Professor Stephen Trejo is a labor economist and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Trejo has studied the economic effects of overtime pay regulation; the impact of labor unions on compensation, employment, and work schedules; immigrant labor market experiences.
His current research encompasses the relative economic status and intergenerational progress of Mexican Americans and other immigrant groups. Dr. Trejo uses census material to gauge changes in education and earnings in Mexican families to answer questions of assimilation. Current research suggests that Mexican immigrants are slower to integrate than other immigrant groups. This sentiment is portrayed in an article featured in U.S. News entitled: Mexican Immigrants Prove Slow to Fit In.
Professor Trejo’s finding suggest that what we know about Mexican American assimilation may be skewed. In his research he has found it difficult to accurately measure the progress of third generation Mexicans and beyond. This is due to self-identification. Past third generation it is difficult to track a person’s origin beyond the checked Hispanic box of a census. As it turns out there is a rather large fraction of high earning Mexican descendents who do not self-identify as Hispanic. This alludes to unseen progress in the Mexican American community.
Dr. Trejo attributes the identification shift to marriage. Beyond culture, people tend to marry people with the same educational attainment. For instance, a person coming from a low-educational attainment group is more likely to marry outside their culture as their educational attainment increases. Because there are statistically less Mexicans at the collegiate level, a Mexican seeking a degree is less likely to find a Mexican mate. The increase of interracial unions has brought up questions of identity that aren’t successfully measured in census information.
Dr. Trejo plans to expand his research to compare Mexican American progress to the progress of low-skill immigrant groups of the 1900′s. Both Irish and Italian immigrant groups eventually integrated into the U.S. identity after a few generations. He would also like to look at marriage patterns and identity more carefully in non-Hispanic groups. Preliminary research indicates that progress among Asian Americans may be overestimated due to interracial marriages at lower levels of educational attainment. Professor Trejo’s work on intergenerational progress provides an interesting commentary on self-identification which may lead to revisions in how census information is collected.
To read more about Dr. Stephen Trejo’s work you can refer to his IZA Research Fellow profile.
