Immigrant Job Quality and Mobility in the United States

Abstract

The U.S. workforce heavily depends on immigrants. To address the role and position of non-White immigrant groups in the United States, the authors examine employment and industry patterns in the labor force, disaggregated by nativity and gender, in 1990 and 2000. The authors then look at job quality and mobility, with job quality defined by occupation, industry, and relative earnings, using 1990 and 2000 census data. Disaggregating results by race and ethnicity, nativity, and gender reveals that immigrants do not appear entirely to be stuck in low-end jobs, and arrival cohort data suggest substantial immigrant upward mobility, mainly from lower to middle but also to higher range jobs. Immigrants may experience more upward mobility than analysts sometimes conclude based on consideration of immigrants’ race and ethnicity alone and on assumptions that the experiences of new immigrants are likely to mirror those of the African American population.

Immigrant Occupational Mobility: Longitudinal Evidence from Spain

“…Thus, because of the lower opportunity cost and the higher expected return, a higher educational level is associated with a deeper U-shaped pattern in the occupational trajectories of immigrants (Duleep and Regets 1999). Occupational status attainment and occupational mobility are also expected to differ by gender, as immigrant men and women tend to be systematically employed in different types of occupations (e.g., Bean, Leach andLowell 2004 andPowers, Seltzer andShi 1998). Alternatively, given that the level of transferability of human capital across countries depends on the cultural and economic distance between the country of origin and the host country (see e.g., Hagan 2004), less developed countries of origin are associated with poorer occupational attainment.…”

“…The assumption underlying this theory is, therefore, that structural factors related to the characteristics of the labour market would originate that immigrants had limited or blocked occupational mobility, implying that the occupational downgrading of immigrants were not transitory but permanent. Some authors argue, moreover, that the slow pace of assimilation is very plausibly reinforced by certain characteristics of immigrants such as low levels of education, membership in disadvantaged and racialised minority groups or undocumented status (Bean, Leach and Lowell 2004).…”

To work or not to work? Immigrant women and work between constraints and opportunities: a comparison between Lombardy and Cataluña

“…This might be the case for immigrants, especially the 140 ones that have migrated for economic reasons. Researches that deal with the job quality of migrants focus on their chances of upward mobility (Bean et al 2004), while their well-being is not connected to the job they perform but to a future return to their home country (Piore 1979) or to the conditions of their loved ones (Boccagni and Ambrosini 2012). …”

Occupational Linguistic Niches and the Wage Growth of Latino Immigrants

“…In contrast, Smith (2003Smith ( , 2006 argues that there is considerable evidence of intergenerational educational and earnings gains among Latino immigrants and that concerns about a lack of assimilation are unwarranted. Similarly, Bean, Leach and Lowell (2004) and Hall and Farkas (2008) argue that there is considerably more upward occupational and wage mobility among recent immigrants than one might expect given the expectations of racial stratification and segmented labor market theories. Overall, while there is widespread agreement that a substantial portion of the wage gap between Latino immigrants and native-born workers is due to differences in education and English-language ability at the time of immigration (e.g., see Catanzarite and Aguilera 2002), there is considerable disagreement as to the explanation of the remaining wage gap, the degree to which it persists over time, and what this portends for the future.…”

“…While conventional models of assimilation treat the low wages of recent immigrants as the first step on a ladder to upward mobility, proponents of the "segmented assimilation" perspective argue that reduced opportunities for less-educated workers in a postindustrial economy combined with phenotype discrimination may result in the downward assimilation of less-educated, darker skinned immigrants (Bean, Leach and Lowell 2004;Portes and Rumbaut 2006). As the largest group of post-1965 immigrants, with relatively low-education levels and the possibility of social and labor market discrimination, Latino immigrants present an important test case for these contrasting perspectives on contemporary immigration in the United States 1 .…”