Greta Gilbertson

Women's Labor and Enclave Employment: The Case of Dominican and Colombian Women in New York City.

The enclave hypothesis holds that obligations stemming from a common ethnicity not only permit utilization of past investments in human capital, but help to create opportunities for mobility. This implies that both men and women benefit from a broader reward structure involving more than just wages. Yet few studies examine whether immigrants in co-ethnic-owned firms, particularly women, benefit from these other forms of compensation, such as advancement opportunities. Using data from a survey of Colombian and Dominican immigrants in New York City, this research examines whether Dominican and Colombian women working in Hispanic-owned firms in New York City are advantaged relative to women in other labor market sectors in earnings-returns to human capital, opportunities for skill acquisition, and fringe benefits. The results indicate that enclave employment provides women with low wages, minimal benefits, and few opportunities for advancement.

Hispanic intermarriage in New York City: new evidence from 1991.

This study replicates research on Hispanic intermarriage by Fitzpatrick (1966) and Gurak and Fitzpatrick (1982) using 1991 marriage records from New York City. It examines trends in marital assimilation among Puerto Ricans and the non-Puerto Rican Hispanic population. The prevalence of intermarriage varies among the six Hispanic national-origin groups. Changes in intermarriage patterns since 1975 are documented. Results show very high rates of intermarriage with non-Hispanics among Cubans, Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans. Considerable intermarriage among Hispanics of different national origins is characteristic of all Hispanics. Finally, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans have distinct patterns of intermarriage, characterized by high rates of intermarriage with each other, lower rates of intermarriage with non-Hispanics, no intergenerational increase in exogamy, and higher rates of nonmixed ancestry among the second generation. Implications of these trends are discussed.

The emergence of protective citizenship in the USA: naturalization among Dominican immigrants in the post-1996 welfare reform era

Despite the increase in scholarly attention to citizenship, few studies have examined how immigrants acquire formal citizenship through naturalization. We employ a qualitative, longitudinal case-study approach to examine whether immigrants naturalize in the U.S. or not, and how they understand naturalization and citizenship in the post-1996 Welfare Reform period. We found that for many immigrants, U.S. citizenship does not necessarily signify permanent settlement or incorporation in the U.S. Indeed, U.S. citizenship allowed older immigrants to continue a pattern of transnational residence, challenging the association between citizenship and permanent incorporation in a single locale and citizenship and integration. Our findings challenge both the national and post-national perspectives and argues for a transnational view of citizenship.

IMMIGRANTS' PROGRESS: Ethnic and Gender Differences Among U.S. Immigrants in the 1980s

Using data from the June 1986 and June 1988 Current Population Surveys, we look at differences in occupational achievement, education, occupational prestige, and per capita income among a large number of first-generation immigrant groups. We seek to explore a central question in the debate about the economic prospects of immigrants: Do groups convert education into occupational prestige in similar ways? To address this issue, we examine differences in estimated rates of returns to socioeconomic occupational scores for education among immigrant groups. Notwithstanding language difficulties and unfamiliarity with the labor market—characteristics that we could not measure with this dataset—the labor market experiences of higher-skilled immigrants appear not to differ appreciably from that of native whites of native parentage. By contrast, low-skilled immigrants are concentrated in low-level jobs where the structure of employment seems to limit the rewards to additional gains in skill.

Broadening the enclave debate: The labor market experiences of Dominican and Colombian men in New York city

This article provides new data on immigrant employment in ethnic firms, in an attempt to go beyond the terms of the ethnic enclave debate as it has developed so far. We contend that enclave research has focused too narrowly on wages. Using data from a survey of Colombian and Dominican immigrants in New York City, we compare enclave, primary, and secondary workers on three types of work-related resources: wages, opportunities for skill acquisition, and access to nonmonetary fringe benefits. We find little evidence that Dominican and Colombia men in the enclave comprise a protected labor market sector. On the contrary, they are disadvantaged with respect to several fringe benefits.

Household transitions in the migrations of Dominicans and Colombians to New York.

Using life history survey data, we examined the correlates of change in the composition of Dominican and Colombian immigrant co-residential households at three points in time—prior to migration, just after migration and at the time of the survey. We found that there is considerable heterogeneity in the patterns of household transitions, although the majority of both Dominican and Colombian households at the time of the survey were nuclear family households. Dominican women tended to have made transitions into single-parent households by the time of the survey. Background and migration characteristics influence the pattern of household transitions, but fail to explain the ethnic and gender differences.

Regulating Transnational Citizens in the Post-1996 Welfare Reform Era: Dominican Immigrants in New York City

Drawing on interviews and observations of Dominican immigrants in New York City, in this paper I explore how immigrants articulate ideas of membership and belonging in the context of anti-immigrant legislation. I situate naturalization and citizenship as a process whereby immigrants accommodate and resist different forms of state power within transnational social spaces. How immigrants view and articulate citizenship in the contemporary period is tied to how state power produces complex and contradictory ideas regarding the meaning and nature of membership. I argue that immigrants both reject and embrace various aspects of state constructions of citizenship.

Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love across Borders

In Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love across Borders, Leisy Abrego brings us deep into the world of El Salvadoran families. She focuses on how family members navigate emotional and financial hardships when parents migrate to the United States and leave children behind. Although the primary focus of the book is the divergence in experiences across transnational families, the heart of the book is an exploration of the economic and emotional consequences of separation. Abrego addresses her primary question by focusing on children left behind and assessing their level of well being. She argues that variation in the experiences of transnational families can be traced in large part to U.S. immigration laws that produce illegality, and to the penalties of being a woman. The book is based on interviews with 80 adolescents and young adults between the ages of 14 and 29 residing in urban areas in and around El Salvador who have migrant parents in the United States. In addition, Abrego conducted 47 interviews with migrant parents (25 women and 22 men) residing in the United States, most of whom were living in Los Angeles and had been in the United States for an average of nine years. (The parents and children are unrelated.) About one third of the women and a quarter of the men were undocumented at the time of the interview, although the majority had entered the country without documents. The book is divided into chapters explaining why migration occurs, the journey and initial settlement, two chapters on the incorporation of immigrants, and two chapters on the experiences of children in El Salvador. In Chapter Two, ‘‘Why Parents Migrate,’’ Abrego found that most of the parents she interviewed left because of poverty, violence, and/or the threat of violence. Both men and women migrated as part of a family strategy and as a means to remit money to children and parents. In Chapter Three, ‘‘Journeys and Initial Settlement,’’ Abrego compares visaauthorized and unauthorized travelers and finds that those who travel without documents are at a much greater disadvantage than those who are authorized. Undocumented status produces cumulative disadvantages once the immigrants are in the United States (through indebtedness, obstacles and risks during the job search, job tenure, and the overall settlement process). Abrego argues that being undocumented shapes not only the financial but emotional well being of children in El Salvador, because those faring well financially can justify their family’s separation by pointing to the concrete gains of migration. In Chapter Four, ‘‘The Structure of Trauma through Separation,’’ Abrego describes the desperate situations of undocumented El Salvadorans in the Los Angeles labor market. Unsurprisingly, she found that women work in some of the most exploitative and lowpaying jobs, mostly as domestics, as hotel housekeepers, and in factories. Fragile network ties are often not helpful to them. Her larger point is that illegal status not only handicaps women (and men) in the labor market but has consequences for the family members ‘‘left behind.’’ In Chapter Five, ‘‘Gendered Opportunities, Expectations, and Well-Being,’’ Abrego uses interview data to show ‘‘the mothers’ almost palpable sense of obligation to remit and their strict approach to parental responsibilities’’ (p. 112). She says that ‘‘mothers in the study never failed to send their children money, if they had it’’ (ibid). Women embrace traditional gender ideologies, perhaps to compensate for their absence and in light of men’s lesser involvement. In Chapters Six and Seven, Abrego explores how children fare economically and emotionally. She finds that children

One in Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty First Century, by Nancy Foner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 312 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐231‐15936‐4

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy is one of the most daring books that I have read in some time. In aspiring to tell a New York City story, author Sudhir Venkatesh weaves together an analysis of aspects of that city’s underworld, its above-world (comprised of emerging elites in business and the arts), and himself. The relevant part about him is that he is a transplant from southern California who has come to New York to build upon a promising career in sociology that was established by his prior studies of the underworld and low-income African Americans in Chicago. Consequently, he appears in this work as much more than a self-reflective ethnographer taking stock of the field and the people that he is studying. Instead, and more provocatively, Venkatesh incorporates autobiography into his explication of how a research agenda unfolded for him in what has become his second city. Floating City does not take the form of a standard academic book. There is no extensive commentary about research methods and design, nor any elaborate commentary on the scholarly intent of the project underlying this material. Venkatesh can negate those projects, fall back on his stature as a well-established sociologist, and venture into a strong story-telling effort predicated upon the reader accepting that he is a skilled interviewer, field note collector, and analyst of the urban scenario. The work begins with an introduction of a handful of seemingly archetypical New York City residents, including Ivy-League graduates, a drug dealer, and the dealer’s cousin (who is a partner of sorts in that trade). The graduates stand at an opposing point on the social class spectrum from the other two, yet they all happen to be in attendance at the same private social event in Manhattan. Why and how they came to be there, and what they ultimately have to do with each other, is a central point of the book. That point is conveyed in nearly suspenseful fashion throughout its eight chapters. Across those chapters, Venkatesh elucidates the connections between the underworld (the Harlem-based drug dealer being just one example) and the above-world (the Ivy League-educated twenty-somethings being just a few examples). The connections are fostered by drug distribution and consumption, participation in escort services and prostitution, and other formally organized means of indulgence. In the book, we learn much about the complex feelings, attitudes, commitments, and values of these and other actors: prostitutes, financiers, pimps, elite club-goers, drug dealers, and the ethnographer who is