Thomas J. Espenshade

Contemporary American Attitudes toward U.S. Immigration.

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of contemporary American attitudes toward immigration. It extends work by Espenshade and Calhoun (1993) who analyzed data from a southern California survey in June 1983 about the impacts of undocumented migrants and illegal immigration. There has not been a follow-up study that evaluates more recent evidence to see how residents throughout the United States feel about overall levels of immigration (legal and undocumented). The paper uses data from a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted in June 1993. Respondents were asked whether they would like to see the level of immigration to the United States increased, decreased or kept the same. We test several hypotheses about factors influencing respondents’ attitudes, including the importance of previously unexamined predictors. These new hypotheses relate to views about the health of the U.S. economy, feelings of social and political alienation, and isolationist sentiments concerning international economic issues and foreign relations. One important discovery is the close connection between possessing restrictionist immigration attitudes and having an isolationist perspective along a broader array of international issues.

An analysis of English-language proficiency among U.S. immigrants.

We examine factors that influence the process by which foreign-born persons whose mother tongue is not English acquire English-language proficiency. We argue that the determinants of English-language proficiency include cultural and other traits that U.S. immigrants acquire either at birth or while growing up in their home countries the human capital and other endowments they possess at the time they migrate to the United States and the skills and other experiences they accumulate after their arrival in this country. Based on data from the November 1989 Current Population Survey our results confirm that both pre- and post-immigration phases of the life cycle contain elements that are associated with how well immigrants to the United States speak English. (EXCERPT)

Marriage Trends in America: Estimates, Implications, and Underlying Causes

This paper examines trends in marriage divorce and remarriage behavior in the United States since World War II and the associated differentials in these behaviors for whites and blacks. The evidence points to the fading centrality of marriage in the lives of men and women since about 1960. Implications of these trends are discussed for illegitimacy living arrangements of children and family economic welfare. The paper also reviews four social science theories proposing reasons for the observed changes in marriage. These theories relate to the gains to marriage the relative income of young adults sex ratio imbalances in the marriage market and secular pressures of modernization. (summary in FRE SPA) (EXCERPT)

Immigration and the stable population model

This paper reports on work aimed at extending stable population theory to include immigration. Its central finding is that, as long as fertility is below replacement, a constant number and age distribution of immigrants (with fixed fertility and mortality schedules) lead to a stationary population. Neither the level of the net reproduction rate nor the size of the annual immigration affects this conclusion; a stationary population eventually emerges. How this stationary population is created is studied, as is the generational distribution of the constant annual stream of births and of the total population. It is also shown that immigrants and their early descendants may have fertility well above replacement (as long as later generations adopt and maintain fertility below replacement), and the outcome will still be a long-run stationary population.

Investing in Children: Estimates of Parental Expenditures

The first full-length study comparing expenditures on raising children by parental income, education, mothers employment status, family size, region where the family lives, race, and the type of post secondary education a child receives. Valuable information for parenthood education programs in schools and indispensable to the judicial system in setting uniform guidelines for child support awards. Also valuable to states in drawing guidelines for reimbursing the foster care of children.

The value and cost of children.

Recent research on actual and perceived benefits and costs of children to their parents in both developed and less developed countries is summarized. Such figures and research cannot only help predict fertility behavior but can also provide data for welfare departments figuring support costs, courts setting support costs, and government planners allocating resources. Findings on costs and satisfactions from several major surveys are presented and then actual costs in the U.S. are presented in a series of tables. Research indicates that efforts to popularize small families could well take an economic approach - developing social security systems for the aged, substituting mothers for childrens work in developing countries. Compulsory education might also help. 1 researcher suggests publicizing exact costs of raising a child. A survey in Hawaii found that parents uniformly underestimated the direct costs of each child. Also, couples might be most receptive to family planning during the years when economic costs are highest.

New Approaches to Human Mobility: Using Mobile Phones for Demographic Research

This article explores new methods for gathering and analyzing spatially rich demographic data using mobile phones. It describes a pilot study (the Human Mobility Project) in which volunteers around the world were successfully recruited to share GPS and cellular tower information on their trajectories and respond to dynamic, location-based surveys using an open-source Android application. The pilot study illustrates the great potential of mobile phone methodology for moving spatial measures beyond residential census units and investigating a range of important social phenomena, including the heterogeneity of activity spaces, the dynamic nature of spatial segregation, and the contextual dependence of subjective well-being.

Does the threat of border apprehension deter undocumented U.S. immigration

The study explores whether U.S. Border Patrol enforcement actively discourages undocumented migration at its source. Two models are compared. One includes such familiar determinants of undocumented migration as relative economic conditions between the United States and Mexico the size of the Mexican young-adult population and implementation of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. An alternative model relates the magnitude of undocumented migration to lagged monthly values of estimated apprehension probabilities on the assumption that migrants form expectations about the apprehension risks they will face on the basis of experiences of other recent undocumented migrants. The study shows not only that both models have some explanatory power but also that the influence of perceived risks of apprehension all but disappears when both sets of predictor variables are combined into a single model. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA) (EXCERPT)

Childbearing and Wives' Foregone Earnings

This paper combines multi-state life-table analysis and the human capital model of wages to derive new estimates of the impact of children on hours of market work and earnings for American women aged 15 to 55. Panel data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience are used to estimate multi-state tables of working life and to assess the impact of fertility on female labour force behaviour. Potential earnings based on a human capital wage model are combined with the working life histories implied by the life-table analysis to estimate opportunity expenditures (i.e. the money value of foregone employment opportunities) associated with different childbearing patterns. The impacts of race, school enrolment, educational attainment, marital status, marital status changes, birth cohort and fertility are considered. Some specific findings are: (1) with identical childbearing patterns, white women forego roughly five times as much as black women in market earnings between the ages of 15 and 5...

Using INS border apprehension data to measure the flow of undocumented migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico frontier.

This article examines how data on INS border apprehensions are related to the flow of undocumented migrants crossing the southern U.S. border. Its centerpiece is a demographic model of the process of unauthorized migration across the Mexico-U.S. frontier. This model is both a conceptual framework that allows us to see theoretical linkages between apprehensions and illegal migrant flows, and a methodological device that yields estimates of the gross number of undocumented migrants. One implication of the model is that, for the first time, the relation between apprehensions and illegal flows can be examined empirically. We show that the ratio in each period between apprehensions and the undocumented flow is simply the odds of being located and arrested on any given attempt to enter the United States clandestinely. In addition, data for 1977–1988 suggest that the simple linear correlation between the number of apprehensions and the volume of illegal immigration is approximately 0.90 and that the size of the illegal migrant flow is roughly 2.2 times the number of Border Patrol arrests. The article concludes with a discussion of the conditions under which it is appropriate to use INS apprehensions data as an indicator for the flow of undocumented U.S. migrants.