Immigration policy and immigrant quality: empirical evidence from Canada

This paper examines the earnings of foreign-born and native-born men in an attempt to evaluate whether the decline in the quality of Canadian immigrants is related to changes in the country-of-origin mix and the class (type) mix of immigrants. Based on a human capital interpretation, higher quality immigrants are defined as immigrants who have smaller on-entry earnings differentials and have earnings that grow at a faster rate (relative to native-born Canadians). The analysis consists of two parts. The first part is based on individual data on earnings and socio-economic characteristics collected in the 1971 and 1986 Canadian Censuses. Earnings equations are estimated for 16 country-of-origin immigrant groups. These regressions are then used to construct a cohort-specific measure of immigrant quality based on the earnings differential between foreign-born and native-born Canadians. In the second part of the analysis, additional regression equations are estimated, pertaining to the period 1968 to 1985, that relate these Census-based measures of immigrant quality to the country-of-origin and class mix of immigrants. In this analysis, unpublished data, supplied by theDepartment of Employment and Immigration, describing the distribution of immigrants across the three main immigrant classes is used. Overall, the analysis confirms that there has been a sharp secular decline in the quality of Canadian immigrants and suggests that it is related to changes in both the country-of-origin and class mix of immigrants.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the meetings of the Canadian Economics Association and the European Society for Population Economics. The comments of Martin Browning, John Ermisch and two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. Of course, all remaining errors and shortcomings are the sole responsibility of the authors.     

Land fragmentation under rapid urbanization: A cross-site analysis of Southwestern cities

Explosive population growth and increasing demand for rural homes and lifestyles fueled exurbanization and urbanization in the western USA over the past decades. Using National Land Cover Data we analyzed land fragmentation trends from 1992 to 2001 in five southwestern cities associated with Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites. We observed two general fragmentation trends: expansion of the urbanized area leading to fragmentation in the exurban and peri-urban regions and decreased fragmentation associated with infill in the previously developed urban areas. We identified three fragmentation patterns, riparian, polycentric, and monocentric, that reflect the recent western experience with growth and urbanization. From the literature and local expert opinion, we identified five relevant drivers ?C water provisioning, population dynamics, transportation, topography, and institutions ?C that shape land use decision-making and fragmentation in the southwest. In order to assess the relative importance of each driver on urbanization, we linked historical site-specific driver information obtained through literature reviews and archival analyses to the observed fragmentation patterns. Our work highlights the importance of understanding land use decision-making drivers in concert and throughout time, as historic decisions leave legacies on landscapes that continue to affect land form and function, a process often forgotten in a region and era of blinding change.     

Deconstructing Development Theory: Feminism,the Public/Private Dichotomy and the Mexican Maquiladoras*

L'analyse postmoderne, la plus récente des nombreuses façons d'aborder le développement international, permet de mieux comprendre les tendances occidentalisantes de la théorie sur le développement ainsi que les dichotomies moderne/traditionnel et progressiste/retrograde qu'elles favorisent. Elle ne parvient cependant pas à mettre en evidence les dichotomies révélatrices de l'inégalité des sexes - homme/femme, public/privé et productif/non productif -, celles qui font partie intégrante de la pensée sur le développement. Le but de cette étude théorique n'est pas de faire le bilan des répercussions du développement dans la vie des femmes du tiers monde mais bel et bien de procéder, dans l'optique feministe, à une analyse deconstructiviste postmoderne de la théorie dominante du développement et à 1'examen d'un exemple pratique, celui des maquiladoras mexicains. Par le biais d'une deconstruction feministe, la théorie du développement trahit un discours foncierement phallocentrique qui cherche à imposer de facon systematique une interpretation occidentale du role de la femme dans les societes dites sous-developpees, avec pour consequence la devalorisation de son apport dans les domaines public et prive. As the newest of many varied approaches to the topic of international development, the postmodern approach offers valuable insights into the Westernizing project of development theory, not least of which is its insight into the dichotomies of modern/traditional and progressive/backward. What the postmodern approach fails to do adequately, however, is uncover the specifically gendered dichotomies also resident in development thought, including male/ female, public/private, and productive/non-productive. The purpose of this primarily theoretical essay is not to enumerate Third World women's experiences with development, but rather to apply the postmodern tool of deconstruction from a feminist perspective, first to mainstream development theory, and subsequently to a practical example of development, the Mexican maquiladora project. Through a feminist deconstruction, development theory is shown to be a fundamentally gendered-phallocentric-discourse that systematically applies Western notions of gender to “underdeveloped” societies and cultures, thereby undervaluing women's essential contributions to both public and private spheres.     

The Role of Modeling and Automatic Reinforcement in the Construction of the Passive Voice

Language acquisition has been a contentious topic among linguists, psycholinguists, and behaviorists for decades. Although numerous theories of language acquisition have surfaced, none have sufficiently accounted for the subtleties of the language that children acquire. The present study attempts to explain the role of modeling and automatic reinforcement in the acquisition of the passive voice. Six children, ages 3 to 5, participated in this study. The results indicated that the children began using the passive voice only after the experimenter modeled passive sentences. Furthermore, the usage of the passive voice increased with repeated exposure to the experimenter''s verbal behavior. Given that the children were not explicitly reinforced, it is proposed that their behavior was automatically reinforced for using the passive voice.     

Positive embedded integration in Bayesian analysis

This paper describes how embedded sequences of positive interpolatory integration rules (PIIRs) obtained from Gauss-Hermite product rules can be applied in Bayesian analysis. These embedded sequences are very promising for two major reasons. First, they provide a rich class of spatially distributed rules which are particularly useful in high dimensions. Second, they provide a way of producing more efficient integration strategies by enabling approximations to be updated sequentially through the addition of new nodes at each step rather than through changing to a completely new set of nodes. Moreover, as points are added successive rules change naturally from spatially distributed non-product rules to product rules. This feature is particularly attractive when the rules are used for the evaluation of marginal posterior densities. We illustrate the use of embedded sequences of PIIRs in two examples. These illustrate how embedded sequences can be applied to improve the efficiency of the adaptive integration strategy currently in use.     

Minority ethnic groups and higher education in Britain: Questions of access and equity

The role of higher education in Britain is in transition as the system expands to educate an ever‐growing proportion of the nation's eighteen‐year‐olds. In the past it could have been argued that one of its main functions was to reproduce the class which would direct the country in the political, judicial, industrial, commercial and educational spheres. Now, succesful completion of a first degree will be unlikely in itself to guarantee access to the ruling élites. This paper considers questions of access and equity within British higher education, and focuses, in particular, on how young people from the minority groups constituted by recent immigration to Britain fare within the system.