Ethnoracial patterns of schooling and work among adolescents: Implications for Mexican immigrant incorporation

This paper investigates Mexican immigrant incorporation by examining labor force participation and schooling among Mexican-origin adolescents in the United States. Theoretical perspectives on immigrant incorporation, labor migration-related cultural repertoires and adolescent development considered together imply that studying ethnoracial differences in schooling among adolescents without taking work into account can yield mis-leading pictures of Mexican-origin non-high school completion patterns, thus hampering the assessment of incorporation theories. To avoid this, we analyze Mexican-origin generational differences in the relationship between schooling and workforce participation among adolescents compared to non-Hispanic whites and blacks. Using micro-data from the 2000 US Census, we find that Mexican immigrant boys who are not enrolled in school are more likely to be in the workforce, and conversely that those who are enrolled in school are much less likely to be in the workforce, compared to whites and blacks. Such relative differences in school/work specialization, as predicted, diminish across Mexican-origin generations. Moreover, based on supplementary analyses, we find similar patterns for a cohort of young adults who failed to complete high school during the 1990s. Overall, the results are consistent with the idea that cultural orientations growing out of the nature and experience of Mexican labor migration are important for assessing school enrollment patterns among Mexican-origin youth and for gauging their implications for educational policy and immigrant-group incorporation.

► Rates of school enrollment and employment are compared among Mexican, white, and black youth.
► For Mexican boys, employment depends on enrollment to a greater degree than among blacks or whites.
► This difference is most prevalent among adolescents born in Mexico.
► Similar employment patterns are found among adult males who did not complete high school.
► A culture of labor migration seems to facilitate labor market integration of low-skilled Mexican men.