Correlates of intra-urban migration in Israel

In order to determine correlates of Israeli intra-urban residential mobility, data from the 1983 general census of the population were gathered from the 61 Israeli towns with at least 5000 inhabitants the majority of which are Jews. Inhibiting and intensifying factors of mobility were identified. It was found that juvenile crime, percent of Asian/African inhabitants, percent female unemployment and mean family size were positively and significantly related to intra-urban mobility. On the other hand, quality of living, median education, mean gross income, uncrowded households and mean age were negatively and significantly related to residential mobility. The level of religiosity, population size, crowded households and percent general unemployment were not related to intra-urban migration. Comparisons of the relationships of these variables to both intra-urban migration and inmigration rates were also made drawing attention to ethnic and SES factors.     

Associations between overseas,intra-urban and internal migration dynamics in Sydney, 1976–91

Between 1976 and 1991 metropolitan Sydney experienced unprecedented internal migration losses to other states and coastal regions of New South Wales. Levels of overseas immigration were also high and housing costs increased markedly, especially between 1986 and 1991. This paper investigates spatial statistical associations between overseas in-migration rates and internal migration loss within Sydney and between housing costs in Sydney and internal migration outflows. The hypothesis was that housing cost changes and overseas migration contributed additively to migration losses from the metropolis. A complementary analysis of the relationship between migration and housing cost changes is also undertaken. There was a strong positive association between overseas in-migration and intra-urban out-migration and a strong negative spatial association between overseas in-migration and internal out-migration. In consequence, housing cost associations with internal migration loss were found, although not all were in the expected direction. There were stronger associations between housing factors and intra-urban migration. The integration of metropolitan Sydney and Australia into the ‘Pacific rim’ economy is examined with reference to wider explanations of house cost changes and migration flows.     

Race,gender, and marriage: destination selection during the great migration

Using historical census microdata, we present a unique analysis of racial and gender disparities in destination selection and an exploration of hypotheses regarding tied migration in the historical context of the Great Migration. Black migrants were more likely to move to metropolitan areas and central cities throughout the period, while white migrants were more likely to locate in nonmetropolitan and farm destinations. Gender differences were largely dependent on marital status. Consistent with the "tied-migration" thesis, married women had destination outcomes that were similar to those of men, whereas single women had a greater propensity to reside in metropolitan locations where economic opportunities for women were more plentiful.     

Race, socioeconomic status, and return migration to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on the 29th of August 2005 and displaced virtually the entire population of the city. Soon after, observers predicted the city would become whiter and wealthier as a result of selective return migration, although challenges related to sampling and data collection in a post-disaster environment have hampered evaluation of these hypotheses. In this article, we investigate return to the city by displaced residents over a period of approximately 14 months following the storm, describing overall return rates and examining differences in return rates by race and socioeconomic status. We use unique data from a representative sample of pre-Katrina New Orleans residents collected in the Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Survey. We find that black residents returned to the city at a much slower pace than white residents even after controlling for socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics. However, the racial disparity disappears after controlling for housing damage. We conclude that blacks tended to live in areas that experienced greater flooding and hence suffered more severe housing damage which, in turn, led to their delayed return to the city. The full-scale survey of displaced residents being fielded in 2009–2010 will show whether the repopulation of the city was selective over a longer period.     

On place utility and the normative allocation of intra-urban migrants

This paper arises out of the fact that place utility, a basic factor in behavioral conceptualizations of migration processes, has not been specified in operational terms. This is done here through a model that assigns intraurban migrants to destination areal units within the city, using a normative linear programming framework based on behavioral considerations. Measures of place utilities for each areal unit and of comparative place utilities for each pair-wise permutation of areal units are provided by the shadow prices of the dual of the linear programming model. The primal of the model allocates migrants so as to maximize the household’s gain from migration. This is measured by the increase in its realized aspirations with respect to a residence site, tempered by the search effort involved in acquiring the site. Implementation of the model utilizes both questionnaire and published data from Cedar Rapids, Iowa for the year 1966 to 1967. Conformity between predictions of the model and real-world characteristics is such that it is concluded that the basic form of the model is sound. It is also concluded that the posited relationships between place utility and behavior in searching for and selecting a new residential site are reasonable and can lead to valuable insights into place utility and its functioning in the intra-urban system. Due to some misallocation of migrant flows, however, we further conclude that the model should be revised into a recursive format for future use.     

Relative Income,Race, and Fertility

If a white husband's income is higher than expected for men of his age, race, education, job characteristics, and region, economic theory predicts higher complete fertility for his wife. In the present study one per cent public use samples from the 1970 Census for California and Hawaii were used to examine the effect of relative income on Japanese, Chinese, and black fertility. Relative income was defined in two ways: (1) with regard to earnings of husbands of the same race, education, employment, and state; (2) with regard to earnings of white husbands of the same education, employment, and state. High relative incomes defined in each way were associated with increased completed fertility of Japanese and Chinese in Hawaii, where Orientals form a majority. Neither definition of high relative income was associated with the completed fertility of Japanese, Chinese, or blacks in California, where non-whites form a minority. The results suggest that the effect of relative income on fertility for a racial group will be positive only where there are few racial barriers to their attainment of high incomes.     

Environmental Hazards,Migration, and Race

This study contributes to our understanding of the association between internal migration patterns and environmentally hazardous facilities, with a focus upon race-specific outmigration at the county-level, nationwide. Among research suggesting inequalities with regard to the social distribution of environmental risk, selective migration is often implied to be a key dynamic leading to differential exposure to proximate environmental hazards. Nonetheless, the models presented here provide no evidence of differential migratory response by race to environmentally hazardous facilities, net of a wide array of socioeconomic controls for labor force opportunity, climate, and demographic structure. Future research should consider these associations at more precise geographies and/or at the individual level.     

Children and return migration

We explore reasons for return migrations which are motivated by immigrants concerns about their children. We develop a simple model, where parents have paternalistic preferences. We show that parental concerns about the child may lead to an increase, or to a decrease in the tendency to return to the home country. Our model suggests that return plans of the parent may respond differently to the presence of daughters than to the presence of sons. The empirical test of our models relies on the exogeneity of childrens gender. We use a survey panel data set, containing information on both return realisations over 14 years, and intended return plans. Our results lend support to the hypothesis that children influence return plans of their parents.I am grateful to Jerome Adda, Jaap Abring, David Card, Slobodan Djajic, and Ian Preston for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Responsible editor: Christoph M. Schmidt.     

Marriage and the Homosexual Body: It's About Race

Any analogy between race and homosexuality cannot erase the fact that skin color has marked and continues to mark bodies for special punishment and necessary protection. Yet, the analogy has also been forged in the struggles against sexual discrimination and in the courts to recognize same-sex marriage as a basic civil right. My purposes here are, first, to review the role the race-sexual orientation analogy has played in same-sex marriage debates, second to examine the analogy within the context of race and queer theories and, finally, to suggest a racial dimension to sexuality that marks the homosexual body.     

Inequality at work: Race,sex and underemployment

New indicators of underemployment are presented for whites, blacks, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans by sex. The indicators are based on hours worked, education, skill utilization, and pay. Data from the 1980 Current Population Survey are supplemented with Dictionary of Occupational Titles information to construct the indicators. Whites consistently have the lowest underemployment, and comparison across groups reveals the different types of employment problems faced by minorities and women. These indicators of underemployment are compared with those from a different conceptual approach (the Labor Utilization Framework) using the same survey data. The advantages of the new indicators are discussed.     

Race Differences in Sexual Behavior and Their Demographic Implications

Differences between blacks and whites in sexual behavior posited in Rushton's theory of r-K race differences were examined in the United States in an analysis of the annual surveys of the National Opinion Research Center for 1990–1996. This data set was analysed for black-white differences in numbers of sexual partners during the last 5 years and for frequency of sexual intercourse. The general pattern of the results was for blacks to report more sexual partners than whites and for black males to report greater frequency of sexual intercourse, consistent with Rushton's theory. This result has implications for the control of the AIDS epidemic and for the demographic transition among blacks.     

Race,wages, and assimilation among Cuban immigrants

This study uses data from the 1980 and 1990 Census and the 1994–2000 Current Population Survey to examine the determinants of earnings among male Cuban immigrants in the U.S. by race. Nonwhite Cuban immigrants earn about 15 percent less than whites, on average. Much of the racial wage gap is due to differences in educational attainment, age at migration, and years in the U.S., but the gap remains at almost 4 percent after controlling for such factors. Nonwhite Cuban immigrants also have lower returns to education than whites. A comparison to white, non-Hispanic U.S. natives indicates that nonwhite Cubans not only earn less initially than white Cubans on arrival in the U.S., but also do not significantly close the racial earnings gap over time.     

The Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race

Physical and cultural diversity have been salient features of human societies throughout history, but “race” as a scientific concept to account for human diversity is a modern phenomenon created in nineteenth‐century Europe as Darwinian thought was (mis)applied to account for differences in human societies. Although modern science has discredited race as a meaningful biological concept, race has remained as an important social category because of historical patterns of interpersonal and institutional discrimination. However, the impossibility of consistent and reliable reporting of race, either as an identity or as an observed trait, means that the notion of race as a set of mutually exclusive categories is no longer tenable. As a social science term, race is being gradually abandoned. Physical differences in appearance among people remain a salient marker in everyday life, but this reality can be better framed within the concept of ethnicity.     

Intra-household conflicts in migration decisionmaking: return and pendulum migration in Morocco

By analyzing the migration behavior and transnational residential strategies of first-generation, aging migrants from a particular Moroccan sending region, this study contributes to a conceptual critique of migration theories that identify the household as the most relevant decisionmaking unit. It highlights the role of intra-household power inequalities and conflicts in migration decisionmaking as well as the effects of migration decisions for intra-household power relations. Many labor migrants who left Morocco to work in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s did not realize their wish to return but instead ended up reunifying their families at the destination. An increasing proportion adopts a pendulum migration strategy to reconcile their own wish to retain strong ties with Morocco with the reluctance of children and spouses to return. Migrants who unilaterally decided not to reunify their families usually return after their active working life. However, this unilateral decision also blocks legal entry into Europe for their children, which has generated considerable intergenerational tensions.     

Cohort migration

Most migration analyses focus on net migration and are concerned with areal redistributions of population. Migration may also be studied as an event in the life-cycle of an individual, and migration rates may be defined as properties of cohorts. A number of efforts to examine migration as a cohort process has been hampered by the character of available data [or the United States. Rather than await the development of a registration system-either directly or via social security and tax records-the collection of residence histories is suggested as the most feasible approach to obtaining suitable data. A schematic representation of residence histories clarifies their relation to other types of migration data and illustrates the need to design such surveys with specific research purposes in mind. Exploratory work with the 1958 Residence History Supplement to the Current Population Survey (by Beale, Shryock, myself, and various colleagues) demonstrates the utility of this approach.Local studies have made fruitful use of residence histories but typically are unable to delineate birth cohorts or other appropriate base populations exposed to risk. Development of cohort migration techniques analogous to the life table approach to mortality or cohort Jertility analysis requires national data. But migration, unlike Jertility and mortality, involves events that are reversible and repeatable. Hence the demographer's stock of analytic tools requires expansion. To the sociologist-demographer, experimentation with cohort migration models seems to be getting at one of the crucial methodological problems of sociology, the analysis of social mobility. A mutually profitable interchange with students of social mobility is envisaged.     

Middle East migration and health

"Labour migration to the Middle East from Sri Lanka has been increasing in recent times. Such a situation has not only demographic, but economic and social implications.... [The author investigates the] impact on the health situation of the migrant workers as well as on the families that they have left behind...by reviewing [the literature] and by making use of the author's own personal experiences as a physician in the Middle East."     

International migration and national development

"In this review, we examine theories, data, and research on the macroeconomic relationship between international migration and national development in all world regions. Earlier reviews have generally been pessimistic about the prospects for economic development as a result of international migration. Until recently, however, theories and data have not recognized the complex, multifaceted, and often indirect ways that international migration can influence the economic status of households, communities, and nations, and they have generally failed to appreciate how these relationships can change over time. When these complexities are incorporated into theoretical models, research designs, and data collection, a more nuanced and far more positive picture emerges. Given a supportive mix of macroeconomic policies and infrastructure, international migration may function as a dynamic force promoting economic growth and national development, so long as it does not bring about the selective emigration of scarce human capital needed for development at home."