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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The New Promised Land: Black-White Convergence In The American South, 1940-2000, Jacob L. Vigdor
The New Promised Land: Black-White Convergence In The American South, 1940-2000, Jacob L. Vigdor
University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series
The black-white earnings gap has historically been larger in the South than in other regions of the United States. This paper shows that this regional gap has closed over time, and in fact reversed during the last decades of the twentieth century. Three proposed explanations for this trend focus on changing patterns of selective migration, reduced discrimination in Southern labor markets, and lower levels of school segregation and school resource disparities in the modern South relative to the North. Evidence suggests that reductions in Southern labor market discrimination explain rapid regional convergence in racial wage gaps between 1960 and 1980. …
The Rise Of Low-Skill Immigration In The South, George J. Borjas
The Rise Of Low-Skill Immigration In The South, George J. Borjas
University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series
The 1990s witnessed a significant geographic redistribution of immigration away from the traditional immigrant-receiving states, mainly California, and towards other parts of the country, mainly the Southern states that have not historically been immigrant-receiving states. This paper documents the impact of this change in immigrant settlement patterns on the skill endowment of the workforce in Southern states. The empirical analysis indicates that the recent change in immigrant settlement patterns led to the rise of a sizable foreign-born low-skill workforce in the South, particularly outside Florida and Texas. This workforce developed both as a result of increased settlement of many newly …