On queue
A Nation of Immigrants: Assimilation and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration
Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan & Katherine Eriksson
Journal of Political Economy, June 2014, Pages 467-506
Abstract:
During the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913), the United States maintained an open border, absorbing 30 million European immigrants. Prior cross-sectional work finds that immigrants initially held lower-paid occupations than natives but converged over time. In newly assembled panel data, we show that, in fact, the average immigrant did not face a substantial occupation-based earnings penalty upon first arrival and experienced occupational advancement at the same rate as natives. Cross-sectional patterns are driven by biases from declining arrival cohort skill level and departures of negatively selected return migrants. We show that assimilation patterns vary substantially across sending countries and persist in the second generation.
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Foreign Nurse Importation and the Supply of Native Nurses
Patricia Cortés & Jessica Pan
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The importation of foreign registered nurses has been used as a strategy to ease nursing shortages in the United States. The effectiveness of this policy depends critically on the long-run response of native nurses. We examine the effects of immigration of foreign-born registered nurses on the long-run employment and occupational choice of native nurses. Using a variety of empirical strategies that exploit the geographical distribution of immigrant nurses across US cities, we find evidence of large displacement effects -- over a ten-year period, for every foreign nurse that migrates to a city, between 1 to 2 fewer native nurses are employed in the city. We find similar results using data on nursing board exam-takers at the state level -- an increase in the flow of foreign nurses significantly reduces the number of natives sitting for licensure exams in more dependent states relative to less dependent states. Using data on self-reported workplace satisfaction among a sample of California nurses, we find suggestive evidence that part of the displacement effects could be driven by a decline in the perceived quality of the workplace environment.
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In the Belly of the Beast: Effects of Anti-Immigration Policy on Latino Community Members
Seline Szkupinski Quiroga, Dulce Medina & Jennifer Glick
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the experiences of Latino adults in South Phoenix, Arizona, during a time of changing immigration policy, through the theoretical lenses of structural vulnerability and macro- and microaggression. The analyses describe how U.S.- and foreign-born Latinos experience the effects of local immigration laws and anti-immigrant sentiment. The results suggest that while there are differences between the U.S.-born and foreign-born in perceived impacts of immigration enforcement, there are few differences in perceptions of vulnerability and no evidence of lesser psychological distress among those who are not the direct targets of immigration enforcement activities. Even if they do not feel directly at risk, most respondents express concerns for family members and others in their social networks as a result of increased attention to immigration enforcement or anti-immigrant sentiment. These shared impacts may have long-term implications for Latino communities in the United States.
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What Makes Muslims Feel French?
Rahsaan Maxwell & Erik Bleich
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we analyze the extent to which Muslims self-identify as French. A common interpretation of Muslim political attitudes assumes that Islam fundamentally conflicts with mainstream European society and that when Muslims are more attached to their religion they will be less likely to identify as French. We examine this assumption by exploring whether Muslim national identification is more strongly related to religiosity or other factors such as socio-economic status, social networks, and immigrant integration. Our results offer some support for each explanation, but we find that religiosity is not the dominant force shaping Muslims' attitudes. Instead, factors associated with immigrant integration have the most profound relationship with Muslim identification. These conclusions are supported by the fact that religiosity and immigrant integration variables have similar effects on the national identification of Christian immigrants. Our findings suggest that focusing on religiosity is not the best way to analyze Muslims' attitudes or identities, and that tensions surrounding Muslims' self-identification with France are likely to decrease in future generations, as immigrant integration proceeds through the increased prevalence of birth in France, having French citizenship, and French language fluency.
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The immigrant paradox: Immigrants are less antisocial than native-born Americans
Michael Vaughn et al.
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, July 2014, Pages 1129-1137
Purpose: Although recent research on crime and violence among immigrants suggests a paradox — where immigrants are more socially disadvantaged yet less likely to commit crime — previous research is limited by issues of generalizability and assessment of the full depth of antisocial behavior.
Methods: We surmount these limitations using data from waves I and II of the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) and compare immigrants (N = 7,320) from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America to native-born Americans (N = 34,622) with respect to violent and nonviolent forms of antisocial behavior.
Results: After controlling for an extensive array of confounds, results indicate that immigrants are significantly less antisocial despite being more likely to have lower levels of income, less education, and reside in urban areas. These findings hold for immigrants from major regions of the world including Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
Conclusions: This study confirms and extends prior research on crime and antisocial behavior, but suggests that it is premature however to think of immigrants as a policy intervention for treating high crime areas.
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Culture: Persistence and Evolution
Francesco Giavazzi, Ivan Petkov & Fabio Schiantarelli
NBER Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
This paper presents evidence on the speed of evolution (or lack thereof) of a wide range of values and beliefs of different generations of European immigrants to the US. The main result is that persistence differs greatly across cultural attitudes. Some, for instance deep personal religious values, some family and moral values, and political orientation converge very slowly to the prevailing US norm. Other, such as attitudes toward cooperation, redistribution, effort, children's independence, premarital sex, and even the frequency of religious practice or the intensity of association with one's religion, converge rather quickly. The results obtained studying higher generation immigrants differ greatly from those found when the analysis is limited to the second generation, as typically done in the literature, and they imply a lesser degree of persistence than previously thought. Finally, we show that persistence is "culture specific" in the sense that the country from which one's ancestors came matters for the pattern of generational convergence.
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Angel Aguiar & Terrie Walmsley
Economic Modelling, August 2014, Pages 253–262
Abstract:
In an attempt to control the flow of undocumented immigrants, successive U.S. governments have considered large scale deportation, amnesties, expanding visa programs, and fining firms who hire undocumented workers. Using a comparative static model, Aguiar and Walmsley (2013), find that amnesties have a positive impact on the U.S. economy. However, such policies are one-time changes in the labor force, whose benefits diminish over time, and which are unlikely to stop the flow of undocumented workers or fulfill the demands of U.S. firms for cheap foreign labor. In this paper, we use a global dynamic model to investigate the long run implications of three policy scenarios: 1) a one-time amnesty for undocumented workers living in the U.S.; 2) a permanent increase in the number of foreign worker visas; and 3) enhanced border security. We find that an amnesty is much less effective than a permanent increase in the number of visas at promoting economic growth in the U.S., while enhanced border control by the U.S. has a small negative effect due to the relative size of the undocumented labor market in the U.S. Combined, the three policies offer a mechanism for supporting U.S. short- and long-term economic growth, while also benefiting suppliers of migrant workers, such as Mexico.
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Trapped in the Working Class? Prospects for the Intergenerational (Im)Mobility of Latino Youth
Veronica Terriquez
Sociological Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Opportunities for upward mobility have been declining in the United States in recent decades. Within this context, I examine the mobility trajectories of a contemporary cohort of 1.5-, second-, and third-plus-generation Latino youth. Drawing on survey data from California that accounts for the precarious legal status of many 1.5 generation immigrants, I find that Latino youths' patterns of postsecondary enrollment and employment do not differ by generation since migration. Additionally, I do not find evidence of racial/ethnic barriers to Latino youths' enrollment in less selective colleges and participation in the labor market. Yet, given the low socioeconomic origins of many Latino youth and their correspondingly low 4-year college enrollment rates, only a small proportion will likely enjoy upward mobility through jobs that require a bachelor's degree. Overall, the cohort of Latino youth coming of age during the Great Recession is poised to experience working-class stagnation. This group's future access to economic and political positions of power will likely be limited by their low enrollment rates in 4-year colleges in general, but in selective postsecondary institutions in particular.
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René Flores
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
As Hispanic immigrants have moved beyond traditional immigrant gateways in recent years, local restrictive immigrant ordinances have proliferated. Although scholars have studied the determinants of these policies, we still know little about their social consequences. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data with 103 white, black, and Hispanic residents, collected in 2007 and 2011 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, which passed an anti-immigrant ordinance in 2006, the author found that the law motivated anti-immigrant activism, hardened native views of Hispanics (regardless of documentation status), and increased native whites’ fears of lawlessness and crime. By 2011, however, locals reported significantly lower ethnic animosity, and the Latino population, led by Dominicans, continued to grow. This research reveals the unintended consequences of symbolic exclusionary laws and also highlights their limitations. It also demonstrates the capacity that microlevel political factors have to affect immigrant incorporation and intergroup relations and shows that the recent spread of local and state immigrant restrictionist policies may negatively affect immigrants’ ability to incorporate in new destinations of settlement at least in the short term.
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The Two-Way Street of Acculturation, Discrimination, and Latino Immigration Restrictionism
Francisco Pedraza
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Existing research concludes that acculturation converges Latino immigration policy views with those of Anglo-Americans. Yet, polls show few Latinos support restricting immigration. This article reconciles these statements with theory and evidence. I argue acculturation is part of a broader give-and-take process, the two-way street in which the contrast between expected and perceived treatment by the receiving community shapes whether or not Latino acculturation leads to restrictionism and “convergence” with Anglos. Regression analysis of survey data shows that perceived group discrimination, but not perceived individual discrimination or Latino within-group discrimination, moderates the link between acculturation and support for restrictive policy.
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Arturo Vargas Bustamante & Jie Chen
Health Services Research, forthcoming
Objective: We study the association between the timing of the Great Recession (GR) and health spending among uninsured adults distinguishing by citizenship/nativity status and time of U.S. residence.
Data Source: Uninsured U.S. citizens and noncitizens from the 2005–2006 and 2008–2009 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.
Principal Findings: The probability of reporting any spending diminished for recent immigrants compared to citizens during the GR. For those with any spending, recent immigrants reported higher spending during the GR (27 percent). Average reductions in total spending were driven by the decline in the share of the population reporting any spending among citizens and noncitizens.
Conclusions: Our study findings suggest that recent immigrants could be forgoing essential care, which later translates into higher spending. It portrays the vulnerability of a population that would remain exposed to income shocks, even after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) implementation.
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Gender Inequalities in the Education of the Second Generation in Western Countries
Fenella Fleischmann et al.
Sociology of Education, July 2014, Pages 143-170
Abstract:
Drawing on comparative analyses from nine Western countries, we ask whether local-born children from a wide range of immigrant groups show patterns of female advantage in education that are similar to those prevalent in their host Western societies. We consider five outcomes throughout the educational career: test scores or grades at age 15, continuation after compulsory schooling, choice of academic track in upper-secondary education, completion of upper secondary, and completion of tertiary education. Despite great variation in gender gaps in education in immigrants’ origin countries (with advantages for males in many cases), we find that the female advantage in education observed among the majority population is usually present among second-generation immigrants. We interpret these findings in light of ideas about gender role socialization and immigrant selectivity.
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Noreen Goldman et al.
Demography, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although many studies have attempted to examine the consequences of Mexico-U.S. migration for Mexican immigrants’ health, few have had adequate data to generate the appropriate comparisons. In this article, we use data from two waves of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) to compare the health of current migrants from Mexico with those of earlier migrants and nonmigrants. Because the longitudinal data permit us to examine short-term changes in health status subsequent to the baseline survey for current migrants and for Mexican residents, as well as to control for the potential health selectivity of migrants, the results provide a clearer picture of the consequences of immigration for Mexican migrant health than have previous studies. Our findings demonstrate that current migrants are more likely to experience recent changes in health status — both improvements and declines — than either earlier migrants or nonmigrants. The net effect, however, is a decline in health for current migrants: compared with never migrants, the health of current migrants is much more likely to have declined in the year or two since migration and not significantly more likely to have improved. Thus, it appears that the migration process itself and/or the experiences of the immediate post-migration period detrimentally affect Mexican immigrants’ health.
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The Land of the Free: Undocumented Families in the Juvenile Justice System
Caitlin Cavanagh & Elizabeth Cauffman
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Approximately 8 million Latinos in the United States are undocumented immigrants, nearly half of whom are parents to a minor. Concerns over deportation may affect the way families with undocumented members perceive legal authorities relative to documented immigrant families. Yet, there have been few studies on how Latinos (documented or undocumented) interact with, and form attitudes about, police and no studies on adjudicated youth from families with an undocumented member. To address this gap, 155 pairs (N = 310) of Latina immigrant mothers and their first-time offending sons were interviewed. More than half of the mothers, and 12.3% of youth, were undocumented residents. Controlling for key contextual factors, youth whose mothers were undocumented held more negative attitudes toward the police than youth whose mothers were documented. Youth, however, did not perceive judges differently based on mother’s documentation status, suggesting that documentation status relates to police specifically rather than justice system attitudes broadly. The same pattern was noted when considering youth’s own documentation status. Because negative attitudes toward police have been associated with decreased reports of victimization and other crimes, policy related to undocumented immigration should consider the unintended effects of such laws.
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Police Arrests in a Time of Uncertainty: The Impact of 287(g) on Arrests in a New Immigrant Gateway
Katharine Donato & Leslie Ann Rodríguez
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a novel data set created from police narratives between 2005 and 2010, this article examines whether and how police reporting varies before and after the implementation of 287(g), a local enforcement program located in Nashville’s Davidson County, a new immigrant gateway city. We examine patterns of symbolic language used by police officers related to arrests of immigrants and U.S. natives, and examine whether differences emerge before and after May 2007, when the 287(g) program began. Results show significant shifts in the reasons given for arrests before and after implementation of 287(g), and characteristics about foreignness such as country of origin, language use, and legal status that became more salient after 287(g). We argue that the 287(g) program — coupled with the political climate in which it was embedded — bestowed salience on traits that, in the past, were not relevant. That is, our findings suggest that anti-immigrant laws, such as 287(g), play an important role in the social construction of legal status among police officers.
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Perceptions of Commonality and Latino-Black, Latino-White Relations in a Multiethnic United States
Betina Cutaia Wilkinson
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines the extent that Latinos’ sense of social, economic, and political power shapes their perceptions of commonality with blacks and whites. In accordance with my theory, which builds on the racial threat and group position theories, I find that Latinos’ sense of power structures their perceptions of blacks and whites. When native-born Latinos feel economically threatened, they are less likely to perceive commonality with blacks. When native-born Latinos gain some political influence, they identify less with whites. Among Latino immigrants who perceive discrimination, residing in a high-threat economic setting is negatively related to perceiving commonality with whites.
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Selection, Language Heritage, and the Earnings Trajectories of Black Immigrants in the United States
Tod Hamilton
Demography, June 2014, Pages 975-1002
Abstract:
Research suggests that immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean surpass the earnings of U.S.-born blacks approximately one decade after arriving in the United States. Using data from the 1980–2000 U.S. censuses and the 2005–2007 American Community Surveys on U.S.-born black and non-Hispanic white men as well as black immigrant men from all the major sending regions of the world, I evaluate whether selective migration and language heritage of immigrants’ birth countries account for the documented earnings crossover. I validate the earnings pattern of black immigrants documented in previous studies, but I also find that the earnings of most arrival cohorts of immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, after residing in the United States for more than 20 years, are projected to converge with or slightly overtake those of U.S.-born black internal migrants. The findings also show three arrival cohorts of black immigrants from English-speaking African countries are projected to surpass the earnings of U.S.-born black internal migrants. No arrival cohort of black immigrants is projected to surpass the earnings of U.S.-born non-Hispanic whites. Birth-region analysis shows that black immigrants from English-speaking countries experience more rapid earnings growth than immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. The arrival-cohort and birth-region variation in earnings documented in this study suggest that selective migration and language heritage of black immigrants’ birth countries are important determinants of their initial earnings and earnings trajectories in the United States.
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Anti-Immigrant Ordinances and Discrimination in New and Established Destinations
Kim Ebert & Sarah Ovink
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
Immigrants and their children come to the U.S. in search of upward mobility, but in many contexts they experience discrimination and restrictive political climates. Contexts vary widely, however, given the growing number of new immigrant destinations. Past studies tend to focus on what immigrants and their children are (or are not) doing to adapt to local contexts, a focus that strengthens the perception that immigrants are a “problem” group. In this article, we move the debate away from more familiar economic analyses to assess how destination type and exclusionary ordinances, defined as laws that restrict the rights of and services accorded to immigrant groups, influence “subjective” outcomes, including reports of discrimination among Mexican Americans. Our results reveal three main findings that illustrate the importance of local context. First, individuals living in a county with a greater share of co-ethnics report fewer experiences with discrimination. Second, in counties with an exclusionary ordinance, share of co-ethnics increases reports of discrimination. Finally, being born in the U.S. and speaking English do not provide protection from discrimination; rather, such characteristics shield Mexican Americans from discrimination only in contexts with larger shares of co-ethnics.
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Disparities in Early Exposure to Book Sharing Within Immigrant Families
Natalia Festa et al.
Pediatrics, July 2014, Pages e162-e168
Objective: This study examined the early developmental context of children in immigrant families (CIF), measured by the frequency with which parents share books with their children.
Methods: Trends in the frequency with which parents report book sharing, defined in this analysis as reading or sharing picture books with their young children, were analyzed across immigrant and nonimmigrant households by using data from the 2005, 2007, and 2009 California Health Interview Survey. Stepwise multivariate logistic regression assessed the likelihood that CIF shared books with parents daily.
Results: In this study, 57.5% of parents in immigrant families reported daily book sharing (DBS), compared with 75.8% of native-born parents. The lowest percentage of DBS was seen in Hispanic families with 2 foreign-born parents (47.1%). When controlling for independent variables, CIF with 2 foreign-born parents had the lowest odds of sharing books daily (odds ratio [OR]: 0.61; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.54–0.68). When stratified by race/ethnicity, separate multivariate logistic regressions revealed CIF status to be associated with lower odds of DBS for Asian (OR: 0.56; 95% CI: 0.38–0.81) and Hispanic CIF (OR: 0.49; 95% CI: 0.42–0.58).
Conclusions: There is an association between the lower odds of DBS and parental immigrant status, especially for Hispanic and Asian children. This relationship holds after controlling for variables thought to explain differences in literacy-related practices, such as parental education and income. Because book sharing is central to children’s development of early literacy and language skills, this disparity merits further exploration with the aim of informing future interventions.