James D. Bachmeier

The Educational Legacy of Unauthorized Migration: Comparisons Across U.S.-Immigrant Groups in How Parents’ Status Affects Their Offspring†

This research compares several national-origin groups in terms of how parents’ entry, legalization and naturalization (i.e., membership) statuses relate to their childrens educational attainment. In the case of Asian groups, the members of which predominantly come to the United States as permanent legal migrants, we hypothesize (1) that fathers and mothers statuses will be relatively homogenous and few in number and (2) that these will exert minimal net effects on second-generation attainment. For Mexicans, many of whom initially come as temporary unauthorized migrants, we hypothesize (1) that parental status combinations will be heterogeneous and greater in number and (2) that marginal membership statuses will exert negative net effects on education in the second generation. To assess these ideas, we analyze unique intergenerational data from Los Angeles on the young adult members of second-generation national-origin groups and their parents. The findings show that Asian immigrant groups almost universally exhibit similar father–mother migration statuses and high educational attainment among children. By contrast, Mexicans manifest more numerous discrepant father–mother combinations, with those in which the mother remains unauthorized carrying negative implications for childrens schooling. The paper discusses the theoretical and policy implications of the delays in incorporation that result from Mexican Americans needing extra time and resources compared to the members of other groups to overcome their handicap of marginal membership status {i.e., being more likely to enter and remain unauthorized).

The dimensions and degree of second-generation incorporation in US and European cities: A comparative study of inclusion and exclusion

This research compares cities between and within the United States and Europe with respect to their dimensionality and degree of immigrant incorporation. Based on theoretical perspectives about immigrant incorporation, structural differentiation and national incorporation regimes, we hypothesize that more inclusionary (MI) cities will show more dimensions of incorporation and more favorable incorporation outcomes than less inclusionary (LI) places, especially in regard to labor market and spatial variables. We use data from recent major surveys of young adult second-generation groups carried out in Los Angeles, New York, and 11 European cities to assess these ideas. The findings indicate that second-generation immigrants in New York (MI) and in European MI places (i.e. cities in the Netherlands, Sweden and France) show greater dimensionality of incorporation (and thus by implication more pathways of advancement) respectively than is the case in Los Angeles (LI) or in European LI places (i.e. cities in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland). We discuss the significance of these results for understanding how the structures of opportunity confronting immigrants and their children in various places make a difference for the nature and extent of their integration.

THE LINK BETWEEN THE TRANSNATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND INTEGRATION OF THE SECOND GENERATION IN EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN CITIES Does the context of reception matter

The Link Between the Transnational Behaviour and Integration of the Second Generation in European and American Cities This article investigates the transnational behaviour of the children of immigrants - the second generation - in 11 European and two U.S. cities. We find evidence that transnational practices such as visits to the home country, remittances and use of ethnic media persist only among a minority of the second generation. At a personal level, these second-generation transmigrants are less socio-culturally integrated but more economically integrated in the host country. They also tend to live in those cities and countries with policies that are more assimilationist or exclusionary than multicultural.

Luxury, Necessity, and Anachronistic Workers Does the United States Need Unskilled Immigrant Labor?

This article assesses the labor market implications of less-skilled migration to the United States. It emphasizes how recent social, demographic, and economic trends have reduced the availability of less-skilled native workers, while new low-education immigrant workers compete with other less-skilled immigrants for available low-skilled jobs. Declines in native fertility to substantially below replacement levels, together with native educational upgrading, have substantially reduced the size of the less-skilled native-born labor pool in the past 30 years, even below the level of need. This trend cannot be explained by declines in low-skilled manufacturing employment. Other factors also serve to exacerbate the size of the shortfall in the availability of less-skilled natives, including mismatches in the locations of low-education natives and less-skilled jobs. Nativity differences in health, physical disability, and substance abuse also operate to widen the gap. The resulting void has largely been filled by increasing numbers of less-skilled immigrant workers. These patterns underscore the need for public policies that provide both less-skilled labor and reductions in social and economic inequalities in the United States.

Immigration & the Color Line at the Beginning of the 21st Century

The “color line” has long served as a metaphor for the starkness of black/white relations in the United States. Yet post-1965 increases in U.S. immigration have brought millions whose ethnoracial status seems neither black nor white, boosting ethnoracial diversity and potentially changing the color line. After reviewing past and current conceptualizations of Americas racial divide(s), we ask what recent trends in intermarriage and multiracial identification – both indicators of ethnoracial boundary dissolution – reveal about ethnoracial color lines in todays immigrant America. We note that rises in intermarriage and multiracial identification have emerged more strongly among Asians and Latinos than blacks and in more diverse metropolitan areas. Moreover, these tendencies are larger than would be expected based solely on shifts in the relative sizes of ethnoracial groups, suggesting that immigrationgenerated diversity is associated with cultural change that is dissolving ethnoracial barriers – but more so for immigrant groups than blacks.

Estimating the Characteristics of Unauthorized Immigrants Using U.S. Census Data: Combined Sample Multiple Imputation:

Contemporary U.S. immigration policy debates would be better informed by more accurate data about how many unauthorized immigrants reside in the country, where they reside, and the conditions in which they live. Researchers use demographic methods to generate aggregated information about the number and demographic composition of the unauthorized immigrant population. But understanding their social and economic characteristics (e.g., educational attainment, occupations) often requires identifying likely unauthorized immigrants at the individual level. We describe a new method that pools data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which identifies unauthorized immigrants, with data from the American Community Survey (ACS), which does not. This method treats unauthorized status as missing data to be imputed by multiple imputation techniques. Likely unauthorized immigrants in the ACS are identified based on similarities to self-reported unauthorized immigrants in the SIPP. This process allows state and local disaggregation of unauthorized immigrant populations and analysis of subpopulations such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) applicants.

Mexican Immigrant Legalization and Naturalization and Children’s Economic Well-Being

Over the past four decades, Mexican immigration has garnered much of the public and legislative attention devoted to reforming immigration policy in the United States (Bean and Lowell 2004). Part of the reason is that Mexicans have constituted the largest of the country’s recent legal immigrant groups. In 2005, for example, 161,445 Mexicans gained legal permanent residency, or 14.4 percent of the all such persons (Office of Immigration Statistics 2006). But much of the focus falls on Mexicans because they comprise such an overwhelming component of unauthorized migration flows. Roughly 300,000 (net) unauthorized Mexicans established de facto U.S. residency in 2005, bringing the total number of unauthorized Mexicans to 6.2 million, or 56 percent of all unauthorized persons in the country (Passel 2006). These numbers dwarf those from any other nation. Moreover, many observers have long argued that policies to curtail or “regularize” unauthorized migration should be adopted before changes in legal immigration policy are considered, thus ensuring that unauthorized Mexican migration occupies a prominent place in any debate over immigration policy (U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform 1994).