Top Research Papers on Immigration

The provisions of the Act relating to the Immigrant Selection Board were excluded from transfer by section 3(2)(b) of the General Proclamation, which exempted from the operation of section 3(1) of the General Proclamation “those provisions of any law ... which provide for or relate to the institution, constitution or control of any juristic person or any board or any other body of persons that may exercise powers or perform other functions in or in respect of both the territory and the Republic”.

Whether it be about population size, origin, or legal status, what ordinary citizens imagine about immigrants is often incorrect. Furthermore, these misperceptions predict greater dislike of foreigners. But, if one considers all the facts that people could get wrong, researchers have likely only scratched the surface. To advance toward a more complete catalog of misperceptions, the current study focuses on one commonly held stereotype: immigrants’ propensity for crime. Using original data from a sample of college students, we examine the crime perception alongside nine established components o...

This paper analyzes immigrants’ views about immigration, contributing to the behavioral literature on the subject. In particular, it explores the role of statistical discrimination as a cause of possible opposition to immigration in the absence of stringent immigration policies and the large amount of undocumented immigration. We test this hypothesis using US data from the seventh wave of the World Value Survey, finding that successful immigrants in the United States (i.e., those who are in the top quintile of the socioeconomic classification), who may benefit the most from being perceived as ...

ABSTRACT Across European Union (EU) labour markets, immigrant and native populations exhibit disparate labour market outcomes, signifying widespread labour market hierarchies. Despite the considerable investment in migration and integration policies, it remains unclear whether these contribute to or alleviate labour market hierarchies between natives and immigrants. Using a longitudinal model based on individual-level EU LFS and country-level DEMIG POLICY and POLMIG databases, we explore variation in changes of immigration and integration policies across Western EU member states to study how t...

This review examines the role of immigration and immigrant policies in shaping the health and well-being of immigrants of color in the United States at subnational levels and at state and local levels.

We study how the presence of individuals of a given foreign descent shapes natives’ attitudes and behavior toward that group. Using individualized donations data from large charitable organizations, we show that the long-term presence of a given foreign ancestry in a US county leads to more generous behavior specifically toward that group’s ancestral country. To shed light on mechanisms, we focus on attitudes and behavior toward Arab-Muslims, combining several existing large-scale surveys, cross-county data on implicit prejudice, and a newly-collected national survey. We show that greater Arab...

Does the share of immigrants in a community influence whether people vote for anti-immigration parties? We conduct a systematic review of the causal inference literature studying this question. We collect estimates from 20 studies and develop a new Bayesian meta-analysis framework to account for both between-study heterogeneity in effect sizes and the possibility of reporting bias. Although meta-analysis methods that do not adjust for reporting bias suggest a moderate effect of local immigration, our Bayesian model finds that the effect of local immigration on far-right voting is on average ne...

In the age of migration, in order to remain competitive in the global marketplace, states are faced with the need to supplement their domestic labor resources with imported manpower. This whole exchange needs to be regulated accordingly regarding both admission and integration into a new country. Out of the advanced industrial states of the world, Japan is relatively new to the immigration game and its immigration policy is perceived as strict against importing labor from abroad. Recently, however, Japan has been showing promising signs of a shift towards a more open labor market for migrants ...

A novel analytic technique was applied to test how different narratives—achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented—impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general, finding narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences.

Various polls suggest that Donald Trump has enjoyed the support of a sizable minority of the Latinx electorate despite his racially offensive rhetoric and support for some of the most restrictive immigration policies in recent memory. Building on Social Identity Theory and Self-Categorization Theory, we contend that some Latinxs harbor negative stereotypes about immigrants, blame them for the status devaluation of the Latinx community, and cognitively distinguish themselves from Latinx immigrants. Rather than viewing anti-immigrant policies, rhetoric, and politicians as a direct status threa...

In two studies, we investigated how intersecting social categories shape views of immigrants in the United States. In Study 1, we analyzed 310 attributes generated by 92 participants for the category of immigrant and 30 additional immigrant groups with intersecting social categories (e.g. “undocumented immigrant”) reflecting various levels of social status. Using the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM) and factor analysis to examine shared meanings, we identified five factors; further comparative analyses of immigrant groups focused on the first two factors (Vulnerable vs. Hardworking, Drain vs. A...

A qualitative analysis of statements made by emergency department patients participating in a study to better understand their experiences and fears with regard to anti-immigrant rhetoric, immigration enforcement, and ED utilization revealed fear-based barriers to accessing emergency care, protective and contributing factors to fear, and the negative impact of fear.

THE RESILIENCE OF STUDENTS WITH AN IMMIGRANT BACKGROUND: FACTORS THAT SHAPE WELL-BEING © OECD 2018 Immigrant students face multiple sources of disadvantage that affect their academic performance and their general well-being. Fluency in the language spoken in the host country is one of these source factors. Language barriers can also amplify the effects of other sources of disadvantage, such as having migrated after the age of 12, lack of parental support, studying in a disadvantaged school or attending a school with a poor disciplinary climate. This chapter examines language as a risk factor w...

ABSTRACT Contemporary nationalism in the West tends to be understood in ethnic terms and associated with a bottom-up reaction to disliked effects of globalization, in particular migration. But there is also a top-down nationalism that is inherent in states` boundary-policing and – constituting membership policies. This paper draws the contours of a state-level neoliberal nationalism. Its imprint can be found in social policy, citizenship policy, and – the focus of this paper – immigration policy, in particular for the highly-skilled. Neoliberal nationalism combines diversity and meritocracy, a...

Research shows that immigration is often associated with less crime. Yet, what remains unclear is why this is the case. The primary explanation for why immigration reduces crime, according to scholars, is the immigration revitalization thesis. This perspective argues that immigration revitalizes communities by promoting local business growth, bolstering social ties, and enhancing conventional institutions (e.g., churches, voluntary organizations), which then reduce crime. These ideas, however, have never been tested. Using longitudinal data from 139 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) betwee...

ABSTRACT The growth of the Latino community has increased levels of contact between this minority group and the predominately white majority. How does exposure to immigrants impact attitudes towards immigrants and immigration held by white Americans? We argue that previous work has not adequately tested the relationship posited by inter-group contact theory, whereby contact should shape policy attitudes. We test our theory drawing on the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). We find that among non-Hispanic whites, having a loved one who is a Latino immigrant improves attitudes ...

Abstract:Extensive research investigates how immigration shapes natives' anti-immigrant sentiment. However, several areas require further scrutiny. This paper explores how processes of immigration affect anti-immigrant sentiment in a new immigration destination country—Japan—drawing on longitudinal data to examine these processes over time and explicitly testing the mechanisms of perceived threat and intergroup contact posited to underpin this relationship. Through this analysis, the paper aims to: examine how generalizable the immigrant share/immigration attitudes theoretical framework is to ...

ABSTRACT Building on the notion of the migration state, this article introduces the concepts of ‘migration rent’ and ‘immigration rentier states’ to describe how states that rely heavily on immigration for their wealth derive unearned income from immigration. Both concepts contribute to better understand of the role of migration in the historical transformation of states and the relationship between state, market and society in rentier monarchies and non-rentier states. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, I show that the Gulf monarchies, and Saudi Arabia in particular, progressively ...

ABSTRACT The media are found to be racialized in framing immigration. Yet, little is known about how the media across regions are gendered in their framings of immigration as economic and cultural issues. Drawing from a representative sample of newspapers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S., this paper conducts a framing analysis of over 1,700 news articles to examine the media’s gendering of the economic and cultural consequences of immigration. This paper shows that the media identify migrant men at a higher rate than women when framing immigration as an economic issue and that the ...

We evaluate the economic consequences of endogenous immigration in a two-country, two-skill, endogenous-growth model, where human and physical capital are the productive assets. Adding physical capital to the model yields new insights about the induced-immigration effects of exogenous pull and push triggers, on the evolution of the “immigration surplus” in the short versus the long run, in destination versus source countries, and in the global economy. The policy effects we analyze include the easing of constraints affecting labor and physical capital mobility at the individual-migrant level a...

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in anti-immigrant hate speech on social media. Drawing on interviews with 15 immigrant associations and 11 pro-immigrant associations in the southern Spanish province of Almería, as well as digital ethnography, this article explores strategies used by immigrant and pro-immigrant associations to counter hate speech. The rise of this hate speech, disseminated mainly by far-right parties, has occurred at a time when many immigrant associations have little or no access to social media platforms. However, members of all these associations (imm...

It is suggested that substantial proportions of Latinx immigrants have immigration concerns about engaging in COVID-19–related testing, treatment, and contact tracing.

States claim to have authority over prospective immigrants who have not yet been admitted but are nonetheless expected to comply with immigration law. But what could ground such an authority claim? The service conception of authority defended by Raz appears not to apply in this case. Nor can it be argued that immigrants give their consent to the state by applying for admission. Another approach appeals to the practice of reciprocity between states in respecting each other’s immigration regimes, but many immigrants will fall outside of its scope. Instead, the article defends the view that the n...

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists supports the health and well-being of all who seek obstetric and gynecologic care and advocates to secure quality health care for all, without regard to immigration status. Policies that infringe on the health and rights of immigrants and limit access to health care, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and punitive immigration-enforcement activities all have detrimental effects on health. Depending on individual circumstances, immigrants may have unique health needs, such as injuries sustained in the process of immigrating or in the workplace, expos...

Between 2015-2019, an estimated 1.8 million Venezuelans migrated into neighboring Colombia. Despite having similar education as native Colombians, these migrants disproportionately entered occupations with less-educated natives. In this paper, I study the consequences of this migrant occupational downgrading for native labor market outcomes. I estimate a labor demand function that incorporates migrant occupational downgrading and imperfect substitutability between migrants and natives. I find that migrants and natives are more substitutable in low-skill occupations and that substitutability ac...

The regulation of immigration in the United States is a civil law matter, and the deportation and exclusion of immigrants from the United States are matters adjudicated in civil, administrative courts operated by the federal government. But migration in the United States is increasingly managed not through the civil law system, but through the criminal legal system, and not just at the federal level, but at all levels of government. The most obvious example of the management of migration through the criminal law in the United States occurs through the federal prosecution of immigration crimes....

Immigration policy is often portrayed as a zero-sum trade-off between labor and capital or between high- and low-skilled labor. Many have attributed the rise of populist politicians and populist movements to immigrants and/or immigration policy. While immigration has distributional implications, we argue that something is clearly missing from the discussion: the fact that migrants are an engine of globalization, especially for countries in the Global South. Migration and migrant networks serve to expand economic markets, distribute information across national borders, and diffuse democratic no...

The present study investigates the effects of group appraisal and acculturation orientations on burnout of social workers working with immigrants. The study is based on the Threat-Benefit and the Acculturation Theories. The proposed theoretical model was tested in a sample of social workers working with immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in Israel (n = 313). Amongst the study participants, 254 were Israeli born, and 59 were immigrants from the FSU. The results demonstrated that social workers' acculturation orientations mediate the connection between the appraisal of the immigrant g...

Abstract Problem, research strategy, and findings Few studies have systematically examined the role of municipal planning in creating immigrant-friendly cities despite the importance of immigration to the growth and development of cities. In this research project I asked to what extent and how planners are involved in immigrant welcoming initiatives. The interviews draw from two perspectives—planning and immigrant affairs—through content analysis of 42 interviews in 30 “welcoming” cities, 28 comprehensive plans, and 17 immigrant integration plans. The analysis revealed that planners are not ve...

The recent dramatic growth in self-employment among Mexican immigrants in the United States in the past two decades is a puzzling trend, in stark contrast to the stagnant growth or even decline among other demographic groups. The authors propose that the expansion of interior immigration enforcement, a characteristic of the US immigration policy during that time span, contributed to this unique trend by pushing Mexican immigrants into self-employment as an alternative livelihood. Exploiting temporal and geographic variation in immigration enforcement measures from 2005 to 2017, the authors sho...

This article investigates the relationship between immigration and inequality in the UK over the past 40 years. This is a period when the share of foreign-born in the UK population increased from 5.3% in 1975 to 13.4% in 2015. We evaluate the impact immigration had on wage inequality in the UK through two channels: the first is the effect on the earnings distribution of natives and the second is the effect on the composition of the wage-earning population. We find both effects to be very small. We decompose wage inequality into inequality within the immigrant and native groups and inequality...

This study examines the incidence and impact of occupational licensing on immigrants using two sources of data: the Current Population Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that immigrants are significantly less likely to have a license than similar natives and that this gap is largest for men, workers in the highest education level, and nonnaturalized immigrants. The licensing rate increases with years since migration and shows large variation by immigrants’ region of origin. A lack of English proficiency reduces the probability that an immigrant has a license. Th...

Although new HIV infections have remained stable or decreased for most U.S. groups at risk for HIV, incidence among Latinx increased by 6% and among Latinx individuals, immigrants are disproportionately infected. One driver of these infections is low rates of HIV testing. While research shows the chilling effect that restrictive immigration laws can have on immigrants' health care utilization, few studies have examined the influence of perceived immigration context and healthcare utilization immigration law concerns on following a public health recommendation such as HIV testing. The purpose o...

Abstract Immigration is a very polarizing issue in American politics, and many individuals develop opinions on the topic based, not on first-hand experience, but on news media coverage. Among the most powerful forms of news content are photographs and images. This study analyzes immigration-related news photography and also considers immigrant perspectives regarding news photography. Findings suggest that recent photographs increasingly depict immigrants and immigration positively, but that certain problematic themes like otherness and securitization remain common.

"When I was growing up": The lasting impact of immigrant presence on native-born American attitudes towards immigrants and immigration

A field study was conducted to test whether contact with immigrant parents would lead Italian teachers to display more positive attitudes toward immigrant children. The participants were 128 Italian pre-school and elementary school teachers of a Northern Italian region. Analyses conducted with structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that quality of contact increased the perceived heterogeneity of the immigrant pupils category and led to a stronger support of social policies favoring immigrant children. In addition, quality of contact also affected the rejection of negative acculturation st...

A large body of work has examined the relationship between population composition and risk of victimization. Past research has also suggested that the nature of political rhetoric may have profound impacts on perceived threat, fear of crime, and moral panic. This study constitutes the first attempt to examine the relationships between the negative political articulation of both immigration and multiculturalism by extreme right-wing parties and the perception of unsafety risk in European countries. We employ data from the 2018 European Social Survey (ESS), which we merge with data from the Mani...

Abstract We empirically examine the relationship between immigration and votes for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the 2017 German parliamentary election. We conduct a cross-sectional analysis, exploiting election results and socio-demographic as well as geographic features of the 401 German administrative districts. We find that immigration has a negative effect on AfD voting. A 1 percentage point increase in the share of foreigners is associated with a decrease in the AfD vote share of up to 0.37 percentage points. The result is robust to several estimation variations, such as addre...

The COVID-19 pandemic has put into sharp relief the need for socio-economic integration of migrants, regardless of their migratory condition. In South America, more than five million Venezuelan citizens have been forced to migrate across the region in the past five years. Alongside other intra-regional migrants and refugees, many find themselves in precarious legal and socio-economic conditions, as the surge in numbers has led to xenophobic backlashes in some of the main receiving countries, including Chile and Peru. In this paper, we explore in how far the COVID-19 crisis has offered stakehol...

ABSTRACT The article examines the politicisation of immigration in Europe during the so-called migration crisis. Based on original media data, it traces politicisation during national election campaigns in 15 countries from the 2000s up to 2018. The study covers Northwestern (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland), Central-Eastern (Hungary, Poland, Latvia, and Romania), and Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). We proceed in three interrelated steps. First, we show that the migration crisis has accentuated long-term trends in the politicis...

In this article, we investigate the role that pro-immigrant organizations play in immigrant racialization. Drawing on a critical case study from the longest standing immigrant rights organization in North Carolina, we demonstrate how immigrant rights organizations can racialize new Latinx arrivals even as they advocate for them. We interrogate the organization’s multi-year, state-wide campaign to counteract mounting public characterizations of Latinx immigrants as drunk drivers. Analyzing a critical juncture in this campaign, we demonstrate how El Pueblo, in their effort to contest the mainstr...

Egalitarians often claim that well-off states’ immigration restrictions create or reinforce objectionable inequality. Standard defenses of this claim appeal to the distributive consequences of exclusion. This article offers a relational egalitarian defense of more open borders. On this view, well-off states’ immigration restrictions are problematic because they accord the citizens of well-off states a troubling form of asymmetric power over the disadvantaged. This creates an objectionably unequal relationship between affluent states’ citizens and disadvantaged immigrants. I show that this argu...

Economic integration of ever-increasing number of immigrants in the host country is a challenge both for the immigrant and their host government. Immigrant entrepreneurship can be one of the solutions to this challenge. However, little is known about how immigrant entrepreneurship intention formation process takes place. Immigrants face various challenging situations that make them psychologically and cognitively distinct. This study models from a holistic perspective, the dimensions of individual and contextual variables as antecedents of Immigrants’ entrepreneurial intention (IEI). The study...

Rahima is a financial services professional in her early thirties, working for a bank and living with her parents in La Courneuve, a neighborhood of Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. She grew up in the Islamic culture that was the result of the revivalist institution-building of the 1990s, listening to recorded lectures by Tariq Ramadan, enthusiastically attending the annual gathering of Muslims at Le Bourget, and participating in a young women’s study circle at her local mosque. Her religious path evolved, from a period in her youth that she later described as “rather salafist” to a period o...

ABSTRACT Although Christian migrant groups make up a sizeable part of the immigrant population in Europe, little is known about their religiosity. This paper studies patterns of intergenerational change and proposes and tests hypotheses that specify when and why changes across generations are stronger. Using data from the European Social Survey (2002–2018) on 33 European countries, it is found that there is a strong pattern of intergenerational decline in the level of religiosity among Christian migrant groups in Europe. This process of religious decline is by no means universal. Results show ...

"Nation of immigrants" discourse is generally used to counter xenophobic fears, but the ideology behind it also works to erase the scourge of settler colonialism, the lives of Indigenous people, and the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Immigration impacts two distinct dimensions of poverty: poverty among immigrants and global poverty. Emigration generally involves moving to better opportunities, and the process lowers poverty among emigrants. Immigration also impacts global poverty through multiple channels including remittances, the proliferation of economic activities, and exchange of ideas between immigrant-sending countries that are generally low income and receiving countries that are often rich. Finally, immigrants improve productivity in the host country through innovation and new economic activities, in turn creating...

Most studies suggest that the fear of immigrants strongly influences public opinion about immigrants and immigration policies in the United States. Despite this knowledge, there is a lack of depth in the literature examining the effect of the fear of immigrants on police stops against undocumented immigrants and immigrants with criminal backgrounds. The present study fills this void in the literature by examining the effect of public fear of immigrants on public support for policing immigrants, specifically, undocumented immigrants with a criminal record, while controlling for other factors. R...

ABSTRACT The study focuses on the role of regional immigration and immigration diversity in influencing entrepreneurs’ ability to crowdfund their projects by leveraging the local crowd. Relying on an empirical analysis of 3250 individual investments via three Swiss reward-based crowdfunding platforms, it is found that higher immigration and immigration diversity levels in the region of the project proponent increase his/her ability to fulfil the funding needs by leveraging local backers (as opposed to backers from different regions). Immigration and immigration diversity constitute a cultural ...

Abstract:Past scholars find that there is a public consensus in the United States on the traits of ideal immigrants. Nevertheless, is there also a consensus on the perceived traits of actual immigrants living in the country? Further, are these perceptions attitudinally consequential? We find no consensus among whites on the composition of the immigrant population in the United States. Further, the immigrant traits they perceive are correlated in specific stereotypical patterns we label "immigrant archetypes." Using latent class analysis, we find five archetypes. Two of them are extreme—one rep...