Labor market segmentation in the big metropolis: Latin-American immigrants in New York

Abstract

The article addresses on the Latin-American immigration to the United Statesof America in the last decades of the 20th Century, in the context of neoliberal capitalism. Itfocuses on two main aspects of this new wave of immigration: on the one hand, the opening ofthe border for the free transit of merchandise and commercial exchange between the countries and, on the other, the restrictions for the circulation of the workforce. This contradiction fosters irregular immigration of considerable amounts of unemployed people in their country of origin, attracted by the existence of a labor market for immigrants in the developed countries. In the first part, the article reviews the profile of the Latin immigrants established in the United States. Then, it analyses the insertion of Latin Americans in the labor market of New York, the most important global city of the world and its hourglass economy. Later on, the article describes the ways in which Latinos have progressively occupied the most precarious, flexible and immigrants-destined labors, in a degenerated and segmented by genre and legal condition labor market. Brazilians are also part of this market, but their visibility is not yet present in the researches and, much less, as part of the other groups of Latin-American immigrants.