Working for Legality: Employment and Migrant Regularization in Europe

Recent programs to regularize undocumented migrants suggest the increasing role of employment as a requirement for foreigners to legally reside in Europe. Taking as illustrations the cases of Spain, France, Austria, Belgium and Germany, this article examines how regularization policies frame work. Employment provisions follow a civic‐performance frame that breaks with the criterion of vulnerability. While secure forms of employment paying standard wages are privileged, the crisis has made such jobs even less accessible to migrants seeking to regularize or maintain their status. Residence permits granted through legalization have become increasingly temporary and conditional, often involving repeated transitions in and out of illegality. A vicious circle of “disintegration” thus threatens to set in where employment precariousness becomes both the source and the consequence of legal precariousness.

Policy Implications

• The article shows how employment provisions are tightly linked to policies of “earned legalization”.
• The article shows that employment can be part of a broader regularization policy emphasizing ties to the host country.
• The article brings attention to potential conflicts between access requirements based on migrant vulnerability, and those based on migrant integration.
• The article warns against the exclusionary workings of employment‐based regularization in times of economic downturn.

     

Picture Perception in Infants: Do 9‐Month‐Olds Attempt to Grasp Objects Depicted in Photographs?

Two experiments tested the DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, Uttal, Rosengren, and Gottlieb (1998 claim that 9‐month‐old infants attempt to grasp objects depicted in photographs. In Experiment 1, 9‐month‐olds viewed an object, a photograph of the object, and 2 flat, nonpictorial displays. On average, they reached for the photograph and nonpictorial displays with their hands approximately horizontal and close to the display surfaces, but reached for the object with their hands oriented obliquely and at significantly higher heights. The infants also exhibited similar behaviors when touching the photograph and nonpictorial displays. In Experiment 2, 9‐month‐olds exhibited similar behaviors when touching a photograph of an object and a photograph of textured carpet. The results of both experiments suggest that 9‐month‐olds treat photographs of objects as 2‐dimensional surfaces and not as graspable objects.     

Short happiness and affect research protocol (sharp)

Issues in the measurement of subjective well-being (SWB) include the relative balance between scale brevity and measurement accuracy. Because accuracy is expected to vary negatively with the length of a scale, the brevity/accuracy trade-off has pragmatic implications for survey research. This article begins by examining minimal psychometric criteria to evaluate short measures of SWB. These criteria include content validity (i.e., four basic categories are cited), criterion validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability. Several measures frequently used in large-scale surveys are shown to fail against one or more of these criteria. Consequently, a new brief measure was developed and shown to satisfy all the criteria. It is termed the Short Happiness and Affect Research Protocol (SHARP). This measure contains 12-items derived from the Memorial University of Newfoundland Scale of Happiness (MUNSH), with the content balanced over positive and negative, and short-term (affective) and long-term (dispositional) components. The internal consistency, temporal stability, and criterion validity coefficients for the SHARP are comparable to those of the MUNSH, which is among the most accurate measures of self-reported SWB.     

The multilevel dependence of contraceptive use on socioeconomic development and family planning program strength

Using World Fertility Survey data for 15 developing countries, we estimate an equation in which the dependent variable—whether the respondent has ever used an efficient contraceptive method—depends on the respondent’s education and location of childhood residence. All of the coefficients of this equation, including the intercept, vary over countries. Analysis based on new methodology shows that the intercept and education effects vary as a function of national family planning program efforts and that none of the parameters of the equation depend on gross national product per capita. The results demonstrate the efficacy of multilevel analysis, provide a partial test of the theory underlying the analysis, and refocus discussion of the contributions of development and policy variables to fertility reduction.     

Bayesian selection of log-linear models

A general methodology is presented for finding suitable Poisson log-linear models with applications to multiway contingency tables. Mixtures of multivariate normal distributions are used to model prior opinion when a subset of the regression vector is believed to be nonzero. This prior distribution is studied for two- and three-way contingency tables, in which the regression coefficients are interpretable in terms of odds ratios in the table. Efficient and accurate schemes are proposed for calculating the posterior model probabilities. The methods are illustrated for a large number of two-way simulated tables and for two three-way tables. These methods appear to be useful in selecting the best log-linear model and in estimating parameters of interest that reflect uncertainty in the true model.     

Perception of emotions and attribution of acceptance by normal and emotionality disturbed children

In order to ascertain possible differences in perceptions of emotion and attribution of acceptance among normal children and those diagnosed as schizophrenic, neurotic, or character disordered (N=40), participants were tested with the Pictures of Facial Affect (Ekman & Friesen, 1976). When subjected to analysis of variance based on diagnostic category, age, and type of emotion, accuracy of perception data showed significant differences only for main effects of age and type of emotion, while attribution data showed significance only for the main effect of type of emotion. Results were discussed with respect to related studies and methodological refinements.     

Social Policy and European Union

What social policy developments may be reasonably expected from the European Union? Three possible positions on this question are developed: a market liberal view; a progressive liberal view; and an institutionalist view. None of these positions is obviously the correct one, and in each case a mixture of pragmatic and principled criticisms can be developed. However, it is argued that the progressive liberal position strikes an ethically acceptable balance of competing considerations.     

Countercyclical union wage premium? Evidence for the 1980s

Empirical results based on pooled male data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics indicate an overall union wage premium of about 11.92 percent for the 1980s. In response to fluctuations in local labor market conditions, proxied by the local unemployment rate, a much more flexible wage-setting process is found in the nonunion sector relative to the union sector. The long-term effect of unemployment on nonunion real wages suggests an approximate 0.6 percent decline for every one percentage point increase in unemployment, a statistically significant reduction, but the long-term effect of unemployment on real wages of union members is negligible. The union wage premium ranges between 11.6 to 12.3 percent for the sample years. Even though union wages are insensitive to short-run fluctuations in local labor market conditions, and are somewhat countercyclical in nature, widespread union wage concessions which occurred during the 1980s may now be exerting a downward pressure on union wages. We acknowledge financial support of National Science Foundation [OSR-9350540], the Ada Howe Kent Research Fund, and The Fogelman Academic Research Excellence Fund. We thank Barbara Ganley for valuable editorial comments and Noga Peled for her able research assistance. The usual caveat applies.