Guillermina Jasso

Estimating the emigration rates of legal immigrants using administrative and survey data: The 1971 cohort of immigrants to the United States

Based on administrative and survey data as well as data-based assumptions about the bounds on alien address reporting, this study provides estimates of the lower and upper bounds for the cumulative net emigration rates, by country and area of origin, of the FY1971 cohort of legal immigrants to the United States as of January 1979. The merged data indicate that the cumulative net emigration rate for the entire cohort could have been as high as 50 percent. Canadian emigration was probably between 51 and 55 percent. Emigration rates for legal immigrants from Central America, the Caribbean (excluding Cuba), and South America were at least as high as 50 percent, and could have been as high as 70 percent. Emigration rates for Koreans and Chinese could not have exceeded 22 percent over the same period.

Family reunification and the immigration multiplier: U.S. immigration law origin-country conditions and the reproduction of immigrants

This paper reports estimates of the total numbers of actual legal immigrants to the United States that result from the family reunification provisions of U.S. immigration law. These immigration multipliers are estimated separately for major visa categories and by gender and are obtained in the context of an analysis of how individual characteristics of immigrants and their origin country conditions affect (a) the decision to migrate to the United States and (b) once admitted, their propensity to remain and to become U.S. citizens. The analyses combine longitudinal data on the 1971 cohort of legal immigrants and data from the 1970 Census Public Use Tapes. The results suggest that the actual multipliers differ importantly by visa category and that they are substantially lower than the potential multipliers and lower as well than previously supposed.

A new representation of the just term in distributive-justice theory: Its properties and operation in theoretical derivation and empirical estimation

This paper proposes a new representation of the Just Term in the theory of distributive justice, one which meets all criticisms made of previously proposed representations while preserving all their useful features. The new representation enables statement of the sense of distributive justice as a function of specified sub‐sets of four observable factors and a new unobservable factor, denoted phi. The paper establishes precisely how alternative characterizations of phi constrain theoretical derivation and empirical estimation of propositions describing the distributive‐justice effects of the four observable factors on four types of observable individual‐level phenomena. The results are summarized in four theorems.

Language Skill Acquisition, Labor Markets, and Locational Choice: The Foreign-Born in the United States, 1900 and 1980

A common language, like a common currency, facilitates exchange, whether economic, social or political, among interacting individuals in a community. In recent years, concern has been expressed about the possibility of language “bifurcation” in the United States. It is believed by some that as significant numbers of the foreign-born who have a non-English language in common come to the United States, there will be potential for a competing language “currency”. Of course, since a common language facilitates exchange, this possibility becomes more likely if the competing non-English language groups are more likely to enter into transactions with each other than with those individuals speaking English within the United States. The settlement patterns of the common-language groups, to the extent that proximity correlates with the number of “own”-language transactions, thus may be an important factor in determining the potential for the viability of a second language in the United States.