Self-employment concentration and earnings among Mexican immigrants in theUS

Recent research has assessed the implications of entrepreneurship for immig rant incorporation by examining the hypothesis that self-employed immigrant s earn higher incomes than other immigrant workers in the labor market. Wit h the important exception of several pioneering ethnographic and case studi es, however little attention has been paid in the literature to whether imm igrants who are not self-employed derive any income benefit om the activiti es of immigrants in their communities who have gone into business for thems elves. lit this article, we draw upon the ethnic entrepreneurship and urban ecological literatures to develop a hypothesis about how the relative size of the local ethnic market conditions the extent to which interurban varia tion in the self-employment rate of Mexican immigrants will influence the i ncomes of Mexican immigrants who are not self-employed. Further, we use dat afrom the 1990 U.S. Census of Population and Housing to investigate this hy pothesis for Mexican immigrants residing in sixty U.S. metropolitan statist ical areas. Results from the analyses indicate that the effects of variatio n in levels of self-employment depend upon the relative size of the local e thnic market: among cities with smaller ethnic markets, higher concentratio ns of self-employment are related to lower Mexican-immigrant earnings, whil e among cities with larger ethnic markets, higher concentrations of self-em ployment are related to small increases in wages.