Grandioso de nuevo
Geographies of Exclusion: The Importance of Racial Legacies in Examining State-Level Immigration Laws
Yalidy Matos
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, I examine the decisions of Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Utah, Indiana, and most recently, Texas to pass restrictive immigration omnibus bills and analyze the factors associated with the decision of a state to pass its own immigration law, sometimes without explicit warrant. I focus on state omnibus legislation for two main reasons. First, this type of legislation has been the focus of much media attention. Second, omnibus legislation mimics comprehensive immigration legislation over which the federal government has sole authority. Additionally, I focus on the regional proliferation of restrictive immigration laws, and then bring my attention to the seven states that passed similar legislation. Individually, I examine the roll call votes by each state’s House of Representatives. By looking at immigration politics at a subnational level, this article provides a more nuanced understanding of the political and ideological work of immigration policies. I argue that contemporary immigration politics at subnational levels should not only be understood as a story about demographic changes and strictly partisan politics but also a story about the sociohistorical legacies of localities. The historical processes of race, and the differing ways in which places get racialized, influences, beyond partisanship, which representatives voted for and against restrictive immigration legislation. These differences, alongside state-level differences, I argue, continue to affect politics and policy today. Immigration policy has become a vessel through which to contest the politics of race, place, and power.
It's All about Race: How State Legislators Respond to Immigrant Constituents
Micah Gell-Redman et al.
University of Georgia Working Paper, July 2017
Abstract:
How do elected representatives respond to the needs of immigrant constituents? In order to explore this question, we conduct a field experiment on state legislators in the United States, which leverages randomized cues that independently manipulate the nativity, likelihood of voting, and race of a hypothetical constituent. We contribute to the existing scholarship by looking beyond black and white to examine how representatives interact with Latino and Asian constituents. In addition, we explore a separate dimension of race by examining differences in response based on nativity and voting status. Contrary to expectations, we find that nativity and voting status do not affect responsiveness. Instead, we find that legislator behavior is driven by racial/ethnic bias. Whites benefit from the highest degree of responsiveness, with blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all receiving lower response rates, respectively. Moreover, the bias that we observe follows a partisan logic. Hispanic constituents receive lower responsiveness primarily from Republican legislators, while Asians experience discrimination from representatives of both parties. We argue that this difference may result from Hispanic identity sending a stronger signal about partisan affiliation, or from a prejudicial view of Asians as outsiders. In this interpretation, rather than the model minority, Asians become the excluded minority.
Citizenship Status and Arrest Patterns for Violent and Narcotic-Related Offenses in Federal Judicial Districts along the U.S./Mexico Border
Deborah Sibila, Wendi Pollock & Scott Menard
American Journal of Criminal Justice, September 2017, Pages 469–488
Abstract:
Media reports routinely reference the drug-related violence in Mexico, linking crime in communities along the Southwest U.S. Border to illegal immigrants. The primary purpose of the current research is to examine whether the media assertions can be supported. Logistic regression models were run to determine the impact of citizenship on the likelihood of disproportionate arrest for federal drug and violent crimes, along the U.S./Mexico border. In arrests for homicide, assault, robbery, and weapons offenses, U.S. citizens were disproportionately more likely than non-citizens to be arrested. The only federal crime where non-citizens were disproportionately more likely to be arrested than were U.S. citizens was for marijuana offenses. Results of the current study challenge the myth of the criminal immigrant.
Should Policy Makers Be Concerned About a Negative Wage Impact of Skilled Immigrants Receiving Advanced Educational Degrees in the U.S.?
Daniel Aobdia & Anup Srivastava
Northwestern University Working Paper, June 2017
Abstract:
Skilled immigrants play an increasingly important role in the U.S. economy. Visa regulation governing their employment by U.S. corporations, however, has remained largely unchanged over the last 25 years or so. Policy makers unanimously agree that such visa regulation needs a comprehensive reform. Hindering reform is the belief that U.S. corporations hire skilled immigrants to lower the wages of native workers, not to meet the shortfall of skilled labor. We contribute to the debate by examining the wage-depressing argument in the audit industry, which is a significant employer of U.S.-educated skilled immigrants. We find no evidence for this argument in our setting. Our study should interest researchers and policy makers as it supports the case for regulation reform for immigrants receiving advanced degrees in the U.S.
Minimum Wages and the Labor Market Effects of Immigration
Anthony Edo & Hillel Rapoport
Paris School of Economics Working Paper, July 2017
Abstract:
We exploit the non-linearity in the level of minimum wages across US States created by the coexistence of federal and state regulations to investigate how minimum wages affect the labor market impact of immigration. We find that the effects of immigration on labor market outcomes of native workers within a given state-skill cell are more negative in U.S. States with low minimum wages (i.e., where the federal minimum wage is binding). The results are robust to instrumenting immigration as well as state minimum wages, and to implementing a difference-in-differences strategy comparing U.S. States where effective minimum wages are fully determined by federal standards over the whole period considered (2000-2013) to U.S. States where this is never the case. Our results therefore underline the important role played by minimum wages in mitigating any adverse labor market effects of immigration.
Undocumented Immigration, Drug Problems, and Driving Under the Influence in the United States, 1990–2014
Michael Light, Ty Miller & Brian Kelly
American Journal of Public Health, September 2017, Pages 1448-1454
Methods: We combined newly developed state-level estimates of the undocumented population between 1990 and 2014 from the Center for Migration Studies with arrest data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports and fatality information from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Underlying Cause of Death database. We used fixed-effects regression models to examine the longitudinal association between increased undocumented immigration and drug problems and drunk driving.
Results: Increased undocumented immigration was significantly associated with reductions in drug arrests, drug overdose deaths, and DUI arrests, net of other factors. There was no significant relationship between increased undocumented immigration and DUI deaths.
Substance use disorders among immigrants in the United States: A research update
Christopher Salas-Wright et al.
Addictive Behaviors, January 2018, Pages 169-173
Method: The data source used for the present study is the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC-III, 2012–2013), a nationally representative survey of 36,309 civilian, non-institutionalized adults ages 18 and older in the US. Logistic regression was employed to examine the relationship between immigrant status and SUD risk.
Results: Immigrants were found to be substantially less likely than US-born individuals to be diagnosed with a past-year or lifetime SUD, including alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, and opioid use disorders. These findings held across major world region and among immigrants from the top-ten immigrant sending nations, and across differences in age, gender, family income, age of migration, and time spent in the US.
Protecting unauthorized immigrant mothers improves their children’s mental health
Jens Hainmueller et al.
Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The United States is embroiled in a debate about whether to protect or deport its estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants, but the fact that these immigrants are also parents to more than 4 million U.S.-born children is often overlooked. We provide causal evidence of the impact of parents’ unauthorized immigration status on the health of their U.S. citizen children. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program granted temporary protection from deportation to more than 780,000 unauthorized immigrants. We used Medicaid claims data from Oregon and exploited the quasi-random assignment of DACA eligibility among mothers with birthdates close to the DACA age qualification cutoff. Mothers’ DACA eligibility significantly decreased adjustment and anxiety disorder diagnoses among their children. Parents’ unauthorized status is thus a substantial barrier to normal child development and perpetuates health inequalities through the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.
Do State Employment Eligibility Verification Laws Affect Job Turnover?
Pia Orrenius, Madeline Zavodny & Emily Gutierrez
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
State laws requiring employers to verify workers' employment eligibility may reduce employment and earnings among unauthorized workers and make it difficult for them to switch jobs. Using data from the 2005–2014 Quarterly Workforce Indicators, we find evidence of a reduction in employment and job turnover among Hispanics as a whole in states that require all employers to verify employment eligibility. These adverse effects become larger as the share of likely unauthorized Hispanic workers falls. The drop in job turnover may be due to the laws trapping some Hispanic workers in their jobs. There is little effect on employment or job turnover among non-Hispanic whites or blacks. There is no effect on average pay for all groups of workers.
Immigrant Resentment and Voter Fraud Beliefs in the U.S. Electorate
Adriano Udani & David Kimball
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Public beliefs about the frequency of voter fraud are frequently cited to support restrictive voting laws in the United States. However, some sources of public beliefs about voter fraud have received little attention. We identify two conditions that combine to make anti-immigrant attitudes a strong predictor of voter fraud beliefs. First, the recent growth and dispersion of the immigrant population makes immigration a salient consideration for many Americans. Second, an immigrant threat narrative in political discourse linking immigration to crime and political dysfunction has been extended to the voting domain. Using new data from a survey module in the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and the 2012 American National Election Study, we show that immigrant resentment is strongly associated with voter fraud beliefs. Widespread hostility toward immigrants helps nourish public beliefs about voter fraud and support for voting restrictions in the United States. The conditions generating this relationship in public opinion likely exist in other nations roiled by immigration politics. The topic of fraudulent electoral practices will likely continue to provoke voters to call to mind groups that are politically constructed as “un-American.”
Ethnic density, immigrant enclaves, and Latino health risks: A propensity score matching approach
Kelin Li, Ming Wen & Kevin Henry
Social Science & Medicine, September 2017, Pages 44-52
Abstract:
Whether minority concentration in a neighborhood exposes residents to or protects them from health risks has generated burgeoning scholarly interests, yet endogeneity as a result of neighborhood selection largely remains unclear in the literature. This study addresses such endogeneity and simultaneously investigates the roles of co-ethnic density and immigrant enclaves in influencing high blood pressure and high cholesterol level among Latinos, the largest minority group in the United States. Pooled cross-sectional data that included both native and foreign-born Latinos of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and other origins (N = 1563) from the 2006 and 2008 Southeastern Pennsylvania Household Health Survey were linked to census-tract profiles from the 2005–2009 American Community Survey. Results from both multilevel regression and propensity score matching analysis confirmed the deleterious effect of residential co-ethnic density on Latino adults' health risks over and above individual risk factors. We also found selection bias associated with the observed protective effect of immigrant concentration, which is likely a result of residential preference.
Household fear of deportation in Mexican-origin families: Relation to body mass index percentiles and salivary uric acid
Airín Martínez, Lillian Ruelas & Douglas Granger
American Journal of Human Biology, forthcoming
Objective: Fear of deportation (FOD) is a prevalent concern among mixed-status families. Yet, our understanding of how FOD shapes human health and development is in its infancy. To begin to address this knowledge gap, we examined the relationship between household FOD, body mass index (BMI) percentiles and salivary uric acid (sUA), a biomarker related to oxidative stress/hypertension/metabolic syndrome, among 111 individuals living in Mexican-origin families.
Methods: Participants were 65 children (2 months-17 years, 49% female) and 46 adults (20-58 years, 71% female) living in 30 Mexican-origin families with at least one immigrant parent in Phoenix, AZ. We recruited families using cluster probability sampling of 30 randomly selected census tracts with a high proportion of Hispanic/Latino immigrants. The head of household completed a survey containing demographic, FOD, and psychosocial measures. All family members provided saliva (later assayed for sUA) and anthropometric measures. Relationships between household FOD, BMI percentile, and sUA levels were estimated using multilevel models.
Results: Higher levels of household FOD were associated with lower BMI percentiles and lower sUA levels between families, after controlling for social support and socioeconomic proxies.
Ethnicity, Immigration, and Wealth Fluctuations in the United States
Olga Gorbachev, Brendan O'Flaherty & Rajiv Sethi
Review of Income and Wealth, forthcoming
Abstract:
Wealth in the United States rose and fell precipitously during the first decade of this century for all major ethnic groups, but the fluctuations in Hispanic wealth were especially extreme. We show that household characteristics and location can account for the Hispanic experience during the boom but not the bust. We argue that the sudden collapse in credit availability to undocumented immigrants at the start of the recession led, through a contraction in demand for the homes of natural sellers in this market, to a loss in wealth far greater than could be predicted based on household characteristics and location alone.