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Can Protests Make Latinos "American"? Identity, Immigration Politics, and the 2006 Marches
Heather Silber Mohamed
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article takes advantage of a quasi-experiment in the 2006 Latino National Survey (LNS) to examine the effects of exogenous events on identity. Roughly halfway through the survey's data collection, millions of Latinos mobilized to protest HR 4437, an immigration bill advancing in the U.S. Congress. This event provides the opportunity to examine differences in self-identification among comparable populations. I divide the LNS into a control group interviewed prior to these demonstrations and a treatment group interviewed after. My analysis shows respondents in the latter group were more likely to identify as American, with effects concentrated among Spanish speakers, and particularly Mexicans and Dominicans. I find no difference in identification as Latino or with one's ancestral subgroup. These findings run contrary to the expectations of much existing literature, which assumes an increased sense of group threat results in heightened pan-ethnic sentiment across the Latino population.
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Nicholas Valentino, Ted Brader & Ashley Jardina
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
General ethnocentrism seems to be a powerful antecedent of immigration opinion, typically displaying larger effects than economic concerns. News about immigration, however, may focus attention on a particular group in a given historical moment. We predict group-specific affect, not general ethnocentrism, should most powerfully shape immigration policy opinion in the contemporary United States. We test this expectation with content analyses of news coverage, survey data from 1992 to 2008, a survey experiment, and official statistics. First, we find that mentions of Latinos in news coverage of immigration outpace mentions of other groups beginning in 1994, the year when Proposition 187, a proposal in California to end most social welfare and educational assistance to illegal immigrants, garnered significant national attention. Second, while ethnocentrism dominates economic concerns in explanations of Whites' immigration policy opinions, attitudes toward Latinos in particular account for nearly all of the impact of ethnocentrism since 1994. Finally, journalistic attention to Latino immigration roughly parallels actual rates of immigration from Latin America, suggesting the media shaping of policy opinion around this group may be driven by real-world demographic patterns.
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Irene Park et al.
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study tested the moderating roles of ethnic identity and American identity on the association between perceived racial/ethnic discrimination and antisocial behaviors among Asian American college students. Using data from the Multi-Site University Study of Identity and Culture (MUSIC) collaborative, the sample included 1,362 East Asian and South Asian American college students. Perceived discrimination was significantly associated with antisocial behaviors for both East Asians and South Asians. Ethnic identity was not a significant moderator of the discrimination-antisocial behavior link, but American identity exacerbated the association between perceived discrimination and antisocial behaviors for both East Asians and South Asians. Interestingly, the explanatory power of the regression model was greater for South Asians than for East Asians in predicting antisocial behaviors. The importance of attending to American identity as a potential source of risk for Asian American college students exposed to racial/ethnic discrimination is discussed.
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Changes in Income Inequality and the Health of Immigrants
Tod Hamilton & Ichiro Kawachi
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research suggests that income inequality is inversely associated with health. This association has been documented in studies that utilize variation in income inequality across countries or across time from a single country. The primary criticism of these approaches is their inability to account for potential confounders that are associated with income inequality. This paper uses variation in individual experiences of income inequality produced by immigrants who reside in the United States who migrated from countries with greater or less income inequality than the United States to evaluate whether individuals who moved from countries with greater income inequality than the United States have better health than immigrants who migrated from countries with less income equality than the United States. Utilizing individual-level data on immigrants from the 1996- 2008 waves of the March Current Population Survey along with country-level data from the 2009 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme for the immigrants' countries of origin, we show that health is more favorable among immigrants who have more years of education, are male, and are married. Regression models that incorporate country-of-origin characteristics show that among immigrants who have resided in the United States between 6 and 20 years, those from countries with greater income inequality than the United States self-report better health than immigrants who migrated from countries with less income inequality than the United States. Results also imply that, relative to immigrants from less developed countries, immigrants from more developed countries have lower odds of reporting poor/fair health.
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United We Stand? African Americans, Self-Interest, and Immigration Reform
Tatishe Nteta
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Alongside the growth of the immigrant population has been a corresponding backlash by citizens who increasingly support restrictive immigration policies aimed at undocumented immigrants. Much of what we know about this backlash is based on data from White Americans. Are African Americans among the growing segment of anti-immigrant supporters? Employing data from the 2006 Pew Center "America's Immigration Quandary Survey," I uncover that African Americans support restrictive immigration policies, and that class membership alongside subjective and objective measures of self-interest influence these policy stances. These findings challenge prior assertions that self-interest does little to account for American public opinion, demonstrating that on the issue of immigration reform that self-interest matters for African Americans.
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Matthijs Kalmijn
Social Forces, December 2012, Pages 453-476
Abstract:
A common claim in the literature is that higher-educated persons are more likely to marry outside their ethnic/racial group than lower-educated persons. We re-examine this "educational gradient" with a multilevel analysis of 46 immigrant groups in the Current Population Survey. We find that there are positive effects not only of individual education on intermarriage but also of the educational level of a group. Moreover, the educational gradient declines when the aggregate level of education of an immigrant group is higher. The aggregate effect of education points to cultural explanations of the gradient that emphasize the role of interethnic attitudes. The interaction effect points to a structural explanation that explains the gradient in terms of opportunities of finding similarly educated spouses within the group.
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Giorgio Brunello & Lorenzo Rocco
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use aggregate PISA data for 19 countries over the period 2000 to 2009 to study whether a higher share of immigrant pupils affects the school performance of natives. We find evidence of a negative and statistically significant relationship. The size of the estimated effect is small: doubling the share of immigrant pupils in secondary schools from its current sample average of 4.2 percent to 8.4 percent would reduce the test score of natives by 1 to 3.4 percent, depending on the selected group of natives. There is also evidence that - conditional on the average share of immigrant pupils - reducing the dispersion of this share between schools has small positive effects on the test scores of natives. Whether these findings can be generalized to a larger sample of countries is an open question that we leave to future research.
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Guadalupe Bacio, Vickie Mays & Anna Lau
Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies indicate that U.S.-born Latino teens exhibit higher rates of alcohol use compared with their foreign-born counterparts. Different hypotheses have been advanced to explain the mechanisms underlying this immigrant paradox, including the erosion of protective cultural factors across generations and increased exposure to risky peer environments in the United States. The present study examined whether the immigrant paradox applies to drinking initiation and problematic drinking among Latino adolescents, and tested whether generational differences in family protective factors and peer risk factors might explain the immigrant paradox. A nationally representative sample of Latino teens (N = 2,482) of Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican origin from 3 immigrant generations (21% first generation, 33% second generation, and 46% third and later generations) was obtained from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Logistic and negative binomial regression models indicated that early drinking initiation and problematic alcohol use were more prevalent among later-generation youth, supporting the immigrant paradox. Erosion of family closeness and increased association with substance-using peers mediated the relationship between generation and alcohol use patterns in this sample. Results provide support for culturally sensitive interventions that target peer perceptions of substance use and bolster protective family values among Latino adolescents.
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Occupational Linguistic Niches and the Wage Growth of Latino Immigrants
Ted Mouw & Sergio Chavez
Social Forces, December 2012, Pages 423-452
Abstract:
Does the concentration of recent Latino immigrants into occupational linguistic niches - occupations with large numbers of other Spanish speakers - restrict their wage growth? On the one hand, it is possible that Latino immigrants who are concentrated in jobs with large numbers of Spanish speakers may have less on-the-job exposure to English, which may isolate them socially and linguistically and limit their subsequent economic mobility. On the other hand, working in linguistic niches can also be beneficial for upwardly mobile immigrants if it allows them to gain a foothold in the United States while they improve their English skills and develop labor market experience. Using data from the 1996, 2001 and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we test for the effect of working in occupational linguistic niches on wages and wage growth. The results show that while workers in linguistic niche occupations earn lower wages on average, they do not experience lower rates of wage growth over time. Moreover, we find that about 20 percent of workers who start the 4-year SIPP panel in linguistic niches experience occupational mobility that reduces the percentage of workers speaking Spanish in their occupation by over 10 percent over the course of the study, and these "movers" have higher levels of wage growth than other workers in the sample.
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Beyond the Ethnic-Civic Dichotomy: Cultural Citizenship as a New Way of Excluding Immigrants
Arjan Reijerse et al.
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In European Union (EU) countries, public debates about immigrants and citizenship are increasingly framed in cultural terms. Yet, there is no agreement within the citizenship literature on whether a cultural citizenship representation can be distinguished from the more established ethnic and civic representations and on how its measures relate to anti-immigrant attitudes. The present study tested measures of citizenship representations among high school students (N = 1476) in six EU countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Sweden). Factor analyses favored a three-factor model of citizenship representations (i.e., ethnic, cultural, and civic factors), which showed partial metric invariance. Across countries, ethnic and cultural scales correlated positively with each other and negatively with the civic scale. Moreover, ethnic and cultural scales related positively and the civic scale negatively to anti-immigrant attitudes. However, when analyzed simultaneously, relations of the ethnic scale with anti-immigrant attitudes were no longer significant, while those of the cultural and civic scales proved to be robust. Implications of these findings are discussed.
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The Impact of Economic and Cultural Cues on Support for Immigration in Canada and the United States
Allison Harell et al.
Canadian Journal of Political Science, September 2012, Pages 499-530
Abstract:
Past research suggests that citizens' attitudes toward immigration are driven by perceptions of immigrants' (a) economic status and (b) ethnicity. In this study, we use an online survey conducted with a representative sample of Canadians to test to what extent economic and cultural cues influence support for individual immigrants. In particular, by drawing on a parallel US survey, we explore whether Canadians' relatively unique (positive) attitudes toward immigration make them more immune to economic and cultural threat manipulations than their American counterparts. The analysis is based on an experimental design embedded in a series of immigrant vignettes that vary the ethnoracial background and social status of an individual applying for immigration. We examine overall support for immigration, as well as the extent to which both ethnic and economic status cues affect support for individual immigrants. We also explore variance within Canada, specifically, in Quebec versus the rest of the country. Results offer new and unique information on the structure of attitudes on diversity and immigration in Canada. Most importantly, they suggest the relative importance of economic cues in support for immigration in both countries.
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Joanna Almeida et al.
Social Science & Medicine, December 2012, Pages 2069-2075
Abstract:
Although immigrant youth have lower rates of substance use than US born youth, whether substance use varies by generation and time in the US is unclear. This study examines adolescent alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use by generation/time in US (i.e., first generation, in US ≤4 years; first generation, in US >4 years; second generation; and third generation or higher). Data come from a 2008 survey of Boston, Massachusetts public high school students (n = 1485). Multivariable logistic regression models were used to examine the association between generation/time in the US and risk of past 30-day substance use, adjusting for age and race/ethnicity. To determine whether the associations differed by gender, we fit gender stratified regression models. The prevalence of substance use was lowest among immigrants who had been in the US ≤4 years. Among girls, generation/time in US was not related to alcohol use or to tobacco use. For boys, being an immigrant regardless of number of years in the US, as well as second generation was associated with a significantly lower risk of tobacco use, compared to third generation youth. Additionally, immigrant boys who had been in the US ≤4 years had a significantly lower risk of alcohol use. Among both boys and girls, all first and second generation youth were significantly less likely to report marijuana use compared to third generation youth. Immigrant youth have a lower risk of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use relative to US born youth; however the protective effect of foreign nativity on alcohol was eroded much more quickly than for tobacco or marijuana. The effects of generation and time in US on substance use differ by gender and the particular substance.
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Frank Bean et al.
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, June 2012, Pages 181-209
Abstract:
This research compares cities between and within the United States and Europe with respect to their dimensionality and degree of immigrant incorporation. Based on theoretical perspectives about immigrant incorporation, structural differentiation and national incorporation regimes, we hypothesize that more inclusionary (MI) cities will show more dimensions of incorporation and more favorable incorporation outcomes than less inclusionary (LI) places, especially in regard to labor market and spatial variables. We use data from recent major surveys of young adult second-generation groups carried out in Los Angeles, New York, and 11 European cities to assess these ideas. The findings indicate that second-generation immigrants in New York (MI) and in European MI places (i.e. cities in the Netherlands, Sweden and France) show greater dimensionality of incorporation (and thus by implication more pathways of advancement) respectively than is the case in Los Angeles (LI) or in European LI places (i.e. cities in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland). We discuss the significance of these results for understanding how the structures of opportunity confronting immigrants and their children in various places make a difference for the nature and extent of their integration.
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Acculturative Status and Psychological Well-Being in an Asian American Sample
Allison Baker et al.
Asian American Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We sought to examine the relationship between acculturative status and positive psychological functioning (i.e., psychological well-being) in a sample of 96 Asian Americans. Using a supplemental item from the Suinn-Lew Asian Self-Identity Acculturation Scale, we classified participants into one of three acculturative statuses: Asian-Identified (n = 56), Western-Identified (n = 20), and Bicultural-Identified (n = 20). We used Ryff's (1989) Scales of Psychological Well-Being as a comprehensive measure of well-being, in addition to other commonly used indicators of well-being such as life satisfaction and depressed mood. We hypothesized that Bicultural-Identified individuals would show greater well-being relative to Asian-Identified and Western-Identified individuals as a result of these latter groups experiencing acculturative stress and bicultural stress, respectively. Results of a priori contrast tests largely confirmed our hypothesis, revealing the predicted pattern among four of six subscales of subjective well-being. Implications for future work examining Asian Americans' well-being and mental health are discussed.
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Rebecca Hamlin
Law & Social Inquiry, Fall 2012, Pages 933-968
Abstract:
International law provides nations with a common definition of a refugee, yet the processes by which countries determine who should be granted refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with many institutional, cultural, geographical, and political similarities. This article compares the refugee status determination regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations - the United States, Canada, and Australia. Despite these nations' similar border control policies, asylum seekers crossing their borders access three very different systems. These differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy than with the level of insulation the administrative decision-making agency enjoys from political interference and judicial review. Bureaucratic justice is conceptualized and organized differently in different states, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and nonrefugee.
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Human trafficking and migration control policy: Vicious or virtuous cycle?
Nazli Avdan
Journal of Public Policy, December 2012, Pages 171-205
Abstract:
This paper examines the relationship between states' migration control policies and human trafficking in origin, transit and destination states. Using cross-sectional data on states' visa policies for 192 states and indicators for human trafficking from the Global Patterns report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the paper analyses feedback mechanisms between policies and trafficking. The empirical evidence suggests that, contrary to the pessimistic predictions of policy scholarship, the feedback is characterised by a virtuous mechanism. Firstly, the results show that, in line with expectations of security studies, states tighten visa policies in response to trafficking threats. Origin and transit states face a greater number of restrictions on travel. Similarly, destination states of trafficking impose tighter controls. Secondly, visa restrictions against origin and transit countries mitigate trafficking from and through these states. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the vicious effect whereby stricter policies exacerbate trafficking pertains mostly to destination states' visa policies and to visas imposed at borders.
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Do Patriotism and Multiculturalism Collide? Competing Perspectives from Canada and the United States
Jack Citrin, Richard Johnston & Matthew Wright
Canadian Journal of Political Science, September 2012, Pages 531-552
Abstract:
The relationship of national identifications to preferences about immigration is a subject of empirical controversy. The hypothesis we explore here through a comparison of Canada and the United States is that the normative content of national identity - how people define the meaning of patriotism in their country - mediates the relationship between national pride and sentiment about immigration and multiculturalism. How political elites construct what citizens should be proud of matters. In comparisons based on the 2003 International Social Survey Program's "National Identity Module," Canadians seem more divided than Americans over their nationality and generally less chauvinist. Canadians are more receptive to maintaining the current level of immigration and see newcomers as less threatening to economic and cultural values. The relationship between identification with the country and support for immigration and multiculturalism diverges sharply between the countries: where in Canada the relationship is positive, in the US it is negative.
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Carlos Siordia & María Díaz
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, November 2012, Pages 525-538
Abstract:
In this study, we investigate individual-level language shift in a population of Mexican origin Latinos/as aged 65 and up. By using data from the Hispanic Established Populations for the Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly, we investigate their English language use as the dependent variable in a hierarchical linear model. The microlevel independent continuous variable is their level of contact with "Anglos"; the macrolevel continuous independent variable is the percentage of Mexicans in tract of residence. After accounting for their generational status, other microlevel social and health covariates, and tract-level attributes, we found a direct relationship between contact with Anglos and a "shift" toward more English language use, where as co-ethnic concentration increases, the influence of contact with Anglos decreases. We frame this article with a discussion on language shifting, and explain how co-ethnic concentration may provide the resources for engaging in a language resistance.