Using data from the public use microdata sample of the 1990 U.S. census, we examine the socioeconomic attainment patterns of Africans in the United States, within the context of the assimilation and selectivity perspectives. Three primary findings emerge from this study. First, we find that white African men and men from English-speaking Africa have higher net hourly earnings than their nonwhite and non-English-speaking counterparts. Second, we find that while South African men have higher net hourly earnings than men from a number of selected African countries, there is no statistically significant difference between the net hourly earnings of South African women and women from these selected African countries. Third, we find no statistically significant difference between the net hourly earnings of black African and black American men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
his article presents a documentation note of the 10th Migration Dialogue seminar held March 7-9, 2002 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Migration Dialogue seminars provide a setting for 40 opinion leaders from Europe and North America to learn about and discuss the major migration management issues of the twenty-first century. The following are three central issues explored in the 2002 seminar. First, the Dominican Republic economy grew rapidly in the 1990s, 6-8 percent per year, as thousands of rural women especially found sewing jobs in free-trade zones. Why did emigration pressure remain so high despite rapid job creation? Are emigration and remittances substitutes for socioeconomic reforms, notably in the education system and the labor market? Do remittances, which account for almost 105 of the Dominican Republic's $16 billion gross domestic product, increase or decrease the desire to emigrate? Second, Hispaniola is a relatively small island shared by peoples with different origins, histories, and languages. The population of the Dominican Republic and Haiti are each 8-9 million. Some 500,000 to 800,000 Haitian nationals live in the Dominican Republic, equivalent to almost 10 percent of Haiti's population.;
Is the contemporary second generation on the road to the upward mobility and assimilation that in retrospect characterized the second generation of earlier immigrations? Or are the American economic context and the racial origins of today's immigration likely to result in a much less favorable future for the contemporary second generation? While several recent papers have argued for the latter position, we suspect they are too pessimistic. We briefly review the Second generation upward mobility in the past and then turn to the crucial comparisons between past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
This study examines immigrant integration in the low socioeconomic stratum in Trinidad. Integration is operationalized as participation in overlapping societal spheres. The study also focuses on corollary aspects of access and goals. While several factors facilitated participation in the social sphere, labor market participation was inhibited by conditions of open unemployment and underemployment. These exigencies had elicited strategies of subsistence from first generation immigrants whose work-related attitudes, ethics, and wage expectation levels functioned to their advantage and led in their competitiveness in a difficult labor market. Some of the second generation were disengaging themselves from their parents' level of labor market activity but relocating farther from the mainstream labor market into a marginalized peer stratum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
The social mobility of immigrants depends not just on the opportunity structure of the receiving society, but also on the past experiences and the sociocultural repertoires that immigrants bring with them on arrival. This becomes clear in a comparison of two ethnic groups that migrated from one Caribbean country to the Netherlands: the Afro-Surinamese and Indo-Surinamese. While both groups left Surinam at the same time and settled into very similar conditions in the Netherlands, their pre- migration histories differed considerably. These different premigration legacies seem crucial to understanding the current differences in the economic and educational performance of these immigrants and their offspring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
n this paper two gaps in North American immigrant homeownership research are addressed. The first concerns the lack of studies (especially in Canada) that identify changes in homeownership rates by skin color over time, and the second relates to the shortage of comparative research between Canada and the United States on this topic. In this paper the homeownership levels and attainment rates of Black, Chinese, Filipino, White, and South Asian immigrants are compared in Canada and the United States for 1970/1971–2000/2001. For the most part, greater similarities than differences are found between the two countries. Both Canadian and U.S. Chinese and White immigrants have the highest adjusted homeownership rates of all groups, at times even exceeding comparably positioned native-born households. Black immigrants, on the other hand, tend to have the lowest ownership rates of all groups, particularly in the United States, with Filipinos and South Asians situated between these extremes. Most of these differences stem from disparities that exist at arrival, however, and not from differential advancement into homeownershi [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
