Immigration Nation
Petra Moser, Alessandra Voena & Fabian Waldinger
Stanford Working Paper, March 2010
Abstract:
This paper uses the dismissal of German-Jewish scientists from German universities as a result of the Nazi racial purity laws of 1933 as a natural experiment to examine the effects of human capital on innovation. Specifically, we compare increases in U.S. innovation after 1933 in technologies where dismissed (Jewish and Communist) scientists were active with technologies where other German scientists were active. This test allows us to address the endogeneity of migration decisions (better qualified workers are more likely to migrate) and measure whether, and how much, the dismissal of Jewish scientists from German universities benefitted innovation in the United States. Data on more than 100,000 U.S. chemical patents between 1900 and 1970 indicate that patenting nearly doubled in affected technologies after Jewish scientists arrived in the United States.
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Legalization and the Economic Status of Immigrants
Silvia Helena Barcellos
RAND Working Paper, March 2010
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of legalization on the economic outcomes of the legalized population. It uses a natural experiment caused by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) which gave amnesty for undocumented immigrants who could prove continuous residence in the U.S. after January 1, 1982. The arbitrary cutoff date on the eligibility criteria causes a discontinuity in the relationship between the year of immigration and the probability of being legal. This paper uses this discontinuity to identify the causal impacts of legalization on immigrants' outcomes. Regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences estimates show that immigrants eligible for the policy have a significantly higher probability of being naturalized citizens than those who were not. Legalization is also found to have a positive and significant effect on wages, a negative effect on the probability of working in a traditionally illegal occupation, and no significant effect on geographical mobility. The analysis for different demographic groups confirms such conclusions and shows that the estimated effects of legalization are larger for low-educated Latin American immigrants, the group that was disproportionably affected by the policy.
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Patricia Roehling, Lorna Hernandez Jarvis, Jonathan Sprik & Precious Campbell
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, May 2010, Pages 292-308
Abstract:
This study collected data from 422 seventh- and eighth-grade adolescents in 2005 and 391 seventh- and eighth-grade adolescents in 2006 in a medium-sized Midwestern community as part of a larger longitudinal study. The 2006 data collection occurred at the height of the national debate about immigration policy and practice. The fortuitous timing of the data collection allowed the authors to compare the responses of seventh- and eighth-grade Latino adolescents surveyed in 2005 with seventh- and eighth-grade students surveyed in 2006 to examine how the debate related to adolescent ethnic identity development and well-being. Using multiple regression analyses the study found evidence that the debate moved eighth-grade Latino students from the undifferentiated stage of ethnic identity development to the exploration stage. Furthermore, it was found that the debate was related to increased levels of acculturative stress and general stress among first-generation eighth-grade Latino students.
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Black-Latino Political Relationships: Policy Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives
Rodney Hero & Robert Preuhs
American Politics Research, May 2010, Pages 531-562
Abstract:
Political relations between racial/ethnic groups in America have (a) been commonly examined in terms of the degree of "cooperation" or "conflict" and (b) have most frequently been studied in the arena of urban politics; this has been especially so in the case of Hispanics/Latinos and African Americans. This article represents the first effort to pose and to systematically assess the question of inter-minority group relations in Congress by examining roll call behavior in the U.S. House of Representatives. Using Black and Latino interest group ratings and associated roll call votes from the 104th to 108th Congresses as indicators of Black and Latino interests, we show that Black representatives have voting records very supportive of the most salient concerns of Latinos and that Latino representatives have voting records at least modestly supportive of the most salient concerns of Blacks. At minimum, the findings suggest that Black and Latino representatives support the "other" group at the same level (or higher) than party affiliation alone would suggest and also indicate an absence of conflict that is found in local-level studies.
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Ethnic Shopkeepers in U.S. Cities in the Late Nineteenth Century
Robert Boyd
Sociological Spectrum, May 2010, Pages 317-337
Abstract:
The literature on retail entrepreneurship makes an important distinction between shopkeeping and petty trading. Building on this literature, the present study addresses two questions about retail enterprise in U.S. cities in the late nineteenth century: To what extent were retail entrepreneurs from the Southern, Central, and Eastern (SCE) European groups shopkeepers rather than petty traders? And which region of the country offered the best opportunities for retail entrepreneurs from these groups to become shopkeepers? Census data from 1900 show that: (1) retail entrepreneurs from these immigrant groups were more likely to be petty traders than shopkeepers; and (2) the opportunities for these entrepreneurs to become shopkeepers were greatest in the South, an emerging peripheral region with relatively small immigrant communities. These findings cast doubt on the conventional view that conditions in major northern cities bolstered shopkeeping among entrepreneurial groups, such as Russian and Polish Jews, in the late nineteenth century.
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Julie Park & Dowell Myers
Demography, May 2010, Pages 369-392
Abstract:
The new second generation of the post-1965 immigration era is observed as children with their parents in 1980 and again as adults 25 years later. Intergenerational mobility is assessed for both men and women in four major racial/ethnic groups, both in regard to children's status attainment relative to parents and with regard to the rising societal standards proxied by native-born non-Hispanic whites. A profile of intergenerational mobility is prepared using multiple indicators of status attainment: high school and college completion, upper white-collar occupation, poverty, and homeownership. The immigrant generation cohort method we introduce accounts for four distinct temporal dimensions of immigrant progress, clarifying inconsistencies in the literature and highlighting differences in mobility between racial/ethnic groups and with respect to different outcome measures. The immigrant generation cohort method consistently finds greater intergenerational mobility than suggested by alternative approaches. Our analysis also shows that the intergenerational progress of women is greater than that of men and provides a more complete record of immigrant mobility overall. Findings for individual racial/ethnic groups accord with some expectations in the literature and contradict others.
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David McKenzie, John Gibson & Steven Stillman
Journal of the European Economic Association, June 2010, Pages 913-945
Abstract:
How much do migrants stand to gain in income from moving across borders? Answering this question is complicated by non-random selection of migrants from the general population, which makes it hard to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non-migrants. New Zealand allows a quota of Tongans to immigrate each year with a random ballot used to choose among the excess number of applicants. A unique survey conducted by the authors allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration to be obtained by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate, but whose names were not drawn in the ballot, after allowing for the effect of non-compliance among some of those whose names were drawn. We also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the ballot. Comparing this non-applicant group to the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non-experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration. We find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills. As a result, non-experimental methods other than instrumental variables are found to overstate the gains from migration by 20-82%, with difference-in-differences and bias-adjusted matching estimators performing best among the alternatives to instrumental variables.
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Personal Value Priorities and National Identification
Sonia Roccas, Shalom Schwartz & Adi Amit
Political Psychology, June 2010, Pages 393-419
Abstract:
We examine relations of personal value priorities to identification with one's nation. We hypothesize that relations of values to identification depend on the motivations that can be attained by identifying with a nation. Study 1 confirmed the hypothesis that identification with one's nation correlates positively with conservation values and negatively with openness to change values in Israel and the USA. Moreover, values predicted identification with the nation above and beyond Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Study 2 showed that increasing the salience of conservation values produced higher identification with Israel, whereas increasing the salience of openness to change values produced lower identification. Study 3 tested the hypothesis that when identification with a national group conflicts with social expectations it has different, even reversed relations with value priorities. We examined identification of recent immigrants to Israel. The more pressure immigrants felt to assimilate, the more positive the correlation of conservation values with identification with the country of residence (Israel) and the more negative the correlation of conservation values with identification with the country of origin (Russia). Taken together, the findings point to the utility of values in revealing the motivational functions of identification with a nation.
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Prosperity, Immigration, and Neighborhood Change in Silicon Valley: 1990-2000
Vern Baxter
Sociological Spectrum, May 2010, Pages 338-364
Abstract:
This article uses panel data collected at the block group level from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census to explore neighborhood change in the Silicon Valley region of Northern California. This was a period of rapid economic expansion and displacement of the white majority by immigrants of Asian and Hispanic descent. The argument that economic prosperity promotes ethnic group assimilation is confronted by mixed findings that ethnic residential segregation intensified in Silicon Valley during the 1990s, regardless of the income level of neighborhoods, and that some second generation immigrants have begun to assimilate residentially. Results support the argument that more recent immigrants, regardless of education, are likely to reside in areas populated by members of their ethnic group. In addition, upward mobility does not necessarily mean ethnic minorities will leave ethnic neighborhoods and desegregate the larger metropolitan area, which also creates the potential for proliferation of more affluent ethnic neighborhoods.
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Christopher Henrie & David Plane
Population Research and Policy Review, February 2008, Pages 43-64
Abstract:
Increasingly since the 1960s and 1970s, population migration trends within the United States have been driven by the development of a second western population core. The burgeoning concentration of population along the Pacific Coast has fueled the emergence of a significant interconnected system of western metropolitan areas that increasingly rivals the primacy of the long-established northeastern core. During the 1990s the dispersal of population downward within the western urban hierarchy supplanted a much diminished Frostbelt-to-Sunbelt trend to become the most salient aspect of national population redistribution. The Southern California and Bay Area conurbations are serving as the primary pivots fueling the extension of a western urban subsystem. In this study we use county-level IRS matched tax return data and the newly defined Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA) units to explore the recent (1995-2000) flows of U.S. internal migrants within the functional urban system of the western United States. We present maps based on demographic effectiveness and on a new migration impact measure to examine and illustrate the evolving spatial patterns characteristic of current population redistribution across the West.
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Yuji Tamura
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze a model of the migrant smuggling market where smugglers differ in the capacity to exploit their clients' labor at the destination. We suggest that destination countries with limited resources may prefer to improve the apprehension of smugglers and their clients at the border rather than inland, although either one of these anti-smuggling measures would reduce migrant exploitation. The reason is twofold. First, even if the resulting improvement in border apprehension alone cannot eliminate smuggling, it can do so when combined with a severe penalty for smuggling. Second, even if it is impracticable to set the penalty for smuggling sufficiently high, improved border apprehension reduces smuggling by discouraging existing exploitative smugglers from smuggling, whereas improved inland apprehension either maintains or even increases it by inducing them and those who are not currently smuggling to take up nonexploitative smuggling.
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Thomas Gindling & Sara Poggio
University of Maryland Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
For many immigrants, especially those from Central America and Mexico, it is common for a mother or father (or both) to migrate to the United States and leave their children behind. Then, after the parent(s) have achieved some degree of stability in the United States, the children follow. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, we examined the hypothesis that separation during migration results in problems at school after re-unification. We find that children separated from parents during migration are more likely to be behind others their age in school and are more likely to drop out of high school.