Native Labor Research Articles

Rethinking the area approach: Immigrants and the labor market in California

A framework that uses a Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function with skill differentiation and integrated national labor markets has predictions for the employment effect of immigrants at the local level. The employment (rather than wage) response to immigration by skill in a state reveals the production substitutability–complementarity between native and immigrant labor. This, in turn, reveals the degree to which immigrants stimulate or depress the demand for native labor. To estimate this elasticity, I use a novel instrument based on demographic characteristics of total Central American migrants or of the Mexican Population to predict immigration by skill level within California. Looking at immigration to California between 1960 and 2005 these estimates support the assumption of a nationally integrated labor market by skill and they support the hypothesis that natives and immigrants in the same education-experience group are not perfectly substitutable. This explains the counter-intuitive fact that there is a zero correlation between immigration and wage and employment outcomes of natives in the state.

Rendering Economies: Native American Labor and Secondary Animal Products in the Eighteenth-Century Pimería Alta

While the ostensible motivation for Spanish missionization in the Americas was religious conversion, missions were also critical to the expansion of European economic institutions in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Native American labor in mission contexts was recruited in support of broader programs of colonialism, mercantilism, and resource extraction. Archaeological research throughout North America demonstrates the importance and extent of the integration of Native labor into regional colonial economies. Animals and animal products were often important commodities within colonialperiod regional exchange networks and thus, zooarchaeological data can be crucial to the reconstruction of local economic practices that linked Native labor to larger-scale economic processes. Zooarchaeological remains from two Spanish missions—one in southern Arizona and one in northern Sonora—demonstrate that Native labor supported broader colonial economic processes through the production of animal products such as tallow and hide. Tallow rendered at Mission San Agustín de Tucson and Mission Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocóspera was vital for mining activities in the region, which served as an important wealth base for the continued development of Spanish colonialism in the Americas. This research also demonstrates continuity in rendering practices over millennia of human history, and across diverse geographical regions, permitting formalization of a set of expectations for identifying tallow-rendered assemblages, regardless of context.

Queensland’s kidnapping Act: the Native Labourers Protection Act of 1884

The events leading to the passage of the Native Labourers Protection Act in 1884 are presented. The Act was actually passed to control abuses in the recruitment of Pacific Islanders in the fishing industry in Queensland, but was not applied to improve recruitment practices or working conditions of the Aborigines.

Alta California Missions and the Pre-1849 Transformation of Coastal Lands

Beginning in the late 18th century, Spanish and Mexican colonization introduced the system of missionization into what is today described as Alta California. Missionaries and soldiers, using native labor, directed the construction of 21 missions along the Alta California coast. The mission complexes—churches, quadrangles, and outlying buildings and structures—were intended to bring about a new order on the native landscape by means of the introduction of European-style architecture, agriculture, and animal husbandry. This introduction began the ecological transformation of the landscape. European plants and weeds came to dominate coastal California well before the California Gold Rush occurred in 1849. This transformation had an immeasurable impact on the local environment, and on the daily life of the native Californians who lived in the missions.

Native Competition and Low-Skilled Immigrant Inflows

This paper demonstrates that immigration decisions respond to differences in local labor market conditions by documenting the change in low-skilled immigrant inflows in response to supply increases among the US-born. Using pre-reform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor supply, I find that immigrants prefer cities with fewer welfare leavers over cities with larger reform-induced supply shifts. The extent of the selection is substantial: for each additional native woman working in a city as a result of welfare reform, 0.8 fewer female immigrants choose to live and work there. These results provide direct evidence that international migration flows tend to equilibrate returns across US local labor markets.

ESTIMATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IMMIGRANT AND NATIVE WORKERS IN AUSTRALIA: A PRODUCTION THEORY APPROACH

The impact of immigration on labour markets depends, among other factors, on the substitutability or complementarity between immigrants and natives. This relationship is examined by treating migrant and native labour, along with capital, as inputs in production process. Estimated price elasticities of substitution between immigrants and native labour suggest that in Australian context, an increase in the wage rate of one group of workers leads to an increased demand for the other. The estimated elasticities of substitution between immigrant and native workers and the complementary relationship between immigrants and capital provide an insight into the complex effects of immigration.

Labour Market Impact of Large Scale Internal Migration on Chinese Urban 'Native' Workers

Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have moved into Chinese cities since the early 1990s contributing greatly to economic growth, yet, they are often blamed for reducing urban 'native' workers' employment opportunities, suppressing their wages and increasing pressure on infrastructure and other public facilities. This paper examines the causal relationship between rural-urban migration and urban native workers' labour market outcomes in Chinese cities. After controlling for the endogeneity problem our results show that rural migrants in urban China have modest positive or zero effects on the average employment and insignificant impact on earnings of urban workers. When examine the impact on unskilled labours we once again find it to be positive and insignificant. We conjecture that the reason for the lack of adverse effects is due partially to the labour market segregation between the migrants and urban natives, and partially due to the complementarities between the two groups of workers. Further investigation reveals that the increase in migrant inflow is related to the demand expansion and that if the economic growth continues, elimination of labour market segregation may not necessarily lead to an adverse impact of migration on urban native labour market outcomes.

Indigenous Labor as Family Labor: Tributes, Migration, and Hispanicization in Colonial Guatemala

It is well known in the history of Spanish America that early colonial-era tributes in labor and commodities were gradually converted to tributes in cash, and tribute labor was gradually replaced by privately contracted labor. For Mexico and Central America, scholarship on these processes has remained largely separate from new, gendered histories. This article revisits tribute and native labor procurement, placing gender and family structure at the center of analysis. Focusing on Guatemala, the article argues that the transition from draft tribute labor to privately contracted labor increasingly drew entire families into migratory labor at Spanish agricultural enterprises. As out-migration from native communities lengthened from eight-day draft turns to longer “voluntary” stints, women and children began accompanying their men to colonial estates. Some women stayed behind, typically with small children, while their men left to earn wages. These women could face dire straits if their husbands died or did not return from abroad. Native women with absent husbands were likely to seek wages by migrating to the Spanish city. Further, the restructuring of labor within the cash economy may have encouraged parents to put their children out to work. Wages earned by native children sent to the city were usually remitted to the parents in the sending community, where tributes were collected. Contrary to popular stereotypes, the article concludes, women and children were at the vanguard of urbanization and hispanicization.

Labor market outcomes of immigrants and non‐citizens in the EU

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to comparatively analyse the roles of foreign origin and citizenship in the labor markets of Eastern and Eestern Member States of the EU.Design/methodology/approachThe EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions is used to evaluate the roles of foreign origin and citizenship on employment and earnings using the standard Probit and OLS econometric models. The native/non‐native labor market divide is measured using Fairlie and Oaxaca‐Blinder decomposition techniques.FindingsThe results indicate that, while predominantly foreign origin is of key importance in the Western EU Member States, both foreign origin and citizenship matter in the Eastern EU Member States, their roles depending on gender. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the effects of citizenship in the EU8 may be driven by the (predominantly ethnic Russian) non‐citizens in Estonia and Latvia.Research limitations/implicationsFurther analysis is necessary to evaluate the observed associations as causal relationships.Originality/valueThe study is the first to shed light on the role of foreign origin and citizenship in the EU8 and the EU15 in the comparative East‐West perspective. The findings have noteworthy implications for the targeting of national as well as EU‐wide integration policies.

“ Beong! Beong! (more! more!)”: John Harper and the Wesleyan Mission to the Australian Aborigines

“Beong! Beong! (more! more!)”: John Harper and the Wesleyan Mission to the Australian Aborigines David A. Roberts and Hilary Carey I said to them in their own language “Were gairer” be not afraid, at which words they sat down and became quite composed. One of them was much pleased to hear me speak in the native tongue, and exclaimed “Beong! Beong!” (more more) Harper Journal, 5 March 1825).1 In July 1826, two Methodist gentlemen sat down for a tense meeting with the New South Wales (NSW) Attorney-General, Saxe Bannister (1790–1877): the Rev. Ralph Mansfield, Secretary, and William Horton, Treasurer, represented the NSW Auxiliary of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS).2 The matter at hand was a controversy that had arisen from a venture undertaken by the Society on a remote penal establishment on the frontier at Wellington Valley on the lower Macquarie River about 100 kilometres north-west of Bathurst in central-western NSW. In particular, there were questions to be answered about the conduct of a young missionary, John Harper (c. 1800–1862), who was alleged to have publicly misrepresented the short-term results and long-term prospects for the evangelization of the Wiradjuri people native to the area.3 It was reported in the press – but widely disbelieved – that Harper had already begun the translation of scripture (‘which implies a grammatical knowledge of the structure of the language’), that the people were so entranced by his facility in the language that they had begged him “Beong! Beong!” (more! more!), and that he had affected such a change in the morality of the native people that not only did they forbear swearing but had ceased to force their wives to have illicit intercourse with male convicts. The intervention of the Attorney-General is a fair indication of the political sensitivity of Harper’s claims and their possible repercussions for government policy relating to the small community of Wesleyan Methodists in the colony and their fledgling missionary activities. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the political engagement and enthusiasm of Methodist missionaries in British colonies had been persistently controversial; the threat of scandal in New South Wales was, potentially, highly embarrassing to both church and state. In the Cape Colony, the involvement of Wesleyan and other missionaries in a campaign to denounce what they saw as the oppression of native people by settlers was to be a significant factor in ongoing hostility between English and Dutch colonizers. Under the cover of a humanitarian campaign against “spiritual and social bondage,” it was generally believed by Dutch settlers that missionaries, backed by the British government, were attempting to subvert their claims to land and their control and access to native labor.4 As Elizabeth Elbourne, Richard Elphick and others have argued, the intervention by missionaries in the Cape was part of a religious and cultural campaign in which settlers, missionaries and imperial administrators contested the moral purpose of empire. The Cape was not the only colonial site where Methodist missionaries were engaged. In 1825 Thomas Fowell Buxton, the parliamentary leader of the anti-slavery party that had succeeded in securing the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and who was later instrumental in the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into the treatment of Aboriginal people in British colonies in southern Africa, Australia and North America, had raised questions in parliament about the demolition of the Methodist Chapel in Barbados in what appeared to be retaliation for the church’s agitation on behalf of slaves.5 In his speech on this occasion, Buxton’s words echo claims made by Harper for his work with the Australian Aborigines: “Mr Shrewsbury had devoted himself laboriously to the improvement of the negroes, and with the best results. Instruction was gaining ground; marriages became more frequent; the marriage tie was held more sacred.”6 Shrewsbury was obliged to suffer constant harassment which Buxton called “the common lot of a Methodist Missionary”: planters would walk into the Wesleyan chapel on a Sunday, failing to remove their hats and whistling, provocative acts which escalated into a full-scale riot on October 5, 1823 during which a mob consisting of...

A Taste of the Employment Bureau of Africa (Teba): Mining the Past

This article describes the Employment Bureau of Africa (TEBA) archives housed at the University of Johannesburg, the origin of TEBA, and its impact on general history and mining history of South Africa and Southern Africa. It also explains difficulties and challenges involved in preserving and making its huge collection accessible to researchers. TEBA's history goes back to 1902 when the Chamber of Mines, founded the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) and the Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC) to obtain unskilled labour to work in the mines of South Africa. The following issues are highlighted: the theory and trends surrounding labour and specifically mining archives, resolving the issue of preservation versus accessibility, raising awareness with regard to the vast scope of possible research topics within the collection and the possibilities and future initiatives presented by the acceptance of custodianship of a very significant and exciting collection. Keywords: TEBA, labour archives, mineworkers history, accessibility, preservation ESARBICA Vol. 27 2008: pp. 128-146

Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory by Laurie Ricou

B o o k R e v ie w s 4 2 3 Readers of WAL will be particularly interested in Campbell’s treatment of the travel narrative. As a storehouse for sublime set pieces, Franz Boasinformed anthropological observations, and careful geological interpretations, Campbell asserts that the travel journal became a way for wealthy tourists to justify their leisure as artistic and scientific labor while also affirming claims of ownership to these new lands. As a historian, Campbell deals with these narratives broadly; he does not offer a full sense of the scope of any single text. Though I would have liked more detailed analysis, this certainly suggests opportunities for further inquiry. Interested literary scholars might attend to the range of experiences contained within a single text, the organization patterns of the nanatives, or, simply, textual detail. WAL readers might also appreciate Campbell’s treatment of John Muir: the theories of glaciation Muir helped popularize serve Alaska travel writers well by making the landscape “legible” while also enabling a rhetoric of Native erasure. Despite the reliance upon Native labor to move through these land' scapes, scientific-oriented travelers focused on the geological at the expense of the cultural. As one follower of Muir put it, “Alaska has no history, ... except a geological history” (240). Although Campbell does not offer a history of Native culture here, he effectively writes humans back into the history of late nineteenth-century Alaska. As a recent transplant to Southeast Alaska and a long-time student of late nineteenth-century America, 1 found that Campbell’s monograph confirmed some familiar theses and opened up some interesting research questions. This will prove a useful companion for scholars interested in American empire, tour­ ism, and especially the last frontier state. Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory. By Laurie Ricou. Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest Press, 2007. 263 pages, $34-95. Reviewed by Michael McDowell Portland Community College, Oregon Laurie Ricou’s Salal demonstrates the many different directions inquiry might go when ecocritical principles are applied to one quiet, overlooked item in the landscape. In this case, the item is the shiny, leathery-leaved evergreen shrub salal, and the landscape is its native range, the coastal Pacific Northwest from northern California to Alaska. But Ricou casts a wide net, which gives us a won­ derfully diverse set of voices speaking of salal from indigenous and immigrant cultures, in recorded oral interviews and in print, as well as in drawings, paint­ ings, photographs, and even music. The result is a highly informed polyphonic meditation on place, using the unpretentious Gaultheria shallon as central text. The contrast between Salal and one of its models, Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire (2001), highlights Ricou’s interest: Where Pollan explores high-profile apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato, Ricou explores such a low-profile, uncharis- W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 9 matic “background” plant that even people who have lived with it on the Northwest coast for years often don’t know what it is. Ricou is looking for the “under'Story,” the stories of “unnoticed people caring in different ways for their environment” (16). We listen especially to those who make a living by salal—nursery owners, salal “propagators,” and, most important, Cambodian “pickers” who spend their days in the woods cutting and snapping off the year’s new salal growth for florists worldwide. One interviewee, a professor at Washington State University, makes clear the significance of Ricou’s method for learning about salal: Speaking of the traditional pickers, he says, “They’re wonderful store-banks of knowledge. ... The knowledge is there. Is it in the university? No” (96). The book suggests that hands-on engagement with nature, even extraction, is how we learn and develop respect for the earth; passive observation is not enough. Salal grows organically from chapter to chapter, from discussion of the plant’s characteristics and naming (it’s called dza’west, “laughing benies,” in Coast Tsimshian) to a review of attention paid it over the past 150 years to explanations of the salal “industry...

Immigration and the Macroeconomy

We analyze the dynamics of labor migration and the insurance role of remittances in a two-country, real business cycle framework. Emigration increases with the expected stream of future wage gains but is dampened by the sunk cost reflecting border enforcement. During booms in the destination economy, the scarcity of established immigrants lessens capital accumulation, labor productivity, and the native wage. The welfare gain from the inflow of unskilled labor increases with the complementarity between skilled and unskilled labor and the share of the skilled among native labor. The model matches the cyclical dynamics of the unskilled immigration from Mexico.

Reconciling National and Regional Estimates of the Effect of Immigration on U.S. Labor Markets: The Confounding Effects of Native Male Incarceration Trends

In this paper, we reconcile the disparity between regional and national level estimates of the effect of immigration on native earnings. The reconciliation derives from the fact that existing national level studies fail to adequately control for changes in other determinants of the wage structure that correspond closely with the skill distribution of immigrant shocks. We focus specifically on the effect of accounting for incarceration trends. Over the past thirty years, an increasing proportion of low skilled native workers have served time in prison, a development that has arguably harmed their employment prospects. We show that the fraction of a given education-experience group that is immigrant is strongly correlated with the fraction of native born workers in the demographic group that is institutionalized. Holding constant incarceration trends considerably diminishes the estimated magnitude of the reduced-form relationship between native labor market outcomes and the fraction in their skill cell that is immigrant.An alternative interpretation of these findings offered by Borjas, Grogger, and Hansen (2006) is that immigration-induced wage declines have pushed more men into criminal activity which, in turn, has increased the incarceration rate. The authors present a model whereby the reduced form effect of immigration on incarceration reflects the product of (1) the effect of immigration on wages and (2) the elasticity of labor demand in the crime sector. The latter elasticity gauges the extent to which the local crime market is able to absorb additional offenders as the quality of legitimate work opportunities (as measured by wages) diminishes. While national level correlations presented by the authors are consistent with this interpretation, we show that the state level results are not. Despite a sizable and statistically significant negative reduced-form effect of immigrant penetration on wages in state-level panel regressions, there is no statistically significant relationship between state-level immigrant shocks and state-level incarceration rates - i.e., despite an identifiable dose to state-level wages, there is no incarceration response. Estimates of the elasticity of demand in the criminal sector using both the original state-level estimates presented in Borjas, Grogger, and Hansen (2006) as well as our replication and simple alternative specification of these regressions are essentially zero. Thus, we conclude that immigration has had no impact on criminal activity among natives operating through labor market competition.

The Role of Labor Struggle in the Shifting Ethnic Composition of Labor Markets

One dominant theme of the current immigration debate is that immigrants (and particularly the undocumented) fill jobs that nobody wants. While it is sometimes recognized that immigrants fill occupations previously occupied by African Americans, commentators seldom acknowledge that in some cases, this substitution is a response to rising labor conflict. The article presents quantitative and qualitative evidence that allows the rejection of the conventional wisdom (jobs that nobody wants) and advances an alternative hypothesis: immigrant hiring was a management strategy to deal with rising native labor agitation. I use the case of poultry processing in the southeastern United States to elaborate this argument.

Algumas considerações sobre a ocupação européia da região do Guairá nos séculos XVI e XVII

The European population nucleus in the Guaira region during the 16 th and 17 th centuries had its own dynamics for its development and its destructurization. An analysis of works that describe the destruction of these populations shows that the “bandeirantismo paulista” was the main factor towards their disruption. However, analysis of documents, published by Jaime Cortesao, specifically on the Guaira region of Guaira, indicates that this problem has to be inserted into a more extensive context. In fact, the “bandeirantismo” first of all preyed on the Indians and its participation in the process of European evacuation of this region may be understood if the social relations extant in the region are taken into consideration. The social relations mentioned above deal with the manner Indians, Jesuits and Spaniards lived and how they developed their contacts with the Portuguese. Native labor, supervised by the Jesuits or by the “encomenderos”, was responsible for the permanence of the colonizers in the region. Due to the good relationship between the Paulistas and the government of Paraguay and due to the constant arrests of Indians by the “bandeirantes”, the destructuring of the social and economic internal system of the region occurred. Such destruction caused the evacuation of the European from the region.

Does Immigration Raise Natives Income? National and Regional Evidence from Spain

How immigration affects the labor market of the host country is a topic of major concern for many immigrant-receiving nations. Spain is no exception following the rapid increase in immigrant flows experienced over the past decade. We assess the impact of immigration on Spanish natives’ income by estimating the net immigration surplus accruing at the national level and at high immigrant-receiving regions while taking into account the imperfect substitutability of immigrant and native labor. Specifically, using information on the occupational densities of immigrants and natives of different skill levels, we develop a mapping of immigrant-to-native self-reported skills that reveals the combination of natives across skills that would be equivalent to an immigrant of a given self-reported skill level, which we use to account for any differences between immigrant self-reported skill levels and their effective skills according to the Spanish labor market. We find that the immigrant surplus amounts to 0.04 percent of GDP at the national level and it is even higher for some of the main immigrant-receiving regions, such as Cataluna, Valencia, Madrid, and Murcia.

Did History Breed Inequality? Colonial Factor Endowments and Modern Income Distribution

We explore the relation between historical population density in former colonies and modern income distribution. A theoretical model highlights the potentially opposing effects of native population density on incentives for colonists to conquer or settle in new territories. While an abundant supply of native labor is an “asset” that drives up land rents, it is also a “liability” that makes land acquisition by colonists more difficult and reduces returns to peacable migration. Conflicts over land, sowing the seeds for inequality by creating a landed elite living off rents, are especially likely to emerge for intermediate native population densities. Results are confirmed by detailed empirical tests highlighting the curvilinear relationship between native population density and modern income inequality. Finally, using population density as an instrument for inequality in the former colonies, we demonstrate that there is no causal relationship running from income distribution to economic growth.

Die Bahurutshe van die Marico (Ramotshere Moiloadistrik): Stryd teen blanke oorheersing, 1852-1916

The Bahurutshe of the Marico (Ramotshere Moiloa district): struggle against white domination, 1852-1916. The early history of the Bahurutshe cannot be determined without using a combination of oral tradition, archaeological evidence and written documentation. The Sotho-Tswana moved into the Trans-Vaal area in three big migration waves, probably between 1300 and 1500. The Bahurutshe-Bakwena grouping was the last and also most significant migration wave. They initially settled in the present Rustenburg-Brits vicinity. By approximately 1450/80 the Bahurutshe separated from the Bakwena and gradually settled in the central part of the Marico district. Thus, the Bahurutshe has been living in the Marico area for about 500 years. In this article, the tense relationships between the white burghers/government and the Bahurutshe in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (1852-1899) are discussed. This era was marked by the dismantling of the Bahurutshe authority, land issues, native tax, increasing state control and native labour. After a discussion of these issues, the article focuses on the participation of the Bahurutshe in the South African War (1899-1902), both on the Boer and the British side. The period of the Transvaal Crown Colony (1902-1909) was especially marred by labour issues, increased poll taxes and the controversial “dual administration”. Lastly, the focus is on the influence which the Native Land Act of 1913 and the 1916 Beaumont Land Commission had on the Bahurutshe.

Agents of Imperialism: Missionaries and Merchants in Early-Nineteenth-Century Hawaii

Although Western traders and American Calvinist missionaries in early-nineteenth-century Hawaii represented native Hawaiians in similar ways, they held different philosophies about the Sandwich Islands and their people. These differing imperialist agendas led to constant tension and clashes between the two Western groups, especially over commerce and access to native labor.