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In the 1990s, Mexican immigration dispersed spatially, leading to the emergence of many "new destinations," in nonmetropolitan areas of the United States. Previous studies constrain the scope of the analysis to the United States, limiting our understanding of how new destinations are formed. We place new destination formation into a binational context and emphasize the role of supply-side immigration dynamics. We argue that occupations in Mexico provide ready-made paths, or "channels," for economic incorporation into the United States and that these channels underlie the formation of many new destinations. Using a unique data set on Mexican migration, we estimate a multivariate model that tests for the presence of occupational channels linking analogous sectors of the U.S. and Mexican economies, focusing especially on the food-processing sector. The results demonstrate that Mexican migration is strongly channeled along occupational lines. There are occupational channels linking each of the major economic sectors in Mexico and the United States, but the effect of channeling is particularly strong in the food-processing sector. By empirically identifying the existence of occupational channels, this study uncovers a key explanation of new destination formation in many nonmetropolitan areas.

National — and local — conversations about immigration are often centered on immigrants' integration into the US society. One factor that shapes immigrants' integration is their pre-migration work experience, skills, and training and a series of studies have used "channeling" as a concept to identify immigrants who have worked in the same occupation and/or industry in the destination labor market as they had in the origin labor market, prior to migration. Using the New Immigrant Survey (NIS) and a simultaneous equation model (SiEM) approach, this article expands on this research by exploring the impact of channeling on wages for Asian Indians, Filipino/as, and Mexicans with lawful permanent resident (LPR) status. Contrary to prior findings on the effects of channeling within specific industries, we find that channeling is associated with lower, not higher, immigrants' wages. The findings are robust to different definitions of channeling, as the negative effects of channeling hold within industrial sectors and occupational groups. Moreover, the results indicate that channeling is not exclusive to the Mexico–US migration stream, but instead may be a feature of various US-bound immigration streams, including those from India and the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have been interested in the relationship between skin tone and health since at least the 1970s; however, no study, to our knowledge, has analyzed a diverse immigrant sample. In this study, we use the New Immigrant Survey and interactions to examine how skin tone and race/ethnicity - alongside gender - jointly pattern BMI among Legal Permanent Residents. Our approach allows for the analysis of BMI among multiple racial/ethnic immigrant groups, while considering skin tone. Our results document that darker skin shades are associated with higher BMI, but only for women. Further, we also tease out the relationship between gender and race/ethnicity for BMI, which allows us to better understand this critical connection for new immigrants' health in the United States. Together, our results highlight that BMI jointly varies by skin tone and race/ethnicity, which emphasizes the importance of an intersectional approach, especially for new immigrant women of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food insecurity is a persistent problem in the United States and is disproportionately distributed across racial/ethnic groups, with some evidence that non-Latino blacks and Latinos experience higher rates than non-Latino whites. But no nationally-representative study examines how race/ethnicity affects food insecurity for immigrants in the United States. Using new assimilation theory and the 1999-2010 waves ( N = 32,464) of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), this study investigated the relationship between food insecurity and both race/ethnicity and nativity status. Results, when socioeconomic status is held constant, provide evidence for a nonwhite/white divide in food insecurity for both immigrants and the native-born. That is, blacks and Latinos - regardless of nativity status - are significantly more food insecure than both foreign- and native-born whites. These results provide insight into a continuing pattern of racial/ethnic inequality in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study builds on recent work investigating the process of migration channeling between analogous sectors of the Mexican and U.S. labor markets. In this study, the authors take up the question of whether channeling between Mexico and the United States promotes immigrants’ economic integration. Drawing on previous research on channeling, and using insights from human capital theory, the authors test the hypothesis that immigrants who are able to use their industry-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities acquired in Mexico within the same industry in the United States achieve higher levels of economic integration. Using a sample of Mexican immigrants from the New Immigrant Survey, we find that industrially channeled immigrants experience a wage premium of over $5,000, on average, in the United States. Our study concludes with a discussion of what industrial channeling means for Mexican immigrants’ broader integration into U.S. society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the research on immigrants’ economic well-being demonstrates a greater concentration of immigrants in or near poverty. A relatively new aspect of scholarly interest in immigrant economic well-being is wealth or net worth. We use assimilation theory and data from the New Immigrant Survey (NIS) to explore wealth inequality among immigrants and highlight how racial/ethnic realities in the United States provide differential opportunities and constraints for immigrants of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, net of factors such as pre-immigration characteristics and length of U.S. stay. We apply quantile regression to analyze immigrants’ net worth and logistic regression to explore immigrants’ investments, including homeownership and investment in stocks and bonds. Results provide evidence of a white/nonwhite wealth divide among immigrants. This study improves our understanding of how long-lasting racial/ethnic inequalities in the United States influence diverse immigrants’ integration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wealth is a strong indicator of immigrant integration in U.S. society. Drawing on new assimilation theory, we highlight the importance of racial/ethnic group boundaries and propose different paths of wealth integration among U.S. immigrants. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and quantile regression, we show that race/ethnicity shapes immigrant wealth inequality across the entire distribution of net worth, along with immigrants' U.S. experience, such as immigrant status, U.S. education, English language proficiency, and time spent in the United States. Our results document consistent racial/ethnic inequality among immigrants, also evidenced among the U.S. born, revealing that even when accounting for key aspects of U.S. experience, wealth inequality with whites for Latino and black immigrants is strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how immigrants’ social capital affects their wealth holdings in the United States. I conceptualize visa sponsorship as a form of social capital and focus on three important factors – strength of ties, educational attainment, and race/ethnicity – that shape the relationship between immigrants’ social capital and wealth. I use the New Immigrant Survey and find that the relationship between visa sponsorship and wealth differs both by the strength of an immigrants’ tie to their network and their education. Notably, race/ethnicity only consistently stratifies the wealth of immigrants with employment sponsorship. Taken together, these results provide unique insight into immigrants’ economic integration in the United States and point to immigrants’ social capital as an important mechanism for wealth inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses wealth attainment as an indicator of economic integration and assesses how educational-occupational mismatch (i.e., over/underqualification) and race/ethnicity affect the wealth attainment of a sample of legal permanent residents in the USA. Using data from the New Immigrant Survey, this paper finds that overqualification is positively associated with wealth attainment, but below the rate for adequately qualified workers in the same occupation. Underqualified immigrants are associated with a pattern of wealth attainment that is equivalent to the adequately qualified. Racial/ethnic wealth inequality among legal permanent residents generally reflects the well-documented pattern among the U.S. native-born. This paper concludes with a discussion that places these results alongside previous research that examines the relationship between educational-occupational mismatch and income among immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Foreign education is associated with lower wealth accumulation. [•] Race/ethnicity serves as an important stratifying factor for blacks and Latinos. [•] Little wealth inequality within racial/ethnic groups by nativity status. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]