Mexican immigration, occupational clustering, and the local labor market adjustment of African-American workers

Table 2 Summary statistics: characteristics of occupations and percent of African-American and Mexican men in the occupations

2-digit occupation categories	Socioeconomic status score of occupation	Manual/language TASK score of occupation	African-American percent	Mexican immigrant percent
Education, training, and library	61	10.4	5.3	1.3
Management	54	2.93	8.2	2.7
Business, fin. operations	52	2.73	3.9	0.9
Computer and math. science	51	3.2	2.2	0.3
Life, physical, social science	49	4.3	0.9	0.2
Architecture and engineering	49	4.2	1.9	0.4
Community and social services	45	2.9	1.4	0.4
Arts, design, entertainment	44	8.2	1.9	0.6
Legal	42	5.1	1	0.1
Sales	39	6.6	11.5	6.1
Protective services	37	15.1	1.9	0.5
Healthcare	36	7	4.2	0.6
Install., maintenance, repair	33	7.9	3.9	3.8
Office and admin support	30	5.8	15.5	6.9
Construction and extraction	27	8.3	5.8	14.1
Production	26	6.8	8.8	19.5
Healthcare support	24	6.7	2.1	1.2
Transp. and material moving	24	30.3	6.4	9.8
Personal care and service	22	10.4	2.9	2.3
Building and grounds cleaning	18	14.8	3.7	11.4
Food preparation and serving	17	11.3	5.6	10.1
Farming, fishing, and forestry	14	11.1	0.9	6.9

Note: See text for further explanation. The socioeconomic status of an occupation is a composite index of human capital requirement to assess the quantitative meaning (in terms of relative wages and skill level) of each occupation derived from a wage regression model, following the methodology of Sicherman and Galor (1990). The ordinal scale ranges from 0 to 100. The occupation task index is based on information from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) that periodically evaluates the tasks required for more than 12,000 detailed occupations. The Census Occupation Codes were then organized into five categories: (1) manual skills—eye, hand, and foot coordination (EHF); (2) finger dexterity (FINGER); (3) direction, control, and planning (DCP); (4) general education math (MATH); and (5) sets limits and tolerance (STS). TASK in this table relates to the relative value of manual skills to communication skills for each occupation (the sum of EHF and FINGER over DCP). David Autor kindly provided this data and task computations to the author (Autor et al. 2003)