Los Estatdos Unidos
Julie Dowling, Christopher Ellison & David Leal
Social Science Quarterly, June 2012, Pages 356-378
Objective: In recent years, immigration has become a central focus of political scrutiny. Much of the negativity directed toward the largely Mexican immigrant population asserts that they do not wish to learn English and acclimate to the dominant culture of the United States. Very little research, however, has explored how Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans assess the value of English proficiency.
Methods: Utilizing the Survey of Texas Adults, we examine attitudes regarding the importance of English. We explore the attitudes of Mexican-origin persons compared to other racial/ethnic groups, as well as explore within-group differences based on citizenship, nativity, and language use.
Results: Our findings reveal the high importance that Spanish speakers, as well as many non-U.S. citizen Mexican immigrants, place on English proficiency. Furthermore, the results indicate that Spanish speakers are actually most likely to stress the importance of English.
Conclusions: Our research contradicts accounts of the largely Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant population as not valuing the English language. In so doing, our work contributes to larger scholarly efforts to better understand immigrants in general and Mexican immigrants in particular.
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Ethnic Diversity and Preferences for Redistribution
Matz Dahlberg, Karin Edmark & Heléne Lundqvist
Journal of Political Economy, February 2012, Pages 41-76
Abstract:
This paper investigates the causal link between the ethnic diversity in a society and its inhabitants' preferences for redistribution. We exploit exogenous variation in immigrant shares stemming from a nationwide program placing refugees in municipalities throughout Sweden during 1985-94 and match data on refugee placement to panel survey data on inhabitants of the receiving municipalities. We find significant, negative effects of increased immigration on the support for redistribution. The effect is especially pronounced among high-income earners. We also establish that estimates from earlier studies failing to identify causal effects are likely to be positively biased (i.e., less negative).
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The Impact of Immigration on the Educational Attainment of Natives
Jennifer Hunt
NBER Working Paper, May 2012
Abstract:
Using a state panel based on census data from 1940-2010, I examine the impact of immigration on the high school completion of natives in the United States. Immigrant children could compete for schooling resources with native children, lowering the return to native education and discouraging native high school completion. Conversely, native children might be encouraged to complete high school in order to avoid competing with immigrant high-school dropouts in the labor market. I find evidence that both channels are operative and that the net effect is positive, particularly for native-born blacks, though not for native-born Hispanics. An increase of one percentage point in the share of immigrants in the population aged 11-64 increases the probability that natives aged 11-17 eventually complete 12 years of schooling by 0.3 percentage points, and increases the probability for native-born blacks by 0.4 percentage points. I account for the endogeneity of immigrant flows by using instruments based on 1940 settlement patterns.
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The Impact of Legal Status on Immigrants' Earnings and Human Capital: Evidence from the IRCA 1986
Ying Pan
Journal of Labor Research, June 2012, Pages 119-142
Abstract:
The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), the largest amnesty in U.S. history, took effect in 1986 and legalized all immigrants who arrived before 1982. The IRCA creates a discontinuity, according to the year of entry, in the probability of having legal status. Therefore, I use the regression discontinuity approach to study the impact of legality on immigrants' labor market outcomes and human capital. Using Californian Latino immigrants from Census 1990, I find that the 1975-81 arrivals, on average, outperform the 1982-86 arrivals in male wages, female employment probability, and male English-speaking ability. These findings are not due to a general trend in U.S. labor market conditions because the same analysis, using refugees, Puerto Rican migrants and U.S.-born Latinos - three comparison groups without legality issues - indicates no difference in outcomes between the 1975-81 and 1982-86 cohorts. However, the advantage of Latino immigrants of the earlier cohort over the later cohort diminishes in Census 2000.
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Hispanic Fertility, Immigration, and Race in the Twenty-First Century
Emilio Parrado & Chenoa Flippen
Race and Social Problems, April 2012, Pages 18-30
Abstract:
In this paper, we systematically describe the connection between immigration and fertility in light of the increasing nativist reaction to Hispanic groups. We follow a life-course perspective to directly link migration and fertility transitions. The analysis combines original qualitative and quantitative data collected in Durham/Chapel Hill, NC as well as national level information from the current population survey. The qualitative data provide a person-centered approach to the connection between migration and fertility that we then extend in quantitative analyses. Results demonstrate that standard demographic measures that treat migration and fertility as separate processes considerably distort the childbearing experience of immigrant women, inflating fertility estimates for Hispanics as a whole. Once this connection is taken into consideration, the fertility levels of Hispanic women are much lower than those reported with standard measures and the fertility-specific contribution of Hispanics to US population growth is much reduced.
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The Effect of Immigration along the Distribution of Wages
Christian Dustmann, Tommaso Frattini & Ian Preston
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper analyses the effect immigration has on wages of native workers. Unlike most previous work, we estimate wage effects along the distribution of native wages. We derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre-allocating immigrants to particular skill groups. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival. As for the effects on native wages, we find a pattern of effects whereby immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution, but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution. This pattern mirrors the evidence on the location of immigrants in the wage distribution. We suggest that possible explanations for the overall slightly positive effect on native wages, besides standard immigration surplus arguments, could involve deviations of immigrant remuneration from contribution to production either because of initial mismatch or immigrant downgrading.
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Timing Is Everything: Short-Run Population Impacts of Immigration in U.S. Cities
Abigail Wozniak & Thomas Murray
Journal of Urban Economics, July 2012, Pages 60-78
Abstract:
We provide the first analysis of the short-run causal impact of immigrant inflows on native populations at the local labor market level. Using published statistics from the American Community Surveys of 2000-2010, we examine how immigrant inflow shocks to a metropolitan area affect native populations. We find that immigrant inflows are associated with increases in local native populations on an annual basis but that these OLS estimates are generally upward biased. Our IV results are purged of this bias, but we still find that an additional immigrant increases the low skill native population by 0.4 to 0.7 in the concurrent period. To explain this result, we show that immigrant inflows lead to declines in outflows of low skill natives from affected MSAs. This is most pronounced in MSAs from which relocation is arguably more costly, which may disproportionately affect the low skilled. We find short-run responses among high skill natives that are consistent with displacement. The decline in high skilled native populations is driven by high skilled immigrant inflows, and high skilled outflows increase from affected MSAs. We show that these short-run changes are obscured in specifications using longer-run population changes and conclude that the short-run impact of immigrants on native populations differs markedly from their longer-run impact.
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Emilio Parrado
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2012, Pages 16-37
Abstract:
This article relies on local area variation in immigration policies, specifically the local implementation of the 287(g) program, and economic conditions to estimate their impact on changes in the size of local Mexican immigrant populations between 2007 and 2009. The author also investigates the impact of the 287(g) program on the employment prospects of low-skilled native black and white workers. The study finds that outside of four influential outliers (Dallas, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Phoenix), there is no evidence that the 287(g) program impacted the size of the Mexican immigrant population. In addition, there is no evidence that immigration enforcement policies mitigated the negative impact of the economic recession on the native population, even in the four outliers where the program was strongly enforced. The author highlights the limited efficacy of immigration enforcement as a way to resolve the issue of the undocumented immigrant population and for altering the employment opportunities of native workers.
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Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan & Katherine Eriksson
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
During the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), one of the largest migration episodes in history, the United States maintained a nearly open border, allowing the study of migrant decisions unhindered by entry restrictions. We estimate the return to migration while accounting for migrant selection by comparing Norway-to-US migrants with their brothers who stayed in Norway in the late nineteenth century. We also compare fathers of migrants and non-migrants by wealth and occupation. We find that the return to migration was relatively low (70 percent) and that migrants from urban areas were negatively selected from the sending population.
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Benjamin Newman et al.
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, June 2012, Pages 160-182
Abstract:
Immigration remains a powerful and recurrent feature of American politics. Of the issues related to immigration, controversy over government policy for controlling illegal immigration occupies a central position in the debate. One increasingly important and prevalent type of control policy that has received little scholarly attention is worksite employment eligibility enforcement, otherwise known as E-Verify Laws. In the present article, we analyze variation in E-Verify policy adoption across the U.S. states, approaching the topic from multiple theoretical perspectives and testing several hypotheses pertaining to policy enactment. Our analysis points to the critical role of proportionate change in a state's immigrant population, as well as the political activity of immigrant-employing industries, in leading to policy adoption. Despite the use of multiple objective indicators, we fail to find strong evidence supporting the hypothesis that economic distress within a state increases its likelihood of enacting E-Verify legislation. Overall, our analysis contributes to an underdeveloped area of immigration policy research and sheds light on an important contemporary immigration issue, while drawing broader conclusions concerning the factors influencing the emergence of anti-immigration policies more generally.
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Latino Immigration and the Low-Skill Urban Labor Market: The Case of Atlanta
Cathy Yang Liu
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: Latino immigrants continue to enter low-skilled urban labor markets across metropolitan areas in the United States. This study provides a dynamic account of the employment competition between Latino immigrant and black workers in the context of an emerging immigrant gateway: the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Methods: This study identifies occupational niches that Latino immigrants and black workers heavily concentrate for years 1990, 2000, and 2008. Occupational-level composition and wage models are also estimated to test for the impact Latino immigration might have on black workers.
Results: Both black workers and Latino immigrant workers became increasingly concentrated in a few occupations between 1990 and 2008. While Latino immigrants have entered several historically black occupational niches, no downward pressure on the wage growth of blacks in the same occupation is observed.
Conclusions: As immigrants become increasingly clustered in manual-intensive craftsmen, operative, and farm occupations, blacks gravitate toward the better-paid and language-intensive sales, clerical, and service occupations, forming a segmented low-skill labor market. The reinforcement of their respective niches also tends to create closure to the other groups and intensify within-group competition.
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Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America
Douglas Massey & Karen Pren
Population and Development Review, March 2012, Pages 1-29
Abstract:
Immigration reforms in the United States initiated in the 1960s are widely thought to have opened the door to mass immigration from Asia and Latin America by eliminating past discriminatory policies. While this may be true for Asians, it is not the case for Latin Americans, who faced more restrictions to legal migration after 1965 than before. The boom in Latin American migration occurred in spite of rather than because of changes in US immigration law. In this article we describe how restrictions placed on the legal entry of Latin Americans, and especially Mexicans, set off a chain of events that in the ensuing decades had the paradoxical effect of producing more rather than fewer Latino immigrants. We offer an explanation for how and why Latinos in the United States, in just 40 years, increased from 9.6 million people and 5 percent of the population to 51 million people and 16 percent of the population, and why so many are now present without authorization.
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Investigating the Reliability of the Civics Component of the U.S. Naturalization Test
Paula Winke
Language Assessment Quarterly, Winter 2011, Pages 317-341
Abstract:
In this study, I investigated the reliability of the U.S. Naturalization Test's civics component by asking 414 individuals to take a mock U.S. citizenship test comprising civics test questions. Using an incomplete block design of six forms with 16 nonoverlapping items and four anchor items on each form (the anchors connected the six subsets of civics test items), I applied Rasch analysis to the data. The analysis estimated how difficult the items are, whether they are interchangeable, and how reliably they measure civics knowledge. In addition, I estimated how uniformly difficult the items are for noncitizens (N = 187) and citizens (N = 225) and how accurate the cutoff score is. Results demonstrated the items vary widely in difficulty and do not all reliably measure civics knowledge. Most items do not function differently for citizens and noncitizens. The cutoff is not as accurate as applied in the operational test. The data revealed that test scores contain construct-irrelevant variance that undermines the overall reliability and validity of the instrument. I discuss these results not only to better understand the civics test but also to recommend how United States Citizenship and Immigration Services could conduct a similar study with the goal of raising the reliability and validity of the test.
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Skilled Immigrant Women in the US and the Double Earnings Penalty
Mary Lopez
Feminist Economics, Winter 2012, Pages 99-134
Abstract:
Although a large literature exists on the United States labor market experiences of low-skilled immigrant men, relatively few studies have examined the labor market position of highly skilled immigrant women. The current study explores the issue of labor market discrimination and examines the extent to which highly skilled immigrant women experience an earnings disadvantage as a result of both gender status and nativity status. Relying on data from the 2000 US Decennial Census 5-Percent Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample and using an augmented Oaxaca decomposition technique, this study finds that highly skilled immigrant women do experience a double earnings penalty. In addition, the results suggest that nativity status explains a larger portion of the double earnings penalty than gender status. These findings are important in light of the higher emigration rates for skilled women than for skilled men in regions such as Africa, Latin America, and Oceania.
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Intrametropolitan Opportunity Structure and the Self-Employment of Asian and Latino Immigrants
Cathy Yang Liu
Economic Development Quarterly, May 2012, Pages 178-192
Abstract:
Using 2000 Census microdata for the Atlanta metropolitan area as a case study, this research investigates the effect of intrametropolitan opportunity structure and local area context, especially spatial structure, urban employment pattern, social environment, and ethnic concentration, on Asian and Latino immigrants' incidence of self-employment. These two groups grew rapidly both in the total labor force and among the self-employed in Atlanta. It is found that living in central city and inner-ring suburbs depresses Latino immigrants' entrepreneurial activities. The growth of trade jobs and concentration of immigrants in a local area both give rise to immigrant entrepreneurship. Results suggest that traditional theories such as disadvantage theory need to be reassessed in the context of new immigrant gateways, while the ethnic enclave hypothesis is still validated. Potential policies to promote immigrant entrepreneurship are also discussed.
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Shaun Wiley, Kay Deaux & Carolin Hagelskamp
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, April 2012, Pages 171-180
Abstract:
Endorsing meritocracy can make low-status group members more accepting of inequality. This study examined whether rejecting meritocracy is related to increased ethnic identification among Latino immigrants, and whether identity in turn is related to increased support for collective action. We hypothesize that these relationships depend upon immigrant generation. A survey was conducted with 184 first- and second-generation Latino immigrants in New York City. Second-generation Latinos endorsed meritocracy less than those in the first generation, at least in part because they perceived that other Americans viewed their group in a less positive light (i.e., lower public regard). Further, meritocracy was negatively linked to ethnic identity and, through it, support for collective action among the second generation. Among the first generation, meritocracy was not related to ethnic identity and was positively related to support for collective action. We discuss the implications of growing up near the bottom of the U.S. social hierarchy for ethnic identity and collective action.
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Marcella Ramelli et al.
International Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We hypothesized that perceived communication effectiveness at arrival and initial friendships with members of the receiving society during the first months after arrival in a new country have a long-term effect on the development of acculturation orientations and that this effect is pronounced for individuals with a high need for cognitive closure (NCC). We examined the hypotheses in a study with Spanish-speaking immigrants in Switzerland (n = 146) and in Italy (n = 147). We asked participants to indicate their current attitude to contact with the receiving society and cultural maintenance and report retrospectively their perceived communication effectiveness at arrival and initial friendships. In line with the predictions, the perceptions of high communication effectiveness at arrival and friendships with members of the receiving society during the initial phase in the new culture were positively correlated with the current attitude to contact with the receiving society assessed 7 years after arrival on average. Also, initial friendships with members of the receiving society were negatively correlated with present cultural maintenance. Moreover, with an increase in NCC, these correlations increased.
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Geertje Lucassen & Marcel Lubbers
Comparative Political Studies, May 2012, Pages 547-574
Abstract:
This contribution aims, first, to determine whether support for the far right is based on perceptions of cultural or economic threats posed by immigrants in 11 European countries. Second, it seeks to reanalyze the question of whether class is an important explanation for support for the far right using new measures of class and, related to this, to determine the extent to which class interacts with perceived threat to explain support for far-right parties. The study reveals that perceived cultural ethnic threats are a stronger predictor of far-right preferences than are perceived economic ethnic threats. This cultural versus economic distinction is also depicted in social class differences in far-right preference. These are particularly evident between sociocultural specialists and technocrats, as anticipated by the new social class scheme. Sociocultural specialists particularly perceive fewer cultural ethnic threats compared to technocrats and consequently have a smaller likelihood to prefer the far right. On the contextual level, the authors find that higher levels of GDP in a country result in greater far-right preference, whereas higher levels of GDP do result in lower levels of ethnic threats. The effect of proportion of Muslims on far-right preference is nonsignificant. The study shows that the choice of countries in cross-national research can heavily influence the results.
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The Cultural Divide in Europe: Migration, Multiculturalism, and Political Trust
Lauren McLaren
World Politics, April 2012, Pages 199-241
Abstract:
One of the defining features of modern states is their incorporation of notions of political and social community based on shared language, history, and myths. However, large numbers of citizens in modern states have come to believe their national communities are under threat from several modern forces, including immigration. Using the European Social Survey (2002-9), this article explores the extent to which perceived threats posed by large-scale immigration undermine national political communities by reducing trust in national politicians and political institutions. The findings indicate that even after controlling for other predictors of trust in the political system, concerns about the effect of immigration on the national community have an impact on trust in politics. Moreover, having a lengthy postwar history with mass immigration mediates this effect, while the potentially mobilizing effects of far-right parties on the relationship between concern about immigration and political distrust are somewhat limited.