Give me your good people
Benjamin Newman
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Summer 2015, Pages 197-219
Abstract:
The belief that immigrants threaten the American culture is a paramount source of opposition to immigration in the U.S. Known as cultural threat, this trepidation is largely conceptualized in the opinion research as symbolic in nature and stemming from concern over the maintenance of national identity. A problematic feature of this conceptualization is that it neglects contact as a potential realistic aspect of the cultural threat of immigration. In response, this article develops a realistic theory of cultural threat that emphasizes personal encounters with unassimilated immigrants. Relying on national survey data, this article demonstrates that contact with non-English-speaking immigrants, as well as the negative emotions it engenders, heightens perceived threat to American culture and support for restrictive immigration policies.
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Eric Juenke
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consistent survey evidence supports the notion that Latinos are more ideologically conservative than their party identification would predict, making them ripe for party switching. However, when controlling for citizenship, generational differences, and policy attitudes, the partisan picture looks much different and much less optimistic for Republicans hoping to keep Latino voters “in-play.” Much of this puzzle is caused by a lingering confusion about Latino respondents versus Latino voters. Socially conservative Latino respondents are much more likely to be non-citizens and non-voters, providing them with little plausible electoral role. Previous research has underestimated this problem because scholars have been more interested in the acquisition of Latino partisanship, regardless of whether the respondents are viable voters or not. Using the 2006 Latino National Survey I demonstrate that ignoring citizenship and voting likelihood produces the misleading (but venerable) truism that conservative Latinos are available Republican voters.
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Recruitment of Foreigners in the Market for Computer Scientists in the United States
John Bound et al.
Journal of Labor Economics, July 2015, Pages S187-S223
Abstract:
We present and calibrate a dynamic model that characterizes the labor market for computer scientists. In our model, firms can recruit computer scientists from recently graduated college students, from STEM workers working in other occupations, or from a pool of foreign talent. Counterfactual simulations suggest that wages for computer scientists would have been 2.8%–3.8% higher and the number of Americans employed as computer scientists 7.0%–13.6% higher in 2004 if firms could not hire more foreigners than they could in 1994. In contrast, total computer science employment would have been 3.8%–9.0% lower and consequently output smaller.
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Unauthorized Immigrants Prolong the Life of Medicare’s Trust Fund
Leah Zallman et al.
Journal of General Internal Medicine, forthcoming
Background and Objective: Unauthorized immigrants seldom have access to public health insurance programs such as Medicare Part A, which pays hospitals and other health facilities and is funded through the Medicare Trust Fund.
Design and Main Measures: We tabulated annual and total Trust Fund contributions and withdrawals by unauthorized immigrants (i.e., outlays on their behalf) from 2000 to 2011 using the Current Population Survey and Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys. We estimated when the Trust Fund would be depleted if unauthorized immigrants had neither contributed to it nor withdrawn from it. We estimated Trust Fund surpluses by unauthorized immigrants if 10 % were to become authorized annually over the subsequent 7 years.
Key Results: From 2000 to 2011, unauthorized immigrants contributed $2.2 to $3.8 billion more than they withdrew annually (a total surplus of $35.1 billion). Had unauthorized immigrants neither contributed to nor withdrawn from the Trust Fund during those 11 years, it would become insolvent in 2029 — 1 year earlier than currently predicted. If 10 % of unauthorized immigrants became authorized annually for the subsequent 7 years, Trust Fund surpluses contributed by unauthorized immigrants would total $45.7 billion.
Conclusions: Unauthorized immigrants have prolonged the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. Policies that curtail the influx of unauthorized immigrants may accelerate the Trust Fund’s depletion.
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Harbingers of Migration Regression: Global Trends and a Mexican Case Study
Richard Jones
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: The question raised here is whether global labor migration has reached its high-water mark and will not in fact recover its prerecession magnitudes. This study examines this question, and the underlying causes of migration regression, reviewing studies at the international level and carrying out a case study of Jerez municipio, Zacatecas, Mexico.
Methods: Two surveys in Jerez — of 242 randomly selected households in six towns in 1995, and of 304 households in the same towns in 2009 — provide a cross-section of conditions before and after U.S. economic setbacks beginning around 2000.
Results: The results point to a reduction in migration to the United States over the period. Furthermore, in the later period, lower fertility, higher educational attainment, and higher household income were all associated with lower levels of active U.S. migration, and income returns to local education were positive, whereas the income returns to U.S. migration were negative.
Conclusions: The results for Jerez are consistent with trends elsewhere in Mexico and those within leading sending nations globally, and they suggest a regression in future migration from these countries.
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Race and Nation: How Racial Hierarchy Shapes National Attachments
Niambi Carter & Efrén Pérez
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We contend that the boundaries and nature of national attachments are shaped by the position of one's group within America's racial order, with higher status yielding more racially exclusive forms of identity. We test our claims in the realm of xenophobia. Using an original survey of African Americans (n = 1,000) and Whites (n = 1,000), we assess national pride, nationalism, nativism, and racial identity, plus affect toward various immigrant groups. We establish that national attachments have racially varied meanings, thereby producing sharp differences in each racial group's response to foreigners. Although national pride is unrelated to White antipathy toward outsiders, nationalism and nativism increase White hostility to immigrants — except when they are White. In contrast, national pride diminishes African American hostility to Black and non-Black immigrants, while nativism is generally unrelated to Black antipathy to outsiders. Finally, while nationalism heightens xenophobia among Blacks, this sentiment envelops all foreigners — including African immigrants. We discuss our results' implications for theories of national attachment in intergroup settings.
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Does Immigration Affect Whether US Natives Major in Science and Engineering?
Pia Orrenius & Madeline Zavodny
Journal of Labor Economics, July 2015, Pages S79-S108
Abstract:
Immigration may affect the likelihood that US natives major in science or engineering. Foreign-born students may crowd US natives out of science or engineering, or they may have positive spillovers on US natives that attract or retain them in those fields. This study uses data on college majors from the 2009–11 American Community Surveys to examine the effect of the immigrant share in US natives’ age cohort while they are in high school or in college. We find some evidence that immigration adversely affects whether US-born women who graduated from college majored in a science or engineering field.
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Matthew Hall & Emily Greenman
International Migration Review, Summer 2015, Pages 406–442
Abstract:
Considerable research and pervasive cultural narratives suggest that undocumented immigrant workers are concentrated in the most dangerous, hazardous, and otherwise unappealing jobs in U.S. labor markets. Yet, owing largely to data limitations, little empirical work has addressed this topic. Using data from the 2004 and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we impute legal status for Mexican and Central American immigrants and link their occupations to Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) data on occupational fatalities and occupational hazard data from the U.S. Department of Labor to explore racial and legal status differentials on several specific measures of occupational risk. Results indicate that undocumented workers face heightened exposure to numerous dimensions of occupational hazard – including higher levels of physical strain, exposure to heights, and repetitive motions – but are less exposed than native workers to some of the potentially most dangerous environments. We also show that undocumented workers are rewarded less for employment in hazardous settings, receiving low or no compensating differential for working in jobs with high fatality, toxic materials, or exposure to heights. Overall, this study suggests that legal status plays an important role in determining exposure to job hazard and in structuring the wage returns to risky work.
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Gregory Robinson et al.
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
We explore the potential political impact of Arizona's controversial immigration statute, SB 1070, using a parallel event: the 1994 passage of Proposition 187 in California. Both statutes were efforts to respond to the flow of illegal immigrants mainly from Mexico and were widely seen as anti-Latino, and both became the central theme of their proponents' reelection campaigns. We reexamine and extend the academic literature on the political impact of Proposition 187, applying the effect estimates to Arizona via a Monte Carlo simulation to project its vote in future presidential elections. These projections show that the potential changes in voting behavior brought on by SB 1070, coupled with population trends, give Democrats a discernable and growing advantage in presidential elections as early as 2016. The results of 2012 make clear that the GOP's best hope to hold the state rests on a strong and enduring move by its white voters toward the Republicans, leaving Arizona with a racially polarized electorate more reminiscent of the American South than its Southwest. We speculate about the potential to create such an electorate where an unusually large percentage of white voters immigrated there as adults from other states.
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Skilled Immigration and the Employment Structures of US Firms
Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr & William Lincoln
Journal of Labor Economics, July 2015, Pages S147-S186
Abstract:
We study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of US firms using matched employer-employee data. Unlike most previous work, we use the firm as the lens of analysis to account for greater heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled immigrant admissions are driven by firms themselves (e.g., the H-1B visa). OLS and IV specifications show rising overall employment of skilled workers with increased skilled immigrant employment by the firm. Employment expansion is greater for young natives than for their older counterparts. The departure rates for older workers relative to younger workers appear highest for those in STEM occupations.
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The Labor Market Effects of Opening the Border: New Evidence from Switzerland
Andreas Beerli & Giovanni Peri
NBER Working Paper, July 2015
Abstract:
Between 1999 and 2007 Switzerland opened its labor markets to immigrants from the European Union (EU), fully liberalizing access by 2007. The timing of this labor market liberalization differed by geography, however. In particular, cross-border workers, who constituted more than half of EU immigrants, were allowed free-entry into the border region (BR), but not the non-border region (NBR), already in 2004. In this paper, we exploit the different timing of these policies in a difference-in-difference approach and estimate the effects of the policy changes on the inflow of new immigrants and on native labor market outcomes such as wages and employment by comparing the BR and NBR. We find that opening the border to EU immigrants increased their presence by 4 percent of employment, and this had no significant impact on average native wages and employment. Decomposing the effect between skill groups we find that immigrants complemented highly educated native workers, while they displaced middle educated workers and had no effect on less educated.
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Kevin Wolff et al.
Journal of Criminal Justice, forthcoming
Purpose: The majority of existing research on immigration and crime suggests that immigrant concentration has either a null or negative impact on rates of criminal behavior. Far less research has examined the effect of immigration on the future outcomes for youth with prior criminal history. Youth who have had prior contact with the juvenile justice system represent an especially vulnerable population that could be expected to benefit most from the protective effects of immigration as identified in the literature.
Methods: We examine the effect of concentrated immigration on reoffending using a large sample of previously referred youth nested within 3,547 neighborhoods from the state of Florida. Hierarchical logistic regression is used in order to assess the effect of neighborhood conditions on juvenile recidivism, net of commonly considered individual-level attributes.
Results: Consistent with past research on the effect of immigrant concentration, results suggest a general protective effect of immigrant concentration on juvenile reoffending, controlling for levels of neighborhood disadvantage.
Conclusions: Neighborhood conditions impact the likelihood of juvenile offending, net of commonly considered individual characteristics. The current study adds to the literature suggesting a protective effect of immigrant concentration on criminal behavior. Study limitations and implications for future research are also discussed.
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Gabriel Sanchez et al.
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Obama administration has simultaneously marketed the prospect of providing undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship through comprehensive immigration reform and overseen mass deportations of mostly Latino immigrants. While it is clear that immigration policy was highly influential to Latino voters in 2012, it remains unclear how this political hypocrisy is being interpreted by Latino voters. As deportations have risen steadily during the Obama administration, there has been little research on how deportations and personal connections to undocumented immigrants have influenced the political attitudes of the Latino/a electorate. Using a nationally representative survey of 800 registered Latino/a voters administered in 2013, we explore the relationships between personal connections to undocumented immigrants and issue salience among Latinos as well as Latinos’ views of President Obama. This study finds that registered Latino voters who know deportees and undocumented immigrants are more likely to report that they think the President and Congress should act on immigration policy versus all other policies. Moreover, Latino voters who know someone who is undocumented are less likely to have favorable views toward President Obama. This study has implications for our collective knowledge of how direct and indirect connections to policy outcomes influence the political behavior of the highly influential Latino/a electorate and how political and policy outcomes will be influenced in the future when a much higher proportion of the electorate have such connections.
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Immigration, Trade and Productivity in Services: Evidence from U.K. Firms
Gianmarco Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri & Greg Wright
NBER Working Paper, May 2015
Abstract:
This paper explores the impact of immigrants on the imports, exports and productivity of service-producing firms in the U.K. Immigrants may substitute for imported intermediate inputs (offshore production) and they may impact the productivity of the firm as well as its export behavior. The first effect can be understood as the re-assignment of offshore productive tasks to immigrant workers. The second can be seen as a productivity or cost cutting effect due to immigration, and the third as the effect of immigrants on specific bilateral trade costs. We test the predictions of our model using differences in immigrant inflows across U.K. labor markets, instrumented with an enclave-based instrument that distinguishes between aggregate and bilateral immigration, as well as immigrant diversity. We find that immigrants increase overall productivity in service-producing firms, revealing a cost cutting impact on these firms. Immigrants also reduce the extent of country-specific offshoring, consistent with a reallocation of tasks and, finally, they increase country-specific exports, implying an important role in reducing communication and trade costs for services.
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Comparing Immigration Policies: An Overview from the IMPALA Database
Michel Beine et al.
International Migration Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically the most or least restrictive toward admissions. The data also reveal trends toward more complex and, often, more restrictive regulation since the 1990s, as well as differential treatment of groups, such as lower requirements for highly skilled than low-skilled labor migrants. These patterns illustrate the IMPALA data and methods but are also of intrinsic importance to understanding immigration regulation.
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A.J. Balcazar, S.E. Grineski & T.W. Collins
Public Health, June 2015, Pages 691–697
Objectives: In examining the Hispanic health paradox, researchers rarely determine if the paradox persists across immigrant generations. This study examines immigrant respiratory health disparities among Hispanic children in terms of current asthma, bronchitis, and allergies using an expanded six-group immigrant cohort framework that includes citizenship and the fourth-plus generation.
Study design: Cross-sectional primary survey data from 1568 caretakers of Hispanic schoolchildren in El Paso, Texas (USA), were utilized.
Results: Results indicate that a healthy immigrant advantage lasts until the 2.5 generation for bronchitis and allergies (P < 0.05), and until the third generation for asthma (P < 0.10). Citizenship was not an influence on the likelihood of a child having a respiratory health condition.
Conclusions: Findings demonstrate the utility of the expanded six-group cohort framework for examining intergenerational patterns in health conditions among immigrant groups.
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Ethnic Change, Personality, and Polarization Over Immigration in the American Public
Christopher Johnston, Benjamin Newman & Yamil Velez
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explores the interplay between ethnic change and individual psychology in shaping mass opinion on immigration. Recent research suggests that personality traits related to uncertainty aversion structure left-right orientation in American politics, and we argue that this personality cleavage should shape citizens’ reactions to ethnic change. Using national survey data and a survey experiment, our analysis reveals that ethnic change polarizes citizens by personality, as those averse to uncertainty feel heightened cultural threat from ethnic change, while those open to uncertainty feel less threatened. The association of traits related to uncertainty aversion with left-right orientation suggests that polarization over immigration is exacerbated by the interaction of citizen personality and ethnic context. While the opinion literature on immigration is replete with studies analyzing the separate effects of ethnic context and individual differences, this article contributes to the literature by analyzing the two in conjunction.