Enemies, Foreign and Domestic
The Influence of Social Desirability Pressures on Expressed Immigration Attitudes
Alexander Janus
Social Science Quarterly, December 2010, Pages 928-946
Objective: Immigration scholars have found that the highly educated and political liberals are considerably less likely to support restrictionist immigration policies than other groups. I ask whether the influence of social desirability pressures in the survey interview is responsible for this finding.
Methods: An unobtrusive questioning technique known as the list experiment is used to measure Americans' support for immigration restrictionism. The list experiment can easily be embedded in a standard telephone survey and has been used by previous investigators to study racial attitudes.
Results: Restrictionist sentiments are found to be more widespread among the U.S. populace than previous studies have estimated, especially among college graduates and political liberals.
Conclusion: My findings have implications for immigration scholars and social scientists who study other sensitive attitudes and behaviors. The most commonly employed strategies to reduce socially desirable responding may not be enough.
----------------------
On the macroeconomic and welfare effects of illegal immigration
Xiangbo Liu
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, December 2010, Pages 2547-2567
Abstract:
This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor market frictions to explore the economic consequences of illegal immigration. In the baseline model, native workers and illegal foreign workers compete for jobs in the same market, but serve as imperfect substitutes in production. The calibrated model generates a U-shaped relationship between long-run domestic consumption and the population share of illegal immigrants. After taking into account both consumption and leisure, I found that an increase in illegal immigration can generate significant welfare gains for the natives. The baseline model is then extended to include heterogeneous workers in the domestic population.
----------------------
Birth Rates and Border Crossings: Latin American Migration to the US, Canada, Spain, and the UK
Gordon Hanson
NBER Working Paper, October 2010
Abstract:
We use census data for the US, Canada, Spain, and UK to estimate bilateral migration rates to these countries from 25 Latin American and Caribbean nations over the period 1980 to 2005. Latin American migration to the US is responsive to labor supply shocks, as predicted by earlier changes in birth cohort sizes, and labor demand shocks associated with balance of payments crises and natural disasters. Latin American migration to Canada, Spain, and the UK, in contrast, is largely insensitive to these shocks, responding only to civil and military conflict. The results are consistent with US immigration policy toward Latin America (which is relatively permissive toward illegal entry) being mediated by market forces and immigration policy in the other countries (which favor skilled workers and asylum seekers, among other groups) insulating them from labor market shocks in the region.
----------------------
Identifying barriers to Muslim integration in France
Claire Adida, David Laitin & Marie-Anne Valfort
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Is there a Muslim disadvantage in economic integration for second-generation immigrants to Europe? Previous research has failed to isolate the effect that religion may have on an immigrant family's labor market opportunities because other factors, such as country of origin or race, confound the result. This paper uses a correspondence test in the French labor market to identify and measure this religious effect. The results confirm that in the French labor market, anti-Muslim discrimination exists: a Muslim candidate is 2.5 times less likely to receive a job interview callback than is his or her Christian counterpart. A high-n survey reveals, consistent with expectations from the correspondence test, that second-generation Muslim households in France have lower income compared with matched Christian households. The paper thereby contributes to both substantive debates on the Muslim experience in Europe and methodological debates on how to measure discrimination. Following the National Academy of Sciences' 2001 recommendations on combining a variety of methodologies and applying them to real-world situations, this research identifies, measures, and infers consequences of discrimination based on religious affiliation, controlling for potentially confounding factors, such as race and country of origin.
----------------------
Brown-Utility Heuristic? The Presence and Contributing Factors of Latino Linked Fate
Gabriel Sanchez & Natalie Masuoka
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, November 2010, Pages 519-531
Abstract:
In an electoral system governed by the plurality rule, those groups who wield the greatest amount of power in the United States are those who vote as a cohesive bloc. Although the size of the Latino population is growing, it is unclear whether all Latinos perceive a shared collective identity that will be exercised in the political realm. This study uses the Latino National Survey, a nationally representative telephone survey of 8,600 Latino adults, to examine how individual Latinos perceive their personal fates and the fate of their national origin group with the larger panethnic community. The authors utilize ordered logistic regression analysis to test their hypotheses regarding the impact of immigration experiences, race, and socioeconomic status on Latino linked fate. Results suggest that linked fate for Latinos may be a temporary phenomenon, as linked fate for Latinos appears to be based on marginalization derived from economic status and immigration experiences.
----------------------
The effect of education on health among US residents in relation to country of birth
Bosu Seo & Benjamin Senauer
Health Economics, January 2011, Pages 45-55
Abstract:
This research explores the impact of education on health in relation to an individual's country of birth using the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys for 2001-2004. We analyze health equations that relate health to education and other variables. Health is measured in terms of self-reported overall health, an index of biological risk factors, and body mass index. The primary hypothesis tested is whether education has a greater impact on immigrants' productive and allocative efficiency, because of their need to learn about how to remain healthy and access appropriate health care in a new environment. The empirical results indicate that for US residents, who were foreign-born, education is associated with a greater beneficial effect on every health outcome compared to those born in the United States. More education is related to an even greater positive effect on health for immigrants from Mexico, the origin of most immigrants, than from other countries. These results provide additional support for the portions of the 2007 Immigration Reform Act rejected by the US Congress, which placed a higher priority on education and job skills than current law. Since increased education and improved health are associated, such policy reform would help reduce the demands on the US health-care system.
----------------------
Do Immigrant Minority Parents Have More Consistent College Aspirations for Their Children?
Elizabeth Raleigh & Grace Kao
Social Science Quarterly, December 2010, Pages 1083-1102
Objective: Educational aspirations are an important predictor of eventual attainment. We examine if immigrant parents have higher aspirations for their children compared to native-born parents and whether they are more likely to maintain high aspirations over time.
Methods: Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), we document differences in the formation and maintenance of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian parents' college aspirations for their children between kindergarten, third, and fifth grades. We also examine the role of acculturation in the stability of immigrant parents' aspirations.
Results: We find that immigrant parents are more optimistic about their children's educational trajectories than are native-born parents and that over time they are more likely to maintain consistently high aspirations for their children.
Conclusion: Immigrant parents do not see their children's future as downwardly mobile, and instead remain optimistic, consistently reinforcing messages about college plans throughout childhood.
----------------------
The effects of bilingualism on toddlers' executive functioning
Diane Poulin-Dubois, Agnes Blaye, Julie Coutya & Ellen Bialystok
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children on tasks measuring executive functioning skills. This advantage is usually attributed to bilinguals' extensive practice in exercising selective attention and cognitive flexibility during language use because both languages are active when one of them is being used. We examined whether this advantage is observed in 24-month-olds who have had much less experience in language production. A battery of executive functioning tasks and the cognitive scale of the Bayley test were administered to 63 monolingual and bilingual children. Native bilingual children performed significantly better than monolingual children on the Stroop task, with no difference between groups on the other tasks, confirming the specificity of bilingual effects to conflict tasks reported in older children. These results demonstrate that bilingual advantages in executive control emerge at an age not previously shown.
----------------------
Amy Kandilov & Ivan Kandilov
Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Winter 2010, Pages 604-623
Abstract:
We estimate the effect of legalization on the wages and benefits of foreign-born agricultural workers. Using data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey, we employ propensity score matching techniques to compare legal permanent residents in the United States with an appropriate control group of undocumented workers. Consistent with previous findings, we show that becoming a legal permanent resident results in a modest wage gain of about 5%. Further, we provide novel evidence that, in addition to higher wages, legalization leads to a significantly higher likelihood of receiving some other form of compensation, such as employer-sponsored health insurance or a monetary bonus.
----------------------
The Residential Segregation of Mixed-Nativity Married Couples
John Iceland & Kyle Anne Nelson
Demography, November 2010, Pages 869-893
Abstract:
This article examines the ways in which mixed-nativity marriage is related to spatial assimilation in metropolitan areas of the United States. Specifically, we examine the residential patterns of households with a mixed-nativity - and, in some cases, interracial - marriage to determine whether they are less segregated from the native-born than entirely foreign-born households. Using restricted-use data from the 2000 census, we find that compared with couples in which both spouses are foreign-born, mixed-nativity couples tend to be less segregated from various native-born racial and ethnic groups. Further, among both foreign-born Asians and Hispanics, those with a native-born non-Hispanic white spouse are considerably less segregated from native-born white households than from other foreign-born Asian and Hispanic households. We also find that even though nativity status matters for black couples in a manner consistent with assimilation theory, foreign-born and mixed-nativity black households still each display very high levels of segregation from all other native-born racial/ethnic groups, reaffirming the power of race in determining residential patterns. Overall, our findings provide moderate support for spatial assimilation theory and suggest that cross-nativity marriages often facilitate the residential integration of the foreign-born.
----------------------
Reassessing the Impact of Hispanic Stereotypes on White Americans' Immigration Preferences
Lingyu Lu & Sean Nicholson-Crotty
Social Science Quarterly, December 2010, Pages 1312-1328
Objectives: There is disagreement in the literature on immigration attitudes regarding the relative importance of ethnic stereotypes and more general cultural and economic concerns about increasing immigration in the formation of those attitudes. We argue that the impact of stereotypes relative to these other factors may have been underestimated for a variety of reasons.
Methods: We test the impact of stereotypes on immigration preferences in data from the Multi-Ethnic Module of the 2000 General Social Survey. Because the dependent variables analyzed herein are ordinal, we estimate ordered logistic regressions that correct for diagnosed hetereoskedacticity.
Results: Statistical analyses confirm that negative stereotypes are a significantly larger predictor of ethnicity-specific immigration preferences relative to general attitudes about immigration. Intervening variables analyses also suggest that the impact of stereotypes has been underestimated relative to cultural and economic anxieties because these variables significantly mediate its observed impact.
Conclusions: The results suggest that ethnic stereotypes are significantly more important in determining immigration preferences among Americans than has been reported in previous research.
----------------------
'Some are more equal than others': Economic egalitarianism and welfare chauvinism in the Netherlands
Jeroen van der Waal, Peter Achterberg, Dick Houtman, Willem de Koster & Katerina Manevska
Journal of European Social Policy, October 2010, Pages 350-363
Abstract:
Various studies have demonstrated that while the lower educated support economic redistribution more than the higher educated do, they nonetheless dislike welfare support for immigrants more strongly. This paper aims to explain this remarkably particularistic application of the principle of economic egalitarianism ('welfare chauvinism') by testing three theories by means of survey data representative of the Dutch population (N = 1972). The first theory asserts that the low level of political competence of the lower educated is responsible, the second focuses on their weak economic position, and the third claims that their limited amount of cultural capital is decisive. Only the latter explanation is confirmed and implications for debates about ethnocentrism, deservingness and welfare state legitimacy, as well as the ideological profile of the lower-educated working class are discussed.
----------------------
How do high-skilled natives view high-skilled immigrants? A test of trade theory predictions
Michael O'Connell
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Trade theory suggests that natives with higher skills are more favourable to immigrants because immigrants, usually low-skilled, do not compete directly with them. What happens when immigrants are relatively high-skilled? Attitudes of respondents measured in the European Social Survey were examined. The coefficient between education and sentiment towards immigrants (while controlling for income and age) and its link with immigrant skill level of a country was assessed in a two-step analysis. No evidence to support trade theory predictions about high-skilled nationals' attitudes was found, probably because there are safeguards insulating high-skilled nationals from direct labour competition with high-skilled immigrants.
----------------------
How Many Immigrants? Foreign-Born Population Innumeracy in Europe
Daniel Herda
Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 2010, Pages 674-695
Abstract:
Individuals frequently perceive immigrant and minority population sizes to be much larger than they are in reality. To date, little is understood about the extent or causes of this phenomenon, known as innumeracy, which may have consequences for inter-group relations. However, before the literature can assess these consequences, a better understanding of the development of these misperceptions is needed. The extant literature focuses only on the United States and lacks a clear understanding of how innumeracy arises. Drawing from the 2002 European Social Survey (ESS), this study attempts to make sense of this phenomenon by proposing and testing a framework that views innumeracy among majority group members as developing in two ways: as cognitive mistakes and emotional responses. I establish the existence and extent of the phenomenon across 21 European nations, test new key predictors such as media exposure and socio-economic status, and find independent associations with cognitive and emotional factors using multi-level regression analyses.
----------------------
Immigrant banking and financial exclusion in Greater Boston
Pascale Joassart-Marcelli & Philip Stephens
Journal of Economic Geography, November 2010, Pages 883-912
Abstract:
Immigrants' lack of financial integration has been explained by individual characteristics including education, income, legal status and English ability, with little attention given to the geographic dimensions of banking. This article builds on the literature on financial exclusion and ecology to investigate the spatial relationships between Immigrant settlement patterns in Greater Boston in 2000 and accessibility to various types of financial institutions. The analysis reveals important differences among the 10 largest immigrant groups, with poorer and more isolated immigrants disproportionately exposed to check-cashers and pawn-brokers. Immigration interacts with race and class to create a complex intra-urban financial ecology of exclusion.