Americans entertain any number of anxieties about contemporary immigration to the United States.  Among the more rational reasons for concern,  evidence of the widening economic gap between the native- and foreign-born should rank high on the list.    Whether the indicator involves wages, poverty (Clark this volume) or access to full-time well-paying jobs (Waldinger this volume), the signs all point in the same direction: immigrants to the United States are falling further behind the native-born on a range of basic measures of economic well-being.

Most of the interest, naturally enough, has focused on wages.   The typical approach involves a comparison of national samples of immigrants and natives, contrasting the two groups first at one point in time, and then some years later, to determine how each falls out in the wage distribution, and how those positions change over time.    Although researchers engage  in considerable dispute as to how to interpret the data, there seems to be little disagreement about the broad trend: at the national scale, post-1965 immigrants are failing to catch-up with the native-born in terms of wages.  Moreover, the immigrant/native gap is growing: the most recent arrivals enter the labor market at lower wages relative to natives than those who entered just two decades ago.  Thus, the prospects for economic assimilation appear to be dimming, getting bleaker still for those immigrants who have just started to work in the US.

This story -- one of a widening wage gap between immigrant and native workers -- derives from the results of research conducted at the national scale. National level comparisons are of unquestionable significance for the overall picture they provide; but they implicitly assume that the geography of immigration matters little for the outcomes of hand. They also mask the fact that contemporary immigration to the United States primarily involves migration to a limited number of states and urban regions, most importantly the five city-regions of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami, that serve as the focus of this book (see Sabagh this volume).    If the characteristics of these particular destinations exercise little effect on immigrants' economic success, then the exclusively national focus of most research conveys the correct picture.  But if contexts of reception condition immigrant economic outcomes, and if these contexts are expressed, not at the national, but rather the sub-national scale--such as in these city-regions --  then trends in the wages of natives and immigrants may also vary from one immigrant place to another.

Indeed, the literature provides convincing evidence that the ability of immigrants to make economic gains depends on conditions in the places where they settle, and not just on the individual characteristics they bring with them or acquire while in the United States. For example, Alejandro Portes and Robert Bach found that differences in individual characteristics, such as education and English language ability, only explained half of the income disadvantage of Mexican men relative to Cuban men.   The Cuban/Mexican disparity, they suggest, derives from differences in the contexts of reception, a concept they coined to denote a variety of features of the destination community, including the resources of the absorbing ethnic community, the robustness of the local labor market, and the policies of the receiving government.     Others have made similar arguments about the importance of conditions in the place of settlement affecting immigrant economic success.  Charles Tilly compared emigrants from one small town in Southern Italy to four cities in different countries (Lyon, Toronto, New York, and Buenos Aires).   This unique sample controls for variation in migrant characteristics and isolates conditions in the place of settlement as the probable cause of differences in economic success.  Similarly, Jeffrey Reitz, in his book comparing immigrants in the United States, Canada, and Australia, has argued that the social and institutional structures of destination societies, rather than immigrant characteristics, account for much of the higher level of economic inequality between immigrants and natives in the United States, as opposed to either Australia or Canada

Thus place-specific conditions are likely to matter, in part because immigrants gravitate to particular places and not others, but for other reasons as well.  Most importantly, wage levels and wage trends for all workers—native- and foreign-born alike—typically vary within countries across regions.  Those variations are likely to be accentuated when economic restructuring also affects regions in very distinctive ways – as has been  the case for America’s leading immigrant places.
Each of the five major centers of immigration in the US experienced distinctive economic transformations in the 1970s and 1980s.  New York lost much of its manufacturing employment and developed further as a center of advanced financial services.  Through 1990, Los Angeles emerged as the premier manufacturing region in the country – based on electronics, aerospace and  a reinvigorated low technology base of garments and furniture – and it expanded its dynamic entertainment sector.  Typical of other Midwestern cities, Chicago experienced considerable restructuring and job loss in its traditional heavy and consumer-oriented manufacturing industries.  The San Francisco region boomed largely because of the electronics and computer-related industries in Silicon Valley to its south.  And Miami solidified its position as a financial and tourist center for Latin America and the Caribbean.    Other regions of the country also experienced singular economic transformations; but the key point is that these occurred with only a small percentage of immigrants in their regional labor markets.

In light of this, a good case can be made for comparisons of immigrant and native wages by the city-region in which both live.  A contrast of this sort yields a measure of immigrant disadvantage -- or advantage, whatever the case may be -- relative to natives working under labor market conditions which both groups actually experience.   National analyses compare immigrants and natives who live in a mix of regions with different economic structures and variable concentrations of immigrants.  But as noted in Chapter 1, a large proportion of the native population lives in parts of the US where immigrants are particularly unlikely to settle.  Furthermore, those places that exercise little attraction to the foreign born are also likely to experience different wage changes and economic pressures than those at work in the regions that have attracted the most sizable immigrant inflows.  If the wages of natives in regions of immigrant settlement differ from those of the natives who live elsewhere then the national relative wage will differ from the relative wage measured in the places where immigrants actually live.  Moreover, because of distinctive regional economic transformations, changes in the wages of natives and immigrants may take a different path in regions of immigrant settlement than they do nationally.  If this is the case then national assessments of the economic assimilation of immigrants may not reflect the actual progress of native- and foreign-born workers in those places where immigrants actually live and work.

Thus, this chapter argues that regional labor markets centered on the city-regions in which immigrants live provide the better units in which to compare the wages of native- and foreign-born workers than the United States as whole.  Or, rephrased in yet somewhat different terms, I argue that national level comparisons of immigrant and native wages obscure significant variation in relative wages across major centers of immigrant settlement.

The remainder of this chapter investigates changes in the wage levels of native-born and immigrant men and women between 1980 and 1990 in five major city-regions of immigrant settlement: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami.   The focus on men and women remains relatively unusual, as the literature on the economic adjustment of immigrants has mainly concerned itself with the experiences of men, even though immigrant women now comprise over 40 percent of all immigrant workers in the United States.   As such, the paper builds on a small but growing body of literature reporting on the labor force activity and assimilation trajectories of immigrant women, which has found both differences and similarities as compared to the experiences of immigrant men.

The initial parts of the analysis present descriptive evidence on the relative wage of immigrants and natives by metropolitan region, and on differential changes in the relative wage by region between 1980 and 1990.  Later sections consider the extent to which characteristics of immigrants and natives explain differences in relative wages between city-regions; and if shifts in these characteristics are sufficient to explain changes in the relative wage in each region in the 1980s. I start with an overview of what is known about immigrant and native wages in the 1980s at the national level and then proceed to the presentation of data and models for the city-regions