The Occupational Cost of Being Illegal in the United States: Legal Status, Job Hazards, and Compensating Differentials.

Considerable research and pervasive cultural narratives suggest that undocumented immigrant workers are concentrated in the most dangerous, hazardous, and otherwise unappealing jobs in U.S. labor markets. Yet, owing largely to data limitations, little empirical work has addressed this topic. Using data from the 2004 and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we impute legal status for Mexican and Central American immigrants and link their occupations to BLS data on occupational fatalities and occupational hazard data from the Department of Labor to explore racial and legal status differentials on several specific measures of occupational risk. Results indicate that undocumented workers face heightened exposure to numerous dimensions of occupational hazard - including higher levels of physical strain, exposure to heights, and repetitive motions - but are less exposed than native workers to some of the potentially most dangerous environments. We also show that undocumented workers are rewarded less for employment in hazardous settings, receiving low or no compensating differential for working in jobs with high fatality, toxic materials, or exposure to heights. Overall, this study suggests that legal status plays an important role in determining exposure to job hazard and in structuring the wage returns to risky work.

Housing and neighborhood quality among undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants.

Extensive research has documented the challenges that undocumented immigrants face in navigating U.S. labor markets, but relatively little has explored the impact of legal status on residential outcomes despite their widespread repercussions for social well-being. Using data from the 1996-2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to impute documentation status among Mexican and Central American immigrants, we examine group differences in residential outcomes, including homeownership, housing crowding, satisfaction with neighborhood and housing quality, problems with neighborhood crime/safety, governmental services, and environmental issues, and deficiencies with housing units. Results from our analysis indicate that undocumented householders are far less likely to be homeowners than documented migrants, and also live in more crowded homes, report greater structural deficiencies with their dwellings, and express greater concern about the quality of public services and environmental conditions in their neighborhoods. In comparison to native whites, undocumented migrants' residential circumstances are lacking, but their residential outcomes tend to be superior to those of native-born blacks. Overall, our results highlight the pervasive impact of legal status on stratifying Mexicans' and Central Americans' prospects for successful incorporation, but also underscore the rigidity of the black/nonblack divide structuring American residential contexts.

Educational attitudes, school peer context, and the "immigrant paradox" in education.

Previous research has been unable to explain declines in educational outcomes across immigrant generations. This study uses data on Mexican and Asian-origin youth from Add Health to test educational attitudes and behaviors as mechanisms linking immigrant generation to four educational outcomes. First, it assesses whether generational changes in attitudes and behaviors correspond to generational differences in educational outcomes. Second, it tests whether generational changes in immigrant children's attitudes depend on the school peer context in which they acculturate. Findings show that educational attitudes and behaviors do decline across immigrant generations, but that these changes in attitudes account for little of the generational variation in educational outcomes. The relationship between immigrant generation and attitudes is strongest in schools with more negative peer cultures.

Legal status and educational transitions for mexican and central american immigrant youth.

This study uses the Survey of Income and Program Participation to infer the legal status of Mexican and Central American immigrant youth and to investigate its relationship with educational attainment. We assess differences by legal status in high school graduation and college enrollment, decompose differences in college enrollment into the probability of high school graduation and the probability of high school graduates' enrollment in college and estimate the contributions of personal and family background characteristics to such differences. Results show that undocumented students are less likely than documented students to both graduate from high school and enroll in college, and differences in college enrollment cannot be explained by family background characteristics. We conclude that legal status is a critical axis of stratification for Latinos.

The social context of assimilation: testing implications of segmented assimilation theory.

Segmented assimilation theory has been a popular explanation for the diverse experiences of assimilation among new waves of immigrants and their children. While the theory has been interpreted in many different ways, we emphasize its implications for the important role of social context: both processes and consequences of assimilation should depend on the local social context in which immigrants are embedded. We derive empirically falsifiable hypotheses about the interaction effects between social context and assimilation on immigrant children's well-being. We then test the hypotheses using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Our empirical analyses yield two main findings. First, for immigrant adolescents living in non-poverty neighborhoods, we find assimilation to be positively associated with educational achievement and psychological well-being but also positively associated with at-risk behavior. Second, there is little empirical evidence supporting our hypotheses derived from segmented assimilation theory. We interpret these results to mean that future research would be more fruitful focusing on differential processes of assimilation rather than differential consequences of assimilation.

Neighborhood Characteristics, Parental Practices and Children's Math Achievement in Elementary School.

This paper investigates the relationships among neighborhood characteristics, education-related parental practices, and children's academic achievement during a critical but under-studied stage of children's educational trajectories - the elementary school years. Using a large, nationally representative database of American elementary school students - the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) - and contextual data from the 2000 U.S. Census, we examine parental practices and neighborhood characteristics at the beginning of children's school careers (grades K-1) and their associations with math achievement through the end of the 5th grade. FINDINGS: Net of family-level characteristics, higher levels of early education- oriented parental practices were associated with higher mathematics achievement at the end of 5th grade, while neighborhood disadvantage was associated with lower 5th grade math achievement. Families residing in high poverty, high unemployment, low-education neighborhoods employed fewer education- oriented practices with their kindergarten- first grade children, but the positive effect of such parental practices on children's mathematics achievement was stronger for children who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

ASIAN AMERICAN-WHITE DIFFERENCES IN THE EFFECT OF MOTHERHOOD ON CAREER OUTCOMES.

U.S.-born Asian Americans are unique among American minority groups in that they lack earnings disadvantages relative to Whites with similar education levels. Controlling for education and age, there is little difference in the earnings of U.S.-born Asian and White men, but Asian women have higher earnings than comparable White women. Using data from SESTAT, this study tests the hypothesis that Asian American women's high earnings may result from adjusting their labor supply less than White women in response to parenthood, leading to greater work experience over time. Findings show that Asian American women are less likely than White women reduce labor supply in response to parenthood, and that their resulting greater work experience explains their high rate of earnings growth.

ASSIMILATION CHOICES AMONG IMMIGRANT FAMILIES: DOES SCHOOL CONTEXT MATTER?

This paper explores the relationship between social context, measured in terms of school characteristics, and the assimilation of immigrant adolescents. First, it develops a measure of assimilation based on comparing immigrant adolescents to native peers within the same school. Second, it investigates whether immigrant adolescents' degree of assimilation varies systematically according to school SES. Third, it explores the role of parental and adolescent behavior in creating such variation. Results show that both Asian and Hispanic immigrant youth are less assimilated to native youths' substance use and delinquency patterns in lower-SES schools. This association can be explained by parenting behaviors and adolescent friendship choices for Asian youth, but not Hispanic youth.

Legal Status and Wage Disparities for Mexican Immigrants.

This paper employs a unique method of imputing the legal status of Mexican immigrants in the 1996-1999 and 2001-2003 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to provide new evidence of the role of legal authorization in the U.S. on workers' wages. Using growth curve techniques, we estimate wage trajectories for four groups: documented Mexican immigrants, undocumented Mexican immigrants, U.S-born Mexican Americans, and native non-Latino whites. Our estimates reveal a 17 percent wage disparity between documented and undocumented Mexican immigrant men, and a 9 percent documented-undocumented wage disparity for Mexican immigrant women. We also find that in comparison to authorized Mexicans, undocumented Mexican immigrants have lower returns to human capital and slower wage growth.

Did send-down experience benefit youth? A reevaluation of the social consequences of forced urban-rural migration during China's Cultural Revolution.

During China's Cultural Revolution, a large proportion of urban youth were forced to go to the countryside as a result of the state's "send-down" policy. Past research has been ambivalent about the long-term social consequences for the Chinese youth who experienced send-down. Some scholars have suggested that the send-down experience may have yielded beneficial effects. To test this claim, we analyze data from the Survey of Family Life in Urban China, which we conducted in three large cities in 1999. Questions available in this data set allow us to ascertain the send-down experience of both the respondent and a sibling and educational attainment at the times of send-down and return. Our analyses of the new data show that the send-down experience does not seem to have benefited the affected Chinese youth. Differences in social outcomes between those who experienced send-down and those who did not are either non-existent or spurious due to other social processes.

IS ASSIMILATION THEORY DEAD? THE EFFECT OF ASSIMILATION ON ADOLESCENT WELL-BEING.

The relationship between assimilation and the well-being of immigrant children has been the focus of debate in the recent sociological literature. Much of this work has questioned whether classical theories of immigrant adaptation, which assumed assimilation to be an integral part of the process of upward mobility for immigrants, are still applicable to today's immigrant children. This study reevaluates the applicability of classical assimilation theory with a comprehensive empirical assessment of the relationship between assimilation and the well-being of Hispanic and Asian immigrant adolescents. Using Add Health data, we examine the effect of different aspects of assimilation on educational achievement, psychological well-being, and at-risk behaviors. We find that the effect of assimilation varies greatly depending on the ethnic group and outcome under consideration, but that it is generally related to both greater academic achievement and more at-risk behavior. We conclude that assimilation theory is still relevant, but suggest an interpretation that emphasizes a process of decreasing differences between groups rather than either detrimental or beneficial effects of assimilation.

Double Jeopardy? The Interaction of Gender and Race on Earnings in the U.S.

There are sizeable earnings differentials by both gender and race in the U.S. labor market, with women earning less than men and most racial/ethnic minority groups earning less than whites. It has been proposed in the previous literature that the effects of gender and race on earnings are additive, so that minority women suffer the full disadvantage of each status. We test this proposition for a broad range of minority groups in the U.S. We find that women of all minority groups in the U.S. suffer a smaller gender penalty than white women. Exploring the potential role of racial variation in gender role specialization in producing such differentials, we find some empirical evidence suggesting that white families specialize more than families of most other races.

Health insurance expansions for working families: a comparison of targeting strategies.

We compare three eligibility criteria for targeting health insurance expansions in working families: poverty, hourly wages, and employment in a small firm. Making pairwise comparisons among these, we find that targeting by poverty is the most effective and efficient. A poverty-based method is also the most effective way to target those lacking access to employer-sponsored insurance and those with low take-up of such coverage. When we examine the effectiveness of targeting by family type, we find that marital status and number of workers in the family make little difference once we control for the presence of children and for poverty level.