UNAUTHORIZED MEXICAN WORKERS IN THE 1990 LOS-ANGELES-COUNTY LABOR-FORCE

By analysing how unauthorized Mexicans compare with seven other ethnor acial groups in Los Angeles County, separately and collectively, by ed ucational attainment and time spent in the US, we find that unauthoriz ed Mexicans had relatively fewer years of formal education (either in the US or in Mexico) and had been in the US a relatively fewer number of years than in-migrants of other ethno-racial backgrounds in 1990. T hese findings are then used as proxies to compare the human capital en dowments of different ethno-racial groups. We next estimate the number of unauthorized Mexicans by occupation, industry and class of worker, and compare these distributions with the total labour force and with the other ethno-racial groups in Los Angeles County. To the extent tha t unauthorized Mexicans are found to be substitutes(complements) in th e labour market, they can be expected to be a valid (invalid) empirica l source of social tension and hence contemporary restrictionist immig ration policy sentiment. Results show that amounts of human capital ar e positively related to the kinds of occupations filled. Analysis of t he percentage of discordant pairs shows that unauthorized Mexicans are found to be most dissimilar (potential complements) to non-Latino(1) Angles; (2) Blacks; (3) American Indians, Aleuts, and Eskimos; and (4) Asians and Pacific Islanders. Results also show that those ethnoracia l groups most similar to (potential substitutes for) unauthorized Mexi cans are (1) legal Mexican in-migrants and (2) other Latino foreign-bo rn persons (both authorized and unauthorized). The ethno-racial group which falls into the intermediate realm of(dis)similarity is US-born M exican. Consequently, for most persons residing in Los Angeles County the rise of restrictionist immigration sentiment is not consistent wit h their labour market experiences, and restrictionist immigration poli cy, to the extent it is based on a labour market competition assumptio n, may not be justified.