ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one economic aspect of unauthorized residency status among Mexican-born workers while controlling for other individual-level and neighborhood-level characteristics—whether and how that status impacted the workers' hourly earnings relative to authorized resident workers in 2001 in Los Angeles County. It sets out the historical context in which the institution of unauthorized residency status emerged, essentially arguing that beginning with the acquisition of California and other states from Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, the migration and integration of Mexican immigrants has been governed and regularized by US immigration and labor policies. The chapter discusses how labor market segmentation theory provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the labor market outcomes resulting from the presence of unauthorized immigrant workers. It outlines how past research has addressed the main methodological obstacles that need to be overcome when attempting to determine what factors explain wage disparities between any two groups of workers.
