Admissible
John Kennan
NBER Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
There is a large body of evidence indicating that cross-country differences in income levels are associated with differences in productivity. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, restrictions on immigration lead to large efficiency losses. The paper quantifies these losses, using a model in which efficiency differences are labor-augmenting, and free trade in product markets leads to factor price equalization, so that wages are equal across countries when measured in efficiency units of labor. The estimated gains from removing immigration restrictions are huge. Using a simple static model of migration costs, the estimated net gains from open borders are about the same as the gains from a growth miracle that more than doubles the income level in less-developed countries.
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Foreign Language Exposure, Cultural Threat, and Opposition to Immigration
Benjamin Newman, Todd Hartman & Charles Taber
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the present article, we extend the notion of cultural threat posed by immigrants beyond its current conceptualization as symbolic, collective-level threats to American culture and identity. Instead, we argue that routine encounters with non-English-speaking immigrants cause many individuals to feel threatened because of real barriers to interpersonal communication and exchange. We draw upon survey and experimental data to demonstrate that local contact with immigrants who speak little to no English, as well as incidental exposure to the Spanish language, heighten feelings of cultural threat, which increases anti-immigrant sentiment and policy preferences.
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Bilingualism enriches the poor: Enhanced cognitive control in low-income minority children
Pascale Engel de Abreu et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores whether the cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism in executive functioning extends to young minority-language children challenged by poverty and if so, which specific processes are most affected. Forty Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilingual children from low-income immigrant families in Luxembourg and 40 matched monolingual children from Portugal completed visuo-spatial tests of working memory, abstract reasoning, selective attention, and interference suppression. Two broad cognitive factors of executive functioning labeled representation (abstract reasoning and working memory) and control (selective attention and inhibitory suppression) emerged from principal components analysis. Whereas there were no group differences in representation, the bilinguals performed significantly better than the monolinguals in control. These results demonstrate first, that the bilingual advantage is neither confounded with nor limited by socioeconomic and cultural factors and second, that separable aspects of executive functioning are differentially affected by bilingualism. The bilingual advantage lies in control but not in visuo-spatial representational processes.
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Adriana Lleras-Muney & Allison Shertzer
NBER Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
In the early twentieth century, education legislation was often passed based on arguments that new laws were needed to force immigrants to learn English and "Americanize." We provide the first estimates of the effect of statutes requiring English as the language of instruction and compulsory schooling laws on the school enrollment, work, literacy and English fluency of immigrant children from 1910 to 1930. English schooling statutes did increase the literacy of foreign-born children, though only modestly. Compulsory schooling and continuation school laws raised immigrants' enrollment and the effects were much larger for children born abroad than for native-born children.
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Wayne Santoro, María Vélez & Stacy Keogh
Social Forces, September 2012, Pages 209-231
Abstract:
Using terms like free spaces and havens, conventional wisdom views social ties by subordinate groups to dominant group members as hindering protest participation. In contrast, we draw on ethnic resiliency and social capital perspectives and argue that there are mobilization benefits to having dominant group members as friends. We offer a unique statistical test by examining the effect of white social ties on Mexican American participation in cultural and political protest. Using survey data, bivariate and multivariate results demonstrate that social connections to whites promote Mexican American activism. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings can be reconciled with previous scholarship.
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Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun & Christopher Malloy
NBER Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
We demonstrate that simply by using the ethnic makeup surrounding a firm's location, we can predict, on average, which trade links are valuable for firms. Using customs and port authority data on the international shipments of all U.S. publicly-traded firms, we show that firms are significantly more likely to trade with countries that have a strong resident population near their firm headquarters. We use the formation of World War II Japanese Internment Camps to isolate exogenous shocks to local ethnic populations, and identify a causal link between local networks and firm trade links. Firms that exploit their local networks (strategic traders) see significant increases in future sales growth and profitability, and outperform other importers and exporters by 5%-7% per year in risk-adjusted stock returns. In sum, our results document a surprisingly large impact of immigrants' economic role as conduits of information for firms in their new countries.
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Inclusion and Public Policy: Evidence from Sweden's Introduction of Noncitizen Suffrage
Kåre Vernby
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The largest disenfranchised group in modern democracies is international migrants who lack citizenship of their country of residence. Despite that noncitizen suffrage has been introduced in some countries and has been the subject of vigorous public debate in many others, there have been no systematic attempts to investigate its policy consequences. Drawing on standard models of political competition, I argue that there will be a selection bias inherent in estimating the impact of noncitizen suffrage on public policy and analyze data that are uniquely suitable to deal with this methodological problem, namely data on exogenous changes in the composition of the electorates of Swedish municipalities generated by the introduction of noncitizen suffrage. According to the results, the effect of enfranchising noncitizens on public policy was large, causing spending on education and social and family services to increase substantially in municipalities where noncitizens made up a nonnegligible share of the electorate.
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Support for redistribution and the paradox of immigration
Brian Burgoon, Ferry Koster & Marcel van Egmond
Journal of European Social Policy, July 2012, Pages 288-304
Abstract:
This paper argues that immigration has varying implications for attitudes about government redistribution depending on the level at which immigration is experienced. Working in occupations with higher shares of foreign-born employees can raise individual economic insecurities in ways that might overwhelm the way high foreign-born shares of the population can reduce solidarity or increase fiscal burdens. Hence, experiencing more immigration in one's occupation might more positively affect support for government redistribution than does experiencing more national-level immigration. We test this and other expectations on survey data in 17 European polities, focused on occupational and national measures of immigration. While national-level exposure to foreign-born populations tends to have little effect on support for government redistribution, occupational-level exposure to immigration tends to spur such support. These results suggest that immigration directly influences the politics of inequality, but in ways more complicated than recent scholarship suggests.
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Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan & Katherine Eriksson
NBER Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
Using novel data on 50,000 Norwegian men, we study the effect of wealth on the probability of internal or international migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), a time when the US maintained an open border to European immigrants. We do so by exploiting variation in parental wealth and in expected inheritance by birth order, gender composition of siblings, and region. We find that wealth discouraged migration in this era, suggesting that the poor could be more likely to move if migration restrictions were lifted today. We discuss the implications of these historical findings to developing countries.
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Tanya Nieri
Sociological Inquiry, August 2012, Pages 460-484
Abstract:
Understanding how schools - a key context for children - shape students' cultural trajectories is important since these trajectories are tied to youth development and achievement. This study assessed how the size of the school's group of acculturated Latino and non-Latino students influenced the acculturation of 1,720 Latino 5th-grade students from urban public schools in the Southwest United States. A longitudinal secondary data analysis revealed that controlling for wave 1 acculturation, youths in schools with larger proportions of linguistically acculturated students were more acculturated at wave 2 than youths in schools with smaller proportions of such students. This effect was independent of Latino students' baseline acculturation level and was found even in schools with minority proportions of more acculturated students.
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John Logan & Hyoung-jin Shin
Social Science Research, September 2012, Pages 1116-1125
Abstract:
It is well known that marital ethnic endogamy declines by immigrant generation, but there is little information on how many generations are required for full marital assimilation. This study for 1880-1910 includes information on the birthplace of men's grandparents, so we can compare the first, second, third, and later generations. We estimate the odds of marrying a native white woman with native-born parents (NWNP) for Irish, Germans, British, and men of other ethnicities. Most groups even in their third generation still show a significantly lower rate of marital assimilation than native stock men. But mixed ancestry (having at least one NWNP parent or grandparent) can result in nearly complete marital assimilation by the third generation.
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Tim Reeskens & Wim van Oorschot
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, April 2012, Pages 120-139
Abstract:
In the present ‘Age of Migration', public policy as well as social scientists are puzzled by the ‘New Liberal Dilemma' (Newton, 2007) of finding popular support for welfare programs that have been installed in times of cultural homogeneity. In this article, we are interested in the question of whether opinions about immigrants' access to welfare provisions originate from general preferences towards welfare redistribution, and whether this association is moderated by the national context. Using the 2008 wave of the European Social Survey, we show that particularly those who favor that welfare benefits should in the first place target the neediest, place the highest restrictions on welfare provisions for immigrants. In addition, the relationship between preferences for welfare redistribution and opinions about immigrants' access to social welfare is moderated by a national context of cultural heterogeneity. We conclude the article by drawing implications for public policy.
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Is There a Hispanic Epidemiologic Paradox in Later Life? A Closer Look at Chronic Morbidity
Zhenmei Zhang, Mark Hayward & Chuntian Lu
Research on Aging, September 2012, Pages 548-571
Abstract:
This study examined the morbidity patterns of foreign-born Hispanics, U.S.-born Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites aged 53 years and older using seven self-reported physician-diagnosed chronic diseases as well as six biomarkers. Drawing on the 2006 Health and Retirement Study and its biomarker data, the authors found that foreign-born Hispanics had comparable or lower rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, chronic lung disease, and stroke, controlling for age and gender. The health advantages were robust when socioeconomic conditions and health behaviors were controlled. Foreign-born Hispanics were not significantly different from U.S.-born Hispanics except for a lower risk for arthritis. In terms of biomarkers, foreign-born Hispanics were not statistically different from Whites except for having higher risks of high systolic blood pressure and blood glucose. Future research should explore multiple factors contributing to the lower rates of major chronic diseases among older Hispanics who have faced social disadvantages over the life course.
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On the margins: Undocumented students' narrated experiences of (il)legality
Kendall King & Gemma Punti
Linguistics and Education, September 2012, Pages 235-249
Abstract:
Undocumented migration is a major demographic trend, yet both under researched and under-theorized. This is particularly the case for undocumented students in the U.S., as most studies that target this population have spotlighted extraordinary adolescents (e.g., Gonzales, 2008). Much less is known about the everyday unextraordinary experiences of undocumented youth in navigating the U.S. legal and social terrain. To address this gap, this study interviewed and observed undocumented Latino youth in the U.S. over 18 months, and examined what we term, the ‘narrative accounts of legality' produced by 15 youths. Analysis of these 20 narrative accounts reveals that immigration status is experienced and understood largely in racial terms. Findings provide insight into how these experiences are linked to youths' sense of self and self-development and the ways in which these high school students and young adults discursively make sense of the myriad contradictions surrounding them.
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Ethnic Identity and Discrimination among Children
Jane Friesen et al.
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We engaged over 430 Canadian children in a series of activities designed to reveal their evaluations of three ethnic groups (White, East Asian and South Asian), their identification with these groups, and their behaviour towards them in a dictator game. Our experiments took place at the children's schools during their normal school day, allowing us to evaluate the salience and effects of ethnic identities on economically relevant behavior in an important natural setting. We find that children from the dominant White category have a clear sense of White ethnic identity, and tend to favour White recipients in the dictator game relative to East Asian or South Asian recipients. Minority East Asian children reveal a more complex ethnic identity; they perceive themselves to be equally similar to White and East Asian children. Unlike Whites, East Asian children do not favour recipients from their own East Asian category, nor do they favour recipients with whom they tend to identify. If anything, East Asian children show out-group favoritism.
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Isabelle Goncalves Portelinha et al.
European Psychologist, Summer 2012, Pages 237-245
Abstract:
Terror management theory posits that cultural worldviews provide protection against death-related anxiety. To the extent that worldviews often encompass competing beliefs, the present research investigated the effect of the salience of an incompatibility between worldview elements. French nationals of second- or third-immigrant generation ( N = 193) were exposed to compatible or incompatible aspects of their cultural identities and then induced to contemplate their own death or a neutral topic. Participants reminded of their mortality renounced their ethnic identity more in the cultural incompatibility condition, and this effect was confined to those who initially presented an integrated (or bicultural) identity. Mortality salience led to monoculturalism striving when bicultural participants considered incompatible aspects of both their cultures, hence verifying the importance of upholding a strong and unwavering cultural worldview to cope with death awareness. The role of death-thoughts accessibility and religious attitudes following participants' efforts to shore up their cultural worldview is discussed.