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Unemployment among Mexican immigrant men in the United States, 2003-2012
Jennifer Laird
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on their socioeconomic characteristics, Mexican immigrant men should have very high unemployment. More than half do not have a high school diploma. One in four works in construction; at the height of the recent recession, 20% of construction workers were unemployed. Yet their unemployment rates are similar to those of native-born white men. After controlling for education and occupation, Mexican immigrant men have lower probabilities of unemployment than native-born white men – both before and during the recent recession. I consider explanations based on eligibility for unemployment benefits, out-migrant selection for unemployment, and employer preferences for Mexican immigrant labor.
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Temporary Worker Advantages? A Comparison of Mexican Immigrants' Employment Outcomes
Lauren Apgar
Indiana University Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
Most studies of Mexican immigrants’ labor market outcomes overlook temporary workers. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, I compare temporary workers’ labor market experiences with those of legal permanent residents (LPRs) and undocumented workers. I examine hourly wages, occupational prestige, and job stability. Together, comparisons reveal that temporary workers experience the poorest employment outcomes. While temporary workers’ hourly wages fall between the wages of LPRs and undocumented workers, they work fewer months and hold less prestigious jobs than both groups. These patterns suggest that temporary workers’ dependence on their employer prevents their upward advancement and job stability.
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One Language, Two Meanings: Partisanship and Responses to Spanish
Daniel Hopkins
Political Communication, Summer 2014, Pages 421-445
Abstract:
The growth and dispersion of America’s immigrant population exposes increasing numbers of non-Hispanic Whites to Spanish. Yet the political impacts of that exposure depend on whether Democrats and Republicans respond in similar ways. To address that question, this article first presents survey experiments showing that exposure to Spanish increases restrictive immigration attitudes only among Republicans. To confirm the external validity of that result, the article then presents an analysis of California’s Proposition 227 indicating that support for ending bilingual education was higher in heavily White, Republican block groups with Spanish-language ballots. No such pattern appears in Democratic block groups. Together, these findings demonstrate that Spanish is a politicized symbol, provoking different responses among Whites depending on their partisanship. To the extent that other immigration-related cues produce similar effects, the salience of immigration seems likely to reinforce existing partisan divisions rather than undermining them.
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The migration response to the Legal Arizona Workers Act
Mark Ellis et al.
Political Geography, September 2014, Pages 46–56
Abstract:
The 2008 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) requires all public and private employers to authenticate the legal status of their workers using the federal employment verification system known as E-Verify. With LAWA, Arizona became the first state to have a universal mandate for employment verification. While LAWA targets unauthorized workers, most of whom are Latino immigrants, other groups could experience LAWA's effects, such as those who share households with undocumented workers. In addition, employers may seek to minimize their risk of LAWA penalties by not hiring those who appear to them as more likely to be unauthorized, such as naturalized Latino immigrants and US-born Latinos. Existing research has found a reduction in foreign-born Latino employment and population in response to LAWA. This paper asks a different question: have groups that are most likely to be affected by the law migrated to other states? We find a significant and sustained increase in the internal outmigration rate from Arizona of foreign-born, noncitizen Latinos – the group most likely to include the unauthorized – after the passage of LAWA. There was no significant LAWA internal migration response by foreign-born Latino citizens. US-born Latinos showed some signs of a LAWA-induced internal migration response after the law went into effect, but it is not sustained. The results indicate that local and state immigration policy can alter the settlement geography of the foreign born. This leads us to speculate about how immigrant settlement may adjust in the coming years to the intersecting geographies of post-recession economic opportunity and tiered immigration policies.
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Empirical characteristics of legal and illegal immigrants in the USA
Vincenzo Caponi & Miana Plesca
Journal of Population Economics, October 2014, Pages 923-960
Abstract:
We combine the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), which contains information on US legal immigrants, with the American Community Survey (ACS), which contains information on legal and illegal immigrants to the USA. Using an econometric methodology proposed by Lancaster and Imbens (J Econ 71:145–160, 1996) we compute the probability for each observation in the ACS data to refer to an illegal immigrant, conditional on observed characteristics. These results are novel, since no other work has quantified the characteristics of illegal immigrants from a random sample representative of the population. Using these conditional probability weights on the ACS data, we are able to uncover some interesting facts on illegal immigrants. We find that, while illegal immigrants suffer a large wage penalty compared to legal immigrants at all education levels, the penalty decreases with education. We also find that the total fertility rate among illegal immigrant women is significantly higher than that among legal ones, in particular for middle and higher educated women. Looking at the sector of activity, we document that the sectors attracting most illegal immigrants are constructions and agriculture. We also generate empirical distributions for state of residence, country of origin, age, sex, and number of legal and illegal immigrants. Our forecasts for the aggregate distribution of legal and illegal characteristics match imputations by the Department of Homeland Security.
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Work Attitudes of Mexican Americans: A Decade of Improvement
Charles Weaver
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, August 2014, Pages 329-343
Abstract:
Weaver compared the work attitudes of Mexican Americans and Euro-Americans with data from 19 nationwide public opinion surveys. He found Mexican Americans productive, cooperative, and networking with a strong sense of work ethic and job satisfaction. Since 2000, the Mexican American population has grown by 57% to 32.9 million. It is more native born, more proficient in English, better educated, more often in important jobs, and has spread across the country. Yet, many live in poverty, and their labor force participation and median household income have declined. To investigate whether their work attitudes have been affected, Weaver’s study was replicated with data from three recent nationwide public opinion surveys to compare 326 Mexican Americans and 2,166 Euro-Americans. The results showed Mexican American work attitudes had become even more favorable. The findings placed beyond doubt the question of whether the work attitudes of Mexican Americans limit their contributions to organizational effectiveness.
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Immigration and African American Wages and Employment: Critically Appraising the Empirical Evidence
Patrick Mason
Review of Black Political Economy, September 2014, Pages 271-297
Abstract:
This paper critically assesses the empirical evidence on the relationship between immigration and African American employment. Studies using various methodologies and data are reviewed: natural experiments, time series, and cross-sectional studies of local labor markets and intertemporal changes in the national labor market. We find that for African Americans as a whole, immigration may have little effect on mean wages and probability of employment. However, there is some evidence that immigration may have had an adverse impact on the labor market outcomes of African Americans belonging to low education-experience groups. However, even this modest conclusion must be qualified: the literature has many unresolved econometric issues that might easily undermine the received wisdom.
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No Longer “All-American”? Whites’ Defensive Reactions to Their Numerical Decline
Felix Danbold & Yuen Huo
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We suggest that Whites’ declining share of the U.S. population threatens their status as the most prototypical ethnic group in America. This prototypicality threat should lead to growing resistance toward diversity, motivated by the desire to reassert Whites’ standing as prototypical Americans. In Study 1, how dramatically Whites perceived their share of the population to decline predicted support for cultural assimilation, mediated by prototypicality threat (controlling for realistic and symbolic threat). This relationship held only among Whites who felt that ethnic groups differ in their prototypicality, not among those who saw all groups representing America equally. Study 2 experimentally manipulated exposure to demographic projections such that Whites who saw their group shrinking showed weaker diversity endorsement relative to those who believed their share to be stable, again mediated by prototypicality threat. These findings reveal Whites’ threatened prototypicality as a novel, emerging source of resistance toward diversity in 21st-century America.
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Raymond Barranco & Edward Shihadeh
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Combining several schools of thought, including the civic engagement thesis, we extend current research by linking three things at the county level; firm size, the ethnic composition of labor markets, and violent crime. Our results suggest that larger businesses (based on the average number of persons employed) are more likely to have an external orientation and long recruitment reach, and this is linked to ethnic shifts in labor markets toward Latino workers. Such shifts are in turn associated with high rates of homicide among non-Latinos. Through indirect effects modeling, we find that increases in Black homicide are linked to rises in concentrated poverty, while increases in White homicide are linked to changes in unemployment. We discuss the implications of our findings.
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Immigrants and Mortgage Delinquency
Zhenguo Lin, Yingchun Liu & Xie Jia
Real Estate Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the effect of immigrant status on mortgage delinquency. Due to their different social and economic background, immigrant households may not integrate well into the host society and therefore are more likely to be delinquent on mortgages than otherwise identical native-born households. We test this hypothesis by comparing the mortgage delinquency rate between immigrant and native households in the 2009 PSID data, in which all the immigrant households have been in the U.S. for more than 10 years. We find that after controlling for observables, those relatively recent immigrants who have been in the U.S. for 10 to 20 years have a higher mortgage delinquency rate than natives, while immigrants who have resided in the US for more than 20 years are no different than natives. In addition, there is no evidence that the second generation of immigrants is more likely to be delinquent than the third-or-higher generations. Our results are robust to potential sample selection bias and functional misspecifications.
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Alex Piquero et al.
Crime & Delinquency, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is now well documented that the view that immigrants commit more crime than native-born persons is not supported by empirical research. Yet, the knowledge base is limited in our understanding of the criminological frameworks that may distinguish these groups and, in part, lead to divergent offending patterns. We use the legal socialization framework to understand potential differences along with data from the Pathways to Desistance to assess differences in legal socialization perceptions between first-generation immigrants, second-generation immigrants, and native-born serious youthful offenders. Results show that, compared with second-generation and native-born youth, first-generation youth tend to have more positive views toward the law, less cynical attitudes toward the legal system, and report more social costs associated with punishment.
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Sarah Morando Lakhani
Law & Social Inquiry, Summer 2014, Pages 643–665
Abstract:
To apply for U Visa status, a temporary legal standing available to undocumented crime victims who assist law enforcement in investigations, immigrants must obtain validation of their experiences from police via a signed “certification” paper. This article investigates the challenges lawyers and immigrant crime victims face in translating and documenting victims' experiences into legal form. By analyzing interactions between Los Angeles attorneys and female undocumented immigrants, I explore how immigrant victims of violence prepare to approach police certifiers. Attorneys arbitrate between accounts of violence and immigrant-police encounters and the legal cases they can develop, offering retrospective and prospective advice to immigrants about how to make effective pleas to police. Drawing attention to the devolutionary dynamics of an inclusive immigration policy, I show how nonfederal bureaucrats shape immigrants' eligibility for legalization remedies. In turn, I expose detrimental consequences of mixing street-level administrative discretion with federal visa eligibility determinations.
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Immigration, Integration, and Support for Redistribution in Europe
Brian Burgoon
World Politics, July 2014, Pages 365-405
Abstract:
Immigration poses individual or collective economic risks that might increase citizen support for government redistribution, but it can also generate fiscal pressure or undermine social solidarity to diminish such support. These offsetting conditions obscure the net effects of immigration for welfare states. This article explores whether immigration's effects are mediated by the economic and social integration of immigrants. Integration can be conceptualized and measured as involving the degree to which immigrants suffer unemployment rates, depend on welfare-state benefits, and harbor social attitudes similarly to the native population. Such integration may alter how immigration reduces solidarity and imposes fiscal and macroeconomic pressures, but does not much alter how immigration spurs economic risks for natives. Where migrants are more integrated by such measures, immigration should have less negative or more positive implications for native support for government redistribution and welfare states than where migrants are less integrated. The article explores these arguments using survey data for twenty-two European countries between 2002 and 2010. The principal finding is that economic integration, more than sociocultural integration, softens the tendency of immigration to undermine support for redistributive policies.
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From Political to Material Inequality: Race, Immigration, and Requests for Public Goods
Jeremy Levine & Carl Gershenson
Sociological Forum, September 2014, Pages 607–627
Abstract:
Studies of political participation typically analyze voting, contentious collective action, or membership in voluntary associations. Few scholars investigate a more mundane — but highly consequential — form of neighborhood politics: requests for basic city services. We conceptualize city service requests as a direct, instrumental contact with local government that alters the geographical distribution of public goods. We hypothesize that rates of service requests vary with the ethnic and immigrant composition of neighborhoods, due to differences in these communities’ expectations of local government. We test this hypothesis using administrative data from the City of Boston. We find neighborhoods with high concentrations of first-generation immigrants less likely to request services, relative to need. The concentration of African Americans, however, is associated with large increases in neighborhood service requests. We conclude with implications for the study of race, inequality, and political incorporation.
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Immigration, redistribution, and universal suffrage
Raul Magni-Berton
Public Choice, September 2014, Pages 391-409
Abstract:
The effect of immigration on redistribution has been widely debated. This paper contributes to this debate by testing two explanations, which are that (i) immigration tends to reduce redistribution due to people’s higher levels of xenophobia, and that (ii) immigration affects redistribution because immigrants do not have the right to vote. Since the demand for redistribution depends on the (expected) gap between median voter income and mean income, immigrants affect the demand for redistribution because, as non-citizens, they do not change the median voter’s income, but, as economic stakeholders, they do affect the mean income. Four empirical consequences of (i) and (ii) are tested at the individual level. Evidence from the European Values Survey in 45 countries confirms (ii), showing that immigrants’ expected competitiveness on the labor market affects preferences for redistribution and that it is amplified when the perceived number of immigrants is high. In contrast, (i) is globally rejected since the impact of the citizens’ declared level of solidarity with immigrants tends to be weak and depends on the type of measurement or specification used.
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On the Effectiveness of SB1070 in Arizona
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes & Fernando Lozano
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the effectiveness of Arizona's omnibus immigration law SB1070, which made it a misdemeanor crime for an alien to not carry proper documentation and asked police to determine the immigration status of any person suspected of being an illegal alien during a lawful stop. We find that SB1070's enactment coincided with the stalling to slight recovery of the share of non-citizen Hispanics in Arizona 3 years after the enactment of an employment verification mandate to all employers. Yet, its effectiveness in reducing the share of likely unauthorized immigrants has been minimal and questions the merit of the law.
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The Threat of Terrorism and the Changing Public Discourse on Immigration after September 11
Joshua Woods & Damien Arthur
Sociological Spectrum, September/October 2014, Pages 421-441
Abstract:
This article uses articles from the opinion-leading press to investigate how the news media's repertoire of negative portrayals changed after the September 11 terrorist attacks. It is based on a systematic random sample of 360 articles from two, opinion-leading newspapers—one known for its liberal slant (New York Times) and one known for its conservative slant (Wall Street Journal). The sample is drawn from a large population of articles published over a six-year period (1998–2004). The findings show that the percentage of negative frames involving not only terrorism but also other non-terrorist threats increased significantly after September 11. The elevated frequency of negative frames was found in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but the increase was significantly greater in the conservative periodical. Immigrants from non-European countries were also significantly more likely to be associated with negative frames than European immigrants. These three variables — national origin, news source, and September 11 — were strong predictors of negative frames, even when controlling for other correlates. Suggesting an authoritarian turn in American political discourse, the study highlights cultural factors, as opposed to the conventional psychological explanations, as key determinants of the changing public discussion of immigration after September 11.
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Defying the Law of Gravity: The Political Economy of International Migration
Jennifer Fitzgerald, David Leblang & Jessica Teets
World Politics, July 2014, Pages 406-445
Abstract:
Bilateral flows of international migrants exhibit tremendous variance both across destination countries and over time. To explain this variance, studies of international migration tend to focus on economic determinants such as income differentials or on social conditions such as the presence of coethnics in certain destination countries. The authors argue that migration is driven not solely by economic or social determinants; rather, the political environment across destinations plays a substantively large role in influencing bilateral migration flows. They test the importance of the political environment — citizenship rights and the prominence of right-wing parties — using data on migration flows from 178 origin countries into 18 destination countries over the period 1980–2006. They find, even after controlling for a variety of economic, social, policy, and international variables, that variation in political environments across time and destination plays a key role in observed patterns of international migration.
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Richard Stansfield
Crime & Delinquency, forthcoming
Abstract:
The United Kingdom experienced a rapid inflow of migrants from European Union accession countries between 2004 and 2011, many of whom participated in the Worker Registration Scheme (WRS). Given the relative labor market position of this recent migrant wave, scholars argued that returns to criminal activity were negligible. Yet, recent data from London’s Metropolitan Police estimated that foreign-born nationals from Poland, Lithuania, and other Eastern European nations were responsible for almost 25% of alleged crimes in London between 2010 and 2011. With the United Kingdom set to see an influx of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants starting in 2014, political and public arenas became rife with fears of a growing Eastern European crime wave. This article attempted to bring some coherence to the relationship between recent Eastern European immigration and multiple forms of crime in the United Kingdom. Using data from 348 local authorities in England and Wales, this study examined recent immigration composition effects on crime. The study also went beyond existing studies on immigration and crime by examining the effects of change in employment-related migration flows, study-related migration, and other migration flows since 2004. Results confirmed that areas that saw the highest rates of immigration do not have higher rates of violence. These areas did exhibit higher rates of drug offenses, however, that could not be explained away by differences in structural conditions. Finally, evidence was found that the reason for migration was critical in predicting criminal returns.