Immigrant Niches and the Intrametropolitan Spatial Division of Labour

Abstract

Immigrants often bunch together in particular lines of work, which many scholars call employment niching. They also may cluster geographically; these districts can be neighbourhoods where workers reside or places of work (industrial quarters where labour is performed). The intrametropolitan spatial division of labour is perhaps best conceived as the relationships among employment concentrations in industrial niches and places of work shaped in large measure by the geographies of residence. The analysis of six immigrant groups reported in this paper models the effect of residential concentration on the chances that an immigrant holds a job in a particular line of work, labours in a particular work place, or does both—works in a particular job and work place. The study, which uses Greater Los Angeles' census tracts for the analysis, reveals that residential patterns help to govern the extent of this industrial segmentation and employment geography but that this relationship is not consistent across immigrant groups. The investigation adds to the literature on labour market segmentation by ethnicity, gender, nativity and home–work relations and offers new perspectives on the relationship between spaces of production and social reproduction in metropolitan places.

Keywords:

• Spatial Division of Labour
• Scale
• Immigrant Niche
• Neighbourhood
• Ethnicity
• Gender

Acknowledgements

This paper reports the results of research and analysis undertaken while the authors were conducting a study approved by the Center for Economic Studies at the US Census Bureau. It has undergone a Census Bureau review more limited in scope than that given to official Census Bureau publications. Research results and conclusions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily indicate concurrence by the Census Bureau. It has been screened to insure that no confidential information is revealed. The National Science Foundation—under grant BCS-9986928—funded this research. Thanks to Rebecca Acosta and the California Census Research Data Center for assistance with the data and to Serin Houston for her research support. Thanks also to John Logan, Sookhee Oh and the participants in the S4-sponsored colloquium at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University for their comments. Three anonymous JEMS referees offered detailed suggestions for improvement, for which we are most grateful.

Notes

1. As Wang and Pandit (2007) note, the literature offers little consensus on the best way to measure immigrant niching, and the quotient approach has a long history in regional economic analysis. Such quotients range in value from zero to infinity and have the advantage of ease of interpretation over other measures. In their evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of three measures of employment concentration, Wang and Pandit (2007: 1232) also point out that, when the share of a particular group in an employment sector is less than 50 per cent (as is the case with the data we use in this analysis), the difference between the indices studied is ‘negligible’.