Placing Progress: Contextual Inequality and Immigrant Incorporation in the United States

This article contributes to the growing body of research on the economic incorporation of immigrants by considering the relative wages of immigrants, the adult children of immigrants, and the U.S.-born children of U.S. parentage. By disaggregating these three groups racially, comparing entire wage distributions, and comparing the immigrant cities of New York and Los Angeles with the United States overall, it presents a perspective on the complicated contexts of the intergenerational progress of immigrants. In addition to comparing the groups’ relative positions in 1990 and 2000, the article decomposes relative wages such that differences in the educational composition of groups can be isolated from residual wage inequality. This research is of interest because consideration of the U.S.-born or educated children of immigrants invokes questions of social mobility and the persistence of ethnic inequality more generally. The article also contributes to a theoretical debate over place and immigrants’ progress by examining the second generation, for whom residence in immigrant cities is often theorized as detrimental to economic incorporation. Finally, it introduces a substantial analysis of local wage structures to questions of immigrants’ intergenerational economic progress to a much greater extent than has previously been the case. The results suggest that prospects for immigrants’ economic incorporation are geographically specific and should be assessed across multiple generations as a result of the continuing contexts of racial wage inequality