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This paper aims to examine perceived barriers and paths to success for Latin American immigrant professionals in the Canadian job market.

Findings are based on 20 semi‐structured interviews with Latin American graduates of Canadian MBA programs. Interviews were analyzed for emergent categories and common themes.

Despite their strong educational backgrounds, participants perceived several challenges to their success in the Canadian workplace, specifically, language barriers, lack of networks, cultural differences and discrimination. They also identified factors that influenced their professional success in Canada, such as homophilious networks and their Latin American background.

By investigating stories of Latin American immigrant professionals, the study explores subjective views of immigration experiences and discrimination in this unique and rarely examined group. A larger sample will increase the confidence of the study's findings and future studies should examine dynamics of these issues over time.

This paper presents insight onto the labor market experiences and coping mechanisms of the currently understudied group of Latin American immigrant professionals in Canada. The study's qualitative approach enabled the examination of challenges experienced by immigrant professionals beyond those typically studied in this literature (e.g. devaluation of foreign credentials) and led to the finding that being Latin American can act both as a disadvantage in the form of discrimination and as an advantage as it differentiates immigrant professionals from other job seekers.

Throughout centuries, Latin America has faced a paradox. On one hand, the abundance of resources has attracted immigrants who find a suitable place to undertake profitable business ventures in the region. On the other hand, the limited entrepreneurial resources of most countries of the region have motivated the migration of talented people, among them entrepreneurs, to non-Latin American countries. This chapter explores this paradox through the analysis of entrepreneurs' motivations to immigrate to, and migrate from Latin America, the influence of their profile on their business ventures, as well as the role played by both the home and the host countries' institutional conditions. The findings of this analysis underline the diversity of migrant entrepreneurs in terms of personal resources and survival versus opportunity-driven migration decisions. They also reveal the kind of mechanisms migrant entrepreneurs use to counteract their host country's institutional challenges.

For many immigrants, especially those from Central America and Mexico, it is common for a mother or father (or both) to migrate to the United States and leave their children behind. Then, after the parent(s) have achieved some degree of stability in the United States, the children follow. In our previous research, we found that children separated from parents during migration are more likely to be behind others their age in school, are more likely to repeat a grade, and are more likely to drop out of high school. The negative impact of separation during migration on educational success is largest for children separated from their mothers (in contrast to fathers), for those whose parents have lived in the United States illegally, and for those who reunited with parents as teenagers (rather than at younger ages).

In this chapter, we suggest public policies to help immigrant children separated from parents during migration to succeed in U.S. schools. The policies that we discuss are based on focus group discussions with parents separated from their children during migration, interviews with psychologists and school administrators, and an online survey of elementary and high school teachers.

This chapter looks at how Latin American immigrants go about shopping for groceries in Nashville, Tennessee, and relates this simple act to a wider political economy. The chapter examines the act of shopping for groceries and the immigrants' preferences through elements largely ignored by the prevailing economic paradigm. To some extent, the immigrants are aware that their mode of shopping is not entirely “rational” and that their choices are often informed by nothing more than “feelings” toward a place or product. The ethnography examines how the immigrants deal with their now dislocated practice of shopping in their everyday life in the new city. In examining this process, the ethnography considers the public spaces in which the practice of shopping takes place, and includes both those stores catering directly to immigrants and those serving a wider market.

Dual nationality rights have been historically viewed with suspicion in immigrants' receiving countries, on the grounds, among other reasons, that they impede immigrants' assimilation. The debate around dual nationality, however, has taken place largely in the absence of empirical evidence. This paper fills this gap by exploring how recognition of dual nationality rights by sending countries affects assimilation of immigrants already residing in the United States. In the 1990s, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Brazil passed dual citizenship laws granting their expatriates the right to naturalize in the receiving country without losing their nationality of origin. On data from the 1990 and 2000 US censuses, immigrants recently granted dual nationality rights are found to be more likely to naturalize relative to immigrants from other Latin American countries. They also experience employment gains and drops in welfare use, suggesting that dual citizenship rights may promote economic assimilation. The effects are the largest among more educated individuals, who also experience earnings gains and an increased likelihood to be homeowners. These findings are consistent with education being correlated with higher career and income benefits from transnational activities. Finally, when studying the effects of dual citizenship on marriage and fertility, we find a negative impact on the number of young children living in the home, suggesting that also in this respect assimilation to US norms is taking place.

Indicators for quality of schooling are not only relatively new in the world but also unavailable for a sizable share of the world’s population. In their absence, some proxy measures have been devised. One simple but powerful idea has been to use the schooling premium for migrant workers in the USA (Bratsberg and Terrell, 2002). The purpose of this paper is to extend this idea and compute measures for the schooling premium of immigrant workers in the USA over a span of five decades.

In this paper, the authors focus on the schooling premia for the Latin American and the Caribbean region and compare them to those of migrants from other regions, particularly from East Asia and Pacific, India, Northern Europe and Southern Europe, all relative to immigrants from former Soviet Republics. The available data allow us to measure such premia for workers who graduated from school, either at the secondary or tertiary levels, in their home countries between 1940 and 2010.

The results show that the schooling premia in Latin America have been steadily low throughout the whole period of analysis. The results stand after controlling for selective migration in different ways. This contradicts the popular belief in policy circles that the education quality of the region has deteriorated in recent years. In contrast, schooling premium in India shows an impressive improvement in recent decades, especially at the tertiary level.

In this paper, the authors extend the idea of computing schooling premium for migrant workers in the USA (Bratsberg and Terrell, 2002) and present comparative estimates of the evolution of schooling premia in 17 Latin American countries for both secondary and tertiary schooling levels.

Focussing on Latin American immigrants in Barcelona, the objective of this paper is twofold: to measure their degree of ethnical identity; and to analyse the relationship between food habits and their ethnical identity.

Face‐to‐face interviews with a representative sample of Latin American immigrants in the Metropolitan area of Barcelona are undertaken. Ethnic identity is measured using the MEIM scale, which combines aspects from the social identity and personal development theories. Finally, a Multinomial Logit Model is used to identify the relationship between food habits and ethnical identity.

Results indicate that the higher the level of ethnic identity and feeling of belonging of immigrants in Catalonia, the greater the persistence of dietary habits from the country of origin. Contrasting with results from other studies, no correlation is found between the persistence of dietary habits and either the length of time spent in Spain or the level of integration into the Catalan culture (measured through use of the Catalan language).

Findings should logically be interpreted within the context of the population and sample studied. Further research should be addressed to analyze other immigrant groups such as Muslims, Asians and Eastern Europeans.

This study explores the strength of traditional food habits of immigrants living in a foreign cultural environment and the role of ethnic identity in contributing to this strength. While past literature focussing on this topic is based on atheoretical and partial indicators to measure ethnic identity, this study provides evidence on the usefulness of using a theory‐based and multidimensional measure. The behaviour of Latin American immigrants in Spain is used as a case study.

Scholars of race and work have shown that social categories shape how individuals interact with coworkers and clients. Social categories also inform the creation of roles within an organization when nonwhites are hired to interact with other nonwhites. This study examines these roles, or racialized labor, and illustrates how racial categories govern organizational behavior. By studying immigrant-serving providers at a range of nonprofits, this chapter shows how the assumed relationship between racial category and knowledge is evidence of ethnoracial logics, or the practice of using racial categories to organize work because of assumptions about the inherent racial ethnic knowledge an employee possesses. To make the case for these logics, the chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Latino, Latina, and White nonprofit professionals to show how expertise is developed and differentiated along racial lines.

This chapter examines the lives of Central American immigrant workers, with a focus on the paramount position of legal status in immigrants’ lives.

The legal context into which Central American immigrant workers arrive creates the various legal statuses they hold, which in turn dictate the kind of jobs they can obtain, where they live and, in general, shape their prospects in the United States. Although many Central Americans have held various forms of temporary protection from deportation, such relief is temporary and therefore subject to multiple extensions, applications, forms, and renewals, which serve to accentuate these immigrants’ legal uncertainty. Given their legal predicament and the consequent truncated paths to mobility, many Central American immigrant workers live in poverty; indeed, they are more likely to live in poverty than other foreign born. At the same time, they have high labor force participation rates. Their high rates of poverty coupled with high labor force participation rates indicate that their jobs do not pay much. In spite of these circumstances, they remit a significant portion of their earnings to their non-migrating family members in the origin countries.

The largely unchanged occupational and sectorial concentrations of Central Americans in the U.S. economy over the last two decades underscores the critical implications of legal status for immigrant incorporation and socioeconomic mobility.

This chapter exposes the vulnerabilities imposed by a precarious legal status and highlights the importance of more secure legal statuses for immigrant workers’ potential integration and paths to mobility.

In this chapter, we have proposed that an important approach to understanding occupational stress and well-being among racial and ethnic minority workers is to integrate the occupational health disparities paradigm into work stress research. As such, the current chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of the existing literature on occupational health disparities for Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. Each of the three sections has highlighted the unique occupational health problems encountered by the specific racial and ethnic group as well as the research and policy gaps. We end with a series of recommendations for future research.