Urban Employment and the Mismatch Dilemma: Accounting for the Immigration Exception

Abstract

This essay tests key components of the mismatch hypothesis with a sample of inner-city men that includes four ethnic or racial groupings — whites, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican immigrants. The findings provide limited support to mismatch. Key components of mismatch, such as human capital attributes and access to automobile commuting, do appear to influence employment likelihoods among native disadvantaged minorities, but have little effect on immigrants. The latter consistently exhibit high employment rates. The interpretation offered rests on two factors. First, the data support the idea that immigrants' social networks largely underlie their impressive work records. In addition, the data provide limited support to the explanation, strongly indicated in the literature, that immigrants are favored by employers for their exploitability and that such preferences are expressed via hiring techniques that utilize the immigrants' social networks.