This is an award under the Grants for Improving Doctoral Dissertation Research program. It is a study of factors explaining how Mexican immigrants do better than members of other ethnic groups in the New York City labor market. Interviews will be conducted among ethnic Korean and Greek owners of small businesses about their employment practices and reasons for preferring to hire workers from Mexico. In combination with interviews carried out among Mexican workers, these data will make it possible to describe the labor market niches and social networks that have fueled the rise in immigration from Mexico into the New York area recently. The proposed research will help to shed light on the formation and maintenance of an underclass in contemporary American cities and show the social mechanisms by which members of some ethnic groups managed to escape from the underclass. As such this project has the potential to contribute toward the amelioration of a serious social problem in American society. In addition to the scientific gains to be achieved by the research, this award will materially assist a highly promising student in completing research for the Ph.D. dissertation. Thus it contributes to the future scientific manpower of the nation and the thorough training of the next generation of social scientists.
