The long-term consequences of a temporary worker program: The US Bracero experience

Recent changes enacted by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) create the potential for two large temporary worker programs, one constructed from the existing H-2 program and the other an outgrowth of IRCA's amnesty provisions. Prior experience with guestworker programs in Europe and the United States suggests, however, that temporary labor migration ultimately will engender a flow of immigration substantially in excess of the number of temporary visas originally allocated. In this paper, we outline a theoretical rationale to explain this observation and test it using microdata gathered from former participants in the Bracero Program, a US-sponsored temporary worker program that ran from 1942 to 1964. Our results indicate that bracero migrants were very likely to make repeated trips, both with and without legal documents; that they were quite likely to introduce their sons and daughters into migratory careers; and that they were eventually likely to settle in the United States in substantial numbers. We argue that, in the long run, there is no such thing as a temporary worker program.     

Backing seen of population policy in AID

Congress is almost certain to agree to use of U.S. funds to motivate reduced population growth in developing countries but funding for sterilization abroad emerged as a political issue in the House. In the proposed U.S. AID budget, which in the past has been about 10% funded for direct population programs, a total concern with literacy for women, higher educational levels, and other developmental programs which increase motivation for family planning has been proposed. Zero Population Growth has sent telegrams to Congress supporting this basic development policy. The controversy over sterilization is the result of India's compulsory sterilization legislation. An amendment refusing to allow any U.S. funds to be used for sterilization programs was rejected, but in rejecting it, the members of the House of Representatives expressed their concern that any and all sterilization programs be completely voluntary. In a letter, AID Deputy Administrator Robert Nooter assured Congress that AID has no goals to sterilize any certain number of women around the world and it is not the main purpose of the AID program to to emphasize sterilization as a method of family planning.     

Immigration and free trade with Mexico: protecting American workers against double jeopardy

Free trade may well increase immigration from Mexico to the United States before ultimately slowing it down. Rapid population growth, unemployment or underemployment of half the labor force, and vast ethnic and kinship links to the United States have given Mexican migration a stubborn momentum. Increased prosperity from free trade will give many would-be migrants the means to resettle in the U. S. Foreign competition will displace Mexican workers in small farms, state-owned enterprises, and less competitive industries, forcing some to migrate. The noneconomic incentives and expectations driving migration will also remain strong. Mexicans may see free trade as making the border a mere formality or as conferring an entitlement to live in the United States. On the U. S. side, free trade may well deepen the government's traditional complacency about border controls. Over the long-term, however, a successful free trade agreement could reduce immigration by improving Mexico's democracy and the quality of life, diminishing the prospects of mass asylum movements from Mexico, creating a better climate for effective family planning, and luring marginal, immigration-magnet industries from the U. S. to Mexico. In the United States, less- skilled American workers in some industries and regions can expect job displacement and other disruptions from free trade. Particularly vulnerable will be workers in perishable crop agriculture, border retail trade, construction, apparel, and light manufacturing such as furniture, auto parts and glass. Continued heavy immigration of Mexican and other foreign workers into those industries and communities will further impede the adjustment of resident workers by competing for jobs and consuming public resources needed for retraining and job search. To ease the adjustment of displaced workers, the U. S. must make Mexico's cooperation in restraining immigration a condition for free trade. Mexico's cooperation should include enforcement of its own laws against clandestine border crossing; action against alien smugglers, document forgers and transiting illegal aliens from Central America; and curbs on the reentry of aliens deported from the United States. U.S. initiatives that would cushion vulnerable American workers against the added disruption of immigration would be: better identification and screening of applicants for public assistance; tightened enforcement of safety and labor standards in immigrant-impacted firms and provision of legal workers to such firms; protection of public assistance resources through better screening and identification of applicants; and curbs on imports of temporary foreign workers for firms that will now have access to Mexican labor in Mexico. Finally, the United States must consistently press Mexico for higher safety, environmental and labor standards at the workplace to improve the job satisfaction and quality of life of working Mexicans who might otherwise migrate, as well as to narrow Mexico's labor cost advantages over the United States.     

Selection,Language Heritage,and the Earnings Trajectories of Black Immigrants in the United States

Research suggests that immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean surpass the earnings of U.S.-born blacks approximately one decade after arriving in the United States. Using data from the 1980–2000 U.S. censuses and the 2005–2007 American Community Surveys on U.S.-born black and non-Hispanic white men as well as black immigrant men from all the major sending regions of the world, I evaluate whether selective migration and language heritage of immigrants’ birth countries account for the documented earnings crossover. I validate the earnings pattern of black immigrants documented in previous studies, but I also find that the earnings of most arrival cohorts of immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, after residing in the United States for more than 20 years, are projected to converge with or slightly overtake those of U.S.-born black internal migrants. The findings also show three arrival cohorts of black immigrants from English-speaking African countries are projected to surpass the earnings of U.S.-born black internal migrants. No arrival cohort of black immigrants is projected to surpass the earnings of U.S.-born non-Hispanic whites. Birth-region analysis shows that black immigrants from English-speaking countries experience more rapid earnings growth than immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. The arrival-cohort and birth-region variation in earnings documented in this study suggest that selective migration and language heritage of black immigrants’ birth countries are important determinants of their initial earnings and earnings trajectories in the United States.     

The ambiguities of U.S. temporary foreign worker policy

Expansion of temporary worker programs has figured prominently in recent proposals to reform United States immigration policy. The Florida sugar cane industry has been using foreign workers from the English-speaking Caribbean since 1943. The 8000 to 9000 workers annually admitted under section H-2 of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act to cut cane constitute the largest legal nonimmigrant labor force in the United States. Examination of the Florida H-2 program reveals that existing temporary worker policy is ambiguous, if not contradictory, on the issues of the displacement of domestic workers; the characteristics and value of H-2 workers; their impact on local communities in the United States; and the effects of seasonal labor migration on the migrant and his country. Suggestions for improving policy include strengthening of statutory guidelines and administrative agencies, adoption of a more market-sensitive adverse effect wage rate, making farm labor more attractive to American workers, removing distinctions between foreign and domestic workers, and measures to improve the lot of the migrant and his home society.This article is drawn from a study funded by a grant from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (R01-HD-14277-01). The Center for Latin American Studies and the Division of Sponsored Research of the University of Florida provided additional financial support for field work in the Caribbean. Fuller discussions of the results are found in McCoy (1984a), McCoy and Wood (1982) and Wood and McCoy (forthcoming). The author would like to acknowledge the suggestions of Jose Alvarez, Robert Bach, Marian Houston, Steve Sanderson and Charles Wood, his collaborator on the larger project. The comments of David North and especially Edwin Reubens on an earlier version, presented at the 1984 meeting of the American Political Science Association, are also appreciated.     

Migration Selection, Protection, and Acculturation in Health: A Binational Perspective on Older Adults

In this article, we test for four potential explanations of the Hispanic Health Paradox (HHP): the “salmon bias,” emigration selection, and sociocultural protection originating in either destination or sending country. To reduce biases related to attrition by return migration typical of most U.S.-based surveys, we combine data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study in Mexico and the U.S. National Health Interview Survey to compare self-reported diabetes, hypertension, current smoking, obesity, and self-rated health among Mexican-born men ages 50 and older according to their previous U.S. migration experience, and U.S.-born Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. We also use height, a measure of health during childhood, to bolster some of our tests. We find an immigrant advantage relative to non-Hispanic whites in hypertension and, to a lesser extent, obesity. We find evidence consistent with emigration selection and the salmon bias in height, hypertension, and self-rated health among immigrants with less than 15 years of experience in the United States; we do not find conclusive evidence consistent with sociocultural protection mechanisms. Finally, we illustrate that although ignoring return migrants when testing for the HHP and its mechanisms, as well as for the association between U.S. experience and health, exaggerates these associations, they are not fully driven by return migration-related attrition.     

The U.S. 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and undocumented migration to the United States

One of the major goals of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) is to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants coming to and residing in the United States. This goal is pursued by allocating increased resources to Border Patrol enforcement, imposing penalties on employers for hiring undocumented workers, and offering to legalize the undocumented population that has resided in the country for a substantial period of time. This paper evaluates the impact of IRCA on the flow of undocumented migrants across the U.S.-Mexican border by analyzing a monthly time series of Border Patrol apprehensions from January 1977 to September 1988 within the context of a multivariate statistical model. The model provides a good fit to the data (R² = 0.94), and our results indicate that INS resources, Mexican population growth, comparative economic conditions on both sides of the border, and seasonal factors related to the agricultural planting and harvesting cycle are all determinants of border apprehensions and, by implication, of the flow of undocumented migrants to the United States. IRCA's impacts on the number of ‘apprehensions averted’ operate mainly through changes in INS effort, the SAWs agricultural legalization program, and other IRCA-related factors. Our analysis concludes that the effects of IRCA, though perhaps smaller than sometimes alleged, were associated with a cumulative net reduction in linewatch apprehensions of nearly 700,000 in the 23-month period following enactment of the law. The associated reduction over the same period in the number of illegal border crossings may be as high as 2 million.     

Mobility,Stagnation, or Attrition? Diverse Earning Trajectories in a Cohort of Foreign‐born Men

Researchers and policymakers frequently debate about the integration of immigrants into the US economy. These debates are often based on limited data that do not capture the diversity of immigrants who arrived in the later twentieth century. Related research has also struggled to incorporate the experience of short‐term immigrants or immigrants who move in and out of the labor force. Using records from the Social Security Administration, we track the complete cohort of foreign‐born men who received social security numbers in 1978 through their subsequent working years and characterize their earning trajectories. We find that the share of foreign‐born men with low earnings declined over time, mainly due to attrition from the formal labor force. We also show, for the first time, that immigrants’ employment and earning histories vary considerably by their countries of origin: while those from several countries in Asia and Africa experienced substantial earnings growth and tended to stay in the United States for the long term, men from Central America and the Caribbean experienced more stagnation and had high levels of temporary and permanent attrition from the formal labor force. We end by discussing the historical contingencies and socioeconomic contexts—in sending countries and the United States—that shaped these trajectories.     

‘The Right to Enter Every Other State’ – The Supreme Court and African American Mobility in the United States

Abstract

In 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated in the Dred Scott case that if one African American was free to move unhindered throughout the United States, then all African Americans, enslaved or otherwise, would have ‘the right to enter every other State’. Such a situation, he argued, was untenable. The Supreme Court thus suggested that if U.S. citizenship included a de facto right to mobility, then African Americans could not be considered citizens. Although not formally written into the U.S. Constitution, numerous Supreme Court rulings since 1857 have underpinned the right to mobility in the United States. Yet the ability to be mobile in the United States has been fundamentally intertwined with the construction of racial identities. It was the white settlers that were free to move westward, the mobile nomadic lifestyles of the peoples they encountered being understood as primitive and inferior. Native peoples subsequently became immobilized on reservations. Similarly, African Americans in the era of slavery were immobilized on plantations and movement away from plantation space was illicit, codified as illegal, and required the hidden networks of the Underground Railroad. An African American moving through white American spaces faced often deadly consequences. African Americans should, in the parlance of the times, ‘know their place’ and not have the ambition, or the right, to move freely around the USA. To explore these contentions, I draw on four landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that elaborate on the mobility, or curtailment thereof, of African Americans in the United States.     

Who Stays? Who Goes? Selective Emigration Among the Foreign-Born

We investigate the level and selectivity of emigration from the United States among foreign-born adults. We use the CPS Matching Method (Van Hook et al. 2006) to estimate the probability of emigration among foreign-born adults aged 18–34, 35–64 and 65+ from 1996 to 2009 (N = 92,852). The results suggest higher levels of emigration than used in the production of official population estimates. Also, indicators of economic integration (home ownership, school enrollment, poverty) and social ties in the U.S. (citizenship, having young children, longer duration in the United States) deter emigration. Conversely, having connections with the sending society, such as living apart from a spouse, was associated with emigration, particularly among Mexican men. Health was least strongly related to emigration. Simulations suggest that selective emigration may alter the home ownership and marital status, but not health, composition of immigrant cohorts. The implications for public policy are discussed.     

The demography of disability and the effects of immigrant history: Older Asians in the United States

Using data from the 2000 U.S. census, we compare the older Asian population with U.S.-born, non-Hispanic whites with respect to three indicators of disability. Insofar as any Asian "advantage" in health vis-a-vis whites exists among the population aged 65 and over, our evidence suggests that it occurs primarily among the U.S.-born segments of this population. We also investigate how differences in disability levels among Asian immigrant groups are influenced by country of birth and by the combined effects of duration of residence in the United States and life cycle stage at entry. These results highlight the diversity of the older Asian population with respect to the ways in which immigration and origin history are linked to disability outcomes. We conclude that in later life, immigrant status confers few disability advantages among the Asian population in the United States.     

The Demand for Immigration to the United States

This paper examines trends and cross-national variation in the active demand for immigration to the United States in the period of 1984–1993, using data from the Visa Office and various other sources. The analysis is restricted to legal immigration in numerically limited categories. The results show that the total number of active immigrant visa applicants steadily increased in the aggregate and in each of the preference categories. Moreover, the active demand for immigration was highly skewed, with the majority of applications coming from a dozen countries: Mexico, the Philippines, India, mainland China, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Jamaica, Hong Kong, and Pakistan. Most of these highly-backlogged countries displayed a significant increase in the growth rate of demand for immigration. The paper also shows a substantial cross-national variation in the active demand for immigration and explores its structural determinants. The regression results indicate that the level of economic development in sending countries and U.S. economic and cultural relations with sending countries play important roles in the determination process. Policy implications of the findings are also discussed.     

U.S. foreign economic policy and illegal immigration

It is often suggested that the most effective policy for the United States, if it wishes to curtail illegal immigration from nearby countries, is to manipulate foreign economic instruments to support their economic development. The Reagan administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative is responsive to this approach in its proposals for increased aid and trade and tax preferences for beneficiary countries. Analysis of U.S. trade, investment, and aid relations with migrant-sending countries leads to the conclusion that these preferences could have a marginal impact on job creation in these countries, but there is no assurance that a modest rise in economic opportunity will lead to a decrease in emigration in the foreseeable future. In addition, preferential trade and tax treatment for some countries involves a departure from U.S. policy and would lead to a clamor for equal treatment by other countries.     

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.     

Verification of the ages of supercentenarians in the United States: Results of a matching study

Unprecedented declines in mortality among the very old have led to the emergence of "true" supercentenarians (persons aged 110 and over). The ages of these individuals have been well-documented in European countries with a history of birth registration, but have not been systematically studied in the United States, which lacks similar documentation and where the inaccuracy of age reporting has been an issue. To verify age, we linked records from the Social Security Administration for close to 700 individuals who died from 1980 to 1999 purportedly at ages 110 and older to records of the U.S. censuses of 1880 and 1900, conducted when these individuals were children. This group was a residual group from an earlier file that was reduced by the SSA after data checks that eliminated incorrect records. The results of the matched records for the residual file indicate that over 90% of the whites were accurately reported as supercentenarians, but only half of the blacks appeared to have attained age 110. The verification of age shows that the United States has more "true" supercentenarians than do other nations.     

Job loss and health in the U.S. labor market

While U.S. unemployment rates remain low, rates of job loss are high and rising. Job loss is also becoming increasingly common in more advantaged, white-collar occupations. This article is concerned with how these patterns impact the health of U.S. workers. Drawing on recent data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I find that job loss harms health, beyond sicker people being more likely to lose their jobs. Respondents who lost jobs but were reemployed at the survey faced an increased risk of developing new health conditions; they were not, however, more likely to describe their health in negative terms. This suggests that recent job “churning” within the United States (i.e., high rates of job loss but low unemployment) may impact certain health outcomes but not others. I find no evidence that the health consequences of job loss differ across white- and blue-collar occupations, although health-related selection out of jobs appears stronger within the blue-collar category.     

Interior Immigration Enforcement and Political Participation of U.S. Citizens in Mixed-Status Households

The 2000s have witnessed an expansion of interior immigration enforcement in the United States. At the same time, the country has experienced a major demographic transformation, with the number of U.S. citizens living in mixed-status households—that is, households where at least one family member is an unauthorized migrant—reaching 16 million. U.S. citizens living in mixed-status households are personally connected to the struggles experienced by their unauthorized family members. For them, immigration policy is likely to shape their current and future voting behavior. Using data from the 2002–2014 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplements, we examine whether intensified immigration enforcement has affected the political engagement of U.S. citizens living in mixed-status households. We find that immigration enforcement has chilled their electoral participation by lowering their propensity to register by 5 %; however, it has not visibly affected their voting propensity among those registered. Importantly, their lower voting registration likelihood does not seem to reflect indifference for community and public matters, given that it has been accompanied by greater involvement in civic forms of political participation, such as volunteering. Understanding how immigration policy affects the political participation of a fast-growing segment of the electorate is imperative because they will inevitably constitute a rapidly rising political force in future elections.     

避孕套在美国的推广及其启示

在美国 ,避孕套是一种受欢迎的可避孕可预防传染病的工具。本文利用相关文献资料并通过实地考察 ,研究了避孕套在美国的推广等问题。这类研究对在中国进一步开展计划生育、增进民众防病意识、提高公众健康水平有一定的借鉴意义。     

Marriage (Still) Matters: The Contribution of Demographic Change to Trends in Childlessness in the United States

Childlessness in the United States nearly doubled between 1980 and 2000. Other dramatic changes in the U.S. population also took place over this period—notably, women’s average educational attainment increased, and the proportion marrying declined—but the impact of these changes on childlessness has not been formally examined. In this article, I use data from the Current Population Survey Fertility Supplements (1995, 1998, 2004, 2008) and logistic regression and regression-based decomposition techniques to assess the contribution of changes in educational attainment, marriage behavior, and racial/ethnic composition on population levels of childlessness in the United States. Results show that increases in the proportion of women unmarried by age 40 contributed most to the increase in childlessness in the late twentieth century, although these increases were offset somewhat by increased childbearing among unmarried women. The rising proportion of women with a college degree also explained a substantial amount of the increase in childless women.     

Reconstruction of fertility trends for the female population of the U.S.S.R

Abstract The article describes fertility trends among Soviet women during the past 40 years as compared to American women during the same period of time. Period-specific fertility rates were arrived at by relating the annual total of live births to a pattern of age-specific fertility rates estimated for each year and also to the number of women for each single year of age. These rates were then appropriately re-arranged and compressed into five-year age groups to form a series of cohort-specific fertility rates. The findings rest on somewhat conjectural estimates of live births and numbers of women in the U.S.S.R., some of which were originally prepared before the 1959 Soviet census. The tentative evidence shows that changes in the period-specific fertility of Soviet women were far more irregular and dramatic in the past, than among American women. After World War II these rates dropped in the U.S.S.R. below those of the United States, except for women over 30 years of age. On the other hand, the cohort-specific rates of Soviet women, although declining from one cohort to the next, at present show their magnitude in the cumulative series for older ages to be marked by higher than among American women. This experimental investigation of fertility in the Soviet Union makes no claim to high standards of accuracy and validity. Its intended purpose is to stress the desirability of shifting emphasis from the temporal and prognostic type of study, characteristic of present-day demographic research about the U.S.S.R., to the generational and historical approach.