Room at the top? Minority mobility and the transition to demographic diversity in the USA

ABSTRACT

We examine the ramifications of the demographic transition to diversity in the USA through an analysis of changes at the top of the occupational hierarchy, as glimpsed in recent census data. We find evidence that, among the incumbents of better-paid occupations, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites, the historically dominant majority, is sharply declining, while the proportion of immigrant-origin minorities, Asians, both foreign and US born, and US-born Hispanics, is growing. African Americans, or US-born blacks, are not so far sharing much in this growth. However, whites still retain important advantages in terms of occupational placement net of education and in terms of earnings net of occupational placement. We conclude overall that demographic shifts are highly likely to drive further diversification at the top of the US workforce; the question of whether whites can hold on to their advantages in the face of these changes cannot be answered yet.

KEYWORDS:

• Social mobility
• demographic transition
• occupations
• immigrant minorities
• African Americans
• white advantage

Acknowledgements

This paper was completed while the senior author was a visiting scholar at Russell Sage Foundation, and he is grateful for the support the fellowship afforded. Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa acknowledges the fellowship support of the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR) during the research. Both authors are grateful to Joe Pereira of CUNY's Center for Urban Research, who provided valuable assistance with data preparation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We refer to ‘ethno-racial origin’ because key social distinctions in American society are defined as a combination of race and ethnicity, such as that between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics. Occasionally, we will refer to ‘race’ as a stand-in for the more complex term.

2. Occupations offer a reasonably fine-grained way to look at position in the labour force. In the 2009–11 data, for instance, there are 462 occupational titles that are ranked and included in the analysis. Because there were some differences in the coding schemes for the 2000 and 2009–11 data sets, we elected to rank occupations separately in each data set, rather than try to reconcile the differences. However, the correspondence between the rankings is very close: for the 455 occupations they share, the correlation between the median earnings scales is 0.98.

3. The ages in the table are offset by one year from the conventional categories (e.g. twenty-six to thirty-five instead of twenty-five to thirty-four) because they refer to age at the time of the survey, while the labour force variables characterize the previous twelve months.