Social Capital and Livelihoods in Johannesburg: Differential Advantages and Unexpected Outcomes among Foreign‐Born Migrants,Internal Migrants,and Long‐Term South African Residents

Foreign‐born migrants – a group rarely compared with both internal migrants and long‐term residents – are often positioned as the most disadvantaged South African urban population. We use data from a 2008 cross‐sectional household survey conducted in Johannesburg to compare a contextually relevant measure of social capital and livelihood advantages between foreign‐born migrants, internal migrants, and long‐term South African residents. Our findings are counterintuitive and emphasize the need to explore the heterogeneity of urban migrant populations, and the mechanisms in which they better their lives, by showing that (1) foreign‐born migrants have better urban livelihood outcomes, and (2) indicators of social capital are not necessarily associated with improved livelihood outcomes.     

Immigrant Settlement Patterns: The Role of Metropolitan Characteristics*

Immigration continues to change the social, economic, and political landscapes of urban America. Consequently, scholars, as well as the general public, are interested in the internal migration patterns of immigrants. In this research, we identify and explain the characteristics of metropolitan areas that have the strongest effects on the percentage change in the foreign‐born population between 1990 and 2000. Using lagged independent variables and a sample of 150 metropolitan areas, we find that settlement patterns among immigrants are diverging from traditional patterns. That is, those metropolitan areas that had moderately high levels of globalization and lower costs of living as well as lower disadvantage indicators (e.g., percentage poverty) in 1990, had larger increases in percentage foreign‐born between 1990 and 2000 compared to areas with lower levels of globalization and higher costs of living and disadvantage. These trends suggest the increasing importance of second‐tier metropolises such as Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas in understanding where immigrants settle.     

The Great Recession and the Allure of New Immigrant Destinations in the United States

In the 1990s, the immigrant population in the United States dispersed to non‐traditional settlement locations (what have become known as “new immigrant destinations”). This paper examines whether the allure of new destinations persisted in the 2000s with a particular focus on the internal migration of the foreign‐born during the recent deep recessionary period and its aftermath. Three specific questions motivate the analysis. First, are immigrants, much like the U.S.‐born population, becoming less migratory within the country over time? Second, is immigrant dispersal from traditional gateways via internal migration continuing despite considerable economic contraction in many new destination metropolitan areas? Third, is immigration from aboard a substitute for what appears to be declining immigrant internal migration to new destinations? The findings reveal a close correlation between the declining internal migration propensity of the U.S.‐born and immigrants in the last two decades. We also observe parallels between the geographies of migration of native‐ and foreign‐born populations with both groups moving to similar metropolitan areas in the 1990s. This redistributive association, however, weakened in the subsequent decade as new destination metropolitan areas lost their appeal for both groups, especially immigrants. There is no evidence to suggest that immigration from abroad is substituting for the decline in immigrant redistribution through internal migration to new destinations. Across destination types, the relationship between immigration from abroad and the internal migration of the foreign‐born remained the same during and after the Great Recession as in the period immediately before it.     

The intersection of class origin and immigration background in structuring social capital: the role of transnational ties

The study investigates inequalities in access to social capital based on social class origin and immigration background and examines the role of transnational ties in explaining these differences. Social capital is measured with a position generator methodology that separates between national and transnational contacts in a sample of young adults in Sweden with three parental backgrounds: at least one parent born in Iran or Yugoslavia, or two Sweden‐born parents. The results show that having socioeconomically advantaged parents is associated with higher levels of social capital. Children of immigrants are found to have a greater access to social capital compared to individuals with native background, and the study shows that this is related to transnational contacts, parents’ education and social class in their country of origin. Children of immigrants tend to have more contacts abroad, while there is little difference in the amount of contacts living in Sweden across the three groups. It is concluded that knowledge about immigration group resources help us predict its member's social capital, but that the analysis also needs to consider how social class trajectories and migration jointly structure national and transnational contacts.     

Marriage Patterns of the Foreign‐Born Population in a New Country of Immigration: The Case of Spain1

We use 2001 Spanish census microdata and multivariate logistic regression analysis to explore differences in marriage patterns between the foreign‐born population in Spain, a country that has experienced a dramatic increase in international migration rates in the last decade. In particular, we examine separately the prevalence of being in a consensual and in an endogamous union for a selected and representative group of origins. Results show that after controlling for individual and union characteristics, major differences in cohabitation between groups disappear while major differences in endogamy prevail. This suggests that, when appropriate data are available, future research should take into account contextual factors.     

Painful Passages: Traumatic Experiences and Post‐Traumatic Stress among U.S. Immigrant Latino Adolescents and their Primary Caregivers

Using data from a stratified random sample of 281 foreign‐born adolescents and their parents in the United States, this study provides data on migration‐related trauma exposures and examines how the migration process influences the risk of experiencing trauma and developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We find that 29 percent of foreign‐born adolescents and 34 percent of foreign‐born parents experienced trauma during the migration process. Among those that experienced trauma, 9 percent of adolescents and 21 percent of their parents were at risk for PTSD. Pre‐migration poverty combined with clandestine entry into the U.S. increased the risk of trauma and the subsequent development of PTSD symptoms. Post‐migration experiences of discrimination and neighborhood disorder further exacerbated this risk, while social support and familism mitigated it. Our results emphasize the importance of understanding how factors prior to, during, and after migration combine to influence the health of immigrants.     

British and Irish Migration and Integration in Ferrol: A Survey of British and Spanish Documentary Sources

This article documents the participation of British and Irish immigrants in an ambitious programme of naval reform in eighteenth-century Spain. In so doing, it explores their integration in their new host country in the town of Ferrol, located in north-west Spain. This town grew up around the royal dockyard which was established there by the middle of the century. In this period, the government of the Spanish monarchy actively developed a policy to attract and import foreign labour for the dockyards in order to face serious competition with foreign countries, gain supremacy over the seas, defend the country and protect its interests abroad. The migration of technicians and craftsmen from British yards to Ferrol has been often analysed on the basis of foreign experience and technology for the development of the shipbuilding industry but little attention was paid to the internal structure of this immigrant population and to the nature of the motivating factors behind these individuals's decision to move to Spain. Based on this argument, this study addresses the presence of women in this migration process, analyses the incentives for migrating and considers the role of social networks as a channel for migration and integration. These issues have been dealt with using data from primary sources which provide a more complete picture to understand this migration to Ferrol and to study the identification and adaptation of immigrants within their new social and cultural environment.     

Re‐Thinking Migrants’ Networks and Social Capital: A Case Study of Iranians in Turkey

Existing research on international migration has focused on the importance of social networks and social capital in the countries of origin and destination. However, much less is known about the importance of social networks and associated social capital in transit countries. Drawing on ethnographic research on Iranian transit migrants in Turkey, this paper argues that migrant networks and social capital are equally important in transit countries. These networks, however, do not always generate positive social capital for Iranian migrants as there are scarce resources and there is no “enforceable trust”. Iranian migrant networks reorganized in a transit country like Turkey are not static structures and they are largely affected by macro‐variables such as current immigration and asylum policies of Turkey and Europe, transnationalism and globalization, and other place‐specific features like Turkey’s location bridging East and West, the existence of human smuggling networks, and its proximity to Iran. But Iranian migrant networks in Turkey are also affected by micro‐variables, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity of individual migrants.     

FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT AND COUNTRY‐SPECIFIC HUMAN CAPITAL

This paper exploits an international bilateral data set over the period 1963–1998 to investigate the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign‐educated labor in an FDI host country. Workers educated abroad acquire country‐specific human capital that is more productive in the host country of study. A foreign subsidiary sharing a parent firm's technology will invest more if it has more foreign‐educated labor, since it can utilize this labor more productively because of the country‐specific human capital. Consistent with our predictions, our empirical findings show that foreign‐educated labor accounted for a sizable portion of growth in FDI flows. (JEL F21, F10)     

Violence,Networks, and International Migration from Colombia

Although Colombia is a major country of emigration, little is known about its citizens' motivations for migration. Social and economic conditions have been studied as determinants of migration, but violence has received less attention. We examine how social networks and violence function to promote emigration from Colombia by linking event‐history data from the Latin American Migration Project to external data on violence and economic conditions. We show that emigration is more likely to be initiated by those with higher education, those with network connections to migrants, and during periods of greater violence and increased police presence. Although violence acts powerfully to determine when people migrate, the geographic distribution of social capital determines where they go. Not surprisingly, migrants go to locations where people in their social networks are currently living or have been earlier.     

Emerging Rural Settlement Patterns and the Geographic Redistribution of America's New Immigrants*

Abstract This paper analyzes geographic patterns of population concentration and deconcentration among the foreign‐born population during the 1990–2000 period. A goal is to examine whether the foreign‐born population, including recent arrivals, are dispersing geographically from metro gateway cities into rural and other less densely populated parts of the country. The paper also evaluates the so‐called balkanization hypothesis, which is that immigration flows run counter‐cyclical to the redistribution trends of the native‐born population, while reinforcing spatial isolation and immigrant segregation. Data for U.S. counties or county equivalents come from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census (Summary Files 1, 3 and 4). Our results suggest that America's immigrant population is dispersing spatially. Immigrants are less concentrated today than in the past and they are less segregated from other population groups, including their own racial group and whites. However, changes over the past decade have been modest. The immigrant population, even in 2000, remained considerably more concentrated than the native‐born population. The empirical results provide little evidence of geographic balkanization.     

In (a) democracy we trust: social and economic determinants of support for democratic procedures in central and eastern Europe

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, most of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe have begun adopting democratic procedures and institutions. In this paper, we argue that the presence or absence of social capital may very well be an important part of any equation that attempts to predict the extent to which the citizens of these nations will support the new democratic regimes. We apply Logit analysis to survey data collected in the Third Annual New Democracies Barometer (NDB III) to test this hypothesis. We also test the importance of economic variables on citizen support for democratic procedures in these nations. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the presence of social capital is a factor in explaining citizen support for democratic procedures. Moreover, we find indicators of social capital to be more important than economic variables in explaining citizen support for democratic procedures in our sample countries.     

Public Assistance Use among U.S.‐Born Children of Immigrants1

U.S.‐born children of immigrants may be less likely to receive some social services than are children of native‐born parents if foreign‐born parents who are themselves ineligible are less likely to apply on their children's behalf. We use retrospective data from a sample of about 2,400 lowincome households in three U.S. cities to determine whether children with foreign‐born caregivers are less likely than children with native‐born caregivers to receive benefits from any of five programs over a two‐year period: TANF, SSI, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and WIC. The most significant disparities between children of citizen and noncitizen caregivers are in TANF and food stamp use.     

Compositional and Temporal Dynamics of International Migration in the EU/EFTA: A New Metric for Assessing Countries’ Immigration and Integration Policies

In this article, I derive estimates of migrants’ expected years of residence in each of 31 countries in the European Union and European Free Trade Association each year from 2002 to 2007. A country‐level measure summarizing the temporal dynamics of international migration, I compare my results against the often used compositional measure of the percent foreign born, and show that these two measures reflect different population processes. I likewise demonstrate the utility of the measure derived here as a tool to assess countries’ integration policies on long‐term residence per their scores in the Migrant Integration Policy Index. Key theoretical and policy implications are discussed.     

Marrying into the American Population: Pathways into Cross‐Nativity Marriages

Cross‐nativity marriages have been a neglected dimension of intermarriage patterns in the U.S., although they provide a vehicle for the easy social and political integration of the foreign‐born spouse and the couple's children. We first present U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service data to show that cross‐nativity marriages are common among migrants entering the country and appear to be increasing over time. The following analyses based on 2008 American Community Survey data imply several pathways into cross‐nativity marriages that are strongly gendered and race specific and that involve major social institutions such as the higher educational system and the U.S. military.     

Global Changes and Gendered Responses: The Feminization of Migration From Georgia

While frequently discussed, the feminization of migration remains among the least understood trends in migration literature. Existing research links feminization of migration to socioeconomic change in migrant origin countries, changes in destination‐country labor markets, structural factors, and changing social attitudes. However, questions of how the feminization of migration begins and how it becomes socially institutionalized remain largely unanswered. Having experienced a recent, dramatic increase in female migration, Georgia provides an excellent case to study the emergence of women's labor migration. Our findings highlight the importance of human capital, increasing divorce rates, and an absence of local economic opportunities in motivating increasing numbers of women to migrate. Additionally, changing destination patterns and shifts in labor‐market demand toward feminized occupations act as key initial conditions enabling the growth of women's migration. As migration is feminized, cultural beliefs stigmatizing female migrants can be renegotiated to frame women's migration within normative gender approaches, providing pathways for cultural maintenance. In the early stages of the feminization of migration, we find the initial attempts to reframe migration are powerful; they can challenge, or at least delay, the expansion of women's autonomy that is often associated with migration.     

Latinas’ Transition to First Marriage: An Examination of Four Theoretical Perspectives

National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and census data are used to examine the effect of both individual‐ and contextual‐level determinants on Latinas’ transition to first marriage (n= 745). Hypotheses derived from 4 leading theories of marriage timing are evaluated. Discrete‐time event‐history models that control for clustering within Labor Market Areas suggest that foreign‐born Latina and Anglo women have virtually identical marriage trajectories. Analyses further demonstrate that Latinas’ individual human capital, and residence in areas characterized by a relatively large supply of single foreign‐born Latino men, are associated with higher probabilities of marriage, whereas women’s aggregate economic opportunities are correlated with the predicted postponement of first marriage.     

Childbearing after Migration: Fertility Patterns of Foreign‐born Women in Sweden1

The present study provides an investigation of patterns in childbearing among foreign‐born women in Sweden from the 1960s to the 1990s. Event‐history techniques are applied to longitudinal population register data on childbearing and migration of 446,000 foreign‐born women who had ever lived in Sweden before the end of 1999. Period trends in parity‐specific fertility appear to be quite similar for Swedish‐ and foreignborn women, but important differences exist in levels of childbearing propensities between women from different countries of origin. Most immigrant groups tend to display higher levels of childbearing shortly after immigration. We conclude that migration and family building in many cases are interrelated processes and that it is always important to account for time since migration when fertility of immigrants is studied.     

Migration at a Time of Global Economic Crisis: The Situation in Spain

In this paper, we offer an initial assessment of the impact of the economic crisis on Spain's migration flows. After a period of intensive economic growth and the ensuing immigratory appeal (1995–2007), Spain has been hit hard by the recession. This has modified the trends that had so far characterized foreign immigration in Spain. The impact of the economic recession has been particularly severe in the case of immigrant workers and, consequently, from an institutional point of view, the Spanish government has adopted various measures to restrict the arrival of new immigrants: it has reduced work permit quotas and it has modified the Foreign Residents Law, toughening residence permit requirements. It has also tried to encourage voluntary returns with a programme devised to provide assistance to immigrants originating from countries with which Spain has social security agreements. The response to this programme has, however, been very limited. Immigration flows have continued and rates of return have stayed low, although new trends are also detectable, such as a decrease in the number of irregular arrivals and a rise in informal employment, as well as differences in the impact of unemployment according to nationality and gender. This reveals the complexity of migration processes beyond the supply and demand of labour and the political will to regulate human mobility. Consequently, immigration patterns in Spain reveal the degree of complexity reached by human mobility, which has increased beyond the logic of the labour market and the government's attempts at regulating migration flows by means of institutional measures. The immigrants' hope of raising their standard of living and the socio‐economic differences between source and receiving countries, even at a time of severe economic crisis, do still serve as explanations for current migration networks, one of the key points in the current debate on international migration.     

The Chinese in Spain

During the past 15 years, the Chinese migrant community in Spain has grown significantly. Originally a small and dispersed population, it now ranks fourth among the migrant groups from non‐European Union (EU) countries. Its increasing presence in daily urban life is evident everywhere. Even though the Chinese community has a long history of settlement in Spain, the Spanish population still considers the Chinese as a closed and somewhat mysterious community. References to exaggerated stereotypes and prejudices regarding their activities and social organization can often be overheard in daily conversations. However, China, usually considered exotic and remote, has recently assumed greater importance in Spain's foreign policy. Thus, the Spanish Government has drawn up the Asia‐Pacific Framework Plan for 2000–2002 as part of its international policy considerations, thereby extending its interests to include areas well beyond its traditional foreign policy focus on Latin America. The Government's objectives are to expand its economic relations with Asia, to enhance trade and tourism with the area, expand the development cooperation with China, the Philippines, and Viet Nam — countries defined as top priorities for the Spanish Government — and to reinforce linguistic and cultural ties with these countries (Bejarano, 2002). In support of the Asia‐Pacific Framework Plan, the Casa Asia (House of Asia) was established in Barcelona in 2002, an institution created to organize academic and artistic activities in order to promote the knowledge of the region among Spaniards, and to foster political, economic, and cultural relations with Asia. The Government intends to pursue two important objectives related to the increasing commitments it is seeking to establish with China, and which are also of relevance to the overseas Chinese as the principal social actors involved. First, the strengthening of commercial exchanges with the People's Republic of China (PRC) are likely to benefit import‐export activities among the Chinese migrants, and be supported by their knowledge and practical experience of the respective social environments. Second, the dissemination of information on Spain is expected to establish and maintain stronger links in both directions. In the near future, these initiatives may also be instrumental in increasing the movement of people between China and Spain. Besides these primary objectives, the initiative pursues another important aim — the promotion of the social integration of the Chinese migrant community in the country. This paper addresses these issues, including data sources and their availability on Chinese migrants in Spain, the relevant local legal framework and how it influences the development of the Chinese migrant group, its sociodemographic composition, and migratory patterns. Finally, it addresses the changes in their economic activities.