1 Introduction

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How will immigrants and their children be incorporated into the host society while they increasingly work and live in a socially diverse and heterogeneous environment? This is a concern shared by most Western developed nations, which have relied on international immigration to alleviate the pressures of fertility decline and labour shortage (Cheong, Edwards, Goulbourne and Solomos 2007; Gregg 2006).

It is commonly observed in immigrant-receiving countries is that recent immigrants predominantly settle in major urban areas. Concurrently, the domestic-born population continues to move away from these areas (Frey 1995, Hou and Bourne 2006). Immigrants, in turn, find themselves increasingly in contact with their own-group members, as well as members of other minority groups, in daily life (Hou 2006). It is within these heterogeneous metropolitan areas that immigrants may come to rely on ethnic resources and networks for employment opportunities as a means of overcoming barriers in the labour market. Indeed, participation in ethnic economies and self-employment have been identified as alternative paths of economic survival, or even advancement, for immigrants and minorities, particularly for those who lack proficiency in the host-country language and for those with low levels of education. (Fong and Lee 2007; Logan, Alba and Stults 2003; Portes and Jensen 1989; Zhou 2004a). Meanwhile, some scholars have cautioned against overstating the benefits of ethnic economies (Logan, Alba and Stults 2003; Sanders and Nee 1987; Sanders and Nee 1992). Others warn of the possibility of minorities being trapped in ethnic enclaves at the expense of integration within the mainstream economy and society (Massey 1995).

Much of the literature on ethnic economies is based on U.S. studies on a few minority groups in several large immigrant-gateway metropolises. Little is known about the development and consequence of ethnic economies in other major immigrant-receiving countries. More importantly, previous studies on ethnic economies have been plagued by 'conceptual anarchy' and arbitrariness in their empirical operationalization (Logan, Alba and McNulty 1994; Nee, Sanders and Sernau 1994). To gain further understanding of the implications of ethnic economies, attention should be focused on specific aspects and forms of ethnic economies that can be directly measured (Logan, Alba and Stults 2003; Waldinger 1993; Waters and Eschbach 1995). Accordingly, this study examines one dimension of ethnic economies: co-ethnic concentration at the workplace, based on a measure that is much less subject to the measurement error common to previous studies.

Using a large national representative sample from Statistics Canada's 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey, this study addresses the following questions: (1) What is the level of co-ethnic concentration at the workplace for minority groups in Canada? (2) How do workers who mostly work with co-ethnics differ from other workers in sociodemographic attributes? In particular, are they more likely to have lower levels of host-country language proficiency and education? (3) Is a higher level of co-ethnic concentration at the workplace associated with lower earnings? If so, to what extent can demographic and job characteristics account for the association? (4) Is a higher level of co-ethnic concentration at the workplace associated with higher levels of life satisfaction?