A pass on immigration
Does salary discrimination persist for foreign athletes in the NBA?
Adam Hoffer & Ryan Freidel
Applied Economics Letters, Winter 2014, Pages 1-5
Abstract:
This study empirically examines Becker’s (1971) wage discrimination theory using foreign-born National Basketball Association (NBA) players. Despite the rapid growth in the NBA, particularly in foreign markets, existing literature suggests that foreign-born players continue to be underpaid relative to players born in the United States. Becker’s theory predicts that, over time, wage discriminators will be priced out of the market and that wages will eventually equilibrate. This study uses the most recent data, from the 2010 to 2011 NBA season, to test if foreign-born discrimination persists. The empirical results from this study reveal that not only have wages for foreign players caught up to the wages of their American counterparts, but foreign-born players received an average wage premium of approximately $900 000.
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Kevin Mongeon
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article tests for salary discrimination based on player ethnicities in the National Hockey League across various geographical locations with a market model that analyzes every game played during the 2010-2011 season. Using both the relative share of game-team players on the starting roster and time on ice as inputs, results suggest that, relative to English Canadian players, French Canadian and American players playing on Canadian teams suffer from wage discrimination. Potential confounding factors that can influence the inferences, as well as the limitations, of the market model approach are discussed.
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Todd Hartman, Benjamin Newman & Scott Bell
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consistent with theories of modern racism, we argue that white, non-Hispanic Americans have adopted a “coded,” race-neutral means of expressing prejudice toward Hispanic immigrants by citing specific behaviors that are deemed inappropriate — either because they are illegal or threatening in an economic or cultural manner. We present data from a series of nationally representative, survey-embedded experiments to tease out the distinct role that anti-Hispanic prejudice plays in shaping public opinion on immigration. Our results show that white Americans take significantly greater offense to transgressions such as being in the country illegally, “working under the table,” and rejecting symbols of American identity, when the perpetrating immigrant is Hispanic rather than White (or unspecified). In addition, we demonstrate that these ethnicity-based group differences in public reactions shape support for restrictive immigration policies. The findings from this article belie the claim of non-prejudice and race-neutrality avowed by many opponents of immigration.
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Understanding the Impact of Immigration on Crime
Jörg Spenkuch
American Law and Economics Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Almost three quarters of Americans believe that immigration increases crime. Yet, existing academic research has shown no such effect. Using panel data on U.S. counties, this paper presents empirical evidence on a systematic, but small impact of immigration on crime. Consistent with the economic model of crime this effect is stronger for crimes motivated by financial gain, such as motor vehicle theft and robbery. Moreover, the effect is only present for those immigrants most likely to have poor labor market outcomes. Failure to account for the cost of increased crime would overstate the “immigration surplus,” but it would not reverse its sign.
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Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes
Sophia Wallace, Chris Zepeda-Millán & Michael Jones-Correa
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article utilizes data from the Latino National Survey (2006) to analyze temporal and spatial variation in the effects of the immigrant rights marches in 2006 on Latino attitudes towards trust in government and self-efficacy. Using a unique protest dataset, we examine the effects of proximity and scale by mapping respondents’ specific geographic location against the location of the marches as well as size of the protests using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We find that local proximity to small marches had a positive impact on feelings of efficacy, whereas large-scale protests led to lower feelings of efficacy. The results shed light on the role localized political events can play in shaping feelings towards government, the importance of conceptions of space and time to the study of social movements, and the positive outcomes that can result from contentious politics.
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Laura Huang, Marcia Frideger & Jone Pearce
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose and test a new theory explaining glass-ceiling bias against nonnative speakers as driven by perceptions that nonnative speakers have weak political skill. Although nonnative accent is a complex signal, its effects on assessments of the speakers’ political skill are something that speakers can actively mitigate; this makes it an important bias to understand. In Study 1, White and Asian nonnative speakers using the same scripted responses as native speakers were found to be significantly less likely to be recommended for a middle-management position, and this bias was fully mediated by assessments of their political skill. The alternative explanations of race, communication skill, and collaborative skill were nonsignificant. In Study 2, entrepreneurial start-up pitches from national high-technology, new-venture funding competitions were shown to experienced executive MBA students. Nonnative speakers were found to have a significantly lower likelihood of receiving new-venture funding, and this was fully mediated by the coders’ assessments of their political skill. The entrepreneurs’ race, communication skill, and collaborative skill had no effect. We discuss the value of empirically testing various posited reasons for glass-ceiling biases, how the importance and ambiguity of political skill for executive success serve as an ostensibly meritocratic cover for nonnative speaker bias, and other theoretical and practical implications of this work.
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Domenic Vitiello
Journal of Urban Affairs, forthcoming
Abstract:
Amidst debates over the impacts of immigration, cities and towns across the United States have alternately opposed or welcomed unauthorized immigrants. Although their “illegal immigration relief acts” and “sanctuary laws” are typically justified in terms of law and order, they also grow from divergent hopes, concerns, and assumptions about newcomers’ integration and effects on local revitalization. These issues have gained importance beyond central cities with the suburbanization of immigration and the economic decline of older suburbs in recent decades. This article explores the case of two adjacent, formerly industrial towns in suburban Philadelphia, examining local leaders’ respective rationale for seeking to incorporate unauthorized immigrants in Norristown and to restrict their settlement and employment in neighboring Bridgeport. Despite their obvious similarities, these towns’ distinct experiences of race, migration, and revitalization explain much of their divergent responses.
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Wage Mobility of Foreign-Born Workers in the United States
Seik Kim
Journal of Human Resources, Summer 2013, Pages 628-658
Abstract:
This paper presents new evidence on whether foreign-born workers assimilate. While the existing literature focuses on the convergence/divergence of average wages, this study extends the analysis to the distribution of wages by looking at wage mobility. We measure the foreign-native gap in year-to-year transition probabilities from one decile group to another of a wage distribution, where the deciles are determined by native samples. Our results, based on the Current Population Survey for 1996–2008, suggest that immigrants in middle and bottom decile groups, who are the majority of immigrants, tend to fall behind relative to natives in the same decile groups.
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Ruth Ditlmann & Paul Lagunes
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current field experiment investigated if and how Latinos versus Anglos experience biased treatment in a setting where documentation is relevant. In an audit experiment, Latino customers were treated differently than a matched team of Anglo customers when making $10 check payments at retail stores. Specifically, Latinos were asked to present an identification card (ID) more frequently than Anglo customers, were quoted a higher minimum-dollar amount for purchasing a gift certificate, and received more negative affect from salespersons. Among those who were asked for identification, a municipal-issued ID card was declined at equal rates from Latinos and Anglos, while an unofficial ID card was declined more from Anglos than Latinos. The association of Latino identity with foreignness and undocumented immigration, and the potential of municipal-ID card programs to serve undocumented immigrants are discussed.
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Shanto Iyengar et al.
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper demonstrates that citizens in seven advanced industrialized democracies generally oppose more open immigration policies, but stand ready to admit individual immigrants. Using an experimental design, we demonstrate the applicability of the “person-positivity bias” to immigration and investigate the effects of economic and cultural “deservingness” on evaluations of individual immigrants. Our results show that immigrants from professional backgrounds elicit higher levels of support than unskilled workers. The bias against unskilled workers is enlarged among immigrants accompanied by families. In comparison with occupational status and the number of family dependents, the target immigrant’s cultural attributes — as measured by Middle Eastern nationality and Afrocentric appearance — prove relatively inconsequential as criteria for evaluating immigrants.
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Richard Stansfield
Journal of Urban Affairs, forthcoming
Abstract:
As the literature examining the relationship between immigration and crime continues to evolve, scholars are now searching for ways to expand this link conceptually. Hand in hand with immigration, the number of Hispanic-owned businesses has grown at rates far exceeding the growth rate for all US businesses over the past two decades, carrying the expectation of local and national government officials of bringing jobs and revenue back into the economy. Yet research on how this growth in minority-owned businesses can help explain ecological crime variation is scarce. This study examines the role of Hispanic-owned businesses in the relationship between immigration and total property and violent crime rates, confirming that cities with higher rates of new immigration are not associated with higher violent crime rates, and have significantly lower property crime rates. Additional analyses examining whether this relationship is mediated by the presence of Hispanic-owned businesses also yield empirical support. The presence of Hispanic-owned businesses was found to attenuate the new immigration–property crime relationship significantly, and to render the association of immigration and property crime rates nonsignificant. The implications of these findings will be discussed, in so far as they relate to both public policy and research on immigration and crime.
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Cultural Diversity and Economic Growth: Evidence from the US during the Age of Mass Migration
Philipp Ager & Markus Brückner
European Economic Review, November 2013, Pages 76–97
Abstract:
We exploit the large inflow of immigrants to the US during the 1870–1920 period to examine the effects that within-county changes in the cultural composition of the US population had on output growth. We construct measures of fractionalization and polarization to distinguish between the different effects of cultural diversity. Our main finding is that increases in cultural fractionalization significantly increased output, while increases in cultural polarization significantly decreased output. We address the issue of identifying the causal effects of cultural diversity by using the supply-push component of immigrant inflows as an instrumental variable.
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Maureen Craig & Jennifer Richeson
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many controversial immigration policies have recently emerged across the United States and abroad. We explore the role of national context in shaping support for such policies. Specifically, we examine whether the extent to which ideological attitudes — Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) — predict policy support is moderated by the national context of the policy. Across three studies, United States citizens read about a controversial immigration policy affecting either their own country (United States) or a foreign country (Israel or Singapore) and indicated their support for the policy. Results reveal that SDO predicts policy support, regardless of its national context; this effect is mediated by perceived competition. Conversely, RWA predicts policy support only if the policy affects domestic immigration; this effect is mediated by perceptions of cultural threat. Consistent with prior research, the present findings highlight the role of perceived cultural threat to one's ingroup and perceived competition in shaping attitudes toward immigration and shed light on some of the motivations underlying the recent rise in popularity of strict immigration policies.
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Immigrant Networks and Their Implications for Occupational Choice and Wages
Krishna Patel & Francis Vella
Review of Economics and Statistics, October 2013, Pages 1249-1277
Abstract:
Occupational shares of various ethnic groups have grew tremendously in regional U.S. labor markets from 1980 to 2000. Using U.S. Census data, we examine the extent to which this growth is attributed to network effects by studying the relationship between the occupational choice of recently arrived immigrants with those of established immigrants from the same country, We find strong evidence of network effects. First, new arrivals are choosing the same occupations as their compatriots, a decision that is operating at the regional level. Second, individuals who choose the most common occupation of their compatriots enjoy a large and positive earnings effect.
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Jennifer Merolla, Karthick Ramakrishnan & Chris Haynes
Perspectives on Politics, September 2013, Pages 789-807
Abstract:
Immigration has been a salient and contentious topic in the United States, with a great deal of congressional debate, advocacy efforts, and media coverage. Among conservative and liberal groups, there is a vigorous debate over the terms used to describe this population, such as “undocumented” or “illegal,” as both sides perceive significant consequences to public opinion that flow out of this choice in equivalency frames. These same groups also compete over the ways in which immigration policies are framed. Here, for the first time, we examine the use of both types of frames (of immigrants themselves, and the policies affecting them) in media coverage. Importantly, we also test for whether these various frames affect preferences on three different policies of legalization. Our results suggest that efforts to focus on the terms used to describe immigrants have limited effect, and that efforts to frame policy offer greater promise in swaying public opinion on immigration.
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Endophilia or Exophobia: Beyond Discrimination
Jan Feld, Nicolás Salamanca & Daniel Hamermesh
NBER Working Paper, September 2013
Abstract:
The immense literature on discrimination treats outcomes as relative: One group suffers compared to another. But does a difference arise because agents discriminate against others — are exophobic — or because they favor their own kind — are endophilic? This difference matters, as the relative importance of the types of discrimination and their inter-relation affect market outcomes. Using a field experiment in which graders at one university were randomly assigned students’ exams that did or did not contain the students’ names, on average we find favoritism but no discrimination by nationality, and neither favoritism nor discrimination by gender, findings that are robust to a wide variety of potential concerns. We observe heterogeneity in both discrimination and favoritism by nationality and by gender in the distributions of graders’ preferences. We show that a changing correlation between endophilia and exophobia can generate perverse changes in observed market discrimination.
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The Labor Market Effects of Immigration and Emigration in OECD Countries
Frédéric Docquier, Çaglar Ozden & Giovanni Peri
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we quantify the labor market effects of migration flows in OECD countries during the 1990's based on a new global database on the bilateral stock of migrants, by education level. We simulate various outcomes using an aggregate model of labor markets, parameterized by a range of estimates from the literature. We find that immigration had a positive effect on the wages of less educated natives and it increased or left unchanged the average native wages. Emigration, instead, had a negative effect on the wages of less educated native workers and increased inequality within countries.
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The Impact of Immigration on the Employment and Wages of Native Workers
Andri Chassamboulli & Theodore Palivos
Journal of Macroeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze the impact of the immigration influx that took place during the years 2000-2007 in Greece on labor market outcomes. We employ a search and matching framework that allows for skill heterogeneity and differential unemployment income (search cost) between immigrants and natives. Within such a framework, we find that skilled native workers, who complement immigrants in production, gain in terms of both wages and employment. The effects on unskilled native workers, who compete with immigrants, on the other hand, are ambiguous and depend first on the presence of a statutory minimum wage and second on the way that this minimum wage is determined.
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Impact of cultural diversity on wages, evidence from panel data
Simonetta Longhi
Regional Science and Urban Economics, September 2013, Pages 797–807
Abstract:
This paper combines individual data from the British Household Panel Survey and yearly population estimates for England to analyse the impact that cultural diversity has on individual wages. Do people living in more diverse areas earn higher wages after controlling for other observable and unobservable characteristics? The results show that cultural diversity is positively associated with wages, but only when cross-section data are used, while panel data estimations show no impact of diversity. Since natives with comparatively higher skills – and wages – tend to self-select into more diverse areas, cross-section analyses may produce upwardly biased results.
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Latino Fathers' Involvement in Their Children's Schools
Veronica Terriquez
Family Relations, October 2013, Pages 662–675
Abstract:
Latinos make up the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the United States, yet we know very little about Latino fathers' involvement in their children's lives. This article adds school participation to conceptualizations of paternal involvement and contributes to an understanding of the role of immigrant acculturation in shaping Latino parenting practices. Drawing on nationally representative data, the author finds that U.S.-born Latino fathers are just as likely as U.S.-born White fathers to participate in children's school activities, after controlling for other covariates. The author also shows that indicators of immigrant acculturation account for some variation in parental school participation among Latino fathers. Findings point to recommendations for engaging Latino fathers in educational interventions that benefit their children and communities.
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Tomás Jiménez & Adam Horowitz
American Sociological Review, October 2013, Pages 849-871
Abstract:
Research on immigration, educational achievement, and ethnoraciality has followed the lead of racialization and assimilation theories by focusing empirical attention on the immigrant-origin population (immigrants and their children), while overlooking the effect of an immigrant presence on the third-plus generation (U.S.-born individuals of U.S.-born parents), especially its white members. We depart from this approach by placing third-plus-generation individuals at center stage to examine how they adjust to norms defined by the immigrant-origin population. We draw on fieldwork in Cupertino, California, a high-skilled immigrant gateway, where an Asian immigrant-origin population has established and enforces an amplified version of high-achievement norms. The resulting ethnoracial encoding of academic achievement constructs whiteness as having lesser-than status. Asianness stands for high-achievement, hard work, and success; whiteness, in contrast, represents low-achievement, laziness, and academic mediocrity. We argue that immigrants can serve as a foil against which the meaning and status of an ethnoracial category is recast, upending how the category is deployed in daily life. Our findings call into question the position that treats the third-plus generation, especially whites, as the benchmark population that sets achievement norms and to which all other populations adjust.
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Immigrants and Native Workers: New Analysis Using Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data
Mette Foged & Giovanni Peri
NBER Working Paper, August 2013
Abstract:
Using a database that includes the universe of individuals and establishments in Denmark over the period 1991-2008 we analyze the effect of a large inflow of non-European (EU) immigrants on Danish workers. We first identify a sharp and sustained supply-driven increase in the inflow of non-EU immigrants in Denmark, beginning in 1995 and driven by a sequence of international events such as the Bosnian, Somalian and Iraqi crises. We then look at the response of occupational complexity, job upgrading and downgrading, wage and employment of natives in the short and long run. We find that the increased supply of non-EU low skilled immigrants pushed native workers to pursue more complex occupations. This reallocation happened mainly through movement across firms. Immigration increased mobility of natives across firms and across municipalities but it did not increase their probability of unemployment. We also observe a significant shift in the native labor force towards complex service industries in locations receiving more immigrants. Those mechanisms protected individual wages from immigrants competition and enhanced their wage outcomes. While the highly educated experienced wage gains already in the short-run, the gains of the less educated built up over time as they moved towards jobs that were complementary to those held by the non-EU immigrants.
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Anna Piil Damm
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Settlement in a socially deprived neighborhood may hamper individual labor market outcomes because of lack of employed or highly skilled contacts. I investigate this hypothesis by exploiting a unique natural experiment that occurred between 1986 and 1998 when refugee immigrants to Denmark were assigned to municipalities quasi-randomly, which successfully addresses the methodological problem of endogenous neighborhood selection. I show that individuals sort into neighborhoods. Taking account of location sorting, living in a socially deprived neighborhood does not affect labor market outcomes of refugee men. Their labor market outcomes are also not affected by the overall employment rate and the overall average skill level in the neighborhood. However, an increase in the average skill level of non-Western immigrant men living in the neighborhood raises their employment probability, while an increase in the employment rate of co-national men living in the neighborhood raises their real annual earnings. This provides quasi-experimental evidence that residence-based job information networks are ethnically stratified.
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The Hesitant Hai Gui: Return-Migration Preferences of U.S.-Educated Chinese Scientists and Engineers
Robert Zeithammer & Ryan Kellogg
Journal of Marketing Research, October 2013, Pages 644-663
Abstract:
Managers, research administrators, and policy makers need a greater understanding of the factors that drive employment preferences of foreign science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral graduates of U.S. universities. To address this need, the authors report the results of a large multischool conjoint survey of return-migration preferences among U.S. STEM doctoral students from China. The survey presents the respondents with potential job offers and yields individual-level estimates of each respondent's indirect utility of a job as a function of location, job status, and salary. The authors use a delayed follow-up choice task to demonstrate stability of the preference estimates both over time and across response modalities. The estimated preferences imply that Chinese doctoral graduates tend to remain in the United States because of a large salary disparity between the two countries rather than because of an inherent preference for locating in the United States. Given these estimated preferences, the authors conduct several policy-relevant, counterfactual simulations of return-migration choice and outline effective targeting and positioning strategy for attracting Chinese STEM talent.
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Mark Elchardus et al.
European Sociological Review, August 2013, Pages 767-779
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of private, quasi-market versus public steering of educational systems on European youngsters’ attitudes towards immigrants. There has recently been a drive for a quasi-market strategy in the provision of education, inspired by the hope that this will increase both quality and cost-effectiveness. However, research has shown that this policy leads to greater inequality between schools and individual pupils. In this paper we use the data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2009) to see whether the extent of market steering lessens support for immigrants' rights. Such an effect is expected because market steering is thought to increase the inequality between schools and to lead to a concentration of immigrant children in schools where pupils with weak socio-economic backgrounds are concentrated. The focus of the analysis is on the country level variation in the attitudes towards immigrants. Controlling for overall immigration pressure, quasi-market systems are observed to lead to less support for immigrants' rights, and this is largely due to the higher concentration of immigrant children in low SES schools in such systems. These characteristics of the educational system explain about half of the cross-national variation in attitudes towards immigrants among the 21 countries observed.
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Migration Experience and Earnings in the Mexican Labor Market
Steffen Reinhold & Kevin Thom
Journal of Human Resources, Summer 2013, Pages 768-820
Abstract:
We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between U.S. migration experience and earnings in the Mexican labor market. We use our model to analyze the effects of self-selection and endogeneity on OLS estimates of the return to migration experience in the Mexican labor market. Under plausible assumptions, OLS estimates provide a lower bound on the true average return to migration experience among return migrants. Using Mexican Migration Project (MMP) data, we find a return to migration experience of about 2.2 percent per year. Our estimates are robust to the inclusion of proxies for unobserved skill. A comparison with patterns in the 1995 Mexican Population and Dwelling Count suggests that our results are robust across data sets and are driven by a relationship between migration experience and wages, not hours worked. We also explore the plausibility of multiple mechanisms that could explain this relationship. We find the most evidence for the theory that individuals are acquiring occupation-specific work experience in the United States. The return to a year of occupation-specific migration experience is estimated to be as high as 8.7 percent for some occupations.
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Lisa Dickson & Matea Pender
Economics of Education Review, December 2013, Pages 126–137
Abstract:
In 2001, the Texas state legislature passed House Bill 1403. With the passage of the law, Texas became the first state to offer in-state tuition rates at public universities for non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) who attended high school in the state for three years. As a result of the policy change, the cost of attending college at public universities in Texas fell dramatically for non-citizens. Using administrative data from five universities in Texas, we employ a quasi-experimental design to identify the effects of the policy change on the probability of enrollment at each of the universities. The results demonstrate a large and significant positive effect of lowering tuition on the enrollment of non-citizens at the University of Texas at Pan American and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
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The Effects of Green Cards on the Wages and Innovations of New PhDs
Xiaohuan Lan
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Autumn 2013, Pages 807–834
Abstract:
Visa policies in the United States restrict job opportunities and job mobility for U.S.-trained PhDs who hold a temporary visa, a group that accounts for 40 percent of newly graduated PhDs in science and engineering. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) allowed Chinese students to be eligible for permanent residence in the United States. Many CSPA beneficiaries, Chinese students who became permanent residents, did not pursue postdoctoral training and instead entered the public or private sector directly. This supply shift increased the relative wage of native postdocs to non-postdocs. Four to eight years after graduation, CSPA beneficiaries earned 9 percent more than the comparison group, were less likely to work in academia, published fewer research articles, and produced more patents.
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Wei-Ting Lu
Qualitative Sociology, September 2013, Pages 303-321
Abstract:
Most studies of Chinese upward mobility focus on how immigrant community institutions sustain ethnic culture to foster educational success. In contrast, I analyze how community-based music schools develop a cultural strategy to guide immigrants to pursue enrollment in prestigious colleges by utilizing high cultural capital in classical music. Chinese immigrant families take advantage of information networks in these schools to develop a bonding form of social capital that allows not only middle-class families but also working-class families to redefine the meaning of ethnicity. This is theoretically surprising, because some theory predicts that middle class status is needed to benefit from such cultural capital. Through competence in Western classical music, Asian students signify their well roundedness, an achievement that goes beyond rote learning. Chinese families pursue this musical cultural strategy to incorporate themselves into mainstream educational institutions. Research on the strategic use of nonoppositional musical culture for educational mobility suggests the limitation of segmented assimilation theory.