Mark Ellis, University of Washington and Richard Wright, Dartmouth College

PROJECT SUMMARY

This project examines the interrelationships between where immigrants live and the jobs they perform. The tendency for immigrants to cluster residentially and concentrate in particular types of jobs is well known.  Scholars speculate about the connections between these two types of segregation – residential and industrial – but rarely investigate its specific form.  These connections are likely bound-up with workplace segregation – the concentration of specific types of jobs in particular places, usually described as the spatial division of labor.  We plan to explore the linkages between these three forms of segregation – residential, industrial, and workplace – in order to better understand the matching of immigrants to jobs.  We hope to show how the ethnic division of labor is coupled to the spatial division of labor, and to understand the importance of ethnic residential geography in this connection. The project directly builds on the immigration and labor market research conducted by the two Principal Investigators over the last eight years with both SSRC and NSF support and adds a new spatial dimension to this established body of work. (Wright and Ellis 1997; Ellis and Wright 1999; Ellis 1999; Wright and Ellis 1999).

Data limitations have previously restricted empirical analyses of the associations between these three forms of segregation.  The Census Bureau has recently made available, under highly controlled circumstances, new detailed individual level information from a special version of the 1990 Census of Population and Housing.  This data set provides a one in six sample of individuals that permits us to simultaneously study residential and industrial/occupational segregation and the spatial division of labor. This version of the census includes information on work, place of residence by census tract, and place of work by census tract. Simply stated, with a large volume of data recording tracts of residence and work for individual workers, we now can theorize the process of sectoral specialization and the spatial division of labor in important new ways.  Basic questions that we intend to address include: Where, by census tract, in Los Angeles do immigrants work?  How is place of work related to an immigrant group’s geography of residence?  Where are a group’s niche jobs (notable sectoral concentrations) in relation to its non-niche jobs? And how far are these niches from residential concentrations?

We expect answers to these questions to vary by immigrant group, and within groups by sex.  We employ two different methodologies. First, we plan to plot workers by census tracts of employment and residence by sex and immigrant group for the Los Angeles CMSA. These maps are input to a series of map-based statistics summarizing the relations between immigrant employment specialization and the geography of work and residence by tract.  Second, we estimate a nested logit model of the probability of working in an immigrant niche and residential location for the most recent immigrant arrivals to Los Angeles – those who came between 1985 and 1990. To ensure disclosure protection, most of the data-processing and model estimation for this project must take place within the confines of the California Census Research Data Center (CCRDC) at UCLA – a branch of the Center for Economic Studies (CES) of the Census Bureau.