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Bridging and/or Bonding:
Studies of New Generation
Immigrant Youth, Social Capital and
Job Search
Miu Chung Yan, Ph.D.
Sean Lauer, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Social Work
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
1
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Youth Unemployment: The Facts
• Global and local issues: 3 times higher than
general unemployment rate
• UN: 2005, 60 million young people unemployed
worldwide
• Canada: Hidden Deficit
• December 2005, general unemployment rate
5.5% and youth unemployment 11.8%
• Defining youth: 15 to 24 or 29 or more?
• New generation = second generation + 1.5
generation who came at young age (12 or below).
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Immigrant Family, Youth &
Employment
• Family is the major source of job referrals for young people.
This finding is corroborated by a few Canadian studies
(e.g., Canadian Youth Foundation, 1995b; Granovetter,
1974; Yan, 2000).
• Payne (1987) finds that unemployment may run in families.
• Questions:
– If immigrant parents generally face unfavourable
employment conditions, then how much resource they
will have in helping their children to access the job
market?
– What other resource will immigrant youth have to
access job market?
• Portes observes that there is only little study on the new
generation immigrant youth.
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International Literature
• Manni (1994): In Australia, while both first and second
generation immigrants are at a disadvantage in the labour
market, compared to the first generation, the second generation
and those with more years in Australia are in a significantly
more favourable condition.
• Nesdale & Pinter (2000): In Australia, while the ethnic
background of immigrant youth may impact their
unemployment, the perceived standing in the host culture
influences their job seeking.
• Portes’ (1995): In Florida, Cuban youth experience otherwise.
• Waldinger and Feliciano (2004) rejects Portes’ observations.
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Canadian Literature
• Statistics Canada (2005): Intergenerational Earning Mobility
Among the Children of Canadian Immigrants
– 2nd generation children more educated, earn more on average
– Had higher weekly earning except those whose fathers are from
Caribbean, Central and South America, and Oceania
– Focused on 25-37 year-old second generation who were borne from 1963
to 1975, a period mainly with European immigrants.
• Palameta, B. (2007). Economic integration of immigrant's
children. Perspectives, October 2008, 5-16.
– Second generation youth from immigrant families tend to do better in
education than their third- and higher generation counterparts
– Earnings disadvantage of visible minority men, though not women, with
two immigrant parents
• Canadian Labour Congress (2005): Racial Status and
Employment Outcomes
– Visible minority youth born in Canada (most likely second generation
youth) has lesser work hours, lower pay, higher unemployment,
compared not only to general youth population but also to foreign born
visible minority youth
5
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Canadian Literature (cont.)
•
•
HRDC (2003): Being Young and Visible: Labour Market Access
Among Immigrant and Visible Minority Youth
– Visible minority youth is harder to find employment
– Local born visible minorities were doing better than foreign
born counterpart
– Age of migration and language ability may be contributing
factors to employment
Brief summary:
– New generation youth are in better position in terms of
language and level of integration
– Visible minority new generation youth may face more barriers
– Lack of research on new generation youth from immigrant
families
– Inconclusive in general
6
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Solutions to Youth Unemployment
• Human Capital: (Becker, 1964)
– A form of assets generated by investments in
education, training and medical care
– Examples: governments have introduced programs,
such as job search training, skills upgrading, retraining, paid job placement and self-employment,
to assist young people in entering the job market.
– Necessary but not sufficient
• Granovetter (1974): not who you are but who
you know that matters in youth employment
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Social Capital (I)
• Bourdieu: social inequality is caused by the unequal
access to and interaction of various kinds of “capitals” –
symbolic, cultural, and social -- social structural
conceptualization.
• Coleman: functional social relationship of authority and
of trust and norms embedded in a young person’s family
and community organization and the connections among
them affect his/her development of human capital –
socio-educational conceptualization.
• Putnam: trust and reciprocity among people by
encouraging social participation in community
organizations –political scientific conceptualization
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Social Capital (II)
•
Portes and Lin:
– social capital, in its most basic form, is the resource embedded in
people’s social networks which can provide purposive functions
to their success
– social capital has a structural property which implies that one’s
social capital depends on his/her social position connecting to
different network
•
Putnam and Granovetter:
– Two forms: Bonding (strong ties) – solidarity and in-group
– Bridging (weak ties) – between group
•
Burt:
– Structural holes: gaps between different networks in our society
which are caused by people’s social position, their strong tie to
their own network, and their limited access to other network
outside their own community
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Application of Social Capital:
Immigrant Studies
• Better education performance (e.g., Zhou and Bankston,
1994)
• Friends and relatives are the most frequently used search
methods (Holzer, 1988)
• Ethnic enclave (Portes, 1995)
– In general, immigrants are rich in bonding capital but lack bridging
capital.
– Portes: strong tie offers short term benefit (low-paid job within the
community) but leads to long term deprivation (such as downward
mobility)
– Bourdieu: social capital is not distributed evenly
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Conceptual Framework
Types of Social Capital
-Individual
- Strength of ties
- Extent of ties
- Community
- Bonding ties
- Bridging ties
Background
Characteristics
-Ethnicity
-Immigrant History
-Gender
-Parents SES
-Field of Study
Job Search Strategies
& Process
- Social Capital
- Employment
Services
- Market
Employment
Outcomes
-Success of
search
-Quality of job
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Two Parallel Studies
• New generation youth with university degree
–
–
–
–
SSHRC Standard Grant
Data Collection: 2005-2007
Pre and post graduation survey design
Semi-structure interview
• New generation youth with no degree
– Metropolis British Columbia
– Data Collection: 2006 - 2007
– Focus group interview
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The Context of Job Search
• Long run decline in the joblessness
– Jobless rate in BC has been in decline
since 2002
• Long run growth of the service
sector
– Roughly 4 in 5 jobs are service industry
jobs
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Preliminary Survey Results
• Two unique aspects of this research
– Measuring social capital as ties
– Measuring social capital before job
search
• A look at heterogeneous ties in
particular
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Measuring Stores of Social Capital
• Social capital is often measured
when used.
• A person may hold valuable social
resources and not use them.
• We use two approaches to measuring
social ties to capture stored social
capital a person holds and might use.
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Close and Extensive Ties
• We use a name generator to collect up to five
close personal ties a young person holds.
Person
Person 1
Initial of First Name
Gender
Relative or Friends
Same ethnic
Employed?
Male/Female
Relative/Friend
Yes/no
Yes/no
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Close and Extensive Ties
• Not all valuable ties are close. We use a
position generator to learn about ties that
reach beyond close personal ties.
Family
Relative
Friends Same ethnicity Friends different Ethnicity
School teacher
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
Electrician
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
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250
100
200
80
Frequency
Frequency
Heterogeneous Close and Extensive Ties
150
60
100
40
50
20
0
0
0.00
1.00
2 .00
3.00
Num ber of Cross-ethnic Friends
4.0 0
5.00
0 .00
2.0 0
4.00
6 .00
8.0 0
Cr oss-Ethnic Ties
10.00
12.00
14 .00
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Why Look at Heterogeneous Ties?
• They can be valuable as an end in
themselves.
• Heterogeneous ties provide access to
diverse social resources that can be
valuable in pursuing goals.
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Heterogeneous Close and Extensive Ties
• New immigrants are less likely to
hold heterogeneous close ties.
• Visible minority new immigrants are
less likely to hold heterogeneous
close and extensive ties
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Heterogeneous Ties, Job Search and
Outcomes - Employment during school
• Search: finding work through personal ties
• Outcome: finding a job relevant to education
• Heterogeneous close ties
– Do not have a direct effect on search or the outcome
• Heterogeneous extensive ties
– Increase use of non-family contacts to find work, but
not for visible minority students
– Increase the likelihood of holding a relevant job for
visible minorities
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Future Impact of Stores of Social Capital
• Job Search
– Neither heterogeneous close nor extensive ties are
associated with finding work through personal contacts
• Job Outcomes
– Heterogeneous extensive ties increase the likelihood of
holding a relevant job, but not for visible minorities
– Among visible minorities, there is an indirect effect
between heterogeneous close ties and holding a relevant
job through the diversity of the workplace.
• Those with heterogeneous close ties are more likely
to work in a diverse workplace, which in turn
makes holding a relevant job more likely.
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Findings of Qualitative Studies
• Interviews with University graduates (SSHRC)
– Semi-structured interviews with 20 youth one year after
graduation
– Include youth from variety of backgrounds and
immigrant generations
• Focus group interviews with non-University
graduates (MBC)
– 5 focus groups with youth from Chinese (2), ‘South
Asian (2) and Filipino/a backgrounds
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Non-University Youth
• Entry Level Service Sector Jobs
– Work is available (Service industry)
– Commitment is low
– Lateral movement is common
• Avoidance of Co-Ethnic Employers
– Shared ethnicity leads to other expectations
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Non-University Youth
• Using Personal Ties
– Often use impersonal strategies (Walk-in and
cold call)
– Personal ties facilitate job movement
– Prefer friendship ties to family ties in job
search
• Education a Persistent Concern
– Interest in degrees rather than training for
specific job
– Part of values and aspirations nurtured by
parents
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University Graduates
• Starting Professional Careers
– Job search is like ‘pulling hair’
– Spend more effort on search but not much
more time
– Ethnic employer non-issue
• The Value of a University Degree
– Credentials open doors
– University education is not directly beneficial
to job opportunity
– Desire on the job training
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University Graduates
• Using Non-personal Ties
– Internet
• Using Personal Ties
– Parents provide valuable emotional
support, but not connections
– Friends in the field – job information
– More attention to establish network in
the field
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Coming from Immigrant Families
• Feel better than their parents in labour market
standing
– Less report in racist experience (economic condition)
• Parents are not useful resource
– No guidance of navigating the job market
– Limited bridging social capital from first generation
immigrant parents
• Non-professional jobs, Lack cross-ethnic ties, Limited
knowledge of the local system
• Differences in the use of friends
– Mostly co-ethnic friends
– Limited scope of bridging to larger job opportunity
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Tentative Policy Suggestions
• Lack of bridging social capital: A possible explanation of
low economic integration of immigrant family
– More studies needed to examine the relationship between availability
of bridging social capital and economic outcome
• Re-examination of the concept of settlement and integration
in immigration policy
– An intergenerational process
• Program suggestions
– Specific programs for new generation immigrant youth – such as
mentorship
– Expand and better promotion of youth employment programs – not
only to youth but also their significant others