Understanding the diversity of immigrant incorporation: a forms-of-capitalmodel

This article develops the concept of forms of capital as the basis of a mod el of immigrant incorporation. The model sets out the manner in which the s ocial, financial, and human-cultural capital of immigrant families predict the sorting of immigrants into various labour market trajectories. For exam ple, immigrants arriving with low stocks of financial and human-cultural ca pital are most likely to find employment in the ethnic economy, whereas imm igrants with human-cultural capital that is fungible in the host society te nd to gain employment in the broader mainstream economy. Event history anal ysis is employed to demonstrate the model on four patterns of job mobility common among immigrants: entrepreneurship, professional-managerial-technica l jobs, employment in the public sector, and semi- or low-skilled factory w ork and low-paid service jobs. The findings show that the mix of capital im migrants arrive with. and subsequently accumulate. shapes the trajectory of their incorporation into the host society. The research is based on a fiel d study of Asian immigrants in the greater Los Angeles area.