Immigration's prism: Historical continuities in the Kennedy-Simpson legal immigration reform bill

National debates about U.S. immigration policy usually involve a blend of three issues: (1) How many immigrants should the United States accept? (2) Where should the immigrants come from? and (3) What criteria should be used in selecting immigrants? The debate and compromise surrounding the Kennedy-Simpson bill, passed by the U.S. Senate in July 1989 and constituting the Senate's latest attempt to reform U.S.legal immigration policy, is no exception. This paper examines the evolution of the Kennedy-Simpson bill, partly to reveal current directions in U.S. immigration policy but more importantly to use this analysis as a prism through which historical continuities in U.S. immigration reforms may be isolated and evaluated.     

Analysis of Irish third-level college applications data

Summary.  The Irish college admissions system involves prospective students listing up to 10 courses in order of preference on their application. Places in third-level educational institutions are subsequently offered to the applicants on the basis of both their preferences and their final second-level examination results. The college applications system is a large area of public debate in Ireland. Detractors suggest that the process creates artificial demand for 'high profile' courses, causing applicants to ignore their vocational callings. Supporters argue that the system is impartial and transparent. The Irish college degree applications data from the year 2000 are analysed by using mixture models based on ranked data models to investigate the types of application behaviour that are exhibited by college applicants. The results of this analysis show that applicants form groups according to both the discipline and the geographical location of their course choices. In addition, there is evidence of the suggested 'points race' for high profile courses. Finally, gender emerges as an influential factor when studying course choice behaviour.     

When training and prevention meet

This article explores the intended and unintended consequences of CiN/child protection training when this training is offered to parents and grandparents who live in the community. It asks whether training can fulfil a preventative function on behalf of children and child protection systems. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Longitudinal HIV risk behavior among the Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Studies (DATOS) adult sample

Longitudinal trajectories for HIV risk were examined over 5 years following treatment among 1,393 patients who participated in the nationwide Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Studies. Both injection drug use and sexual risk behavior declined over time, with most of the decline occurring between intake and the first-year follow-up. However, results of the application of growth mixture models for both sets of trajectories indicated that a subgroup of individuals reverted to a high-risk behavior over time, with a higher level of risk at the 5-year follow-up than their original risk level at intake. Of clients who were engaged in regular injection drug use at intake, 76% continued to inject drug at a moderate-stable or increased rate during the 5-year follow-up.     

Financial Globalisation,State Autonomy and Modern Financial Instruments: The Case of Brazil

This article examines the impact of innovative financial instruments on the relationship between states and financial markets. Using the example of Brazil in the period after 2000, this paper argues that growth in credits default swaps and inflation-linked bond markets have had a tangible impact on this relationship. Growth in these markets has afforded the Brazilian state more autonomy and lessened the normative power of financial markets. This paper shows that developments in global financial markets do not always result in a diminution of state power.

Este artículo examina el impacto de los instrumentos financieros innovadores en la relación entre los estados y los mercados financieros. Tomando el ejemplo del Brasil en el período después del 2000, este artículo sostiene que el crecimiento en los swaps en el incumplimiento crediticio y el mercado de bonos estructurados vinculados a la inflación, han tenido un impacto tangible en esta relación. La habilidad de pasar el riesgo de impago a mercados financieros más amplios, ha significado que más instituciones estén dispuestas a prestarle al Brasil y como consecuencia, la relación del país con la comunidad financiera ha cambiado. El crecimiento en estos mercados ha provisto al estado brasileño de más autonomía y reducido el poder normativo de los mercados financieros. Este artículo indica que los desarrollos en los mercados financieros globales, no siempre resultan en una disminución del poder estatal.

     

NORC Supportive Services Model Implementation and Community Capacity

As community residents age, service delivery systems may not be equipped to meet their changing needs. The Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC) model has emerged as a strategy to utilize existing resources and develop a comprehensive approach to maintaining older adult functional status. However, little has been written about how community capacity influences NORC implementation. A community capacity framework was used to analyze the themes that emerged from participant and service provider interviews at two diverse NORC sites. The findings revealed that perceptions of a sense of community and partnership management influenced the NORC experience for participants and providers.     

Demographic and Socio-economic Influences on Recent British Marital Breakdown Patterns

The advantages of large-scale multi-purpose surveys compared with official divorce records for examining marital breakdown are assessed, and the extent of under-recording of the concept of breakdown in the latter source is estimated. Demographic and socio-economic differentials in breakdown are examined and the former are found to be generally more powerful. A proportional-hazards life-table model is used to establish the impact of childlessness on divorce in a more satisfactory way than hitherto. Among fertile couples, the length of the first birth interval is found to be particularly important as a risk factor influencing breakdown. Controlling for demographic factors, such as age at marriage and fertility status, is shown to modify the observed crude differences between social classes. Housing tenure and personal factors associated with the couple's individual circumstances are more important than social class in explaining marital breakdown, with age at marriage retaining a strongly persisting and remarkably constant effect whatever other variables are included in the analysis.     

Modelling Households: A Synthesis

The 1973 U.S. National Survey of Family Growth is used to examine the effects of removing number and timing failures from the reproductive histories of various cohorts of white and black married women. Blacks are more fertile than whites primarily because of their greater unwanted fertility. Removing number and timing failures from the past reproductive histories of American women would have reduced their fertility considerably. These reductions would have been greater for blacks than for whites and would be greater if some wanted pregnancies had continued to terminate in foetal loss.     

Variable Selection and Updating In Model-Based Discriminant Analysis for High Dimensional Data with Food Authenticity Applications

Food authenticity studies are concerned with determining if food samples have been correctly labelled or not. Discriminant analysis methods are an integral part of the methodology for food authentication. Motivated by food authenticity applications, a model-based discriminant analysis method that includes variable selection is presented. The discriminant analysis model is fitted in a semi-supervised manner using both labeled and unlabeled data. The method is shown to give excellent classification performance on several high-dimensional multiclass food authenticity datasets with more variables than observations. The variables selected by the proposed method provide information about which variables are meaningful for classification purposes. A headlong search strategy for variable selection is shown to be efficient in terms of computation and achieves excellent classification performance. In applications to several food authenticity datasets, our proposed method outperformed default implementations of Random Forests, AdaBoost, transductive SVMs and Bayesian Multinomial Regression by substantial margins.     

REPLY TO ULMER: Symbolic Interactionism or A Structural Alternative?

In his critique of our 1999 article Desensitizing Herbert Blumer's Work on Race Relations: Recent Applications of His Group Position Theory to the Study of Contemporary Race Prejudice,' Jeffery Ulmer charges us with providing a questionable' interpretation of Blumer's ideas on the grounds that we (1) neglect (or distort) Blumer's advocation for making abstract generalizations in the form of definitive' concepts, and thus sabotage Blumer's empirical methodology as well as that of symbolic interactionism in general and (2) fail to address a body of literature that deals with repackaging' Blumer's ideas in such a way that solves' the sorts of tensions we raise between Blumer's theory and quantitative research. Ulmer fears that our representation of Blumer and symbolic interactionism may result in a host of mythic facts' (a term borrowed from David Maines) that will undermine Blumer's contributions to a viable and whole science of the social, including race relations.