Hyoung-jin Shin and Zai Liang
Local Ethnic Labor Market Conditions and the Earnings of
Asian Immigrants
Introduction
This study investigates how the local-level variations in ethnic economies
differently affect the earnings of immigrant workers of the six major Asian ethnic groups
in the U.S.- Chinese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese-
utilizing multi-level analyses. There has been serious debate on the extent to which
ethnic economies can provide positive economic returns to immigrant workers for their
human capital and other market-related characteristics. While assimilation theorists
argue that the socioeconomic advantages to be derived from ethnic affiliations are not
clear, pluralists contend that immigrant groups can take the advantage of ethnic solidarity
to enhance their member’s economic advancement (Alba and Nee, 2003; Portes and
Rumbaut, 2001). The previous studies on ethnic economies have mostly paid attention to
the place of immigrant concentration, but the often-neglected question was how the inter-
metropolitan variations in the ethnic labor market conditions have an effect on the
economic condition of immigrants. Thus, the methodological interest of this study is to
investigate the local-level variations in the ethnic economies that systemically covariate
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