Ghosts in the Global Machine: New Immigrants and the Redefinition of Work
The incorporation of new immigrant workers into the lower reaches of the U.S. labor market has been a very significant employment trend. Debates over the implications of this trend—in particular whether immigrants displace and/or lower wages for native workers—abound (Borjas 1995; Borjas, Freeman and Katz 1997; Camarota 2001; Cornelius 1998; Hamermesh and Bean 1998; Smith and Edmonston 1997). In the U.S. South, the rapid incorporation of large numbers of Latino immigrants into the labor market is a development of historical significance. This region’s economy has long been racially segmented as a bipolar black-white construct, though with substantial internal variation by time and place. Since World War II, a combination of factors including agricultural mechanization, wartime labor demand, and the modern civil rights movement undermining legal and economic constraints on black workers’ mobility, changed the region’s labor markets significantly. Today, the growing Latino presence in labor markets throughout the South (a phenomenon that was heretofore largely confined to only two