the city. You might also have heard Spanish being spoken, and noticed that many of the workers doing the construction work on the turn-of-the-century row homes ubiquitous in south Philadelphia were Mexican immigrants. What you might not have observed were the new hybrid building techniques being developed in the neighborhood, as Mexican workers blended the construction styles they had learned in their communities of origin with the building methods and materials they used in the United States. Even more difficult to see would have been the new learning practices emerging among immigrant workers, and the new construction skills that those practices produced. But even if you were not able to observe the innovation in construction processes being incubated around you, you would have observed a neighborhood literally being rebuilt.If you retraced your footsteps in the fall of 2008, you would have been struck by the silence. Every third house would have had a`for sale' sign in the window, and what little construction activity remained would have been winding down öa reflection