On the Move
Mary MacKinnon & Daniel Parent
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
Approximately 1 million French-Canadians moved to the United States, mainly between 1865 and 1930, and most settled in neighboring New England. In 1900 almost a fifth of all persons born in French Canada lived in the U.S. These migrants exerted considerable efforts to maintain their language and to replicate their home country institutions, most notably the schooling system, in their new country. For decades, this resistance to assimilation generated considerable attention and concern in the U.S. The concerns are strikingly similar to those often invoked today in discussions of immigration from Hispanic countries, notably Mexico. Mexicans may not be assimilating into mainstream America as European immigrants did. We look at the convergence in the educational attainment of French Canadian immigrants across generations relative to native English-speaking New Englanders and to European Roman Catholic immigrants. The educational attainment of Franco-Americans lagged that of their fellow citizens over a long period of time. By the time of the 2000 Census, they appear to have largely achieved parity. The effects of World War II, especially military service, were very important in speeding up the assimilation process through a variety of related channels: educational attainment, language assimilation, marrying outside the ethnic group, and moving out of New England. Economic assimilation was very gradual because of the persistence of ethnic enclaves.
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Substitution Between Immigrants, Natives, and Skill Groups
George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger & Gordon Hanson
NBER Working Paper, September 2011
Abstract:
The wage impact of immigration depends crucially on the elasticity of substitution between similarly skilled immigrants and natives and the elasticity of substitution between high school dropouts and graduates. This paper revisits the estimation of these elasticities. The U.S. data indicate that equally skilled immigrants and natives are perfect substitutes. The value of the second elasticity depends on how one controls for changes in demand that have differentially affected high school dropouts and graduates. The groups are imperfect substitutes under standard trend assumptions, but even slight deviations from these assumptions can lead to an outright rejection of the CES framework.
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Robert Outten et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
In many Western countries, the proportion of the population that is White will drop below 50% within the next century. Two experiments examined how anticipation of these future ethnic demographics affects current intergroup processes. In Study 1, White Americans who viewed actual demographic projections for a time when Whites are no longer a numerical majority felt more angry toward and fearful of ethnic minorities than Whites who did not view future projections. Whites who viewed the future projections also felt more sympathy for their ingroup than Whites in the control condition. In Study 2, the authors replicated the effects for intergroup emotions with a sample of White Canadians. White Canadians who thought about a future in which Whites were a numerical minority appraised the ingroup as more threatened, which mediated the effect of condition on intergroup emotions. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for race relations in increasingly diverse societies.
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Internal Migration in the United States
Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith & Abigail Wozniak
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011, Pages 173-196
Abstract:
This paper examines the history of internal migration in the United States since the 1980s. By most measures, internal migration in the United States is at a 30-year low. The widespread decline in migration rates across a large number of subpopulations suggests that broad-based economic forces are likely responsible for the decrease. An obvious question is the extent to which the recent housing market contraction and the recession may have caused this downward trend in migration: after all, relocation activity often involves both housing market activity and changes in employment. However, we find relatively small roles for both of these cyclical factors. While we will suggest a few other possible explanations for the recent decrease in migration, the puzzle remains. Finally, we compare U.S. migration to other developed countries. Despite the steady decline in U.S. migration, the commonly held belief that Americans are more mobile than their European counterparts still appears to hold true.
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Residential mobility moderates preferences for egalitarian versus loyal helpers
Janetta Lun, Shigehiro Oishi & Elizabeth Tenney
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research examines whether the experience and the expectation of residential mobility related to the type of helpers whom people wanted to befriend and work with. We predicted and found that people who moved more frequently before college (Studies 1 & 2) preferred those who were likely to extend a helpful hand to those outside their immediate social circles. By contrast, people who had not moved preferred those who prioritized helping in-group members over strangers. Study 3 tested the hypothesis by priming the expectation of residential mobility versus stability and replicated the findings with residential mobility but did not find difference in the stability condition. These results suggest that residential mobility does not merely change people's living environments but also affects interpersonal preferences and with whom people would like to associate.
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"For Fear of Persecution": Displaced Salvadorans and U.S. Refugee Policy in the 1980s
Stephen Macekura
Journal of Policy History, Fall 2011, Pages 357-380
"From its beginnings in 1979 to its negotiated peace settlement in 1992, the Salvadoran civil war was one of the most violent and protracted conflicts in the world. Almost immediately, the war transformed from a vicious local struggle to a key episode in the Cold War. Although American journalists, politicians, and activists focused heavily on the numerous atrocities committed by both leftist guerrillas and government-sponsored right-wing paramilitaries, caught amid the chaos and seemingly endless violence were the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans displaced from their homes. In the 1980s, more than five hundred thousand of these displaced persons gradually moved northward, first into Mexico and ultimately toward the United States border. This migration en masse of Salvadorans sparked an intensely politicized debate over U.S. refugee policy and consequently helped to shape the legal contours and political culture surrounding immigration. The key to understanding the Salvadoran refugee crisis in the United States lies in two areas: the Carter administration's reconfiguration of refugee policy in 1980 and the Reagan administration's subsequent implementation of the new law...Yet this legal change rendered displaced Salvadorans without recourse for claiming refugee status as a national group in the United States. For throughout much of the 1980s, the Reagan administration publicly classified Salvadoran refugee claimants as 'economic migrants' seeking personal gain, not political safe-haven."
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The Impact of Immigration on the Structure of Wages: Theory and Evidence from Britain
Marco Manacorda, Alan Manning & Jonathan Wadsworth
Journal of the European Economic Association, forthcoming
Abstract:
Immigration to the UK, particularly among more educated workers, has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply. However studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native-born workers in the UK. This is potentially puzzling since there is evidence that changes in the supply of educated natives have had significant effects on their wages. Using a pooled time series of British cross-sectional micro data on male wages and employment from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, this paper offers one possible resolution to this puzzle, namely that in the UK natives and foreign born workers are imperfect substitutes. We show that immigration has primarily reduced the wages of immigrants - and in particular of university educated immigrants - with little discernable effect on the wages of the native-born.
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The Political Incorporation of Cuban Americans: Why Won't Little Havana Turn Blue?
Benjamin Bishin & Casey Klofstad
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines the political implications of the changing demographics of the Cuban American community. Over the past decade, pundits have predicted a massive shift in Cuban American voting behavior owing to demographic changes in the community. The authors find evidence that the attitudes of Cuban Americans have undergone significant changes, driven largely by the increased number of post-Mariel (1980) immigrants. The authors also find, however, that these dramatic changes have not yet been reflected at the ballot box, nor are they likely to be soon, owing to the slow process of immigrant political incorporation.
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Ethnicity and Population Structure in Personal Naming Networks
Pablo Mateos, Paul Longley & David O'Sullivan
PLoS ONE, September 2011, e22943
Abstract:
Personal naming practices exist in all human groups and are far from random. Rather, they continue to reflect social norms and ethno-cultural customs that have developed over generations. As a consequence, contemporary name frequency distributions retain distinct geographic, social and ethno-cultural patterning that can be exploited to understand population structure in human biology, public health and social science. Previous attempts to detect and delineate such structure in large populations have entailed extensive empirical analysis of naming conventions in different parts of the world without seeking any general or automated methods of population classification by ethno-cultural origin. Here we show how 'naming networks', constructed from forename-surname pairs of a large sample of the contemporary human population in 17 countries, provide a valuable representation of cultural, ethnic and linguistic population structure around the world. This innovative approach enriches and adds value to automated population classification through conventional national data sources such as telephone directories and electoral registers. The method identifies clear social and ethno-cultural clusters in such naming networks that extend far beyond the geographic areas in which particular names originated, and that are preserved even after international migration. Moreover, one of the most striking findings of this approach is that these clusters simply 'emerge' from the aggregation of millions of individual decisions on parental naming practices for their children, without any prior knowledge introduced by the researcher. Our probabilistic approach to community assignment, both at city level as well as at a global scale, helps to reveal the degree of isolation, integration or overlap between human populations in our rapidly globalising world. As such, this work has important implications for research in population genetics, public health, and social science adding new understandings of migration, identity, integration and social interaction across the world.
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Labor Reallocation over the Business Cycle: New Evidence from Internal Migration
Raven Saks & Abigail Wozniak
Journal of Labor Economics, October 2011, Pages 697-739
Abstract:
This article establishes the cyclical properties of a novel measure of worker reallocation: long-distance migration rates within the United States. Combining evidence from a number of data sets spanning the entire postwar era, we find that internal migration within the United States is procyclical. This result cannot be explained by cyclical variation in relative local economic conditions, suggesting that the net benefit of moving rises during booms. Migration is most procyclical for younger labor-force participants. Therefore, cyclical fluctuations in the net benefit of moving appear to be related to conditions in the labor market and the spatial reallocation of labor.
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Labor Market Outcomes for Legal Mexican Immigrants Under the New Regime of Immigration Enforcement
Kerstin Gentsch & Douglas Massey
Social Science Quarterly, September 2011, Pages 875-893
Objectives: This article documents the effects of increasingly restrictive immigration and border policies on Mexican migrant workers in the United States.
Methods: Drawing on data from the Mexican Migration Project, we create a data file that links age, education, English-language ability, and cumulative U.S. experience in three legal categories (documented, undocumented, guest worker) to the occupational status and wage attained by migrant household heads on their most recent U.S. trip.
Results: We find that the wage and occupational returns to various forms of human capital generally declined after harsher policies were imposed and enforcement dramatically increased after 1996, especially for U.S.
experience and English-language ability.
Conclusion: These results indicate that the labor-market status of legal immigrants has deteriorated significantly in recent years as larger shares of the migrant workforce came to lack labor rights, either because they were undocumented or because they held temporary visas that did not allow mobility or bargaining over wages and working conditions.
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Priming the Sleeping Giant: The Dynamics of Latino Political Identity and Vote Choice
Melinda Jackson
Political Psychology, August 2011, Pages 691-716
Abstract:
Latinos are commonly referred to as the "sleeping giant" in American politics, and interest in the political potential of this fastest-growing American ethnic group has risen in recent years. This article examines the influence of Latino political identity on voting preferences in the 2006 California gubernatorial election. A survey experiment linking Latino identity to support for either the Democratic or Republican candidate finds that vote preferences were influenced by group cues and that this effect was strongest in increasing support for the Democratic candidate among Latino Republicans and independents. The influence of Latino political identity is modeled as a two-step process of social identification and group influence, both of which are found to interact with prior partisanship. These findings support a model of political identity that views identity as malleable and subject to contextual influences.
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La voz gringa: Latino stylization of linguistic (in)authenticity as social critique
Lauren Mason Carris
Discourse & Society, July 2011, Pages 474-490
Abstract:
Through discourse analysis of a transcribed conversation in a southern California Mexican restaurant, I identify a discursive practice in which Latina/os mock a white woman's pronunciation of Spanish. Specifically, I examine how participants call attention to linguistic features associated with whiteness in her pronunciation of puto, a pejorative Spanish slang term used to refer to gay men, similar to the use of 'faggot' in American English. By using Valley-Girl-esque phonology (Eckert, 2000; Fought, 2006; Goodwin and Alim, 2010), higher pitch, and politeness formulas, participants draw on linguistic correlates intricately tied to ideologies of whiteness. I call this practice la voz gringa, and show how its use simultaneously calls into question multiple social identities, disrupts the dominant sociolinguistic ordering of white Mainstream English with respect to Latina/o language, and challenges racial/ethnic power dynamics between whites and Latina/os.
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Immigration and the Health of U.S. Black Adults: Does Country of Origin Matter?
Tod Hamilton & Robert Hummer
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous work suggests that regional variation in pre-migration exposure to racism and discrimination predicts differences in individual-level health among black immigrants to the United States. We exploit data on both region and country of birth for black immigrants in the United States and methodology that allows for the identification of arrival cohorts to test whether there are sending country differences in the health of black adults in the United States. While testing this hypothesis, we also document heterogeneity in health across arrival cohorts and by duration of U.S. residence among black immigrants. Using data on working-age immigrant and U.S.-born blacks taken from the 1996-2010 waves of the March Current Population Survey, we show that relative to U.S.-born black adults, black immigrants report significantly lower odds of fair/poor health. After controlling for relevant social and demographic characteristics, immigrants' cohort of arrival, and immigrants' duration in the United States, our models show only modest differences in health between African immigrants and black immigrants who migrate from the other major sending countries or regions. Results also show that African immigrants maintain their health advantage over U.S.-born black adults after more than 20 years in the United States. In contrast, black immigrants from the West Indies who have been in the United States for more than 20 years appear to experience some downward health assimilation. In conclusion, after accounting for relevant factors, we find that there are only modest differences in black immigrant health across countries of origin. Black immigrants appear to be very highly selected in terms of good health, although there are some indications of negative health assimilation for black immigrants from the West Indies.