Inviting
Anxiety, Immigration, and the Search for Information
Shana Kushner Gadarian & Bethany Albertson
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we use the issue of immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to previous literature, anxiety motivates citizens to learn and pay more attention to news coverage. Literature in psychology demonstrates that anxiety is associated with a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening information. We predict that anxious citizens will seek more information but that they will seek out and be attracted to threatening information. In an experiment, we induce anxiety about immigration and then subjects have the opportunity to search for additional information in a website designed to mimic online news sources. The website has both immigration and nonimmigration stories, and the immigration stories are split between threatening coverage and nonthreatening coverage. We find that anxious subjects exhibit biased information processing; they read, remember, and agree with threatening information.
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The Slowdown in the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants: Aging and Cohort Effects Revisited Again
George Borjas
NBER Working Paper, June 2013
Abstract:
This paper uses data drawn from the 1970-2010 decennial Censuses to examine the evolution of immigrant earnings in the U.S. labor market. The analysis reveals that there are cohort effects not only in the level of earnings, with more recent cohorts generally having relatively lower entry wages, but also in the rate of growth of earnings, with more recent cohorts having a smaller rate of economic assimilation. Immigrants who entered the country before the 1980s typically found that their initial wage disadvantage (relative to natives) narrowed by around 15 percentage points during their first two decades in the United States. In contrast, the immigrants who entered the country after the 1980s have a negligible rate of wage convergence. Part of the slowdown in wage convergence reflects a measurable reduction in the actual rate of human capital accumulation. In particular, there has been a concurrent decline in the rate at which the newer immigrant cohorts are "picking up" English language skills. The study isolates one factor that explains part of these trends: The rate of increase in English language proficiency is significantly slower for larger national origin groups. The growth in the size of these groups accounts for about a quarter of the decline in the rates of human capital acquisition and economic assimilation.
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On Estimating the Effects of Immigrant Legalization: Do U.S. Agricultural Workers Really Benefit?
Breno Sampaio, Gustavo Ramos Sampaio & Yony Sampaio
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The question of whether legalization affects immigrants' economic returns has been the focus of many empirical studies in recent decades. Results have consistently shown that there are significant wage differences between legal and illegal workers. However, the validity of such findings has been questioned, given the lack of good identification strategies to account for omitted variables. In this article we propose using techniques designed to address the issue of selection into treatment based (to some degree) on unobservables. Our results suggest that lower skill levels - not discrimination - explain differences in immigrants' economic outcomes.
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Leah Zallman et al.
Health Affairs, June 2013, Pages 1153-1160
Abstract:
Many immigrants in the United States are working-age taxpayers; few are elderly beneficiaries of Medicare. This demographic profile suggests that immigrants may be disproportionately subsidizing the Medicare Trust Fund, which supports payments to hospitals and institutions under Medicare Part A. For immigrants and others, we tabulated Trust Fund contributions and withdrawals (that is, Trust Fund expenditures on their behalf) using multiple years of data from the Current Population Survey and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. In 2009 immigrants made 14.7 percent of Trust Fund contributions but accounted for only 7.9 percent of its expenditures - a net surplus of $13.8 billion. In contrast, US-born people generated a $30.9 billion deficit. Immigrants generated surpluses of $11.1-$17.2 billion per year between 2002 and 2009, resulting in a cumulative surplus of $115.2 billion. Most of the surplus from immigrants was contributed by noncitizens and was a result of the high proportion of working-age taxpayers in this group. Policies that restrict immigration may deplete Medicare's financial resources.
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How Immigration Can Hurt a Country
Eric Rasmusen
Indiana University Working Paper, May 2013
"It is by no means clear that immigration helps a country's citizens, even apart from issues of crime and use of public benefits. It is crucial to determine whether immigration puts so much pressure on fixed inputs to production that the extra domestic product fails to reward domestic owners of labor complements (e.g., capital) more than it hurts domestic owners of labor substitutes (e.g., labor itself). More specifically, if the immigrants put pressure on national infrastructure but are not taxed at rate higher than natives, the natives in effect are giving away the infrastructure to the immigrants. If natives are richer than immigrants and the tax system is progressive, the result is even worse for the natives."
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Neighborhood Immigration, Violence, and City-Level Immigrant Political Opportunities
Christopher Lyons, María Vélez & Wayne Santoro
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a multilevel comparative framework, we propose that politically receptive city contexts facilitate the viability of marginalized neighborhoods. To illustrate this proposition, we examine the relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violence. Drawing on political process and minority incorporation theories, we argue that favorable immigrant political opportunities will strengthen the often-found inverse relationship between immigration and crime at the neighborhood level. Unique data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (Peterson and Krivo 2010a) provide demographic and violence information for Census tracts in a representative sample of 87 large cities. We append this dataset with city-level measures of immigrant political opportunities, such as the extent of minority political incorporation into elected offices and pro-immigrant legislation. Multilevel instrumental variable analyses reveal that the inverse relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violent crime is generally enhanced in cities with favorable immigrant political opportunities. We speculate that this occurs because favorable political contexts bolster social organization by enhancing trust and public social control within immigrant neighborhoods. Our findings demonstrate that the fate of neighborhoods marginalized across ethnicity and nativity are shaped by the responsiveness of political actors and structures to their concerns.
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Immigrant Assimilation into U.S. Prisons, 1900-1930
Carolyn Moehling & Anne Morrison Piehl
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
The analysis of a new dataset on state prisoners in the 1900 to 1930 censuses reveals that immigrants rapidly assimilated to native incarceration patterns. One feature of these data is that the second generation can be identified, allowing direct analysis of this group and allowing their exclusion from calculations of comparison rates for the "native" population. Although adult new arrivals were less likely than natives to be incarcerated, this likelihood was increasing with their years in the U.S. The foreign born who arrived as children and second generation immigrants had slightly higher rates of incarceration than natives of native parentage, but these differences disappear after controlling for nativity differences in urbanicity and occupational status. Finally, while the incarceration rates of new arrivals differ significantly by source country, patterns of assimilation are very similar.
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Social Dominance and the Cultural Politics of Immigration
Benjamin Newman, Todd Hartman & Charles Taber
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that conflict over immigration largely concerns who bears the burden of cultural transaction costs, which we define as the costs associated with overcoming cultural barriers (e.g., language) to social exchange. Our framework suggests that the ability of native-born citizens to push cultural transaction costs onto immigrant out-groups serves as an important expression of social dominance. In two novel studies, we demonstrate that social dominance motives condition emotional responses to encountering cultural transaction costs, shape engagement in cultural accommodation behavior toward immigrants, and affect immigration attitudes and policy preferences.
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Sarah Allen Gershon & Adrian Pantoja
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: Central to current debates over immigration is the impact of transnational ties on immigrant political incorporation in the United States. Some researchers believe these ties hinder incorporation, while others have found a positive relationship between these variables, and yet other scholars have found that transnational connections exert no significant impact on immigrant behavior in the United States. We test these competing hypotheses in an attempt to resolve this scholarly debate.
Methods: We rely on data from the 2006 Latino National Survey and use logistic regression to test the impact of transnational ties on immigrant political incorporation (via naturalization).
Results: Transnational ties positively impact immigrants' orientations toward citizenship and eventual naturalization.
Conclusions: Immigrant political incorporation is not a unidirectional process where immigrant engagement in the United States increases with disengagement in the ancestral homeland. Rather, Latino immigrants with ties to their ancestral homelands are more likely to desire and seek out U.S. citizenship.
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Immigrant enclaves and obesity in preschool-aged children in Los Angeles County
Tabashir Nobari et al.
Social Science & Medicine, September 2013, Pages 1-8
Abstract:
While neighborhood environments are increasingly recognized as important contributors to obesity risk, less has been reported on the socio-cultural aspects of neighborhoods that influence obesity development. This is especially true among immigrants, who may lack the necessary language skills to navigate their new living environments. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that young children of immigrants would be at lower obesity risk if they lived in neighborhoods where neighbors share the same language and culture. Using 2000 Census data and 2003-2009 data from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children in Los Angeles County, we examined the relation between BMI z-scores in low-income children aged 2-5 years (n=250,029) and the concentration of neighborhood residents who spoke the same language as the children's mothers. Using multi-level modeling and adjusting for child's gender and race/ethnicity, household education, neighborhood socioeconomic status, and year the child was examined, we found that percent of neighborhood residents who spoke the same language as the child's mother was negatively associated with BMI z-scores. This relation varied by child's race/ethnicity and mother's preferred language. The relation was linear and negative among children of English-speaking Hispanic mothers and Chinese-speaking mothers. However, for Hispanic children of Spanish-speaking mothers the relation was curvilinear, initially exhibiting a positive relation which reversed at higher neighborhood concentrations of Spanish-speaking residents. Our findings suggest that living in neighborhoods where residents share the same language may influence obesity-related behaviors (namely diet and physical activity) possibly through mechanisms involving social networks, support, and norms.
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Hispanic Population Growth and State Immigration Policy: An Analysis of Restriction (2008-12)
Timothy Marquez & Scot Schraufnagel
Publius, Summer 2013, Pages 347-367
Abstract:
Recent failures to enact immigration reform at the national level have been used as justification for a dramatic increase in legislation passed by the American states. Much of the legislation has exposed immigrants to higher scrutiny or prohibited recent immigrants from receiving certain benefits. However, other pieces of legislation have extended assistance to noncitizens, both documented and undocumented. This article examines state immigration laws from 2008 to 2012 using three dependent variables: the number of liberalizing state laws, the number of restricting state laws, and a composite Restrictive Score. We test eight different explanations and find that the most consistent predictor of a restrictive state posture is the growth of the Hispanic population in each state during the last census period.
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Shu Zhang et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
For bicultural individuals, visual cues of a setting's cultural expectations can activate associated representations, switching the frames that guide their judgments. Research suggests that cultural cues may affect judgments through automatic priming, but has yet to investigate consequences for linguistic performance. The present studies investigate the proposal that heritage-culture cues hinder immigrants' second-language processing by priming first-language structures. For Chinese immigrants in the United States, speaking to a Chinese (vs. Caucasian) face reduced their English fluency, but at the same time increased their social comfort, effects that did not occur for a comparison group of European Americans (study 1). Similarly, exposure to iconic symbols of Chinese (vs. American) culture hindered Chinese immigrants' English fluency, when speaking about both culture-laden and culture-neutral topics (study 2). Finally, in both recognition (study 3) and naming tasks (study 4), Chinese icon priming increased accessibility of anomalous literal translations, indicating the intrusion of Chinese lexical structures into English processing. We discuss conceptual implications for the automaticity and adaptiveness of cultural priming and practical implications for immigrant acculturation and second-language learning.
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Alexander Schmidt & Dennis Spies
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we address the question of whether the policy statements of political parties with regard to migration affect the link between individual anti-immigrant sentiment and support for redistributive policies. While the effect of political parties "playing the race card" is well documented and repeatedly discussed in the American context, it has received little attention in comparative studies. We test our measurements of issue-salience with regard to migration and welfare-related matters by conducting multilevel models for a sample of 14 European countries. We also control for the potential effects of the countries' welfare regimes - which is so far the most prominent contextual variable. Our results strongly indicate a moderating party-effect: The more parties accentuate crucial migration issues, the less general support there is for welfare programs by native anti-immigrant groups. In contrast, we find no effect of the repeatedly discussed welfare regime on this relationship, once controlled for party statements.
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Gender, Bilingualism, and the Early Occupational Careers of Second-Generation Mexicans in the South
Rubén Hernández-León & Sarah Morando Lakhani
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Following two decades of Mexican migration to the southern United States, the second generation is entering the labor market. We analyze the early occupational careers of fifty-eight second-generation young adults in Dalton, Georgia, a global carpet-manufacturing center. We find intergenerational occupational mobility, with children of Mexican immigrants deploying human-capital skills to access better jobs than their parents. However, the Mexican second generation faces opportunity ladders structured along gender lines, with women working in services and men laboring as bilingual supervisors and crew leaders in the carpet industry. While bilingual skills play a critical role in the employment paths that members of the second generation have started to chart, their use of bilingualism is also shaped by gender dynamics in the workplace.
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Made in the USA? Immigrants' Imported Ideology and Political Engagement
Sergio Wals
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores both the extent to which immigrants' pre-migration ideological predispositions might serve as a heuristic, by which these individuals anchor and adjust their ideological predispositions in the new polity, and the extent to which imported ideology enhances the likelihood of immigrants' political engagement once in their new home. Empirical tests take advantage of two unique survey datasets of Mexican immigrants residing in the United States; one of which incorporates a survey embedded experiment. Results show that immigrants' ideological predispositions in the country of origin do anchor these individuals' ideological predispositions in the new host country in terms of intensity and directionality. Most importantly, imported ideology does heighten the prospects of immigrants' electoral participation in the United States.