From Illegal to Legal: Estimating Previous Illegal Experience among New Legal Immigrants to the United States1

This paper develops a framework for estimating previous illegal experience among annual cohorts of new legal immigrants to the United States – using public‐use administrative microdata alone, survey data alone, and the two jointly – and provides estimates for the FY 1996 cohort of new immigrants, based on both administrative and survey data. Our procedures enable assessment of type of illegal experience, including entry without inspection, visa overstay, and unauthorized employment. We compare our estimates of previous illegal experience to estimates that would be obtained using administrative data alone; examine the extent of previous illegal experience by country of birth, immigrant class of admission, religion, and geographic residence in the United States; and estimate multivariate models of the probability of having previous illegal experience. To further assess origins and destinations, we carry out two kinds of contrasts, comparing formerly illegal new legal immigrants both to fellow immigrants who do not have previous illegal experience and also to the broader unauthorized population, the latter using estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2002 ), Passel (2002 ), and Costanzo et al. (2002 ).     

The Legacy of Robin M. Williams Jr. in the Short Twenty-First Century

This essay describes Robin M. Williams Jr.'s maturation from a precocious college student to a fully formed sociological researcher by describing various personal and professional encounters with significant events of the twentieth century. I reflect on the ways the historical cataclysms of depression and war galvanized Williams and his peers to work toward radical change, both in their lives and in the world about them. The result was a remarkable societal transformation that improved the lives of ordinary citizens in many and diverse ways. The essay concludes with the hope that sociologists will once again be in the vanguard of social action, as Robin Williams was during his long career of teaching, research, and public criticism.     

Density zoning and class segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas

Objectives:Socioeconomic segregation rose substantially in U.S. cities during the final decades of the 20th century, and we argue that zoning regulations are an important cause of this increase.Methods. We measure neighborhood economic segregation using the Gini coefficient for neighborhood income inequality and the poor-affluent exposure index. These outcomes are regressed on an index of density zoning developed from the work of Pendall for 50 U.S. metropolitan areas, while controlling for other metropolitan characteristics likely to affect urban housing markets and class segregation.Results. For both 2000 and changes from 1990 to 2000, OLS estimates reveal a strong relationship between density zoning and income segregation, and replication using 2SLS suggests that the relationship is causal. We also show that zoning is associated with higher interjurisdictional inequality.Conclusions. Metropolitan areas with suburbs that restrict the density of residential construction are more segregated on the basis of income than those with more permissive density zoning regimes. This arrangement perpetuates and exacerbates racial and class inequality in the United States.     

Determinants of Savings, Remittances, and Spending Patterns among U.S. Migrants in Four Mexican Communities

In this paper we attempt to overcome several weaknesses of earlier field studies of the effect of international migration on sending communities. In general, these studies fail to employ representative samples of migrants, specify theoretical models of decision-making, or control for a variety of individual and household characteristics likely to affect how migrants dispose of their earnings, including sample selectivity. Representative samples of Mexican migrants from four sending communities are used to estimate a theoretical model that controls for a variety of individual, family, and trip characteristics; other stages of the analysis also control for sample selectivity. The findings suggest that migrant decision-making is strongly and consistently determined by social capital and community membership, with other variables playing ancillary roles in different decision processes. The propensities to save, remit, and invest productively generally rose as ties to the United States increased, and were generally higher in communities with well-developed local economies.     

International Migration at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century: The Role of the State

This note reviews recent theoretical and empirical work on the determinants and efficacy of state immigration policies to draw conclusions about the future direction of policy regimes throughout the globe and their likely effects. An age of increasingly restrictive immigration policies is emerging, but it is still unclear how effective these policies will be in controlling the volume and composition of international migration. States can be located along a continuum of efficacy with respect to the imposition of restrictive policies. Unfortunately virtually all research done to date has focused on the effectiveness of restrictive policies in major immigrant-receiving developed countries. More research needs to be done to determine just how effective restrictive immigration policies can be under varying degrees of state capacity.     

Guestworker programs: Evidence from Europe and the United States and some implications for U.S. policy

Mounting concern in the United States over increased illegal migration from Mexico during the past decade has generated a heated policy debate and led to a number of proposals as to how the U.S. government should deal with the problem. Among these has been a call for a temporary worker program similar to the U.S.-sponsored Bracero Program (1942–1964) in which over 4 million Mexican workers were recruited to perform temporary agricultural labor in the southwestern United States. This article considers the implications of such a program by examining the social and economic effects of previous guestworker programs in the United States and western Europe from the perspective of both sending and receiving societies. Particular attention is paid to the efficacy of these programs in promoting temporary as opposed to long-term immigration of foreign workers as well as their developmental impact on sending countries.Now at 2405 Rayburn House Office Building, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington DC 20515.     

Les usages nationaux d'une science « globale » : La diffusion de nouveaux paradigmes économiques comme stratégie hégémonique et enjeu domestique dans les champs nationaux de reproduction des élites d'État

This paper analyses the production and international diffusion of different forms of State expertise, such as economics, from a threefold perspective: hegemonic strategies structured around the Cold War, professional rivalries between lawyers and economists within the field of state power and the internationalisation of the academic circuits for the reproduction of national elites. In order to understand the relatively low (or delayed) introduction of neo-liberal paradigm in Asia, it starts by highlighting the authoritarian genesis of these new fields of economic expertise, as an instrument for the developmental policies launched by the Cold War dictatures, such as Suharto in Indonesia or Marcos in the Philippinnes. Then, by focusing on the cases of India and South Corea, it analyses how the processes of institutionnalisation and consolidation of these new professional fields was structured around an international division of scientific labour, in which the elite US campuses control both the production of theoretical innovation and the academic networks for the reproduction of the elites of the periphery.     

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.