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];
Motivated by recent findings of a diminishing earnings gap between the West Indians and other black workers, the earnings processes of immigrant and native-born West Indians are examined in an effort to find the role of culture traits in their earnings
