Assimilating into What? Employment Relations, Benefits and Wages of Mexican Americans.

Mexican newcomers make up a working poor, with limited access to jobs beyond the low wage sector. The question now is whether their US born children will progress beyond the modest origins of their parents. This paper seeks to answer this question by examining inter-ethnic and inter-generational differences in employment relations, and inquiring into the impact of those differences on monetary and non-monetary forms of compensation. Using the February 1995, 1997, 1999 and 2001 series of Current Population Survey data, we compare first, second, and third-generation-plus Mexican Americans to native whites and African-Americans of the third generation or beyond. We measure labor market outcomes in three unique ways, each tightly knit to stability, status, and quality of employment. The first outcome is probability of atypical employment: we explore the probability of temporary, part-time, contract, and self-employment by ethnicity and generation. The second outcome is probability of healthcare and retirement coverage, controlling not only by group but also by kind of employment, measuring possible variation in the effects of ethnicity and generation on benefits within traditional and each sector of atypical employment. We do the same for our third outcome, weekly wages, controlling for ethnicity, generation, and atypical employment. We find that while recently arrived Mexican immigrants are the most likely to hold atypical jobs, inequality continues into the second and subsequent generations. As have previous researchers, we also demonstrate that non-standard employment yields negative effects on wages and benefits. We further demonstrate the interaction between ethnicity and generation and employment status. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]