More immigrants have settled in Southern California since the 1960s than in any other metropolitan region in the world. Los Angeles County, which in 1960 had the smallest proportion of immigrants of any large city in the U.S.—eight percent—now counts ethnic minorities as 71 percent of its total population, making it the largest ethnic-minority population in the country. Indeed, all the counties of Southern California have a so-called minority majority, with populations that are more than 50 percent minority residents—most of them immigrants or children of immigrants.
Hurricane Katrina irrevocably changed the face of New Orleans. In addition to the physical devastation, 50 percent of the population was either temporarily or permanently displaced. The combination of population flight and the intense rebuilding process has triggered an urgent demand for labor and an unprecedented influx of Latino immigrants. These changes have drastically altered the racial and ethnic composition of the city. Blacks, who once constituted 67 percent of the population, now comprise 47 percent, while the Latino population jumped from 3 percent to at least 10 percent.
Supplemental Award: $35,000, March 2008
Literature on the role of social networks in employment has shown that although most blacks, Latinos, and whites search for work through their friends and relatives, blacks are significantly less likely to find work this way. The contacts of black job-seekers are less prone to assist in the employment search, for example, by making a recommendation to an employer. Why don’t blacks help as much as their Latino and white counterparts?
- Read a summary of the project's main findings
- Read the full report: Leaves That Pay: Employer and Worker Experiences with Paid Family Leave in California (PDF)
- Watch Eileen Appelbaum and Ruth Milkman present the report at U.C. Berkeley
- Related RSF Publications
Introduction
Books
Brokered Boundaries
Creating Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times
About This Book
Anti-immigrant sentiment reached a fever pitch after 9/11, but its origins go back much further. Public rhetoric aimed at exposing a so-called invasion of Latino immigrants has been gaining ground for more than three decades—and fueling increasingly restrictive federal immigration policy. Accompanied by a flagging U.S. economy—record-level joblessness, bankruptcy, and income inequality—as well as waning consumer confidence, these conditions signaled one of the most hostile environments for immigrants in recent memory. In Brokered Boundaries, Douglas Massey and Magaly Sánchez untangle the complex political, social, and economic conditions underlying the rise of xenophobia in U.S. society. The book draws on in-depth interviews with Latin American immigrants in metropolitan New York and Philadelphia and—in their own words and images—reveals what life is like for immigrants attempting to integrate in anti-immigrant times.
What do the social categories “Latino” and “American” actually mean to today’s immigrants? Brokered Boundaries analyzes how first- and second-generation immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean navigate these categories and their associated meanings as they make their way through U.S. society. Massey and Sánchez argue that the mythos of immigration, in which newcomers gradually shed their respective languages, beliefs, and cultural practices in favor of a distinctly American way of life, is, in reality, a process of negotiation between new arrivals and native-born citizens. Natives control interactions with outsiders by creating institutional, social, psychological, and spatial mechanisms that delimit immigrants’ access to material resources and even social status. Immigrants construct identities based on how they perceive and respond to these social boundaries. The authors make clear that today’s Latino immigrants are brokering boundaries in the context of unprecedented economic uncertainty, repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and a heightening fear that upward mobility for immigrants translates into downward mobility for the native-born. Despite an absolute decline in Latino immigration, immigration-related statutes have tripled in recent years, including many that further shred the safety net for legal permanent residents as well as the undocumented.
Brokered Boundaries shows that, although Latin American immigrants come from many different countries, their common reception in a hostile social environment produces an emergent Latino identity soon after arrival. During anti-immigrant times, however, the longer immigrants stay in America, the more likely they are to experience discrimination and the less likely they are to identify as Americans.
DOUGLAS S. MASSEY is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School.
MAGALY SÁNCHEZ R. is senior researcher and visiting scholar at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.