Natasha Iskander

Hidden Talent: Tacit Skill Formation and Labor Market Incorporation of Latino Immigrants in the United States

This article examines informal training and skill development pathways of Latino immigrant construction workers in two different urban labor markets: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We find that institutional differences across local labor markets not only shape how immigrants develop skills in specific places but also determine the localized obstacles they face in demonstrating and harnessing these skills for employment. To explain the role of local institutions in shaping differences in skill development experience and opportunities, we draw on the concept of tacit skill, a term that is rarely incorporated into studies of the labor market participation of less educated immigrants. We argue that innovative pathways that Latino immigrant workers have created to develop tacit skill can strengthen advocacy planning efforts aimed at improving employment opportunities and working conditions for marginalized workers, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike.

The Rise and Fall of a Micro-Learning Region: Mexican Immigrants and Construction in Center-South Philadelphia

This paper documents the rise and fall of a micro-learning region in Philadelphia. The central actors in this region are undocumented Mexican immigrants who until recently were able to draw on the intensity of their workplace interactions and their heterodox knowledge to produce new and innovative building techniques in the citys residential construction. The new knowledge they developed was primarily tacit. More significantly, the learning practices through which immigrant workers developed skills and innovated new techniques were also heavily tacit. Because these practices were never made formal and were never made explicit, they remained invisible and difficult to defend. With the housing-market collapse and subsequent decline in housing renovation in the south-center region of Philadelphia, this tacit knowledge, and the practices that gave it shape and significance, are no longer easily accessible. We draw on this case to demonstrate the importance of access to the political and economic resources to turn learning practices into visible structured institutions that protect knowledge and skill. Whether or not the practices that support knowledge development are themselves made explicit can determine whether the knowledge they produce becomes an innovation that is recognized and adopted or whether it remains confined to a set of ephemeral practices that exist only so long as they are being enacted.

Building Job Quality from the inside-out: Mexican Immigrants, Skills, and Jobs in the Construction Industry

Using an ethnographic case study of Mexican immigrant construction workers in two U.S. cities and in Mexico, the authors illustrate the contribution of immigrant skill as a resource for changing workplace practices. As a complement to explanations that situate the protection of job quality and the defense of skill to external institutions, the authors show that immigrants use collective learning practices to improve job quality from inside the work environment—that is to say from the inside-out. The authors also find that immigrants use collective skill-building practices to negotiate for improvements to their jobs; however, their ability to do so depends on the institutions that organize production locally. Particular attention is given to the quality of those industry institutions, noting that where they are more malleable, immigrant workers gain more latitude to alter their working conditions and their prospects for advancement.

Revealing talent: Informal skills intermediation as an emergent pathway to immigrant labor market incorporation

In todays fast-changing urban labor markets, skill formation is crucial to long-term income security and occupational advancement. While most studies emphasize the skills that workers acquire through formal training and educational programs, a less understood but equally important concern is how workers acquire skills through informal means and then how they demonstrate and defend skills for which they have no formal credentials. This is especially important when considering the labor market participation of less-educated immigrant workers with limited formal training and credentialing support. How do these immigrant workers develop, demonstrate, and defend their skills in receiving community labor markets? What factors facilitate or hinder these processes? How might skill formation be institutionalized in order to enhance immigrant labor market incorporation? In this paper we examine these questions through a study of Latino immigrant workers in North Carolinas construction industry. In particular, we focus on the role that immigrant skills intermediation, and the informal learning processes it supports, play in the formation of emergent pathways for developing, demonstrating, and defending immigrant talent in mainstream labor markets. We conclude that informal intermediation by established immigrant workers can facilitate immigrant skill development and demonstration in mainstream labor markets and thus provides an important pathway for advancing the labor market status of less-educated immigrant workers.

Learning in Place: Immigrants' Spatial and Temporal Strategies for Occupational Advancement

abstract Studies of low-wage workers have long recognized the role of space in mediating access to employment. Significantly less attention has been paid to the ways in which space informs workers’ ability to develop the attributes that would make them more employable. In this article, we address this gap through an examination of how immigrant workers use the relative spatial organization of residence and production to cultivate the skills that enable them to shift out of low-wage occupations. We also argue that workers’ spatial job market strategies have an important, but often overlooked, temporal aspect: workers use space over time not only to shape their access to jobs but also to create breathing room for learning skills that enable them to improve their employment trajectories over the long term. Drawing on a multiyear ethnographic study of M exican immigrants in downtown P hiladelphia, we show that immigrant workers used the functional proximity among the restaurant industry, small-scale residential construction work pertaining to housing renovation, and the neighborhoods where they lived to develop skill sets that enabled them to shift into higher-wage construction jobs. In essence, these workers knitted together two seemingly separate industries, such that they could use their employment time in one for learning in and about the other. Our study suggests that interventions that curtail immigrants’ mobility may have implications that are far more serious than limiting immediate access to jobs: these measures may undercut immigrants’ strategies for developing the skills required for long-term occupational mobility and advancement.

Celebrating the Enduring Contribution of Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies:

-----------------------------Written in 1979, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial societies offered a powerful and fresh way of understanding labor migration and the role of immigrant workers in the u.S. labor market that dramatically broke with traditional neoclassical thinking. dominant theory up to that point had focused on push factors, arguing that labor migration stemmed simply from geographic differences in the supply and demand of labor and placed agency in the hands of migrants who made the decision individually to maximize their utility by moving from low wage to high wage countries. in stark contrast, Birds of Passage focused on pull factors, utilizing dual labor market theory to argue that migration was fundamentally demand driven. by Piore’s reckoning, labor migration was the consequence of the chronic and unavoidable need of advanced industrial societies for workers who were willing to labor for low wages with great instability, little chance for advancement, and often under difficult conditions. These insights and the conceptual framework Piore offered in the book are still relevant for understanding and analyzing labor migration and the policy dilemmas it poses today.

Street Vendors, Television Extras, Walmart Stockers, and More: Worker Subjectivity and Labor Processes in Atypical Work

This essay reviews Enrique de la Garza Toledo’s anthology on atypical work, titled Trabajo no clásico, organización y acción colectiva (Vols. 1 & 2) and situates it within the larger tradition of Latin American sociology of work. It argues that the anthology merges an emphasis on labor processes in a specific industry with an attention to the subjectivities and relationships that support worker agency and labor movements. Moreover, it posits that the rich case studies on atypical work in a wide spectrum of settings in Mexico City that are included in these two volumes provide grounded material for meso-level theorizing about the factors that shape atypical work and the ways that workers in those jobs respond to them.

How normative debates about immigration shape analyses of the assimilation processes of second-generation youth: lessons from Spanish Legacies

ABSTRACT In Spanish Legacies, Portes, Aparicio, and Haller offer the results of their longitudinal study on the assimilation of the children of immigrants in Spanish society. Thanks to their study design, which parallels the earlier Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study conducted by Portes and Rumbaut, the authors are able to compare assimilation trajectories in Spain with those of second-generation youth in the United States. This comparison raises important considerations about how immigration policy shapes assimilation processes. More centrally, the contrast between the cases invites a deeper consideration of normative questions that not only undergird immigration policy but also shape the assimilation experiences of the second generation. The juxtaposition of the two cases also elicits provocations about how the sociological theories about assimilation might have been different if they had been developed based on the Spanish, rather than the American, experience, and how those Spanish-inflected theories might support different directions of inquiry.

Emigration and Political Development

Folded into Jonathon Moses’ book, Emigration and Political Development, is an elegant discussion of emigration from Norway before World War I and its impact on that country’s political trajectory. The author explores the effects of Norwegian emigration—an outpouring of people headed toward the United States, which began in the 1820s and halted only on the eve of The Great War. This emigration started with a trickle of religious dissidents fleeing repression but over time grew to encompass large numbers of rural inhabitants leaving primarily for economic reasons. Moses argues that the Norwegians’ experience in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, and in particular their encounter with political freedom, helped transform the political culture in Norway and would ultimately lead to the reform of governance structures. He posits, for example, that reports from Norwegian emigrants who settled in the United States about the economic opportunities and the political freedoms they enjoyed hastened the outflow of the poor and landless compatriots. So significant was this movement, argues Moses, that it led to measures taken in the late 1800s to improve the lot of Norway’s tenant farmers, such as the establishment of a fund to help landless peasants purchase a plot, as well as other land reform measures to make more areas available for cultivation. He makes similar claims for the effect of emigration on the rise in industrial wages and the swell of labor mobilization at the close of the nineteenth century. He argues that as large numbers of workers emigrated, Norway’s expanding industry, faced with labor shortages, was forced to pay higher wages to recruit workers, and that the country’s nascent labor movement exploited the pressures these shortages brought to bear on manufacturers with calls for emigration as a form of labor protest. Likewise, Moses maintains that emigration was an important factor in the expansion of suffrage rights in the late 1800s, noting that suffragists invoked emigration as evidence of political dissatisfaction and, as he puts it, deployed the threat of emigration ‘‘as a sort of political crowbar’’ (p. 111). He also sees the influence of emigration, or rather emigrants, in the leftist drive for a parliamentary form of governance in Norway, and later, in the country’s push for independence from Sweden. He alludes to the moral and financial support, especially for rearmament, that emigrants devoted to these two causes. Moses’ discussion of emigration’s influence on Norway’s political development in the nineteenth century captures the book’s greatest strengths. He uses rich historical data to make his arguments, drawing on sources ranging from letters to political treatises to levels of labor mobilization and proclamations by labor leaders. He ambitiously covers a century of history in one short chapter, and so inevitably the political evolution he sketches is at times impressionistic and its connection to emigration heavily drawn. But Moses is careful to specify caveats throughout, particularly in reference to causality. And his account raises important questions about how high levels of emigration can, over time, transform the political culture of the country of origin. Unfortunately, Moses’ description of the political impact of Norwegian emigration, nuanced and rich as it is, nevertheless suffers from many of the same flaws that characterize, even define, the rest of the book. These shortcomings stem from the book’s central purpose. The author explains that his project with this monograph is twofold: to show that emigration ‘‘can deliver political effects’’ and to outline a research design ‘‘that can reveal those effects’’ (p. 5). Applying this analysis to a timespan of more than 150 years and over an expanse of more than the same number of countries, as Moses explicitly sets out to do, requires making several gross generalizations about emigration, political development, and economic change. It also demands rubbing out critical historical details, such as shifts in national boundaries and even the emergence of the modern nation-state. Reviews 245

Street Vendors, Television Extras, Walmart Stockers, and More

This essay reviews Enrique de la Garza Toledo’s anthology on atypical work, titled Trabajo no clásico, organización y acción colectiva (Vols. 1 & 2) and situates it within the larger tradition of Latin American sociology of work. It argues that the anthology merges an emphasis on labor processes in a specific industry with an attention to the subjectivities and relationships that support worker agency and labor movements. Moreover, it posits that the rich case studies on atypical work in a wide spectrum of settings in Mexico City that are included in these two volumes provide grounded material for meso-level theorizing about the factors that shape atypical work and the ways that workers in those jobs respond to them.