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Immigration, Applied Research on
Immigration, Applied Research on Maria E Enchautegui, Urban Institute, Washington, DC, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract The growing number of immigrants and its importance in the demographic changes being experienced in the United States have resulted in a surge in immigration research in the last two decades. This article is an effort to tap into the multidisciplinary literature on immigration to bring the issues that are capturing the attention of the most recent scholarship, pointing to data limitations and gaps. We identify family-based immigration, integration, enforcement, documenting the undocumented, the effects of immigration on the wages of native workers, and inequality as the most pressing issues in current immigration research.
Overview of US Immigration As of the writing of this article, there were 232 million international migrants in the world 3.2% of the world’s population (Migration Policy Institute Data Hub http://www. migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub). At 40.8 million foreign-born in 2012, United States has by far the largest number of world immigrants (Migration Policy Institute Data Hub Migration Policy Institute Data Hub http://www. migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub). According to Census Bureau’s projections, mid-twenty-first century will be the first time that immigration will surpass natural increase as the main driver of US population growth (U.S. Census Bureau Population Projections: http://www.census.gov/population/ projections/data/national/2012.html). As shown in Figure 1, the percentage foreign-born in the United States has been growing since 1970 standing at 13% in 2012. The foreign-born population residing in the United States is composed of naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, aliens with temporary residence permits, and those residing illegally. The American Community Survey provides information on whether a foreign-born person is a US citizen or not. In the 2012 American Community Survey, 46% of the foreign-born persons not of American parents reported to be naturalized citizens (IPUMS, American Community Survey 2012 https://usa.ipums.org/usa/). The remaining of the foreign-born population are noncitizens. These data do not provide information about immigration status of noncitizens. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) produces estimates of the number of legal permanent residents and nonimmigrants on temporary visas. The latest estimates show that there were 13.3 million legal permanent residents in the United States and 1.9 in temporary statuses (DHS, Immigration Statistics Publications: http://www.dhs.gov/ immigration-statistics-publications). DHS and The Pew Hispanic Trends Project produce estimates of the unauthorized population. Estimates from DHS for 2011 based on the American Community Survey put the number of unauthorized immigrants at 11.5 million (DHS, Immigration Statistics Publications: http://www.dhs.gov/ immigration-statistics-publications). The most recent estimate from Pew for March 2012 was 11.7 million (Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project: http://www.pewhispanic.org).
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 11
A distinct characteristic of the US immigration system in comparison to other countries is the preponderance of family ties in visa allocation. Family reunification has long been the foundation of US immigration policy. Between Fiscal Years (FY) 2003 and 2012, United States awarded an average of 1.03 million legal permanent resident visas annually (DHS Immigration Statistics: http://www.dhs.gov/ immigration-statistics). About two-thirds of these visas were awarded based on family relationships to US citizens and legal permanent residents (Figure 2). In addition to family reunification, the granting of permanent residence visas is also driven by humanitarian, economic, and diversity reasons. In FY 2012, 154 614 or 15% of all permanent resident visas went to refugees and asylees (noncitizens who have been granted asylum). Another 14% or 139 000 of visas were awarded based on employment and skills. But when counting only the worker, not his or her family, the percent of all visas awarded in the basis of employment and skills was only about 6%. The United States also awards permanent visas to diversify the country of origin of the immigrant population. A lottery is conducted among intended immigrants from countries with a low number of people admitted to the United States. Diversity visa participants should have at least a high-school
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12.9
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1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2012
Figure 1 Percentage of foreign-born in United States, 1990–2012. US Census. America’s Foreign-Born Population in the Last 50 Years http://www.census.gov/how/infographics/foreign_born.html; 2012 figure from: http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/ productview.xhtml?pid¼ACS_12_1YR_S0501&prodType¼table.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.10530-6
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Diversity 4%
Refugees and asylees 15%
Employment 14%
Other 1%
Immediate relaƟves of US ciƟzens 46%
Family preference 20%
Total = 103 161 Figure 2 Percentage distribution of legal permanent visas awarded in fiscal year 2012. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration Statistics, Immigration Yearbook, 2012, Table 6. (http://www.dhs.gov/ yearbook-immigration-statistics.
diploma or have, within the past 5 years, a minimum of 2 years of experience working in a profession requiring at least 2 years of training or experience (Migration Policy Center, How the US Immigration System Work http://www.immigrationpolicy. org/just-facts/how-united-states-immigration-system-worksfact-sheet). This group accounted for 4% of all legal permanent visas awarded in FY 2012.
The Merits of Family-Based Immigration The predominance of family ties in awarding legal permanent visas has generated a debate on whether United States is losing international competitiveness by not putting more emphasis on skills in awarding visas, as other economically developed countries do. Examples of this concern can be found in various bills presented at Congress, which stress putting more attention to skills in awarding legal permanent visas of which the most recent are such as S. 744 and H.R. 2131 (Govtrack.us: https:// www.govtrack.us). Researchers have compared family and employment immigrants and have tried to answer whether class of admission makes a difference in terms of the economic standing and economic progress of immigrants. A further indictment on immigration policy is the fact that researchers have also examined if the labor market quality of immigrants have declined across successive entry cohorts. Since there is no national data containing information on the class of admission under which an immigrant gained legal permanent residence, most work comparing family and employment immigrants use data from United States Citizenship and Immigration Office on specific cohorts that were granted permanent residence. The immigrant-level data are not public and their use has to be procured through special permit from the DHS. Moreover, information contained in
these data is quite limited. It does contain information on class of admission, year visa was granted, and a few other variables such as occupation, age, gender, and marital status, but not earnings. With these data and imputing earnings based on the average earnings of the occupation from other data sources, studies have found that employment-based immigrants have higher earnings than family-based immigrants (Akresh, 2006; Barrett, 1998; Jasso and Rosenzweig, 1995). Another glimpse into the merits, or lack thereof, of familybased immigration comes from the 1996 New Immigrant Survey Pilot – a pilot study of immigrants who became legal permanent residents in 1996, with retrospective information on occupations (Akresh (2006)). The study reports that family immigrants have a lower occupational index than employment immigrants and experience more downward occupational mobility than employment immigrants. While it appears that employment immigrants have higher earnings, due to the paucity of longitudinal data on immigrants we do not know if family immigrants become like employment immigrants with time, nor how long this would take. The soon to be released second wave of the 2003 New Immigrant Survey will shed new light on the performance of immigrants by class of admission. This survey is a random sample of immigrants who became legalized in 2003 and were interviewed in that same year and again in 2007. It contains information on a host of social and economic variables as well as their class of admission. Given the paucity of data on class of admission, the merits of the current immigration policy system is being discussed within the banner of immigrant quality. The large representation of persons with low levels of education in the immigration flow and the shift in sending countries after enactment of the 1965 Immigration Act have prompted discussions on whether recent immigrants are of lower labor-market quality than prior immigrants. This question is not at all new since even economists’ writings from the late-1800s bring concerns about declining quality of immigrants (see references in Card, 2009). But the availability of microlevel Census data brings empirical precision to this question. Researchers have compared the entry earnings of successive cohorts of immigrants, relative to native workers and most have found that the labor market quality of immigrants has declined (Borjas, 1985, 2013; Funkhouser and Trejo, 1998; LaLonde and Topel, 1991). But Jasso et al. (2000) claim that to assess the quality of immigrants and to make assessments about immigration policy we must look at legal immigrants and Census data used in other studies that include unauthorized immigrants. Their data on legal husband immigrants from 1972 to 1995 do not show declines in quality, measured by the average occupational earnings. This finding reveals the importance of differentiating between legal and nonlegal immigrants in immigration research. As more data points become available through the Census and American Community Survey, it has become evident that there is no permanent feature to the labor market quality of US immigrants. Borjas and Friedberg (2009) find an improvement in quality for the immigrants that entered after 1990 attributing it to the increase in the number of employment immigrants resulting from the 1990 Immigration Act. Changes in quality are also evident in the USCIS microdata on different
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cohorts of immigrants who were awarded permanent resident visas (Barrett, 1998; Jasso et al., 2000).
Are Immigrants and Their Children Integrating to the US Economy and Society? The integration of immigrants into US society and economy has been a long-standing theme in the immigration scholarship. The word integration (the term assimilation is also often used) broadly refers to the extent to which, with time in the United States, immigrants’ outcomes resemble those of natives on indicators such as income, employment, occupations, fertility, household structure, English language abilities, and civic engagement. Assimilation in earnings takes place because, with time in the United States, immigrants invest in human capital such as education, learn the English language, and accumulate US labor market experience, and these investments increase earnings (Chiswick, 1978). Alternatively, assimilation can be the product of a learning process or job search. With time in the United States, immigrants learn about the US labor market and this knowledge produces a better matching between jobs and skills and a better pay (Daneshvary et al., 1992). Sociologists refer to Anglo conformity, predicting convergence of immigrants to the outcomes of the middle class (see citations in Valdez, 2006). In 1993 Portes and Zhou introduced the concept of segmented assimilation. According to Portes and Zhou “the question is into what particular sector of American society a particular immigrant group assimilates” (p. 82). These authors offer that immigrants assimilate to different segments of the society in three main pathways: assimilation into the middle class; assimilation into the urban underclass, and the preservation of immigrants’ culture and values. This perspective has generated a proliferation of research about what assimilation paths are immigrants following, especially the second generation (Greenman and Xie, 2008; Hirschman, 2001; Rumbaut, 1997; Valdez, 2006). One integration outcome that has received a lot of attention is earnings. Economists have addressed if the earnings of immigrants converge to those of natives. Due to a lack of longitudinal data, this question has been addressed with synthetic cohorts from Census data. The work of LaLonde and Topel (1992) exemplifies this work, finding that the earnings gaps between immigrants and natives are closed within a period of 10 years in the United States. A problem with synthetic cohorts is that they cannot address selectivity of emigration. If people who emigrate are those with lower earnings. (Hu, 2000; Lubotsky, 2007; Schwabish, 2011), then assimilation patterns from synthetic cohorts may exaggerate the speed at which immigrants catch up with natives. Recently, researchers have used earnings data from the Social Security Administration to follow immigrants’ earnings for a long period of time and a few other studies have matched CPS respondents across interview rotations to follow immigrants’ earnings for up to 2 years. These studies paint a more dire picture of earnings assimilation, showing little if any earnings growth across time, at times even declines, and assimilation rates much lower than those from synthetic cohorts (Hu, 2000; Schwabish, 2011; Lubotsky, 2007; Kim, 2013).
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Most recently and with the advent of data on youth, research on integration has been expanded by looking at the performance of the children of immigrants and testing theories of segmented assimilation. With Adolescent Health Data, Greenman and Xie (2008) analyze a broad set of outcomes and find that assimilation, measured as years of residence in the United States, generation, ethnic composition of the neighborhood, and ethnicity of friends, have a positive effect on some outcomes and negative in others. Using data from CPS on place of birth of mothers and fathers, Card (2005) finds that the wage and the educational gaps with natives are almost closed by the second generation. The second generation may be the key yardstick by which to assess immigrant integration (Card, 2005). Data sources on immigrant children and youth such as Children of Immigrants (Rumbaut, 1997), Education Longitudinal Survey, and Adolescent Heath allow for examination of a wide variety of outcomes to test hypotheses about integration of the second generation, opening ample opportunities for future research.
Enforcement and the Well-Being of Immigrant Families Since the 1990s, the levels of immigration enforcement have increased and the range of enforcement practices have widened with the cooperation between federal and local governments, and with state-of-the-art technology (Meissner et al., 2013). Hagan et al. (2011) describe three laws passed between 1996 and 2000 making it easier to deport an immigrant by increasing the type of deportable offences, weakening judicial review, and reducing the ability of the migrant to appeal: the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA); the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996; and the USA Patriot Act of 2001. Enforcement escalated after 9/11. Between FY 2005 and 2012, 2.8 million persons were removed from the country, almost twice the amount from the previous 8 years (DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: http://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigration). Most of the deported are from Mexico and Central America. In the last few years, researchers have started to put out basic information about deportees and analyzing the consequences of enforcement for immigrant families, particularly children. The report In the Shadow of the Wall (http://las.arizona.edu/ sites/las.arizona.edu/files/UA_Immigration_Report2013web. pdf), sampled 1113 persons who were deported to Mexico. Deportees were interviewed in ports of entry in Mexico immediately following deportation and in migrant shelters in Mexican cities. This study found that 82% of the deportees were men and their median age was 31 years old; 22% had citizen children and 42% were the sole provider. In a survey of 300 deportees taken in El Salvador, Hagan et al. (2008) also found that most were men, in the ages of 18–30 and that 30% had spouses or children in the United States. Most studies on the impacts of enforcement on families and children are qualitative and based on small samples but several patterns are evident from these studies. It is clear that there is family separation after deportation and that this affects the income of the family left behind (Capps et al., 2007; Hagan et al., 2011). Children’s mental health is also affected
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(Capps et al., 2007; Hagan et al., 2011). This research also shows that increased enforcement has injected a fear of deportation among unauthorized immigrants (Hagan et al., 2011; Dreby, 2012). Dreby (2012) articulates that it is not the deportation itself but the possibility of deportation that has affected an even greater number of children, even among children whose parents are not at risk of being deported. Dreby finds that increased enforcement has caused children to conflate immigration with illegality, and Menjivar and Abrego (2012) describes how deportation fears spread even among documented immigrants. Immigration is a social process (Massey, 2004). Having a migrant parent, a migrant sibling, and a migrant child all separately increase the odds of leaving on a first undocumented trip substantially and significantly (Massey and Riosmena, 2010). But enforcement has had an effect on unauthorized immigration. Several studies using the Mexican Migration Project find that border enforcement reduces undocumented immigration (Angelucci, 2012; Hanson and Spilimbergo, 1996; Lessem, 2012; Thom, 2010). Angelucci (2012) concludes that during the most recent period of high enforcement in her data (1997–2003) enforcement actions were a significant deterrent to in-migration, while the effect on average duration of stay became smaller, leading to a decline in the net flow of undocumented immigrants. Another aspect of enforcement is happening at the local level. Researchers are starting to sort out the effects of local policies on mobility, access to services, and informal work (Amuedo-Dorantes et al., 2013; Lofstrom et al., 2011). There is a dearth of research about enforcement and employers. Bringing in the employers perspective can enhance our knowledge about effectiveness and consequences of immigration enforcement.
Documenting the Lives of Undocumented Immigrants With the rise in undocumented immigration, researchers have recognized the need to document the lives of undocumented immigrants. For a long time, the only information available on unauthorized immigrants was population estimates nationally and for the largest states. But this changed with the Mexican Migration Project (http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/home-en. aspx). The Mexican Migration Project is possibly the earliest concerted effort to collect data on undocumented immigrants and their households. Data have been collected yearly since 1983, though this is not a nationally representative sample of US undocumented immigrants. The sample is drawn from households in 22 Mexican states. In the last decade there have been efforts to collect data on undocumented immigrants in the United States, and this has been done primarily through place-based surveys in large immigration cities such as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. There is also a good number of ethnographic studies of the undocumented immigrants (Bhimji, 2010, Cleaveland, 2012; Menjivar and Abrego, 2012; Salcido and Adelman, 2004). Most recently, a few studies have surfaced using state-based administrative data such as state wage records in the state of Georgia (Hotchkiss and Quispe-Agnoli, 2013) and records from use of emergency rooms in North Carolina hospitals. (DuBard and Massing, 2007).
These different data sources have documented many aspects of undocumented immigrant lives such as food insecurity (Hadley et al., 2008), domestic violence (Salcido and Adelman, 2004), wages and employment (Hotchkiss and Quispe-Agnoli, 2013; Mehta et al., 2002), type of emergency care service used (DuBard and Massin, 2007), effects of economic trends on migrants lives (Cleaveland), labor rights violations (Bernhardt et al., 2009), the job quality (Enchautegui, 2008), and daily laborers (Bhimji, 2010), among others. Researchers are also looking at the undocumented children and the citizen children of undocumented parents. Gonzales (2011) brings insights about the experiences of undocumented youth in American schools as they transit from an environment where illegality does not matter to one where illegality becomes central to their lives. Growing up as a child of undocumented parents also has implications for many dimensions of child development (Yoshikawa and Kalil, 2011). An emerging group in the undocumented population and one that will likely generate future research is unaccompanied children, children without lawful immigration status with no parent or legal guardian in the United States. The Office of Refugee Settlement, Program of Unaccompanied Alien Children reported serving an average of 8000 children annually and this figured jumped to 13 000 in FY 2012 and to 25 000 in FY 2013 (https://www. acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/orr/unaccompanied_childrens_ services_fact_sheet.pdf). Given the importance of undocumented immigrants in the US population and that immigration status is important in determining eligibility for government programs, the Government Accounting Office (2006) has issued recommendations about how to collect immigration status data on government statistics, but these recommendations have not been adopted by the Current Population Survey, the American Community Survey, nor government health surveys. Currently, two government-sponsored data sets collect information on undocumented status. These are the National Agricultural Workers Survey conducted by Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Survey of Income and Program Participation from the Census Bureau.
Impacts of Immigrants on Native’s Wages The impacts of immigration on the wages of native workers continue to be one of the most researched and most debated topics in immigration. Methodology twists and new evidence keeps bringing new insights to this area of research. Earlier studies estimated the effects of immigrants on native wages through variations in the share of metro-area population that are immigrants; Card (2005) and LaLonde and Topel (1991) exemplify this approach. Most of these studies find small or zero effects of immigration on native wages. But these studies are criticized on the basis that natives in local areas respond to immigration by moving to lower immigration areas (Borjas, 2003). Recent work by Cadena and Kovak (2012) adds a further angle to the limitations of the spatial approach when finding a high mobility rate of Mexican Americans and that this high mobility protects low-skilled natives from negative local-demand shocks such as in the
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Great Recession. This research points out to the limitations of the spatial approach in uncovering the effects of immigration on the wages of natives. More recent studies use a structural approach, departing from a production function. The unit of observation is the relative quantities at the national level of workers by skills, experience, and nativity. With this approach Borjas (2003) and Borjas et al. (2010) find large negative effects of immigration on native wages, especially for workers with no high school graduateswith no further education, but effects on college-educated are also found. Borjas’ modeling assumes, and examination of occupations suggests, that immigrants and natives within education–experience combinations are perfect substitutes. Ottaviano and Peri- O&P (2012) using a similar approach find negative but small effects of immigration in the wages of natives. The key difference is that O&P assume that the lowskilled labor is composed of high-school dropouts and highschool graduates and that these two groups are substitutes. Borjas and coauthors, however, assume that the low-skilled group is composed of only high-school dropouts. O&P joining of high-school dropouts and high school graduates-with no further education under the low-skilled group is substantiated by evidence that the substitutability between these two groups is almost infinite (Card, 2009). Therefore, the aggregation of high-school dropouts and high school graduates-with no further education under one skill group is critical in these estimations, reducing the effects of immigration on natives’ wages. Although immigration has affected the relative supply of highschool dropouts, it has not affected the relative supply of the combined group of dropouts and high-school diplomas. It must be noted that this research does not distinguish between documented and undocumented immigrants and we do not know if the lack of competition is due to undocumented immigrants not competing openly in the labor market.
Immigration and Inequality Immigration has also made its way into current discussions about increased inequality. Immigration could increase inequality directly and indirectly. Directly it would increase inequality if immigrants’ wages are more unequal than natives’ and if immigrants’ average income is different from natives (Blau and Khan, 2012). For instance, a high share of poor immigrants will increase the population at the bottom, while a high share of rich immigrants will increase the population at the top. If immigrants are a small share of the population and their skills are similar to those of natives, effects on income inequality will be small (Blau and Khan, 2012). Indirectly, immigrants could increase inequality if it reduces the wages of low-skilled workers, or if it helps raising the wages of those at the top. A study by Card (2009) concluded that immigration contributed only to a small percent (5%) of the increase in inequality experienced between 1980 and 2000. Blau and Khan (2012) reached similar conclusions showing that immigration increased inequality by 6% among men and by 3% among women. This literature is quite small now but future research may start looking at the role of second-generation immigrants on inequality, similar to what has happened in integration research.
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See also: Ethnicity and Migration in Europe; Ethnography in Applied Social Research; Global Migration; Immigration Policy; Immigration and Crime in the United States; Immigration, Emigration, and Citizenship; Immigration: Political Aspects; International Migration; Location Theory; Migration History; Migration and Development; Migration and Social Capital; Migration, Theory of; Migration: Cultural Aspects; Migration: Motivations; Qualitative Research; Sample Survey Methodology, History of.
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Abstract The growing number of immigrants and its importance in the demographic changes being experienced in the United States have resulted in a surge in immigration research in the last two decades. This article is an effort to tap into the multidisciplinary literature on immigration to bring the issues that are capturing the attention of the most recent scholarship, pointing to data limitations and gaps. We identify family-based immigration, integration, enforcement, documenting the undocumented, the effects of immigration on the wages of native workers, and inequality as the most pressing issues in current immigration research.
Overview of US Immigration As of the writing of this article, there were 232 million international migrants in the world 3.2% of the world’s population (Migration Policy Institute Data Hub http://www. migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub). At 40.8 million foreign-born in 2012, United States has by far the largest number of world immigrants (Migration Policy Institute Data Hub Migration Policy Institute Data Hub http://www. migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub). According to Census Bureau’s projections, mid-twenty-first century will be the first time that immigration will surpass natural increase as the main driver of US population growth (U.S. Census Bureau Population Projections: http://www.census.gov/population/ projections/data/national/2012.html). As shown in Figure 1, the percentage foreign-born in the United States has been growing since 1970 standing at 13% in 2012. The foreign-born population residing in the United States is composed of naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, aliens with temporary residence permits, and those residing illegally. The American Community Survey provides information on whether a foreign-born person is a US citizen or not. In the 2012 American Community Survey, 46% of the foreign-born persons not of American parents reported to be naturalized citizens (IPUMS, American Community Survey 2012 https://usa.ipums.org/usa/). The remaining of the foreign-born population are noncitizens. These data do not provide information about immigration status of noncitizens. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) produces estimates of the number of legal permanent residents and nonimmigrants on temporary visas. The latest estimates show that there were 13.3 million legal permanent residents in the United States and 1.9 in temporary statuses (DHS, Immigration Statistics Publications: http://www.dhs.gov/ immigration-statistics-publications). DHS and The Pew Hispanic Trends Project produce estimates of the unauthorized population. Estimates from DHS for 2011 based on the American Community Survey put the number of unauthorized immigrants at 11.5 million (DHS, Immigration Statistics Publications: http://www.dhs.gov/ immigration-statistics-publications). The most recent estimate from Pew for March 2012 was 11.7 million (Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project: http://www.pewhispanic.org).
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A distinct characteristic of the US immigration system in comparison to other countries is the preponderance of family ties in visa allocation. Family reunification has long been the foundation of US immigration policy. Between Fiscal Years (FY) 2003 and 2012, United States awarded an average of 1.03 million legal permanent resident visas annually (DHS Immigration Statistics: http://www.dhs.gov/ immigration-statistics). About two-thirds of these visas were awarded based on family relationships to US citizens and legal permanent residents (Figure 2). In addition to family reunification, the granting of permanent residence visas is also driven by humanitarian, economic, and diversity reasons. In FY 2012, 154 614 or 15% of all permanent resident visas went to refugees and asylees (noncitizens who have been granted asylum). Another 14% or 139 000 of visas were awarded based on employment and skills. But when counting only the worker, not his or her family, the percent of all visas awarded in the basis of employment and skills was only about 6%. The United States also awards permanent visas to diversify the country of origin of the immigrant population. A lottery is conducted among intended immigrants from countries with a low number of people admitted to the United States. Diversity visa participants should have at least a high-school
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1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2012
Figure 1 Percentage of foreign-born in United States, 1990–2012. US Census. America’s Foreign-Born Population in the Last 50 Years http://www.census.gov/how/infographics/foreign_born.html; 2012 figure from: http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/ productview.xhtml?pid¼ACS_12_1YR_S0501&prodType¼table.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.10530-6
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Diversity 4%
Refugees and asylees 15%
Employment 14%
Other 1%
Immediate relaƟves of US ciƟzens 46%
Family preference 20%
Total = 103 161 Figure 2 Percentage distribution of legal permanent visas awarded in fiscal year 2012. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration Statistics, Immigration Yearbook, 2012, Table 6. (http://www.dhs.gov/ yearbook-immigration-statistics.
diploma or have, within the past 5 years, a minimum of 2 years of experience working in a profession requiring at least 2 years of training or experience (Migration Policy Center, How the US Immigration System Work http://www.immigrationpolicy. org/just-facts/how-united-states-immigration-system-worksfact-sheet). This group accounted for 4% of all legal permanent visas awarded in FY 2012.
The Merits of Family-Based Immigration The predominance of family ties in awarding legal permanent visas has generated a debate on whether United States is losing international competitiveness by not putting more emphasis on skills in awarding visas, as other economically developed countries do. Examples of this concern can be found in various bills presented at Congress, which stress putting more attention to skills in awarding legal permanent visas of which the most recent are such as S. 744 and H.R. 2131 (Govtrack.us: https:// www.govtrack.us). Researchers have compared family and employment immigrants and have tried to answer whether class of admission makes a difference in terms of the economic standing and economic progress of immigrants. A further indictment on immigration policy is the fact that researchers have also examined if the labor market quality of immigrants have declined across successive entry cohorts. Since there is no national data containing information on the class of admission under which an immigrant gained legal permanent residence, most work comparing family and employment immigrants use data from United States Citizenship and Immigration Office on specific cohorts that were granted permanent residence. The immigrant-level data are not public and their use has to be procured through special permit from the DHS. Moreover, information contained in
these data is quite limited. It does contain information on class of admission, year visa was granted, and a few other variables such as occupation, age, gender, and marital status, but not earnings. With these data and imputing earnings based on the average earnings of the occupation from other data sources, studies have found that employment-based immigrants have higher earnings than family-based immigrants (Akresh, 2006; Barrett, 1998; Jasso and Rosenzweig, 1995). Another glimpse into the merits, or lack thereof, of familybased immigration comes from the 1996 New Immigrant Survey Pilot – a pilot study of immigrants who became legal permanent residents in 1996, with retrospective information on occupations (Akresh (2006)). The study reports that family immigrants have a lower occupational index than employment immigrants and experience more downward occupational mobility than employment immigrants. While it appears that employment immigrants have higher earnings, due to the paucity of longitudinal data on immigrants we do not know if family immigrants become like employment immigrants with time, nor how long this would take. The soon to be released second wave of the 2003 New Immigrant Survey will shed new light on the performance of immigrants by class of admission. This survey is a random sample of immigrants who became legalized in 2003 and were interviewed in that same year and again in 2007. It contains information on a host of social and economic variables as well as their class of admission. Given the paucity of data on class of admission, the merits of the current immigration policy system is being discussed within the banner of immigrant quality. The large representation of persons with low levels of education in the immigration flow and the shift in sending countries after enactment of the 1965 Immigration Act have prompted discussions on whether recent immigrants are of lower labor-market quality than prior immigrants. This question is not at all new since even economists’ writings from the late-1800s bring concerns about declining quality of immigrants (see references in Card, 2009). But the availability of microlevel Census data brings empirical precision to this question. Researchers have compared the entry earnings of successive cohorts of immigrants, relative to native workers and most have found that the labor market quality of immigrants has declined (Borjas, 1985, 2013; Funkhouser and Trejo, 1998; LaLonde and Topel, 1991). But Jasso et al. (2000) claim that to assess the quality of immigrants and to make assessments about immigration policy we must look at legal immigrants and Census data used in other studies that include unauthorized immigrants. Their data on legal husband immigrants from 1972 to 1995 do not show declines in quality, measured by the average occupational earnings. This finding reveals the importance of differentiating between legal and nonlegal immigrants in immigration research. As more data points become available through the Census and American Community Survey, it has become evident that there is no permanent feature to the labor market quality of US immigrants. Borjas and Friedberg (2009) find an improvement in quality for the immigrants that entered after 1990 attributing it to the increase in the number of employment immigrants resulting from the 1990 Immigration Act. Changes in quality are also evident in the USCIS microdata on different
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cohorts of immigrants who were awarded permanent resident visas (Barrett, 1998; Jasso et al., 2000).
Are Immigrants and Their Children Integrating to the US Economy and Society? The integration of immigrants into US society and economy has been a long-standing theme in the immigration scholarship. The word integration (the term assimilation is also often used) broadly refers to the extent to which, with time in the United States, immigrants’ outcomes resemble those of natives on indicators such as income, employment, occupations, fertility, household structure, English language abilities, and civic engagement. Assimilation in earnings takes place because, with time in the United States, immigrants invest in human capital such as education, learn the English language, and accumulate US labor market experience, and these investments increase earnings (Chiswick, 1978). Alternatively, assimilation can be the product of a learning process or job search. With time in the United States, immigrants learn about the US labor market and this knowledge produces a better matching between jobs and skills and a better pay (Daneshvary et al., 1992). Sociologists refer to Anglo conformity, predicting convergence of immigrants to the outcomes of the middle class (see citations in Valdez, 2006). In 1993 Portes and Zhou introduced the concept of segmented assimilation. According to Portes and Zhou “the question is into what particular sector of American society a particular immigrant group assimilates” (p. 82). These authors offer that immigrants assimilate to different segments of the society in three main pathways: assimilation into the middle class; assimilation into the urban underclass, and the preservation of immigrants’ culture and values. This perspective has generated a proliferation of research about what assimilation paths are immigrants following, especially the second generation (Greenman and Xie, 2008; Hirschman, 2001; Rumbaut, 1997; Valdez, 2006). One integration outcome that has received a lot of attention is earnings. Economists have addressed if the earnings of immigrants converge to those of natives. Due to a lack of longitudinal data, this question has been addressed with synthetic cohorts from Census data. The work of LaLonde and Topel (1992) exemplifies this work, finding that the earnings gaps between immigrants and natives are closed within a period of 10 years in the United States. A problem with synthetic cohorts is that they cannot address selectivity of emigration. If people who emigrate are those with lower earnings. (Hu, 2000; Lubotsky, 2007; Schwabish, 2011), then assimilation patterns from synthetic cohorts may exaggerate the speed at which immigrants catch up with natives. Recently, researchers have used earnings data from the Social Security Administration to follow immigrants’ earnings for a long period of time and a few other studies have matched CPS respondents across interview rotations to follow immigrants’ earnings for up to 2 years. These studies paint a more dire picture of earnings assimilation, showing little if any earnings growth across time, at times even declines, and assimilation rates much lower than those from synthetic cohorts (Hu, 2000; Schwabish, 2011; Lubotsky, 2007; Kim, 2013).
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Most recently and with the advent of data on youth, research on integration has been expanded by looking at the performance of the children of immigrants and testing theories of segmented assimilation. With Adolescent Health Data, Greenman and Xie (2008) analyze a broad set of outcomes and find that assimilation, measured as years of residence in the United States, generation, ethnic composition of the neighborhood, and ethnicity of friends, have a positive effect on some outcomes and negative in others. Using data from CPS on place of birth of mothers and fathers, Card (2005) finds that the wage and the educational gaps with natives are almost closed by the second generation. The second generation may be the key yardstick by which to assess immigrant integration (Card, 2005). Data sources on immigrant children and youth such as Children of Immigrants (Rumbaut, 1997), Education Longitudinal Survey, and Adolescent Heath allow for examination of a wide variety of outcomes to test hypotheses about integration of the second generation, opening ample opportunities for future research.
Enforcement and the Well-Being of Immigrant Families Since the 1990s, the levels of immigration enforcement have increased and the range of enforcement practices have widened with the cooperation between federal and local governments, and with state-of-the-art technology (Meissner et al., 2013). Hagan et al. (2011) describe three laws passed between 1996 and 2000 making it easier to deport an immigrant by increasing the type of deportable offences, weakening judicial review, and reducing the ability of the migrant to appeal: the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA); the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996; and the USA Patriot Act of 2001. Enforcement escalated after 9/11. Between FY 2005 and 2012, 2.8 million persons were removed from the country, almost twice the amount from the previous 8 years (DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: http://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigration). Most of the deported are from Mexico and Central America. In the last few years, researchers have started to put out basic information about deportees and analyzing the consequences of enforcement for immigrant families, particularly children. The report In the Shadow of the Wall (http://las.arizona.edu/ sites/las.arizona.edu/files/UA_Immigration_Report2013web. pdf), sampled 1113 persons who were deported to Mexico. Deportees were interviewed in ports of entry in Mexico immediately following deportation and in migrant shelters in Mexican cities. This study found that 82% of the deportees were men and their median age was 31 years old; 22% had citizen children and 42% were the sole provider. In a survey of 300 deportees taken in El Salvador, Hagan et al. (2008) also found that most were men, in the ages of 18–30 and that 30% had spouses or children in the United States. Most studies on the impacts of enforcement on families and children are qualitative and based on small samples but several patterns are evident from these studies. It is clear that there is family separation after deportation and that this affects the income of the family left behind (Capps et al., 2007; Hagan et al., 2011). Children’s mental health is also affected
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(Capps et al., 2007; Hagan et al., 2011). This research also shows that increased enforcement has injected a fear of deportation among unauthorized immigrants (Hagan et al., 2011; Dreby, 2012). Dreby (2012) articulates that it is not the deportation itself but the possibility of deportation that has affected an even greater number of children, even among children whose parents are not at risk of being deported. Dreby finds that increased enforcement has caused children to conflate immigration with illegality, and Menjivar and Abrego (2012) describes how deportation fears spread even among documented immigrants. Immigration is a social process (Massey, 2004). Having a migrant parent, a migrant sibling, and a migrant child all separately increase the odds of leaving on a first undocumented trip substantially and significantly (Massey and Riosmena, 2010). But enforcement has had an effect on unauthorized immigration. Several studies using the Mexican Migration Project find that border enforcement reduces undocumented immigration (Angelucci, 2012; Hanson and Spilimbergo, 1996; Lessem, 2012; Thom, 2010). Angelucci (2012) concludes that during the most recent period of high enforcement in her data (1997–2003) enforcement actions were a significant deterrent to in-migration, while the effect on average duration of stay became smaller, leading to a decline in the net flow of undocumented immigrants. Another aspect of enforcement is happening at the local level. Researchers are starting to sort out the effects of local policies on mobility, access to services, and informal work (Amuedo-Dorantes et al., 2013; Lofstrom et al., 2011). There is a dearth of research about enforcement and employers. Bringing in the employers perspective can enhance our knowledge about effectiveness and consequences of immigration enforcement.
Documenting the Lives of Undocumented Immigrants With the rise in undocumented immigration, researchers have recognized the need to document the lives of undocumented immigrants. For a long time, the only information available on unauthorized immigrants was population estimates nationally and for the largest states. But this changed with the Mexican Migration Project (http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/home-en. aspx). The Mexican Migration Project is possibly the earliest concerted effort to collect data on undocumented immigrants and their households. Data have been collected yearly since 1983, though this is not a nationally representative sample of US undocumented immigrants. The sample is drawn from households in 22 Mexican states. In the last decade there have been efforts to collect data on undocumented immigrants in the United States, and this has been done primarily through place-based surveys in large immigration cities such as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. There is also a good number of ethnographic studies of the undocumented immigrants (Bhimji, 2010, Cleaveland, 2012; Menjivar and Abrego, 2012; Salcido and Adelman, 2004). Most recently, a few studies have surfaced using state-based administrative data such as state wage records in the state of Georgia (Hotchkiss and Quispe-Agnoli, 2013) and records from use of emergency rooms in North Carolina hospitals. (DuBard and Massing, 2007).
These different data sources have documented many aspects of undocumented immigrant lives such as food insecurity (Hadley et al., 2008), domestic violence (Salcido and Adelman, 2004), wages and employment (Hotchkiss and Quispe-Agnoli, 2013; Mehta et al., 2002), type of emergency care service used (DuBard and Massin, 2007), effects of economic trends on migrants lives (Cleaveland), labor rights violations (Bernhardt et al., 2009), the job quality (Enchautegui, 2008), and daily laborers (Bhimji, 2010), among others. Researchers are also looking at the undocumented children and the citizen children of undocumented parents. Gonzales (2011) brings insights about the experiences of undocumented youth in American schools as they transit from an environment where illegality does not matter to one where illegality becomes central to their lives. Growing up as a child of undocumented parents also has implications for many dimensions of child development (Yoshikawa and Kalil, 2011). An emerging group in the undocumented population and one that will likely generate future research is unaccompanied children, children without lawful immigration status with no parent or legal guardian in the United States. The Office of Refugee Settlement, Program of Unaccompanied Alien Children reported serving an average of 8000 children annually and this figured jumped to 13 000 in FY 2012 and to 25 000 in FY 2013 (https://www. acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/orr/unaccompanied_childrens_ services_fact_sheet.pdf). Given the importance of undocumented immigrants in the US population and that immigration status is important in determining eligibility for government programs, the Government Accounting Office (2006) has issued recommendations about how to collect immigration status data on government statistics, but these recommendations have not been adopted by the Current Population Survey, the American Community Survey, nor government health surveys. Currently, two government-sponsored data sets collect information on undocumented status. These are the National Agricultural Workers Survey conducted by Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Survey of Income and Program Participation from the Census Bureau.
Impacts of Immigrants on Native’s Wages The impacts of immigration on the wages of native workers continue to be one of the most researched and most debated topics in immigration. Methodology twists and new evidence keeps bringing new insights to this area of research. Earlier studies estimated the effects of immigrants on native wages through variations in the share of metro-area population that are immigrants; Card (2005) and LaLonde and Topel (1991) exemplify this approach. Most of these studies find small or zero effects of immigration on native wages. But these studies are criticized on the basis that natives in local areas respond to immigration by moving to lower immigration areas (Borjas, 2003). Recent work by Cadena and Kovak (2012) adds a further angle to the limitations of the spatial approach when finding a high mobility rate of Mexican Americans and that this high mobility protects low-skilled natives from negative local-demand shocks such as in the
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Great Recession. This research points out to the limitations of the spatial approach in uncovering the effects of immigration on the wages of natives. More recent studies use a structural approach, departing from a production function. The unit of observation is the relative quantities at the national level of workers by skills, experience, and nativity. With this approach Borjas (2003) and Borjas et al. (2010) find large negative effects of immigration on native wages, especially for workers with no high school graduateswith no further education, but effects on college-educated are also found. Borjas’ modeling assumes, and examination of occupations suggests, that immigrants and natives within education–experience combinations are perfect substitutes. Ottaviano and Peri- O&P (2012) using a similar approach find negative but small effects of immigration in the wages of natives. The key difference is that O&P assume that the lowskilled labor is composed of high-school dropouts and highschool graduates and that these two groups are substitutes. Borjas and coauthors, however, assume that the low-skilled group is composed of only high-school dropouts. O&P joining of high-school dropouts and high school graduates-with no further education under the low-skilled group is substantiated by evidence that the substitutability between these two groups is almost infinite (Card, 2009). Therefore, the aggregation of high-school dropouts and high school graduates-with no further education under one skill group is critical in these estimations, reducing the effects of immigration on natives’ wages. Although immigration has affected the relative supply of highschool dropouts, it has not affected the relative supply of the combined group of dropouts and high-school diplomas. It must be noted that this research does not distinguish between documented and undocumented immigrants and we do not know if the lack of competition is due to undocumented immigrants not competing openly in the labor market.
Immigration and Inequality Immigration has also made its way into current discussions about increased inequality. Immigration could increase inequality directly and indirectly. Directly it would increase inequality if immigrants’ wages are more unequal than natives’ and if immigrants’ average income is different from natives (Blau and Khan, 2012). For instance, a high share of poor immigrants will increase the population at the bottom, while a high share of rich immigrants will increase the population at the top. If immigrants are a small share of the population and their skills are similar to those of natives, effects on income inequality will be small (Blau and Khan, 2012). Indirectly, immigrants could increase inequality if it reduces the wages of low-skilled workers, or if it helps raising the wages of those at the top. A study by Card (2009) concluded that immigration contributed only to a small percent (5%) of the increase in inequality experienced between 1980 and 2000. Blau and Khan (2012) reached similar conclusions showing that immigration increased inequality by 6% among men and by 3% among women. This literature is quite small now but future research may start looking at the role of second-generation immigrants on inequality, similar to what has happened in integration research.
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See also: Ethnicity and Migration in Europe; Ethnography in Applied Social Research; Global Migration; Immigration Policy; Immigration and Crime in the United States; Immigration, Emigration, and Citizenship; Immigration: Political Aspects; International Migration; Location Theory; Migration History; Migration and Development; Migration and Social Capital; Migration, Theory of; Migration: Cultural Aspects; Migration: Motivations; Qualitative Research; Sample Survey Methodology, History of.
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