This study examines immigrant integration in the low socioeconomic stratum in Trinidad. Integration is operationalized as participation in overlapping societal spheres. The study also focuses on corollary aspects of access and goals. While several factors facilitated participation in the social sphere, labor market participation was inhibited by conditions of open unemployment and underemployment. These exigencies had elicited strategies of subsistence from first generation immigrants whose work-related attitudes, ethics, and wage expectation levels functioned to their advantage and led to their competitiveness in a difficult labor market. Some of the second generation were disengaging themselves from their parents’ level of labor market activity but relocating farther from the mainstream labor market into a marginalized peer stratum.
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