The Geography of Immigrant Labor Markets: Space, Networks, and Gender

The New Americans Recent Immigration and American Society Edited by Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut A Series from...

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The New Americans Recent Immigration and American Society

Edited by Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut

A Series from LFB Scholarly

This page intentionally left blank

The Geography of Immigrant Labor Markets Space, Networks, and Gender

Virginia Parks

LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC New York 2005

Copyright © 2005 by LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parks, Virginia, 1970The geography of immigrant labor markets : space, networks, and gender / Virginia Parks. p. cm. -- (The new Americans) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-59332-092-2 (alk. paper) 1. Alien labor--United States. 2. Women alien labor--United States. 3. Labor market--United States. 4. Immigrants--United States. 5. Social networks--Economic aspects--United States. 6. Discrimination in employment--United States. 7. Discrimination in housing--United States. 8. United States--Emigration and immigration--Regional disparities. I. Title. II. Series: New Americans (LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC) HD8081.A5P365 2005 331.6'2'0973--dc22 2005012796

ISBN 1-59332-092-2 Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements..............................................................................vii Chapter 1

Introduction ............................................................... 1

Chapter 2

The Shape of Immigrant Local Labor Markets: The Effects of Social and Spatial Accessibility......... 7

Chapter 3

Mapping Immigrant Residence and Work............... 31

Chapter 4

How Local the Immigrant Labor Market?............... 55

Chapter 5

Connecting Neighborhood and Home to Ethnic Labor Market Segregation ........................... 81

Chapter 6

Connecting Neighborhood and Home to Black and Immigrant Women’s Labor Force Participation .......................................................... 121

Chapter 7

Gendering the Nexus of Work, Residence, Networks, and Urban Form ................................... 153

Appendix 1

Measuring Space: Commute Data ......................... 161

Appendix 2

Measuring Space: Accessibility Indices ................ 163

Notes .................. ............................................................................... 167 References.......... ............................................................................... 171 Index .................. ............................................................................... 185

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Acknowledgements

The research for this book was generously supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-9986877), a fellowship from the University of California Institute of Labor and Employment, and support from the California Census Research Data Center (CCRDC). I would like to thank the CCRDC staff and Pablo Gutierrez, Dale Iwai, and others at the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) for their able assistance. Further thanks go to Mark Ellis, David Rigby, Allen Scott, and Abel Valenzuela for their valuable input and advice. Mark Ellis deserves special commendation for setting me on my path in Geography, honing my arguments, and rigorously challenging my conclusions. Of course, all errors remain my responsibility.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

One of the defining features of the immigrant labor market experience is the concentration of immigrants into a few jobs. Whether occupational or industrial, sociologists describe these immigrant concentrations as immigrant niches (Model 1993). Social networks lie behind the development of these niches. Immigrants learn about jobs through other immigrants, and employers utilize current workers’ social contacts for recruitment purposes. As one worker extends a hand to friends and family, and they to others, job information spreads broadly through an ethnic network while channeling members narrowly into a few jobs (Waldinger 1996). These social networks perpetuate the ethnic division of labor and contribute to the segregation of immigrants from other workers in the labor market. While these social characteristics of immigrant labor markets have been well documented, little is known about the spatial characteristics of immigrant labor markets. We do know that immigrants tend to settle in just a few cities. The five largest immigrant populations in the United States reside in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago (in order of size). Approximately 56 percent of all immigrants in the U.S. make one of these metropolitan regions their home (Waldinger 2001, p. 43). Thus, when we speak of “immigrant labor markets,” we describe a predominantly urban phenomenon. Our spatial knowledge of immigrant labor markets within these cities, at the intraurban scale, is limited. In contrast, the intraurban residential patterns of immigrants have been a constant focus of scholarly attention dating back to the Chicago School urban sociologists (Logan, Alba, et al. 1996; Logan, Alba, and Zhang 2002; Massey 1985; Park and Burgess [1925] 1967; Wright, Ellis, and Parks 1

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The Geography of Immigrant Labor Markets

2005). Immigrants not only concentrate residentially in a few cities, they tend to concentrate residentially into a few immigrant enclave neighborhoods. This pattern of residential concentration may be related to immigrants’ patterns of concentration in the labor market. Put differently, ethnic residential segregation may be related to ethnic labor market segregation. This relationship may stem from spatial relationships, such as the location of the immigrant neighborhood relative to jobs. While the importance of space as a factor in the employment outcomes of groups such as native-born Blacks and women has been well documented (Brueckner and Zenou 2003; Hanson and Pratt 1995; Martin 2004; Mouw 2002; Raphael 1998), there is some question as to whether similar spatial effects exist for immigrants (Aponte 1996). For example, a central debate among scholars interested in the job prospects of disadvantaged groups such as native-born Blacks is the spatial mismatch hypothesis (Kain 1968, 1992, 2004). The movement of jobs to the suburbs, spatial mismatch proponents argue, negatively impacts Blacks who reside in inner-city neighborhoods. Blacks cannot easily relocate to the suburbs in pursuit of jobs given racial residential discrimination, and the costs of a long commute discourage them from taking suburban jobs while remaining in the inner city. Thus, a spatial mismatch between where Black workers live and where available jobs are located contributes to higher unemployment rates among these inner-city residents. Given similarities between immigrants and innercity Blacks as low-skill workers who experience residential segregation, immigrants may be impacted similarly by the effects of poor geographic accessibility to jobs. Conversely, spatial accessibility may not matter for immigrant employment outcomes given the strong reliance of immigrants on social networks when finding work. Immigrant employment sites may be located throughout the city, and immigrants may find employment in these jobs regardless of how near to or far from them they live. In this way, immigrant employment networks may override spatial accessibility constraints. No clear geographic relationship may exist between immigrant neighborhoods and immigrant employment sites. And while immigrants may be segregated residentially, their residential segregation may yield a different outcome than does residential segregation for blacks. Rather than providing immigrants with poor geographic accessibility to jobs, their segregation in residential space may be related to their segregation in the labor

Introduction

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market. The relationship between residential segregation and labor market segregation may evolve because immigrant social networks are spatially rooted in ethnic neighborhoods. The kind of neighborhood an immigrant lives in may be more important than where that neighborhood is located relative to employment. Geographic accessibility may matter little, while the place-based nature of social networks may matter considerably. Immigrants who live in ethnic neighborhoods may be more tightly connected to an ethnic employment network than immigrants who live outside such neighborhoods because local social networks may tie information about one place (work) to another place (home). Thus, the relationship between immigrant employment sites and immigrant neighborhoods may depend upon social networks embedding in places, rather than upon the pull of geographic nearness. Lastly, these processes may operate differently by gender. Feminist geographers have established that women’s labor markets function spatially differently than men’s. Because women tend to work closer to home in order to accommodate their household responsibilities, the area over which they look for available job opportunities is relatively smaller than the area over which men search (Hanson and Pratt 1991). Thus, even though women may know about jobs further afield, these jobs are essentially moot opportunities. We do not know, however, if the same gendered commuting pattern holds for immigrants. If it does, then the spatially constrained labor markets of immigrant women may help explain the emergence of female immigrant niches. Further, geographic accessibility may matter more for immigrant women than men. Social accessibility may matter most for immigrant men, regardless of spatial accessibility, while both social and spatial accessibility may influence the employment outcomes of immigrant women.

Research Questions This book explores the complicated social and spatial processes that give rise to the immigrant local labor market. The analyses contained in the following chapters consider the spatial characteristics of immigrant labor markets in light of gendered differences, ethnic networks, residential context, and the location of immigrant neighborhoods in relation to the location of immigrant employment. A

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key question underlying these analyses asks whether spatial accessibility matters for immigrant employment at the intraurban scale, or whether ethnic networks (social accessibility) override intraurban geographic constraints on job search and commuting. Of key concern are gendered differences. For example, do social or spatial accessibility matter more for immigrant women than men? The following chapters begin to paint a picture of how social and spatial accessibility, neighborhood location and neighborhood context, shape the immigrant labor market experience in Los Angeles. The book proceeds as follows. In Chapter 2, I review several literatures that address the two primary concerns of this study: how geographic accessibility influences employment outcomes for particular groups and the social processes that drive immigrant labor markets. Here I outline the theoretical precepts that guide the empirical analyses of later chapters. As a first approach to analyzing the relationship between home and work for immigrants, I map the residential and employment concentrations of immigrants throughout the Los Angeles region. These maps, contained in Chapter 3, are unique in that they portray the employment patterns of immigrants by national-origin and gender for the first time. Prior to the availability of the confidential one-in-six 1990 Census of Housing and Population, data that illustrate these patterns did not exist at the fine geographic scale of the census tract. These maps reveal the relatively tight locational correspondence between immigrant neighborhoods and immigrant employment sites. Chapter 4 is the first empirical chapter of three. In this chapter, I explore the spatial extent of the immigrant labor market and its “local” character. In particular, I evaluate the role of ethnic networks and residential context in shaping immigrant women’s spatial labor markets through an examination of their commutes and a test of the “spatial entrapment” hypothesis. Postulated by geographers, the spatial entrapment hypothesis holds that household responsibilities require women to work close to home, thus limiting their job opportunities (Hanson and Pratt 1991). Alternatively, sociologists argue that ethnic networks, rather than spatial propinquity, connect immigrants to jobs. While home may anchor and constrain an immigrant woman’s job search area, ethnic networks may expand her search area by overriding the friction of geographic distance. In this chapter, I consider whether immigrant women may be spatially entrapped as women and/or socially connected as immigrants.

Introduction

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In Chapter 5, I investigate the relationship between residential segregation and ethnic and gender segregation in the labor market. While sociologists have made a compelling case for the importance of ethnicity and nativity in channeling workers to specific jobs through ethnic networks, little work has been done to spatialize such networks. This chapter takes a first step in investigating the spatial nature of ethnic networks. I argue that these networks are rooted in ethnic neighborhoods and that residential segregation is likely to be a more important determinant of women’s employment outcomes than men’s given the highly local context of women’s lives as a result of household responsibilities. Lastly, in Chapter 6, I explore the extent to which local place effects matter for the labor force participation of disadvantaged women, such as low-skill native-born Blacks and immigrants. Central to the analysis is a concern with the effects of location—where jobs are located in relation to where women live. Does spatial job accessibility impact women’s decision to enter the labor market? Does location matter more for some women than others, such as those with children and stronger ties to home as a result? Additionally, I explore the effects of neighborhood context. Evidence suggests these effects matter, as researchers have described the locally specific nature of women’s lives—particularly women’s utilization of “place-based knowledge” when searching for employment (Hanson and Pratt 1991; Sassen 1995). These effects may impact women differently based upon race, ethnicity, and nativity. In a broader sense, this book attempts to reconcile competing claims concerning the roles of social and spatial accessibility in facilitating or hindering immigrant labor market outcomes. As a geographer, I perceive labor market processes as socio-spatial processes, and I argue throughout the book that space does matter for immigrant employment outcomes. The effects vary for different groups, however, and by gender. No specific spatial rule applies to all groups, though general tendencies emerge. Most significantly, the collective results point to the existence of local labor markets for immigrants. While globalization may compress time and space, drawing workers from throughout the world to the Los Angeles region, once here, these individuals balance home and work within the temporal constraints of a day. In the words of David Harvey, “Labor ... has to go home every night” (1989, p. 19).


CHAPTER 2

The Shape of Immigrant Local Labor Markets: The Effects of Social and Spatial Accessibility

In this chapter, I consider the local labor market literature in geography in light of the significant presence of immigrants in domestic labor markets such as Los Angeles. My particular interest lies in synthesizing ideas from two literatures: the immigrant labor market literature in economic sociology and the local labor market literature in economic geography. While sociologists tend to emphasize social connections within the labor market exclusively, geographers focus on socio-spatial relations. Because of the strong social networks identified among immigrants by sociologists, immigrants prove an important group for which to consider the implications that geography may or may not play in the processes that shape immigrant local labor markets. I expand the analytical framework of the local labor market by bringing together sociology’s focus on social networks and geography’s focus on the labor market’s local geographic characteristics through an investigation of how these different traditions of labor market analysis bear upon the local labor market experiences of immigrants. I raise a number of empirical questions that address how social and spatial accessibility may shape immigrant local labor markets. These lay the groundwork for the book’s empirical analyses.

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Introducing the Labor Market The labor market arises from the exchange of an individual’s labor for a wage. In neoclassical economics, wages are set by the continual interplay of supply and demand within a market that tends toward a state of equilibrium based on the marginal productivity of labor. Human capital theory explains wages as a reflection of a worker’s productivity, best indicated by that worker’s set of skills. Higher levels of skill generate higher levels of productivity resulting in higher wages. Skills clutched in hand, individuals enter the labor market fully informed of all job opportunities and select the job that best compensates them for their abilities and potential productivity. In Marxian economics, the labor market arises from the exchange of the commodity labor power for the material necessities of reproducing that labor power. The labor market serves as the mechanism that transforms labor power into variable capital (Lee 1994). But this is not a lifeless, mechanical process. Workers constitute a special entity in the production process because they are sentient human beings. Workers bring to the market socially conditioned expectations and a set of social relations. These necessarily influence the wage-labor exchange, a bargaining process often beset with conflict. As such, labor is not a true commodity, but a “pseudo-commodity” that is “idiosyncratic and spatially differentiated” (Storper and Walker 1983). As socio-spatial sentient beings, workers interject a range of complexities into the labor market process. The uniqueness of labor power as a commodity produced by human beings serves as the starting point for sociologists and geographers interested in labor markets. While economists focus on the individual as an independent actor within the market devoid of social complexities, sociologists focus on the individual as a member of society, influenced by other actors. Contemporary economic sociology describes the “embeddedness” of economic activity (Granovetter 1985) in which “economic action takes place within the networks of social relations that make up the social structure” (Smelser and Swedberg, 1994, p. 18). The role of social networks in shaping labor market processes has received considerable attention in economic sociology (Granovetter 1974; Granovetter 1986; Montgomery 1991, 1992; Waldinger 1986-87). Geographers have focused on the socio-spatial relationships that influence workers’ expectations, employers’ actions, and the

The Shape of Immigrant Local Labor Market

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employment relation that emerges from the interaction of the two. Geographers argue that labor market processes must be understood as local contingencies produced by current and historical political and economic conditions. Lee (1994) articulates geography’s attention to the “local” in the labor market as follows: [A]lthough it is possible to speak, for example, of singular national, international or even global labour markets in terms of the forms of legislation which govern them and/or the migration of labour (always limited in relation to total labour supply) within them, all labour markets are in a sense local, shaped by the daily journey-to-work and intensified by the processes and experience of reproduction within particular localities (p. 309). Geographers define the local labor market by the historical and sociopolitical characteristics of local places, but they are concerned also with defining the geographic form and extent of the local labor market—the area that best defines the “local” labor market.

The Local Labor Market in Economic Geography While neoclassical economics views the local labor market as simply one scale at which equilibrium takes place (usually the metropolitan level), economic geographers incorporate both friction of distance and socio-spatial relations into the concept of the local labor market. While much early work on the local labor market focused exclusively on the empirical definition of the commuting shed, later research emphasized the fundamental role of social context over geographic definitions. The commuting shed’s fall from favor, however, has come at a price, as a concrete understanding of the local labor market’s on-the-ground form pivots upon workers’ daily commuting routines. Harvey (1989) describes the commuting shed’s relationship to the concept of the local labor market and the urban process: Unlike other commodities, labor power has to go home every night and reproduce itself before coming back to work the next morning. The limit on the working day implies some sort of limit on daily travel time. Daily labor markets are therefore confined within a given commuting range. The geographical

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The Geography of Immigrant Labor Markets boundaries are flexible; they depend on the length of the working day within the workplace, the time and cost of commuting (given the modes and techniques of mass movement), and the social conditions considered acceptable for the reproduction of labor power (usually a cultural achievement of class struggle). A prima facie case exists, therefore, for considering the urban process in terms of the form and functioning of geographically integrated labor markets within which daily substitutions of labor power against job opportunities are in principle possible (p. 19).

While some empirical work on commute sheds reduces space to a mere container within which the labor market functions, commuting behavior nevertheless gives geographic form to the local labor market. The local labor market and the geography of production Allen Scott’s (e.g. 1994, 1988) research on intraurban industrial processes stands as a significant contribution to the geographic literature on local labor markets. In his work, Scott ties the process of urban development and the emergence of urban form to the production apparatus of capitalist society (Scott 1988). Scott seeks to counter urban theoretical approaches that privilege the social space of the city (such as the ecological models of the Chicago School and the vast literature that developed in response) at the expense of recognizing the productive function of the city. Marxist theorists, such as Castells (1973), also overlooked the production apparatus in favor of consumption and reproduction. In Metropolis, Scott (1988) argues that the very emergence and existence of the modern metropolis depends upon its function as capitalist space: “What is crucial about the production system … is that it creates the powerful forces that, first, give rise to metropolitan agglomeration as a purely locational phenomenon, and, second, influence in many intimate ways the workaday existence of the entire citizenry” (p. 2). Thus, urban processes derive from the city’s first function as a site of economic activity. From this starting point, Scott links residential patterns, as social spaces within the city, to the city’s productive capacity through the mechanism of the local labor market. Scott (1988) argues “for a view of intraurban social space as being deeply marked in both its locational and functional characteristics by the operation of the division of labor


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and local labor markets” (p. 218). Most generally, the local labor market for Scott emerges from the “locational symbiosis” between employment sites and workers’ places of residence. In a discussion moving from commuting patterns to the locational patterns of agglomeration economies, Scott (1988) discusses the multiple but constitutive forces that give rise to the spatial form of the local labor market. Commuting patterns underlie the geographic form of the local labor market by tying together the locations of workplaces to the residences of workers. Workers trade off between the costs (and amenities) of housing and the costs of commuting in light of their wage rate when choosing their residential locations. Firms trade off between costs of land, rent, transportation amenities, and labor when choosing employment locations. Scott explains the rational of firms in choosing location sites near suitable labor pools, especially in the case of industrial agglomerations, as follows: Because of their [interlinked producers] inflated collective demand for labor and the direct impact this has on wage rates, such clusters of producers frequently locate as a body close to the geographical center of their main labor force. This locational strategy secures continued transactional efficiency while ensuring that upward pressures on wage rates are as restrained as they possibly can be (1988, p. 130). This transaction-costs perspective seeks to explain how industrial location decisions both impact and are impacted by workers’ commute costs, and how workers’ residential decisions both impact and are impacted by industrial location decisions. A thicker version of the local labor market Many workers face constraints in their residential and employment decisions. A thicker, more contextualized version of the local labor market helps us to incorporate these constraints by explicitly incorporating ethnicity, race, and gender, as well as attendant sociopolitical factors such as housing and employment discrimination. Peck (1996) argues for a socially constituted conception of the labor market that moves “beyond cartography to focus on processes” (86). According to Peck, the local labor market is a "conjunctural causal structure" which takes into account the local variability of three key

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components: the production process, the social reproduction of labor supply, and forces of social regulation, such as institutions and unions. Peck’s concept of the local labor market centers upon Harvey’s (1989) notion of the local labor market as place. As Peck explains: "His [Harvey's] concern is not with the local labor market as a space in which universal labor market processes operate, but as a place in which these processes may be channeled and modified to produce unique local outcomes'" (1996, p. 89). Thus, the local labor market gets positioned as a go-between (what Peck calls a “mid-level theoretical device”) holding in the one hand, abstract general processes, and in the other, material outcomes. While this conception of the local labor market re-orients us to the socio-political influences on the labor market and their particular local manifestations, Peck’s focus elides the geographic nature of the local labor market and the everyday consequences geographic accessibility poses for both workers and firms. While Peck argues that “no matter how accurate the commuting data or how powerful the computer system into which it is fed, the problems of delimiting the boundaries of local labor markets are insoluble” (1996, p. 88), the research he uses to support his claims rely upon exactly such data. The work of Hanson and Pratt (1995), for example, employs commute data to illustrate the spatial diversity of people’s lived daily lives and the social constructions that inform these lives (such as the social construction of work and home for women—a point Peck can emphasize given the rich empirical evidence provided by Hanson and Pratt’s work). The strength of Scott’s and Hanson and Pratt’s articulations of the local labor market lies in their rigorous attention to mechanisms that inform the geographically “local” of the local labor market. The importance of Peck’s approach, however, lies in its use as an analytical tool that enables articulation of spatial processes as locally differentiated and socially constructed phenomena. Peck’s work builds upon the significant contribution of Hanson and Pratt (discussed in the following section) in shaping our understanding of local labor markets as socially constructed heterogeneous spaces and places. Hanson and Pratt (1992) forcefully argue that Local labor markets are . . . heterogeneous because of gender, race and class-based segmentation . . . but they are also spatially segmented through the fine-scaled processes defining labor supply and demand. . . . [T]he geography of labor


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markets is far richer than simply a measure of distance. . . . Individuals knowledge of the universe of jobs available to them, their expectations about wages and benefits, and the gendering and racialization of jobs all are shaped locally. . . . Job opportunities are more than just dots on a map; they are to a considerable extent socially constructed through the interactions embodying everyday life (quoted in Peck, 1996, pp. 89-90). The work of both Peck and Hanson and Pratt necessarily problematizes a transactions-cost analysis and pushes us to probe for multidimensionality within the local labor market, such as specific racial, ethnic, class, and gendered forms the local labor market may take.

The Role of Race and Gender in Shaping Labor Markets Research that does strive for a multi-dimensional understanding of the local labor market recognizes that many workers face constraints selecting their residential and employment locations that extend beyond housing costs, commuting costs, and wages. Blacks face a housing market shaped by the historical and current effects of discrimination. Household responsibilities require that women work close to home, restricting their job search areas. Two key literatures address these issues: the spatial mismatch and spatial entrapment literatures. Both attempt to bring factors such as race and gender considered exogenous by neoclassical theory and some economic geographers into an explanation of labor market processes that treats such factors as endogenous. Spatial mismatch hypothesis First developed by Kain (1968, 1992, 2004), the spatial mismatch hypothesis explains high black unemployment as a function of both employment suburbanization and residential segregation. As jobs shift from the inner-city to the suburbs, blacks are unable to readily access the relocated jobs by moving their place of residence because of constraints imposed by housing discrimination. In turn, high commute costs discourage blacks from accepting jobs in the suburbs. As jobs

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move, blacks are left behind in a wake of rising inner-city unemployment. The claims of the spatial mismatch hypothesis remain controversial given inconsistent empirical findings, though recent research employing innovative methodology supports the spatial mismatch hypothesis (Brueckner and Zenou 2003; Martin 2004; Mouw 2000; Raphael 1998). Supporters argue that spatial mismatch partially accounts for the racial gap in unemployment.1 For example, Ihlandfeldt and Sjoquist (1990, 1991) find that job proximity explains roughly 30 percent of the gap between black and white teenage unemployment rates, and Stoll (1998) finds that job decentralization negatively affects young black men’s unemployment and duration of unemployment. Mouw (2000) finds that the decentralization of jobs away from black neighborhoods between 1980 and 1990 in Detroit accounted for one-quarter of the black-white unemployment gap. Martin (2004) finds that shifts in employment away from Black neighborhoods increased Black unemployment rates by up to 4.3 percentage points between 1980 and 1990. Detractors of the spatial mismatch hypothesis (Leonard 1987), however, argue that the gap in unemployment between blacks and whites stems from factors other than space, such as racial discrimination or transportation resources (see also Cooke 1993; Holloway 1996). In his study of black families in Chicago, Ellwood (1986) finds comparable unemployment rates between similarly educated blacks regardless of where they live within the city. From this he concludes that “race, not space” explains the persistent gap in unemployment between whites and blacks. Ong and Taylor (1995) argue that neither race nor space determine employment; rather access to a car proves the most important factor for employment. (For a review of the earlier spatial mismatch literature see Holzer 1991; see Mouw 2000 and Fernandez 2004 for reviews of more recent work). Wage effect of spatial accessibility The spatial mismatch hypothesis also has been used to explain blacks’ lower earnings. If blacks experience lower levels of job accessibility, “wage effects should occur as a larger pool of potential workers compete for nearby jobs, thus depressing their wages and creating a positive ‘wage gradient’ for jobs further away” (Holzer 1991, p. 107). Additionally, increased commuting costs for blacks who do find


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employment further from their homes will experience a decrease in their net wages as commuting costs increase (Holzer 1991). Most studies measuring the economic effects of job accessibility are studies that use a measure of job suburbanization as their accessibility measure. These studies utilize a dichotomous independent variable indicating the location of residence (or workplace) in either the central-city or the suburbs. Using this approach, Vrooman and Greenfield (1980) and Price and Mills (1985) find negative effects of central-city residence on black earnings. In contrast, Harrison (1974) finds that the distribution of weekly earnings for blacks living in central-city areas are not different from those living in the suburbs. Interestingly, studies measuring the difference in earnings by centralcity and suburban workplaces found that blacks who work in the central-city earn significantly lower wages than those employed in the suburbs (Brueckner and Zenou 2003; Danziger and Weinstein 1976; Hughes and Madden 1991; Ihlandfeldt and Sjoquist 1991; Straszheim 1980). Further research needs to expand the scope of analysis to test better the specific claims of the spatial mismatch hypothesis. The experience of different groups, such as immigrants an women, may either lend support or detract from the explanatory power of the mismatch hypothesis. For example, why do low-skill immigrants have higher rates of employment than low-skill blacks? Do immigrants experience lower levels of residential segregation? Do they live closer to jobs than blacks? If yes, then the claims of the spatial mismatch may hold. However, if immigrants experience similar levels of residential segregation as blacks, if they in fact live in the same neighborhoods as blacks, and live similar distances away from jobs as blacks, then the claims of the spatial mismatch hypothesis are questionable. It would seem, then, that the spatial proximity of a neighborhood to employment is less important than the social networks it provides. Spatial entrapment hypothesis Research in geography points to women’s household responsibilities and gendered networks as key factors in shaping the spatial distribution of women’s employment (Hanson and Pratt 1988, 1991, 1995; Johnston-Anumonwo 1992; Madden and White 1980). Women tend to work closer to home than men, a spatial employment strategy reflected in the nearly universal finding that women’s commutes are, on average,

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shorter than men’s (Gordon, Kumar et al. 1989; Hanson and Hanson 1980; Hanson and Johnston 1985; McLafferty and Preston 1991). In order to manage the demands of both work and home, women adopt complex time management strategies. Minimizing their commute is one such strategy. A shorter commute allows them more time before and after work to shop for groceries, drop off and pick up children, prepare meals, and tend to myriad other household errands. In their survey of people with commutes of less than ten minutes, Hanson and Pratt (1995) found that the reason most frequently given by women for their short commutes was “wanting to be able to get home quickly to tend to children or to respond to household emergencies” (p. 99). Transportation research on the types of trips women make for the purposes of meeting household demands also support this interpretation: women tend to make more family and household support trips and spend more time in household and family support activities than men (Hanson and Hanson 1980; Hanson and Johnston 1985; Niemeier and Morita 1996; Rosenbloom 1993). Finally, a short commute may reflect household strategies in relation to transportation costs. Because men tend to earn more than women, men’s jobs are often privileged in the household (Spain and Bianchi 1997). In the face of transportation scarcity, such as access to only one car, “rational” decisions provide the husband with the car. (This also may be the result of hierarchical and patriarchal relationships within the home.) Thus, women constrained by transportation mode choose workplaces easily accessible by foot or public transit. Because household duties limit women’s commutes, their job search is more spatially constrained. Hanson and Pratt (1991) argue that when women restrict their job opportunities spatially, they limit their wage opportunities. Women settle for lower-paying, but geographically accessible, jobs. As a consequence, women are “spatially trapped” within local labor markets that generate lower returns to skill (Hanson and Pratt 1988, 1991; Rutherford and Wekerle 1988; Villeneuve and Rose 1988). Women work close to home so they can make things work at home, but exchange higher wages in order to do so. Geographers also have examined the relationship between increased commute and income for women. Madden (1981) found that women’s commutes would be as long or longer than men’s if they received the same wages as men. Rutherford and Wekerle (1988) measure the marginal utility of additional travel in terms of additional


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income for men and women. If women trade-off lower wages for shorter commutes (Ericksen 1977), then longer commutes should yield higher wages. In regressions on income by distance traveled, Rutherford and Wekerle (1988) found that women earned only onethird of what men did for the same additional commute. The spatial entrapment hypothesis also argues that the gender division of labor is spatialized by the location of female-dominated jobs in response to this constraint, as well as by women’s inability or unwillingness to commute long distances (Hanson and Pratt 1988; Werkerle and Rutherford 1989; Villeneuve and Rose 1988). As women make decisions to work close to home, firms make decisions to locate nearby in order to improve the odds of recruiting them. In her study of San Francisco “back offices,” Nelson (1986) argues that the shift of service jobs to cheaper sites outside the city center is motivated by not only land costs but also accessibility to “captive” female labor. In this scenario, firms knowingly locate within convenient reach of desirable supplies of female workers—in Nelson’s example, educated non-militant white women living in the suburbs. A weakness of the spatial entrapment hypothesis is its basis in empirical work that analyzes women as an aggregate group and that focuses on geographic study areas where white women comprise the majority. While a few studies of commute behavior consider women of color in relation to white women (McLafferty and Preston 1991), but the study of immigrant women in the context of this debate has been largely absent (to my knowledge, only one other study considers the commutes of immigrant women—Preston, McLafferty, and Liu 1998). Given the presence of an ethnic and racial division of labor, conclusions drawn from the study of non-immigrant women may not hold for immigrant women. Spatial job search Underpinning the spatial mismatch and spatial entrapment hypotheses is the proposition that some groups, such as blacks and women, search for work from a fixed-place of residence. Blacks’ residential locations are fixed by the historical and contemporary effects of housing discrimination. Women’s residential locations are fixed in part by the gender division of household labor that constrains their commute behavior. For many women, residence is chosen in relation to their husband’s workplace.

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Particularly over the short-term, these workers face constraints in finding employment imposed by search costs as postulated by the spatial job search model (Lippman and McCall 1976). All things being equal, workers will opt for jobs closer to home in order to minimize commute costs. The extent of a worker’s spatial search is determined by the costs of a commute the worker is willing to bear in relation to his or her reservation wage. Workers with non-pecuniary constraints on their commute, such as women’s household responsibilities, will limit their job search area further to accommodate such constraints. The intensity of the search, or how long or thoroughly a worker searches, is determined by equating the marginal costs and benefits of search. Search costs include opportunity costs of postponing employment, time, travel expenses, and other resources necessary to carry out the search (such as daycare expenses for job seekers with children). Stoll (1999) provides empirical evidence for the spatial job search model, showing that access to a car and distance to search areas affects the geographic extent of job search. As Stoll and Raphael (2000) have noted, individual search behavior may undo the effects of spatial mismatch. They point out that if blacks and whites share the same search behavior and both search in job-rich areas, then blacks’ search behavior can override the effects of spatial mismatch. On the other hand, if blacks search from a fixedresidential location and limit the spatial extent of their search area because of costs, then residential segregation will limit the areas within which blacks search for jobs. Stoll and Raphael (2000) find that “racial residential segregation, coupled with spatially related job search costs, ensures that blacks, Latinos, and whites search for work in different parts of the metropolitan area and near their residential areas” (202). These areas have slower employment growth. The overall effect of black and Latino search (poorer search quality in slow-growth employment areas) contributes to underemployment and unemployment among blacks and Latinos. Relating job search to job accessibility, Johnson (2004) finds that racial differences in employment accessibility account for one-fourth of the difference between whites and blacks in successfully completing a job search.


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Social Networks and Job Search Job search depends upon information about employment opportunities, a highly socially and spatially variable commodity. While the neoclassical labor market model assumes full information about jobs on the part of job searchers, sociological and geographic research points to the highly differentiated nature of job information. Information accessed by job searchers through social networks is a critical component of job search (Cohn and Fossett 1996; Granovetter 1974). A plethora of research exists testing the effects of social networks on employment outcomes, though the bulk of this research treats social networks and the information they contain as aspatial. Some research, however, considers the effects of both social and spatial accessibility. Kasinitz and Rosenberg (1996) found that blacks in Brooklyn were unable to gain employment in a local manufacturing firm because they lacked social connections to the firm. Spatial accessibility did not explain their absence among the firm’s employees. Mouw (2002), however, finds that both firm location and the use of employee referrals in the hiring process lead to greater interfirm racial segregation. Other research points implicitly to the spatial characteristics of social networks, primarily as residentially-based networks of the urban poor. Wilson (1987, 1996) argues that blacks residing in poverty neighborhoods have particularly poor social networks, especially as employed middle-class blacks have abandoned these neighborhoods for the suburbs. Studies such as Reingold (1999) assume a specific spatial context by limiting their samples to inner-city residents. The research by Stoll and Raphael (2000) discussed earlier points to the ramifications of such residentially-bound networks in terms of spatial mismatch: these racially segregated, inner-city neighborhoods tend to be located near areas of declining or slow employment growth. Lastly, Elliott (1999) finds that workers who find jobs through a nonwhite contact experience wage penalties and that these penalties increase if the contact is also a neighbor. Proximity, however, may not characterize the spatial nature of these residential networks in terms of their connections to jobs. Especially in the case of immigrants, residential networks may connect immigrants to jobs far from home. This is not to downplay the spatial nature of these connections. A spatial corridor exists between these neighborhoods and the job sites to which they are connected, though a corridor not necessarily characterized by proximity (Sassen 1995). The

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spatial job search model, however, gives theoretical validity to the concept of proximity. Understanding how proximity is overridden or reinforced given the characteristics of particular groups of workers remains an important task for a more fully developed model of the local labor market. While the role of proximity may be minimal in the case of immigrant local labor markets, gender research points to its central role in shaping women’s local labor markets. Gendered networks Geographers have argued that women’s social networks play an important role in women’s employment outcomes while highlighting the spatial characteristics of these networks. Specifically, geographers have found that women’s networks tend to be place-specific and local in character. Hanson and Pratt (1991) found that women, when searching for jobs, rely heavily upon information from other women who are not only close friends or family but who also live nearby. In this way, women’s networks are both gender-specific, comprised of what Granovetter (1973, 1974) describes as strong ties, and spatially local. Hanson and Pratt (1991) also found that women prioritize geographic proximity as a condition of paid employment because of their domestic responsibilities, and that women search for work from a residentially-fixed location. Nearly all of the women in Hanson and Pratt’s study found work after moving to their current neighborhood, and several gave up jobs they had prior to moving. Hanson and Pratt (1991) argue that gendered networks play a part in perpetuating occupational sex segregation. Because women tend to work in female-dominated jobs, information about jobs and job contacts that circulate through women’s networks will most likely be about jobs into which women are heavily segregated. In a comparison of women employed in female-dominated occupations to women in male-dominated occupations, Hanson and Pratt (1991) found that the former relied upon job information from other women to a greater extent than women employed in male-dominated occupations. Drentea (1998) substantiates this finding. In her study, women who relied upon informal job search methods (i.e. networks) had jobs with more women in them than women who utilized formal job search methods. Sassen (1995) emphasizes the need to understand women’s networks as examples of place-based knowledge. She points to research that identifies women’s networks as primarily residentiallybased, while men’s networks tend to reach beyond the neighborhood


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and focus at the workplace. Women’s networks contain more friends and family members while men’s more diverse networks contain more coworkers (Marsden 1987; Moore 1990). Such findings raise critical questions about the gendered effect of residential segregation on job search and employment outcomes. Residential segregation may matter more for women than for men in terms of finding employment and the quality of that employment. The quality of local job opportunities may affect the quality of women’s employment to a greater extent than for men, as well as point to the need for locally directed employment initiatives targeted at women. Ethnic networks and immigrant labor markets The economic sociology of immigration literature relies heavily upon the role of social networks in explaining the process of matching immigrant workers to jobs in the labor market. The general outlines of the labor market are drawn from the constitutive forces of supply and demand, usually explained in terms of labor queues and job queues. As with all workers, immigrants find work within a labor market structured by an ethnic and racial hierarchy wherein different groups work different jobs. Faced with a labor queue of available workers, employers hire as far up their hierarchy of preferred workers as possible (Thurow 1975; this process also operates by gender, Reskin and Roos 1990). This “preference” stems from a set of ideas associated with the skills and work attitudes of particular groups of workers (Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991; Moss and Tilly 1996). In a racial hierarchy, ethnic workers are ranked in relation to one another—a process that in U.S. labor markets usually positions whites at the front of the queue, blacks at the back, and immigrants in the middle (Lim 2001). On the supply-side, the shape of the queue depends upon the relative availability of different groups of workers—the demographic make-up of the labor pool. If preferred workers are in short-supply, employers hire farther down their preference queue, opening opportunities for groups such as immigrants and blacks (Waldinger 1996). Workers also have a set of job preferences, a ranking of jobs based on pay, benefits, hours, and other work characteristics. In like fashion to employers and their labor queues, workers shape the ethnic division of labor by taking jobs as far up their job queue as possible. Ethnic networks then reinforce the ethnic and racial segregation of jobs by channeling co-ethnics into similar jobs and the same

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workplaces (Granovetter 1974; Tilly 1990). Immigrant networks “facilitate job search, hiring, recruitment, and training because they fulfill the needs of workers and employers, furnishing reliable, low-cost information about the characteristics of jobs and workers” (Waldinger 1994, p. 27; see also Bailey and Waldinger 1991). Thus, the concentration of immigrants into a few jobs, or niche jobs (see Model 1993), reflects immigrants’ wealth of social capital (Massey, Alcaron et al. 1987). Immigrants rely upon social networks to find employment like other workers, though the literature describes immigrant/ethnic networks as qualitatively different. Immigrant networks are marked by “bounded solidarity and enforceable trust” between co-ethnics (Portes 1998; Portes and Zhou 1992). These are tightly bound networks, governed by the expectations of a larger community. Expectations of reciprocity are high, maintaining and deepening network relationships. Although ethnic networks provide immigrants easy access to employment information, these networks tend to be characterized as “strong ties.” As such, they contain little to no employment information beyond the immigrant’s immediate social sphere. In this way, immigrants may become “socially trapped” into ethnic niche jobs.

Placing Immigrants in the Local Labor Market The position of immigrants vis-à-vis local labor market theory raises key questions about the relationship between social and spatial accessibility in generating labor market outcomes. Sociologists have largely focused on the role social networks play in connecting immigrants to jobs, though attempts have been made to understand some spatial aspects of immigrant labor markets in discussions that stem from research on ethnic enclave economies. The assumption is often made, however, that geographic factors generate few if any effects on immigrant labor market outcomes precisely because of immigrants’ status as migrants. The reasoning usually follows that if immigrants initially undertake a migration journey thousands of miles long, comparatively small distances at the intraurban scale can have little relevance on their employment outcomes. I argue that such a characterization conflates two distinct “journeys” (the migration journey and the journey-to-work) into too simple a notion of spatial labor market processes. Rather, these are two


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processes governed by very different factors and decision-making processes, including geographic factors. I believe this challenges us to understand the job search as a multi-stage process. First, immigrants decide whether to migrate to another country in search of work. Second, upon arrival at their destination, immigrants engage in the next stage of the job search process—finding a job and a residential location that fit within the spatial-temporal constraints of daily life. Labor must go home every night, thus the relevance of geographic local labor market processes for immigrants. Bringing in/locating the ethnic enclave While geographers have focused on the effects of space on the gender division of labor, sociologists have theorized the effects of space on the ethnic division of labor through the “ethnic enclave” debate. The ethnic enclave hypothesis argues that coethnics enjoy greater returns to human capital when employed within the enclave, understood as a spatial concentration of coethnics at some scale (Portes and Jensen 1989; Wilson 1980). The ethnic enclave hypothesis claims that these higher returns to skill stem from the rewards of “bounded solidarity and enforceable trust” enjoyed by workers employed by fellow coethnics (Portes and Zhou 1992). While ethnic networks may constrain immigrants’ job searches to enclave employment, the outcome is seen as beneficial in terms of returns to skill—a dramatically different theorized outcome than that of the spatial entrapment hypothesis for women. In its original formulation, the ethnic enclave hypothesis draws upon labor market segmentation theory and addresses the effects of the place of work on workers’ returns to skill (Wilson 1980). Discussions of labor market segmentation theory within the immigration literature have focused on immigrants’ position within the secondary sector and the mechanisms that serve to trap immigrants in these secondary jobs (Piore 1979). Wilson (1980) and Portes and Jensen (1987) challenged this conclusion with the ethnic enclave hypothesis. They argue that immigrants have a third sector available to them in addition to the primary and secondary sectors—the enclave labor market associated with immigrant-owned firms and the employment of coethnics. This enclave sector mimics the primary sector by generating higher returns to skill than in the secondary sector and by providing immigrants a path toward entrepreneurship through on-the-job training and access to credit within the enclave. These benefits rest upon ethnic solidarity and

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reciprocal obligation. In empirical tests of the hypothesis, Portes and Bach (1985) found that although Cubans employed in Miami’s ethnic enclave received lower returns to skill than Cubans employed in the primary sector, they received higher returns to skill than Cubans employed in the secondary sector. Empirical studies since Portes and Bach’s initial work have generated mixed results. Sanders and Nee (1987) argue that the case study nature of Portes’ research (the Cuban enclave in Miami) does not adequately allow comparisons to non-enclave participants. In their study of Chinese and Cuban enclave participants and non-participants (measured by residence in and out of San Francisco and Miami respectively), Sanders and Nee find that enclave employees were at a significant labor market disadvantage compared to those who lived outside the enclave. The Sanders and Nee paper initiated a heated methodological debate. Jensen and Portes (1992) criticized Sanders and Nee for using place of residence data as a proxy for place of work. The primary problem facing researchers has been a lack of available data that can be used to test Portes’s results from his longitudinal study of Cubans in Miami, such as data on place of work and ethnicity of owner. The theoretical implications of the enclave for immigrant women are unclear. In light of recent research indicating the gendered nature of immigrant networks (Hagan 1998; Hondagneu-Sotello 1994), it seems ethnic solidarity may be gendered as well. The enclave may not generate the same theorized benefits for women as for men, particularly if employers are men. On the other hand, gendered networks may channel immigrant women into enclave jobs that generate higher returns to skill as theorized for men. Empirical findings point to the disadvantaged position of women in the enclave. In a study examining Dominican and Colombian women employed in Hispanic-owned firms in New York City, Gilbertson (1995) found that enclave employment conferred upon women low wages, few fringe benefits, and limited opportunities for advancement. This corroborates Zhou and Logan’s (1989) finding that Chinese women employed in New York’s Chinatown had no measurable increased earnings-return to skill. These studies, however, are at odds with Portes and Jensen’s (1989) results reporting increased returns experienced by Cuban women employed in Miami’s Cuban enclave.


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If enclave employment is generally exploitative of women (Gilbertson 1995), then ethnic networks that channel immigrant women into enclave jobs may serve as an example of “the weakness of strong ties” (Granovetter 1973). If networks are sufficiently strong, they may “trap” immigrant women into enclave jobs. And while immigrant women who are employed in an employment enclave may not be spatially entrapped in terms of being limited to employment that is close to home, they may be spatially entrapped if enclave employment limits them to certain places of employment, i.e. workplaces within the enclave. On the other hand, both processes may operate simultaneously for immigrant women. Ethnic enclave formation in the workplace may respond to women’s spatial entrapment stemming from household responsibilities. Immigrant women with few skills who rely heavily on gendered networks in obtaining employment may be the least able to engage in long commutes. Ethnic enclave formation may respond in kind, and these jobs may be most closely located to immigrant women’s places of residence. Geography of production and ethnic neighborhoods Scott (1988) explains the emergence of ethnic neighborhoods as a response to the productive forces of the capitalist U.S. city: Ethnicity in the American metropolis is thus preeminently a contingent outcome of local labor market pressures and needs. This involves the continual recreation of pools of cheap and malleable labor (including women and adolescents) suitable for employment in the disintegrated complexes of laborintensive manufacturing and service industries that cluster within the metropolis. In this specific sense, urban ethnicity is at once a durable phenomenon, and yet it is also largely transient insofar as any particular group is concerned. With the notable stubborn exception of Blacks, groups with subordinate cultural identities in the American city have fairly consistently been assimilated over the course of three or four generations into the mainstream of urban life (Rodgers, 1981; Zunz, 1981). Thus, the socialization processes and upward mobility characteristic of American society have continually undercut the conditions under which cheap exploitable labor at the bottom of the employment ladder can be internally

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The Geography of Immigrant Labor Markets reproduced. The concomitant vacuum has invariably been filled by new rounds of immigration, new rounds of ethnic neighborhood formation, and new rounds of social and political fragmentation (226).

While Scott argues that this explanation is a “far cry indeed from the purely ecological theories of moral order and social solidarity that have so far seemed to dominate the literature on urban ethnicity” (1988, p. 226), I would argue that this explanation applies to the first stage of the immigrant location process—the migration journey of economic migrants. This explains why migrants journey to U.S. cities and accounts for the immigrant presence in U.S. urban labor markets. It does not, however, explain where immigrants locate residentially within the urban area once they have arrived. For this explanation, Scott relies upon his general theory of geographical local labor market processes: the location of immigrant neighborhoods evolves as part of the reciprocating effect of workers moving near potential jobs and firms locating near potential labor pools (Scott 1988). Both immigrants and their employers seek low-rent districts, placing low-skill workers and low-wage jobs near one another in the city. As Scott (1988) explains, “Typically, these ethnic groups form dense segregated neighborhoods close to centers of employment where unskilled low-wage jobs abound” (p. 226). An extensive historical literature documents this spatial relationship between ethnic, particularly immigrant, neighborhoods and industries employing these residents (Hershberg 1981; Ward 1968, 1971). But it seems that the persistence of ethnic residential segregation in most U.S. cities, even among moderate- and high-skilled immigrants, demands a more nuanced approach, perhaps even one incorporating ideas of “social solidarity.” Sociologists have made convincing claims to the importance of ethnic networks, bounded solidarity, and close ties among immigrants. Ethnic neighborhoods provide such resources within a geographically proximate cultural safe-haven. Scott (1988) acknowledges this, commenting that immigrant “neighborhoods are held together as geographical units by the tight social networks (built up around idiosyncrasies of language and culture) that develop within them” (p. 226). Whether these neighborhoods necessarily emerge in close proximity to immigrant worksites or persist after these worksites disappear (with historical location decisions shaping present-day geographies) remains in question for contemporary urban geographies.


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Emerging Questions Concerning the Immigrant Local Labor Market The location of immigrant neighborhoods in relation to immigrant employment opportunities remains a question to which we have an unsatisfactory empirical response. Though ethnographic research of the immigrant enclave (e.g. Zhou 1992) seems to indicate strong patterns of ethnic jobs clustering near ethnic neighborhoods, quantitative work on the enclave either defines the enclave as a metropolitan area (Borjas 2000; Logan, Alba, and Stults 2003; Zhou 1992), focuses on place of work (at a large geographic scale) independent of place of residence (Portes and Jensen 1989), or focuses only on place of residence (Sanders and Nee 1987). The latter two approaches analyze residential patterns in isolation from employment patterns while the former disallows any notion of a local labor market smaller than the metropolitan area. As Scott has forcefully argued, this ignores the importance of the residential-workplace relationship and the key role of production in generating urban form. While Scott’s research (1984, 1988) does attempt to explore the interrelated patterns of workplace and residence, his small survey samples disallow generalization.2 As a result, many questions concerning the place of immigrants within the U.S. urban geographic context stand as empirical questions demanding exposition. The extent to which immigrant neighborhoods and work places cluster together remains somewhat unclear for contemporary metropolitan areas. A contemporary process that spatially links ethnic neighborhoods to ethnic employment may not function as in the past due to ethnic networks and transportation trends. Sociologists argue that having information about a job, no matter how far from home, generally trumps a blind search for a job close to home (Waldinger 1996). Facilitated by the contemporary ubiquity of the car (despite its relative expense, 80% of all immigrants in Los Angeles commute to work by car), these networks may render a relationship of propinquity between ethnic neighborhoods and ethnic employment sites unnecessary. Networks may connect immigrants to jobs far from their places of residence, greatly expanding an immigrant’s spatial job search area. Immigrant neighborhoods may have initially emerged in response to jobs nearby, but residential inertia may take hold, pulling in new immigrants even if these (formerly nearby) jobs move. Social information may be behind this pull. Immigrants may move into ethnic

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neighborhoods for purposes of “social solidarity,” a byproduct of which is information about employment opportunities. Though these employment opportunities may not be located geographically nearby, an important socio-spatial relationship exists between the ethnic neighborhood and the employment site. Sassen (1995) calls this a spatially circumscribed “activity space,” but not one necessarily characterized by geographic proximity. In this way, neighborhoods provide information about jobs that may or may not be located nearby. Nevertheless, these residential-workplace information networks function as spatially circumscribed activity spaces connecting two spatial endpoints together. Such spaces may be gendered, and residentially-based employment information may be more significant for immigrant women than men. Research has pointed to the importance of residentially-based ties for women (Hanson and Pratt 1991) and to the importance of family and community employment ties for immigrant women compared to men (Tienda and Glass 1985; Fernandez-Kelly 1995). Such gendered networks may have a greater effect on where immigrant women work and what they do, thus tightening the boundaries of their local labor market “activity spaces.” One empirical test of these processes would examine whether women who live in ethnic neighborhoods are more likely to work in ethnic niche jobs. This approach, however, leaves unexamined the role of geographic proximity as a component of this relationship. If an analysis of geographic proximity identified a lack of geographic clustering of ethnic jobs near ethnic neighborhoods, this would seem to indicate the importance of social over geographic accessibility at the intraurban scale. Conversely, evidence of immigrant jobs clustering near immigrant neighborhoods would indicate the importance of geographic accessibility to jobs for immigrants. Immigrants may find themselves within both socially and spatially segmented labor markets. Further, geographic accessibility may partially explain the emergence and development of some immigrant niche jobs. If immigrant neighborhoods are located within close proximity to industries within which immigrants concentrate, then geographic proximity may partially explain this industrial concentration. Again, these patterns may be more or less pronounced by gender. If immigrant women experience spatial constraints because of household responsibilities and are limited in their travel to a greater


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extent than men because of household allocation of transportation resources, then gendered employment networks may connect immigrant women to jobs over a more constrained area than do men’s networks. As a result, jobs located near to immigrant neighborhoods may serve to both establish an “ethnic niche” of immigrant women workers and sustain the niche as social and spatial connections mutually “lock-in” this flow of workers. Such questions highlight the importance of approaching local labor markets as socially constructed activity spaces that center upon what Sassen (1995) terms the workplace-community/workplace-household nexus. This analytical approach requires consideration of race, ethnicity, gender, nativity, and household characteristics as endogeneous to labor market processes. Sassen (1995) concludes her essay, “Immigration and Local Labor Markets” with the following statement: Thinking about labor markets as activity spaces determined or specified in part by the workplace-home link or the spatial dependency of employers and workers introduces a series of variables into the analysis that are typically seen as exogenous. Most important to us are information about the market and formation of preferences. Both information and preferences can be shown to be at least partly—but often in good measure—place-specific, internal to the activity space or ‘economic subsystem’ under consideration. Framing labor markets as activity spaces also allows us to detect or reconstruct how gender, race, and nationality can shape information channels in the labor market and thus shape individual expectations. This can be inferred to have a strong reproductive effect for existing patterns and contributes to explaining labor market segmentation. Local experience or place-based knowledge can be seen as central to the spatial segmentation of labor markets (1995, pp. 115-116). Unraveling the interplay of these constitutive influences on immigrant local labor markets requires an approach informed by an understanding of social networks gleaned from economic sociology and an understanding of socio-spatial processes gleaned from economic geography.


CHAPTER 3

Mapping Immigrant Residence and Work

Available data have limited the investigation of fine-grained spatial processes that connect home and work. Most public data sets exchange fine-scale geographic information for individual-level information, or vice versa. Researchers must choose between aggregate data at a fine spatial scale (such as aggregate demographic data at the census tract level) or disaggregate, individual-level data at a much larger spatial scale (such as the MSA). Rarely are individual-level data geocoded below what the Census defines as a Public Use Microdata Area, or PUMA—a geographic area comprised of at least 100,000 persons. Such an areal unit is often much too large to capture fine-scale sociospatial patterns, such as ethnic neighborhood clustering. These neighborhood characteristics are necessary when examining the effects of place and location on individual labor market outcomes, and labor market analysis is difficult to carry out without information on individual characteristics, such as nativity, years of education, or marital status. Additionally, information on the geographic place of work for individual-level data is particularly difficult to obtain. Scholars studying the spatial employment patterns have relied largely upon the Census Transportation Planning Package that provides employment data at the tract level, though in aggregate form (for example, see Hanson and Pratt 1988). Simultaneously considering a worker’s place of residence and her place of work provides a key to analyzing the spatial dimension of the ethnic and gender division of labor. This requires, of course, a data set with both tract of residence and tract of 31

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work information. Until recently, no public data set has provided such information, and scholars have had to construct such data sets from their own data collection (see England 1993; Hanson and Pratt 1995). The U.S. Census Bureau now makes available a unique 1990 Census of Housing and Population data set that contains tract of residence and tract of work information for individuals. Made available to researchers under controlled circumstances, this confidential data set contains the full sample of the 1990 long form responses (the 1-in-6 sample). This data set allows the user to identify an individual and her individual characteristics (such as nativity status, education level, English proficiency, etc.), match this information to the characteristics of the neighborhood she lives in (as well as locate this neighborhood geographically), and finally to match all of this information to information about the characteristics of her workplace tract (as well as locate this workplace tract geographically). Unless otherwise noted, I utilize this data set throughout the study to analyze the workplace-neighborhood relationships of immigrants in Los Angeles. To ensure large enough cell sizes for modeling, the study focuses on the Los Angeles consolidated statistical metropolitan area (CSMA)—the five counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura. This regional view is significant, however, for more than simply statistical purposes. In a sprawling urban area such as Los Angeles, the labor market ignores the geographic boundaries of municipal entities such as cities and counties. Further, the prototypical urban/suburban divide has little conceptual or geographic relevance for an urban region historically developed on a pattern of suburbanization. The high rises of Downtown Los Angeles were nonexistent before the 1970s, and while much of the typical urban economic functions associated with downtown development (city government, financial services, etc.) do occur in Downtown Los Angeles, they also occur throughout the multinodal landscape of the Los Angeles region. The outlying counties of the Los Angeles region, therefore, cannot be viewed as residential suburbs with little employment activity. Finally, the well-known car culture and well-developed freeway system of the Los Angeles region are both cause and result of a multinodal urban landscape. Therefore, many people live in one county and work in another, dictating the importance of a regional view given the limited relevance of politically delineated boundaries. Local lab


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market processes may operate at a much finer scale than the region or even the city for many groups, but these processes must be identified from a larger-scale perspective in order to avoid arbitrarily delimiting the boundaries of local labor markets. This book examines the six largest low-skill immigrant groups in the Los Angeles region: Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese, representing, respectively, three Latino and three Asian groups. While Filipinos also constitute a very large immigrant group in the region, a large proportion of Filipino workers are relatively high skilled. My analysis is primarily interested in investigating the effects of geographic accessibility for low-skill workers, as the higher wages of high-skill workers do much to overcome the obstacles of geographic accessibility (Simpson 1987). Accordingly, I have selected the Vietnamese as my third Asian-origin group.

Mapping Immigrant Residence And Work Descriptive maps (see Figs. 3.1-3.18 at end of chapter) illustrating immigrant places of residence in relation to their places of employment provide a first look at the local character of immigrant labor markets and the spatial interdependence of home and work. I use a residential concentration quotient to reveal the clustering of immigrants into ethnic neighborhoods: RCQj = (Pij / Pj) /(Pim / Pm)

(3.1)

where RCQj is the residential concentration quotient for residential tract j, Pij is the population of group i in residential tract j, Pj is the total population of residential tract j, Pim is the population of group i in metro area m, and Pm is the total population of metro area m. The RCQ measures a group’s share of a neighborhood’s population relative to the group’s share of total population in the Los Angeles region. A quotient equal to 1 represents parity in a tract; that is, the group’s population share in the tract is equal to its share in the region as a whole. Anything above 1 reflects a disproportionate concentration of a group in a tract; below 1 represents an underrepresentation. For example, a group with a quotient value of 5 in a particular tract is represented at

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five times its expected share of the tract’s population if the group were evenly distributed across the region.1 The exception is Mexicans. Because Mexicans comprise such a large portion of the Los Angeles population (12 percent), even neighborhoods with a RCQ=1 have a high percentage of Mexican residents (12 percent). As a result of this scale effect, only 1.11 percent of all Mexicans live in neighborhoods with a RCQ >=5. I have adjusted the enclave cut-off for Mexicans to three (RCQ >=3); 35% of all Mexicans live in enclave neighborhoods by this definition. Black concentrated neighborhoods are also those neighborhoods defined as having a concentration of blacks five times greater than their expected share (RCQ >=5). The work maps are generated using a similar measure of employment concentration: ECQj = (Pij / Pj) /(Pim / Pm)

(3.2)

where ECQj is the employment concentration quotient for employment tract j, Pij is the total employment of group i in employment tract j, Pj is total employment in employment tract j, Pim is the total employment of group i in metro area m, and Pm is total employment in metro area m. Maps of immigrant residence and work While the three Latino groups (Figs. 3.1, 3.4, and 3.7) share much overlap in neighborhood location, a sharp pattern of neighborhood segregation is evident when comparing these groups to the three Asian groups (Figs. 3.10, 3.13, and 3.16). Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans are concentrated near Downtown Los Angeles, in East L.A., to the southeast in cities such as Bell Gardens and Huntington Park, in the San Fernando Valley communities of Pacoima and Van Nuys. The Central American groups share an important enclave in the Pico Union area, and Mexicans have a greater presence in Orange County communities such as Santa Ana. The three Asian groups, in contrast, find their enclave neighborhoods in very different areas of the Los Angeles region. Further, they share much less overlap among themselves than do the three Latino groups. The Chinese are primarily located to the north and east of Downtown Los Angeles in Chinatown and the “Chinese suburbs” of Monterey Park and Hacienda Heights. Smaller


35

concentrations are evident in Cerritos and such exclusive communities as Palos Verdes and Cowan Heights. Koreans are most heavily concentrated in and around Koreatown, but also reside in enclaves in south Los Angeles (Torrance, Gardena, Carson), Cerritos, and Orange County’s Garden Grove. While the Vietnamese have established enclaves near the Chinese in places such as Chinatown and Monterey Park, their largest presence is found in Orange County, such as in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Westminster. Moving from the maps of residence to the maps of employment, we see the relatively tight correspondence between home and work, as well as the gendered spatial segregation of work. The latter is strikingly revealed in the greater spatial concentration of women’s employment among several groups, especially Mexicans (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3), Salvadorans (Figs. 3.5-3.6), and to a lesser extent, the Chinese (Figs. 3.11 and 3.12). The contrast between Salvadoran men and women is most notable on this account (Figs. 3.5 and 3.6). Not only are immigrant women, such as Mexicans and Salvadorans, much more segregated by employment industrially than their male counterparts (explained further in Chapter 5), they are also much more segregated spatially. That is, immigrant men’s employment tends to be more dispersed across the Los Angeles region while immigrant women’s employment is concentrated into fewer areas. A second, significant pattern is the relatively strong geographic correspondence between immigrant neighborhoods and immigrant places of work. While employment is always more dispersed than residence, the maps reveal that each group’s immigrant enclave neighborhoods serve as anchor points in the maps of work for both men and women. The Mexican (Figs. 3.1-3.3), Chinese (Figs. 3.9-3.11), and Vietnamese (Figs. 3.16-3.17) maps reflect this pattern most strikingly, each group displaying the key spatial characteristic of the classic ethnic enclave economy: the coterminous location of residence and employment. In the case of the Vietnamese, this pattern also extends beyond the ethnic enclave economy (such as Little Saigon in Orange County). A high concentration of both Vietnamese men and women are employed in the large tract near Seal Beach just to the west of many of their enclave neighborhoods, the site of Rockwell International. This is most likely the location of Vietnamese niche industries such as electrical machinery and computer manufacturing. A slight deviation from this pattern is found in the map of Salvadoran women’s employment (Fig. 3.6). Many of the heaviest

36


concentrations of Salvadoran women’s employment are located apart from their residential concentrations. This is largely due to Salvadoran women’s high concentration in domestic services (one in five women are employed in this industry) and the location of this employment in upper-middle class, usually white, homes in areas such as Brentwood, Beverly Hills, and Encino or the newly gated communities of Orange Park Acres and Cowan Heights (though not majority white, decidedly upper-middle class). This map, however, must be interpreted cautiously. The relatively low employment density of these hill community tracts can be deceiving; their relatively large size and dark shading make them appear more significant than they are. Plenty of Salvadoran women work in the geographically smaller, but much denser, tracts near Downtown and Salvadoran neighborhoods such as Pico Union. While these maps visually illustrate the relatively strong colocation patterns of immigrant residence and employment, the analyses in the following chapters explicitly model the effect of residential and employment location on immigrant employment outcomes.

37 Figure 3.1: Residential concentrations of Mexicans in Los Angeles, 1990

38 Figure 3.2: Work concentrations of Mexican men, Los Angeles, 1990

39 Figure 3.3: Work concentrations of Mexican women, Los Angeles, 1990

40 Figure 3.4: Residential concentrations of Salvadorans, Los Angeles, 1990

41 Figure 3.5: Work concentrations of Salvadoran men, Los Angeles, 1990

42 Figure 3.6: Work concentrations of Salvadoran women, Los Angeles, 1990

43 Figure 3.7: Residential concentrations of Guatemalans, Los Angeles, 1990

44 Figure 3.8: Work concentrations of Guatemalan men, Los Angeles, 1990

45 Figure 3.9: Work concentrations of Guatemalan women, Los Angeles, 1990

46 Figure 3.10: Residential concentrations of the Chinese, Los Angeles, 1990

47 Figure 3.11: Work concentrations of Chinese men, Los Angeles, 1990

48 Figure 3.12: Work concentrations of Chinese women, Los Angeles, 1990

49 Figure 3.13: Residential concentrations of Koreans, Los Angeles, 1990

50 Figure 3.14: Work concentrations of Korean men, Los Angeles, 1990

51 Figure 3.15: Work concentrations of Korean women, Los Angeles, 1990

52 Figure 3.16: Residential concentrations of the Vietnamese, Los Angeles, 1990

53 Figure 3.17: Work concentrations of Vietnamese men, Los Angeles, 1990

54 Figure 3.18: Work concentrations of Vietnamese women, Los Angeles, 1990

CHAPTER 4

How Local the Immigrant Labor Market?

Introduction The spatial extent of the immigrant labor market has been the subject of some debate. Arguing against the effects of the friction of distance, many sociologists challenge the applicability of hypotheses such as spatial mismatch to immigrants. Ethnic networks, they assert, rather than spatial propinquity, connect immigrants to jobs (Sassen 1995; Waldinger 1996). In contrast, geographers have claimed that the friction of distance does spatially delimit local labor markets, especially for women and minorities (see especially the work of Hanson and Pratt 1991, 1995). For example, the spatial entrapment hypothesis postulates that because household duties limit women’s commutes, women search for work over a smaller geographic area than do men. For an immigrant woman, then, home may anchor and constrain her job search area, but ethnic networks may expand her search area by overriding the friction of geographic distance. Immigrant women may be spatially entrapped as women and/or socially connected as immigrants. Residential context also may influence where immigrants work, particularly given ethnic residential segregation. Immigrant-owned businesses may locate near ethnic neighborhoods, providing immigrants with easy access to job opportunities. Immigrant women who live in such neighborhoods may have short commutes, but no shorter than their male counterparts. In this case, women’s shorter commutes may not be the result of spatial entrapment as much as a reflection of the location of enclave jobs. This chapter tests whether spatial entrapment holds for immigrant women and explores the role of ethnic networks and residential context in shaping immigrants’ labor markets and their gendered patterns. 55

56


Gender, Networks, Space and the Local Labor Market Both networks and space sort workers into jobs, and gender mediates both processes. Tightly circumscribed social networks among groups such as immigrants channel workers into a few jobs, contributing to the ethnic division of labor (Model 1993; Waldinger 1996). The prevalence of ethnic networks in matching immigrants to jobs stems from the fact that networks work well for workers and employers; both parties find them a reliable source of low-cost information (Waldinger 1994). Given the gendered nature of social life, men and women’s social networks tend to be comprised of mostly men or women, respectively. These gender-segregated networks connect men and women to different jobs, a process that both emerges from and contributes to occupational sex segregation (or the gender division of labor). As a result, immigrant women often find themselves directed to jobs that are largely female and immigrant. Space plays a role in sorting workers, particularly women, into the labor market as well. Research in geography points to women’s household responsibilities and gendered networks as key factors in shaping the spatial distribution of women’s labor (Hanson and Pratt 1988, 1991, 1995; Johnston-Anumonwo 1992; Madden and White 1980). Women tend to work closer to home than men in order to manage the demands of both work and home, a spatial strategy reflected in the nearly universal finding that women’s commutes are, on average, shorter than men’s (Gordon, Kumar et al. 1989; Hanson and Hanson 1980; Hanson and Johnston 1985; McLafferty and Preston 1991). Consequently, many women settle for lower-paying, but geographically accessible, jobs and become “spatially trapped” within local labor markets that generate lower returns to skill (Hanson and Pratt 1988, 1991; Rutherford and Wekerle 1988; Villeneuve and Rose 1988). Criticisms of the spatial entrapment hypothesis point to its basis in empirical work that analyzes women as an aggregate group, that focuses on certain geographic areas that may lend themselves well to the assertions of spatial entrapment, that reflects temporally specific socio-spatial patterns, or that looks primarily at white women (e.g. see England 1993). A few studies of commute behavior consider women


57

of color in relation to white women (McLafferty and Preston 1991), but the study of immigrant women in the context of this debate has been largely absent (to my knowledge, only one other study considers the commutes of immigrant women—Preston, McClafferty, and Liu 1998). Given the presence of an ethnic and racial division of labor, conclusions drawn from the study of native-born women may not hold for immigrant women. Hanson and Pratt (1988) argue that we need to consider the effect of ethnicity in spatial distributions of employment; specifically how “ethnic residential segregation might be linked to the spatial segregation of women’s employment” (1988, p. 199). The recent availability of individual data (sufficient to identify nativity) at a fine geographic scale now makes it possible to disentangle these relationships.

Gendering the Local Interplay of Work and Home: Immigrant Women and the Ethnic Enclave The spatial expressions of the gender and ethnic divisions of labor arise primarily from the constitutive forces of residential and industrial location. The mutual processes of spatial supply, generated through workers’ residential decisions, and spatial demand, created through industrial location, give form to the local labor market. For example, the spatial entrapment hypothesis argues that the gender division of labor is spatialized by women’s inability or unwillingness to commute long distances from home (supply) and by the location of femaledominated jobs in response to this constraint (demand) (Hanson and Pratt 1988; Villeneuve and Rose 1988; Werkerle and Rutherford 1989). While the generalization of this claim to all women has been contested (England 1993), location near an available workforce plays an important role in firm and industrial location decisions and the development of local labor markets. As Scott (1988) argues, the development of local labor markets occurs in dynamic fashion with firms and workers locating near one another. Recent research on the ethnic enclave economy makes a similar claim. Portes (1995) defines ethnic enclave economies as “spatially clustered networks of businesses owned by members or the same minority. They are not dispersed among other populations, … but emerge in close proximity to the areas settled by their own group” (p.

58


27). Usually these businesses initially emerge to meet needs of the immigrant community, providing culturally specific goods and services. In turn, these businesses offer job opportunities to co-ethnics who may face difficulty in obtaining employment outside the enclave because of language and/or skill deficiencies. In fact, some scholars argue that these jobs generate higher returns to skill than jobs outside the enclave (Portes and Jensen 1989; Wilson 1980). However, the extent to which immigrant neighborhoods and work places cluster together remains somewhat unclear for contemporary metropolitan areas. In contrast to the concept of the ethnic enclave economy (Portes and Bach 1985), Light and Gold (2000) argue that “the concept of the ethnic economy is agnostic about [locational] clustering” (p. 10). The absence of any clustering of ethnic jobs near ethnic neighborhoods would likely indicate that social rather spatial accessibility determines the boundaries of the immigrant local labor market. This would support the sociologists’ claim that having information about a job, no matter how far from home, generally trumps a blind search for a job close to home (Waldinger 1996). Ethnic networks, however, may have different spatial characteristics for men and women. If immigrant women experience commuting constraints because of household responsibilities, then gendered employment networks may connect immigrant women to jobs over a more geographically constrained area than men’s networks. “Spatial entrapment” may introduce spatial drag into the otherwise frictionless operation of ethnic job networks. Additionally, employers likely play a role in shaping the spatial extent of immigrant labor markets, especially for women (Hanson and Pratt 1992). Location near a preferred workforce may serve to both establish an ethnic niche of immigrant women workers and sustain the niche as social and spatial connections mutually “lock in” this flow of workers. Evidence of short commutes for immigrant women employed in niche jobs compared to their male counterparts and their female counterparts who work outside of niche jobs would suggest this process. In this chapter’s analysis of immigrant commuting patterns, I evaluate how gender, ethnic networks, and residential context mediate the spatial extent of immigrant labor markets (Wyly 1999). Three questions drive this analysis. First, do we see evidence of spatial entrapment among immigrant women? Second, what is the relationship between ethnic networks and employment location? Third, what effect


59

does living in an immigrant enclave neighborhood have on commute distance?

Commuting in a Segregated Labor Market As discussed above, the spatial entrapment hypothesis posits that women’s shorter commutes contribute to occupational sex segregation in the labor market (Hanson and Johnston 1985; Hanson and Pratt 1991, 1995). What happens, though, when occupational sex segregation intersects with the ethnic division of labor? Ethnic networks may mitigate the constraints of spatial entrapment, and women employed in niche jobs may actually commute further to work. Conversely, spatial entrapment constraints may limit the spatial reach of ethnic networks. Among immigrants, Table 4.1 displays both the rule and the exception to women’s shorter commutes.1 Across four of the six groups, women engage in significantly shorter commutes than their male counterparts. The difference is largest between Chinese men and women (four minutes) and smallest between Guatemalan men and women (less than a minute). Striking, however, are the differences between Guatemalan and Salvadoran men and women. Guatemalan women’s average commutes are the same as men’s, and Salvadoran women travel significantly longer than Salvadoran men. The dramatic occupational segregation of Guatemalan and Salvadoran women may largely explain their long commutes: 20 percent of these women work as domestics, cleaning homes of other Angelenos throughout the region. This is an industry marked by a particular spatial form—at once relatively disperse, though tending toward concentration in select neighborhoods. I return to this characteristic later. Employment within an ethnic niche provides a proxy for ethnic networks (Wright and Ellis 2000). Social contacts through co-ethnics provide a key link between immigrants and jobs, and ethnic niches reflect highly refined systems of these ethnic employment networks. Niche employment, then, may equalize men and women’s commutes if ethnic networks override the constraints of spatial entrapment for immigrant women. Commute times to niche employment, then, will not significantly differ between men and women. If, on the other hand, spatial entrapment holds for immigrant women, then the ethnic networks that tie them to niche employment will be more sensitive to

60


distance than men’s networks. In this case, commutes to ethnic niche employment will be shorter for women than for men. TABLE 4.1 Commute Time in Minutes by Gender

Mexican men Mexican women

Mean 25.26 21.95

Std dev 18.00 17.65

t value

Salvadoran men Salvadoran women

29.08 30.33

19.32 32.31

-2.28**

Guatemalan men Guatemalan women

29.53 28.75

20.76 23.97

1.00

Chinese men Chinese women

26.87 22.67

20.16 18.42

61.74***

Korean men Korean women

26.80 24.29

17.15 17.75

4.55***

Vietnamese men Vietnamese women

26.40 24.28

17.04 16.91

3.66***

18.49***

Data: 1990 5-percent PUMS *p

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