Explore the vast range of titles available.

The dramatic increase in Hispanic immigration to the United States in recent decades has been coterminous with fundamental shifts in the labor market towards heightened flexibility, instability, and informality. As a result, the low-wage labor market is increasingly occupied by Hispanic immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. While numerous studies examine the implications for natives' employment prospects, our understanding of low-wage immigrants themselves remains underdeveloped. Drawing on original data collected in Durham, North Carolina, this article provides a more holistic account of immigrant Hispanic's labor market experiences, examining not only wages but also employment instability and benefit coverage. The analysis evaluates the role of human capital and immigration characteristics, including legal status, in shaping compensation outcomes, as well as the influence of other employment characteristics. Findings highlight the salience of nonstandard work arrangements such as subcontracting and informal employment to the labor market experiences of immigrant Hispanic men, and describe the constellation of risk factors that powerfully bound immigrant employment outcomes.

We build on recent developments in social organization theory to examine the sexual partnering of Mexican men in a new area of immigrant destination. We elaborate on two levels of contextual influence: (1) how differences in social capital between sending and receiving communities affect partner formation and (2) how neighborhood social cohesion influences immigrants' behavior. Data come from an original survey conducted in Durham, North Carolina, and migrant sending communities in Mexico. We show dramatic differences in sexual partnering between Mexico and the United States, which are directly linked to lack of social networks and familial support. Neighborhood-level social cohesion in part counteracts those effects. The role of social capital and neighborhoods, however, is highly gendered. The presence of women is a critical dimension of the social organization of immigrant communities and its effect extends beyond mere partner availability.

Racial and ethnic inequality in homeownership remains stubbornly wide, even net of differences across groups in household-level sociodemographic characteristics. This article investigates the role of contextual forces in structuring disparate access to homeownership among minorities. Specifically, I combine household-and metropolitan-level census data to assess the impact of metropolitan housing stock, minority composition, and residential segregation on black and Hispanic housing tenure. The measure of minority composition combines both the size and rate of growth of the coethnic population to assess the impact on homeownership inequality of recent trends in population redistribution, particularly the increase in black migration to the South and dramatic dispersal ofHispanics outside traditional areas of settlement. Results indicate remarkable similarity between blacks and Hispanics with respect to the spatial and contextual influences on homeownership. For both groups, homeownership is higher and inequality with whites is smaller in metropolitan areas with an established coethnic base and in areas in which their group is less residentially segregated. Implications of recent trends in population redistribution for the future of minority homeownership are discussed.

This article borrows from the intersectionality literature to investigate how legal status, labor market position, and family characteristics structure the labor supply of immigrant Latinas in Durham, North Carolina, a new immigrant destination. The analysis takes a broad view of labor force participation, analyzing the predictors of whether or not women work, whether and how the barriers to work vary across occupations, and variation in hours and weeks worked among the employed. I also explicitly investigate the extent to which family constraints interact with other social characteristics, especially legal status, in shaping women's labor market position. Results highlight that immigrant Latinas experience multiple, interrelated constraints on employment owing to their position as low-skill workers in a labor market highly segregated by gender and nativity, as members of a largely undocumented population, and as wives and mothers in an environment characterized by significant work-family conflict.

Despite the sizeable impact of migration on childbearing, less is known about how it shapes contraceptive use undergirding fertility. We utilize binational survey data collected in 2006/7 by the Migration, Gender, and Health among Immigrant Latinos in Durham, NC study to assess how selection, disruption, and adaptation shape contraceptive use among Mexican migrant women. We address selectivity with respect to both socio-demographic and formative sexual initiation characteristics, comparing migrants to non-migrants in Mexico. We examine the disruptive effect of migration on contraception among migrant women sexually initiated in Mexico. Finally, we compare current methods between Mexican migrants and non-migrants to assess adaptation to U.S. contraceptive practices. We find migrant selectivity is less important than context in shaping immigrant women’s contraceptive practices, though migrant women sexually initiated in the United States exhibit earlier and higher levels of contraceptive use than their migrant peers initiated in Mexico. Migration also disrupts contraceptive trajectories. Many migrants discontinue contraceptive use pre-migration in response to their husbands’ solo migration. Partner separation also reduces contraceptive use immediately after migration. Finally, migrants show numerous signs of adaptation to the U.S. context, mainly via the adoption of oral contraception. The main obstacle for contraceptive use in Durham is lack of information about where to obtain it. Efforts to improve immigrants’ reproductive health should recognize the deleterious effect of policies encouraging family separation. Health care must reach immigrant women soon after arrival, be attuned to pre-migration contraceptive practices, and recognize the unique vulnerabilities of women migrating at older ages.

This article draws on original survey data to assess the prevalence of perceived discrimination among Latin American immigrants to Durham, North Carolina, a \"new immigrant destination\" in the Southeastern United States. Even though discrimination has a wide-ranging impact on social groups, from blocked opportunities, to adverse health outcomes, to highlighting and reifying intergroup boundaries, research among immigrant Latinos is rare, especially in new destinations. Our theoretical framework and empirical analysis expand social constructivist approaches that view ethnic discrimination as emerging from processes of competition and incorporation. We broaden prior discussions by investigating the specific social forces that give rise to perceived discrimination. In particular, we examine the extent to which perceptions of unequal treatment vary by gender, elaborating on the situational conditions that differentiate discrimination experiences for men and women. We also incorporate dimensions unique to the contemporary Latino immigrant experience, such as legal status, family migration dynamics, and transnationalism.

Even though women have long participated in Mexico–U.S. migration studies assessing the labor market implications of international mobility for women are rare. Especially lacking are studies that follow a life-course approach and compare employment trajectories across contexts and in connection with other transitions. Using life-history data collected in Mexico and the U.S., we explore the impact of migration on women's employment, focusing on how the determinants of employment vary across contexts. We show that U.S. residence eliminates or even reverses the employment returns to education found in Mexico and that the constraints imposed on women's work by marriage are actually stronger in the U.S. context. We also explicitly connect migration to other life-course events, documenting how the impact of context varies not only by marital status but also by where women's unions were formed.

Despite their importance to women's empowerment and migrant adaptation more generally, the social and cultural processes that determine how gender relations and expectations evolve during the process of migration remain poorly understood. In this article, data from a survey conducted in Durham, North Carolina and four sending communities in Mexico are used to examine how the structures of labor, power, and emotional attachments within the family vary by migration and U.S. residency, women's human capital endowments, household characteristics, and social support. Using both quantitative and qualitative information, the main finding of the study is that the association between migration and gender relations is not uniform across different gender dimensions. The reconstruction of gender relations within the family at the place of destination is a dynamic process in which some elements brought from communities of origin are discarded, others are modified, and still others are reinforced. Results challenge the expectation that migrant women easily incorporate the behavior patterns and cultural values of the United States and illustrate the importance of selective assimilation for understanding the diversity of changes in gender relations that accompany migration.

This article examines the forces shaping the labor supply and wages of immigrant Hispanic women in new destinations. The analysis draws on data collected in Durham, North Carolina, and evaluates how labor market outcomes are influenced by variables including human capital, immigration characteristics (including legal status), family structure, and immigrant-specific labor market conditions such as subcontracting. Findings indicate that the main determinants of labor supply among immigrant Hispanic women in Durham relate to family structure, with human capital playing a relatively minor role. Important variation is observed in the degree of work-family conflict across occupations. For wages, human capital and immigration characteristics (including documentation) are more important than family structure. Results show that the position of immigrant Hispanic women in Durham's low-wage labor market is extremely precarious, with multiple, overlapping sources of disadvantage, particularly related to legal status and family structure.

This article explores the impact of the 2007 recession and immigration enforcement policies on Latin American immigrants' out-migration from the Durham, North Carolina, area—a new immigrant destination. Drawing on an original ethnosurvey collected in 2011, the analysis assesses the extent of out-migration over time, what precipitated the move, and whether individuals returned to their country of origin or migrated within the United States. We find that out-migration more than doubled after the 2007 recession and that migrants overwhelmingly returned to their home countries. While family considerations and accidents accounted for most of the departures before the recession, economic considerations became the dominant drivers of out-migration after 2007. Deportations also grew in number but accounted for a negligible share of all out-migration. Departures were more prevalent among immigrants from Mexico and those with lower educational attainment. Latin American migration, especially from Mexico, continues to be circular, and deportation is a relatively ineffective strategy for immigrant population control when compared to voluntary returns.