Top Research Papers on Immigration

The third edition of this major work provides a systematic, comparative assessment of the efforts of a selection of major countries, including the U.S., to deal with immigration and immigrant issues— paying particular attention to the ever-widening gap between their migration policy goals and outcomes. Retaining its comprehensive coverage of nations built by immigrants and those with a more recent history of immigration, the new edition pays particular attention to the tensions created by post-colonial immigration, and explores how countries have attempted to control the entry and employment o...

Colonial Immigrants in a British City (1979) analyses the relationship between West Indian and Asian immigrants and the class structure of a British city. Based on a four-year research project in the Handsworth area of Birmingham, the book is a study of race and community relations – political, social, economic and personal – in a major centre of immigrant settlement. It considers the relationship between housing class and class formations and consciousness in other sectors of allocation, such as employment and education. It includes a consideration of the changing political climate on race re...

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 politicisation of ...

This article reviews and organizes the existing literature on the determinants and nature of prejudice and discrimination toward immigrants, summarizing what to date and the challenges in attributing effects to immigrant status per se.

It is found that considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years is found.

Undocumented U.S. Immigrants and Covid-19 Years of anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric will be difficult to reverse, but it is essential that the Trump administration address the needs of undocumen...

Do labor market concerns affect support for immigration? Using a large, representative sample of the US population, we first elicit beliefs about the labor market impact of immigration. To generate exogenous variation in beliefs, we then provide respondents in the treatment group with research evidence showing no adverse labor market impacts of immigration. Treated respondents update their beliefs and become more supportive of immigration, as measured by self-reported policy views and petition signatures. Treatment effects also persist in an obfuscated follow-up study. Our results demonstrate ...

Do voters have stable immigration views? While any account of immigration politics must make an assumption about whether underlying attitudes are stable, the literature has been ambiguous regarding the issue. To remedy this omission, we provide the first comprehensive assessment of the stability and change of immigration attitudes. Theoretically, we develop a framework to explicate the temporal assumptions in previous research and find that most studies assume attitudes are flexible. Empirically, we draw on nine panel data sets to test the stability question and use multiple approaches to acco...

Immigrant entrepreneurship has become a phenomenon of global interest. This paper reviews existing immigrant entrepreneurship literature in order to map out the major streams of research and identify widely used theories, methods, and contexts. To do this, the authors have reviewed 514 articles from academic journals. This paper highlights the need for interdisciplinary approaches that transcend boundaries. The development and adoption of different theoretical frameworks, the use of multi-level methods, and the consideration of unexplored country contexts are among the authors’ recommendations...

Abstract Given the rising rate of migration across the globe, immigrant entrepreneurship is more than ever a topic of high theoretical and practical relevance. Immigrant entrepreneurship can offer host societies a win-win situation, generating incomes for immigrant entrepreneurs and contributing to knowledge transfer, innovativeness, and economic growth within the host economy. However, studies reveal that immigrant entrepreneurship is primarily male dominated and our understanding of the drivers and contextual factors that explain the gender gap is limited. Based on the mixed embeddedness app...

It is concluded that people with negative views on immigration before the intervention can become more supportive of immigration if their misperceptions about the characteristics of the foreign-born population are corrected.

In 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May told a newspaper that she wanted to create a ‘really hostile environment’ for irregular migrants in the UK. Although the phrase has since mutated to refer to generalised state-led marginalisation of immigrants, this article argues that the hostile environment is a specific policy approach, and one with profound significance for the UK’s border practices. We trace the ‘hostile environment’ phrase, exposing its origins in other policy realms, charting its evolution into immigration, identifying the key components and critically reviewing the corresponding legi...

This work builds on and synthesizes the work of prior scholars to advance how society codifies structural disadvantages for racialized immigrants into governmental and institutional policies and how that affects health via three key pathways that emerged from the review of the literature.

The second edition of Best Practices for Social Work with Refugees and Immigrants offers an update to this comprehensive guide to social work with foreign-born clients and an evaluation of various helping strategies and their methodological strengths and weaknesses. It incorporates the latest research to provide a practical, up-to-date resource.

This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote share for the Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 to 2016. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it. These effects are mainly due to the indirect impact on existing citizens’ votes, and this is independent of the origin country and race of immigrants. We find that the political effect of immigration is heterogeneous across counties and depends on their skill level, public ...

We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation.Leveraging new data, we use age of SSN assignment to identify immigrant status.Immigrants represent 16 percent of inventors, but authored 23 percent of patents.Immigrant inventors contribute to knowledge diffusion across borders.They disproportionately rely on foreign technologies and inventor collaborations.Using variation from premature inventor deaths, we find immigrant inventors create stronger innovation productivity spillovers on their collaborators, as compared to US-born inventors.A simple model implies immigrants are resp...

How readily do potential migrants respond to increased returns to migration? Even if origin areas become less attractive vis-à-vis migration destinations, fixed costs can prevent increased migration. We examine migration responses to hurricanes, which reduce the attractiveness of origin locations. Restricted-access U.S. Census data allows precise migration measures and analysis of more migrant-origin countries. Hurricanes increase U.S. immigration, with the effect increasing in the size of prior migrant stocks. Large migrant networks reduce fixed costs by facilitating legal immigration from hu...

Both the experience from previous economic crises and first indications on labour market and social outcomes during the current pandemic suggest that the COVID‑19 crisis is likely to have a disproportionate impact on immigrants and their children. This policy brief provides first evidence on how the pandemic has affected immigrants and their children in terms of health, jobs, education, language training and other integration measures, and public opinion, and describes host countries’ policy responses. It complements a previous brief on the impact of the pandemic on migration management.

This paper uses social psychological and sociological theories to explore the anticipated effects on xenophobia and anti-immigrant attitudes worldwide and discusses recommendations for further research required during the ups and downs of the pandemic, as well as during recovery.

Parsa Erfani, BA; Nishant Uppal, BS; Caroline H. Lee, BA; Ranit Mishori, MD, MHS; Katherine R. Peeler, MD