ABSTRACT
In contrast to Western Europe and North America, there is a lack of research on the social and economic incorporation of immigrants in sub-Saharan Africa. This omission hides the role of internal and international migrations in social and demographic change in sub-Saharan Africa (Russell et al. 1990; Zuberi et al. 2003). In Western societies, considerable research has focused on analyzing immigrant incorporation and the employment and earning opportunities of immigrants in relation to those of nonimmigrants (Bloom and Gunderson 1990; Chiswick 1982; Jasso and Rosenweig 1990; Semyonov et al. 2001; Winkelmann 2000). This body of research has documented wide differences in labor force and socioeconomic outcomes between immigrants and nonimmigrants. For example, studies in Australia and Canada found that immigrants from southern Europe or of Mediterranean origin had poorer socioeconomic outcomes compared to other immigrants and nonmigrants (Chiswick and Miller 1988; Evans and Kelley 1991). In European Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, the gap between the unemployment rates of nationals and of immigrants has been widening, with foreigners being exposed to unemployment rates that are considerably higher than the proportion of the labor force for which they account (OECD 1998). Caribbean Blacks and Bangladesh/Pakistani immigrants in the United Kingdom also have higher rates of unemployment than similarly qualified UK-born Whites (Modood 1997). Mexican immigrants in the United States and northern African immigrants in Israel were also observed to have lower socioeconomic success rates compared to native groups (Borjas and Tienda 1993; Semyonov 1996). In a comparison of the earning attributes of blacks in the United States, Dodoo (1997) compared male African immigrants to Caribbean-born Blacks and U.S.-born Blacks. He found that Caribbean-born immigrants had the highest earnings and that African immigrants fared worst, even though they had considerably higher levels of schooling. Our study adds to this growing literature by comparing the labor force outcomes of male and female immigrants, internal migrants, and nonmigrants in postapartheid South Africa.
