Subfield Exam: Immigration and Stratification
1. Theory (Various Sorts)
Date: 09.29.2011
Title: International Migration
Author: Brown, SK and Frank Bean
Source: Chapter 12 in Handbook of Population ed. by Poston & Micklin
Category and Keyword: International Migration, Movements of People, Migration
Purpose:
 Examine International Migration
Descriptions:
 Table 12.1
o 75 million foreign born in world and in 2000 = 175 million (UN)
 Table 12.2
o Shows North America has more migrants from 1995 to 2000 than any continent
Theory:
 While it is always difficult to ascertain whether policy or social and economic forces are
more important in affecting immigration flows and patterns, it is crucial to recognize the
fundamental importance of both kinds of influence.
 Neoclassical Economists:
o Neoclassical economists envision migration as stemming from macro level
imbalances between countries (or areas) in the supply of and demand for labor
and the resultant wage differences these disequilibria generate (Harris and Todaro
1970).
o Migration is thus conceptualized to represent an investment strategy for
individuals to maximize their returns to labor power. Migrants thus calculate their
expected wages over their ‘‘time horizon,’’ or expected lengths of stay at their
destinations (Borjas 1990).
o By moving to countries with better schools and more developed labor markets,
migrants tend both to enhance their investment in human capital and to increase
the likely return to that investment. Thus, human capital theory explains why
countries like the United States attract so many well-educated migrants and cause
a ‘‘brain drain’’ from other countries (Massey et al., 1998).
 New Economic Theories:
o Some theorists (for example, Stark 1991; Taylor, Martin, and Fix 1997) have
amended microeconomic theories by emphasizing the intersection of labor market
factors and family/household variables in affecting migration decisions and by
incorporating the notion of minimizing risk along with maximizing earnings. This
perspective also predicts that social rank, relative income, and potential for social
mobility will influence migration.
o For example, Taylor and associates (1997, 1994) have emphasized that not only
lower average wages but also greater social and economic inequality in Mexico
stimulate migration to the United States.
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o Some Mexican households are ‘‘transnational’’ in the sense that they send
members to the United States on a relatively permanent basis to earn
supplemental income, while other members remain in the home community where
the remittances are invested (Roberts, Bean, and Lozano-Ascencio 1999).
Labor Market Segmentation Theory:
o Explains the two different types of migrants that come to the U.S.
o In contrast to economic approaches, labor market segmentation theories
emphasize how social stratification variables affect migration. Dual labor market
theory envisions firms and their employees as stratified into primary and
secondary sectors. The primary sector meets ‘‘basic demand’’ in the economy and
consists of larger, better established firms that provide more capital-intensive,
better-paying jobs. The secondary sector, by contrast, meets fluctuating or
seasonal demand and relies primarily on lower-paid, labor-intensive jobs (Averitt
1968; Massey et al. 1998; Piore 1979; Tolbert, Horan, and Beck 1980).
World Systems Theory:
o World systems analysts emphasize the influence on migration of the character of
relationships among countries and among regions and cities within countries.
World systems theory is heavily influenced by the dependency critique of
capitalism, according to which capital accumulation depends on reserves of labor
and materials, thus promoting development in some countries and
underdevelopment in others.
o Core countries build capital by exploiting the labor power and materials of less
developed, or peripheral, countries (Furtado 1964; Wallerstein 1983).
o The evolution of the global economy has not only stimulated international
migration, it has also generated linkages between individual sending and
receiving nations. The colonial and neocolonial history of capitalist expansion
around the globe has resulted in ties between countries now in the semiperiphery,
where industrialization is in its early stages, and core countries and their global
cities in the more developed nations.
Network Theory:
o Network theory seeks to explain, at the microlevel, how connections among
actors influence migration decisions, often by linking individual immigrants with
their family members and with jobs, both before and after arrival.
o While labor markets in sending and receiving countries create push and pull
factors stimulating migration, migration may continue after these push and pull
factors have diminished. When large numbers of people have moved from one
particular location to another, a process of ‘‘cumulative causation’’ is established
whereby multiple ties to communities of origin facilitate on- going and at times
increasing migration (Massey et al. 1993; Massey 1994).
o Instead, they usually possess information about a particular job at a particular
wage, and this information signals an opportunity in the destination labor market
(Sassen 1995).
Political Economy theories:
o While economic labor market and network factors drive migration, the
immigration policies of receiving countries also play important roles in affecting
flows. According to Hollifield’s (1992) theory of ‘‘hegemonic stability,’’ the
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world economic system rests on the political and military might of the dominant
states.
o As these examples show, receiving countries often attempt to control immigration
by encouraging temporary work patterns rather than permanent settlement.
Measuring Migration:
 The United States stopped trying to count emigrants in 1957 and relies instead on
estimates, often put at roughly 30% of the level of immigration to the United States (U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service 2002a). Many times, governments estimate net
migration over a given period as the difference between population change and natural
increase.
 Using the same denominator for migration both in and out of an area allows
demographers to calculate a crude net migration rate:
o Total in-migrants - total out-migrants in a time period X 1000 ÷ Average
total midyear population in that time period
 Four sources of measurements: 1) Administrative registers of populations or foreigners.
2) Administrative records such as visas, work or residence permits, or deportations. 3)
Entrances and departures at borders. 4) Censuses and household surveys.
Kinds of Flows to the U.S
 The major migration flows to the United States in the post–World War II period have
been (1) legal immigrants, (2) refugees and asylees, (3) unauthorized migrants, and (4)
persons admitted for short periods of time on so-called nonimmigrant visas.
Table 12.3: Selected Major Legislation
 1921 / Immigration Act // First Quotas put on migrants to US based on white population
coming in US in 1910.
 1924 / Immigration Act // Recalibrated to the year 1890
 1943 / Act // temporary agricultural laborers from South and Central America; served as
the legal basis for the Bra- cero program, which lasted until 1964
 1948 / Displaced Persons Act // admitted refugees fleeing from war
 1965 / INA // ended quotas and become employer based (preference) and skills and
family based
 1966 / Cuban Refugee Act // Admitted Cubans
 1980 / Asylees // regularized policies on how they can become LPRs
 1985 / IRCA // some amnesty (SAW) and employer sanctions
 1990 / Immigration Act // 3 preference based categories (work / family / diversity)
Table 12.4 All immigrants
 in 2000: 850,000.
 Preference based (all three): 393,000
 Not subject to Preference: 457,000
Bracero Program:
 The Bracero program, which started in 1942 at the beginning of World War II, provided a
means whereby temporary contract laborers from Mexico could enter and work in the
country legally (Calavita 1992).
Work Force Proportions:
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Change in Civilian workforce fairly consistent 1950 to 2000 (ranges by decade 1.2 (2000
end) to 2.6 (1980 end)
Number of immigrants as %age of labor force growth: 20 (1980 end) to 53 (2000 end);
1. Theory (Various Sorts)
Date: 09.29.2011
Title: Immigration and Religion
Author: Wendy Cadge and Elaine Howard Eckland
Source: Annual Review of Sociology 2007; 72:1415-1437
Category and Keyword: religious identity, civic life, second generation, migration, diaspora
Purpose:
 We argue that current research is more descriptive than analytic overall, and we highlight
a series of research questions and comparisons to enrich theoretical thinking.
Theses:
 Recent estimates suggest that 23% of the American population is an immigrant or the
child of an immigrant (Alba & Nee 2003…
 The majority of this research has been case studies of individual religious groups and
organizations. We selectively synthesize and review these studies to chart patterns in
current thinking and to identify blind spots to be addressed in future research.
 The main strengths of recent research are also its greatest weaknesses: a reliance on
richly descriptive individual case studies and, although there are certainly notable
exceptions, a lack of systematic analytic comparison and synthesis.
 Similarly, only recently has religion been carefully considered as an independent variable
that influences factors such as immigrant economic mobility or civic and political
participation (Ebaugh & Pipes 2001,…
Plan of Action:
 1) First, we briefly review existing case studies focused largely on immigrants’ religious
gathering places.
 2) we consider how religion contributes to identity formation for immigrants, with
particular attention to ethnic and gender identities.
 3) we focus on research about religion and civic and political participation among
immigrants.
 4) We consider the religious beliefs, practices, and organizations of second-generation
immigrants.
 5) Outline several ways to enrich theoretical thinking in future research.
Historical Ideas and Theories:
 Herberg (1955) argued that after the first generation, immigrants would abandon their
native languages and ethnic traditions while retaining their religions, using religion as a
way of melting into America’s triple melting pot of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
 1990: began research on immigrants here after 1965
o Ebaugh, O’Brien, and Chafetz are three of the few sociologists to think
systematically about variation among different organizations.
o Through an analysis of the National Catholic Bishops Conference of the United
States, Mooney (2006) argues that immigration is changing the shape of the
Catholic church and has be- come a strategic issue on which the “Catholic church
has reasserted its prophetic voice
Identity Formation
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one example: Ebaugh & Chafetz (1999) argue that, in the 13 religious organizations
studied in Houston, women reproduce traditional ethnic culture but also have increased
access to high-status positions in their congregations to the degree that men are not able
or willing to fill them. Men tend to be interested in these positions in direct proportion to
the amount of social status they lose in the process of migration (Ebaugh & Chafetz 1999,
George 1998).
Religious Lives and Civic Participation (of immigrants)
 E.G. Fifth, researchers are just beginning to ex- amine the possibilities of religion to act
as a resource for political mobilization.
Religions and the 2nd Generation:
 Most research in this area has focused on how tensions be- tween the immigrant first
generation and the more Americanized second generation play out in congregational
contexts.
 E.G. Research on Indian Christians shows that members of the second generation sometimes have different ideas about the content of their religion, with the first generation
viewing Christianity according to ascribed religious and ethnic criteria and the second
generation viewing Christianity according to the more achieved and individualistic
criteria they perceive as evangelical (Kurien 2004).
Theories for the Future:
 Contextual more than spatial: Rather than focusing on one city, for example, comparisons
across different U.S. cities be- tween immigrants from the same country who share a
religious tradition can show how the contexts of reception shape immigrants’ experiences,
as in the research about Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants in San Francisco,
Washington, DC, and Phoenix conducted by Menjivar (1999, 2000, 2003, 2006a,b).
 Third, additional research that systematically considers immigrants’ contexts of exit and
reception can show how such contexts shape the religious gatherings of immigrants in the
United States, particularly with regard to their status as economic migrants or refugees,
their movement from religious majority to minority status and vice versa, etc.
 Some of these questions will be more easily answered as future waves of data from the
New Immigrant Survey, the largest systematic survey of immigrants.
 More broadly, scholars have only begun to consider how the religious organizations in
which immigrants participate inter- act with broader social institutions and how religion
influences individual immigrants’ interactions with such institutions.
 Moreover, sociologists rarely consider how religion influences the experiences
immigrants have in social spheres that are not thought of as specifically religious, such as
workplaces, neighborhoods, local civic and political organizations, childcare centers,
recreational facilities, and other aspects of daily life in the United States.
Note:
 In the past 15 years, sociologists have moved from knowing very little about the religious
lives of immigrants to knowing a great deal about their religious organizations.
Note on Transnational Migration:
 Here, we highlight a few of their key points. Participation in transnational religious
organizations allows migrants access to social capital in the new nation as well as the
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possibility of retaining social capital in their homelands. Migrants change the religious
institutions of their destination countries (such as the changes brought to the U.S.
Catholic church by Latin American migrants coming to the United States) and export
different forms of faith to their nations of origin.
Religion links migrants through time, allowing them to remain a part of a chain of
memory with coreligionists from the past, present, and future. New forms of transnational
civil society are created as religion provides spaces to socialize the first and second
generations into existing political structures, while at the same time acting as a
counterpoint to extremist political voices.
1. Theory (Various Sorts)
Date: 09.29.2011
Title: Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal
Author: Douglas Massey, Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, & J.
Edward Taylor
Source: Population and Development Review 1993; V19N3
Category and Keyword: migration, theory
Purpose:
 The purpose of this article is to explicate and integrate the leading contemporary theories
of international migration. We begin by examining models that describe the initiation of
international movements and then consider theories that account for why transnational
population flows persist across space and time.
NOTE: A regurgitation of earlier articles (i.e. Neoclassical theory, etc. – SEE THOSE!)
One theory I left out!
 Global cities: The world economy is managed from a relatively small number of urban
centers in which banking, finance, administration, professional services, and high-tech
production tend to be concentrated (Castells, 1989; Sassen, 1991). In the United States ,
global cities include New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami; in Europe, they
include London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Milan; and in the Pacific, Tokyo, Osaka, and
Sydney qualify. Within these global cities, a great deal of wealth and a highly educated
workforce are concentrated, creating a strong demand for services from unskilled workers
(busboys, gardeners, waiters, hotel workers, domestic servants). (me: Sassen 1990 in
2006 migration reader)
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Cumulative Causation (by Myrdal in 1957 – then Massey in 1990): What makes
movement more likely over time? Yes, growth of networks, migrant supporting
institutions… One act of migration changes the social context within which subsequent
decision are made, typically in ways that make further migration more likely. How? Six
socio-economic factors: 1) Distribution of Income 2) Distribution of Land 3)
Organization of Agriculture 4) Culture 5) The Regional Distribution of Human Capital 6)
and the Social Meaning of Work.
o 1) People want to increase their income relative to other groups
o 2) International buy land in home country (to farm)
o 3) Migrants use less intensive labor methods to farm (i.e. pesticides)
o 4) People see migrants in their community and change perception about it
o 5) Migration is a selective process: Skilled people first leave the area – (Brain
Drain)
o 6) Jobs taken by immigrants in receiving country eventually get to be so much in
a certain occupation, that occupation gets labeled as an “immigrant job”
Models:
 Neoclassical economic theory saw it as an individual decision (need to go to make more
money) and the NEW economic theory models see it as a household level decision
(decision making unit).
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Including theory of relative deprivation (ME: i.e. MIGRANTS from Monterrey! see
Hernandez-Leon)
1. Theory (Various Sorts)
(following not on list)
Date: 09.29.2011
Title: Immigration Theory for a New Century: Some Problems and Opportunities
Author: Alejandro Portes
Source: IMR 1997; V31 N4
Category and Keyword: migration, theory,
Purpose:
 This essay examines some of the pitfalls in contemporary immigration theory and
reviews some of the most promising developments in research in this field.
Note: See 7. Transnational Migration Article of similar idea 1999
Thesis:
 Immigrants coming to Ellis Island – Assimilation was the word of the day; and the
national story seemed so
Social Scientists Moved Our Understanding:
 A) social scientists from different disciplines have grounded the study of todays
immigration firmly on its fundamental realities: the sustained demand for an elastic
supply of labor, the pressures and constraints of sending Third World economies, the
dislocations wrought by struggles for the creation and control of national states in less
developed regions, and the microstructures of support created by migrants themselves
across political borders.
 B) Now they also study: explore how social networks, community normative
expectations, and house-hold strategies modify and, at times, subvert those structural
determinants.
Four Errors:
1) A first misconception is that the accumulation of evidence leads to theoretical
innovation.
2) The study of immigration has been, for the most part, data-driven. WEAKNESS: the
tendency to put to test theoretical propositions by comparing them with individual selfreports. CORRECTION: The various stages of the process of acculturation and
assimilation, described in Richard Alba and Victor Nee’s essay (1997) in this issue, may
be at variance with how immigrants themselves view their situations.
3) Along the same lines, Ruben Rumbaut and I developed a typology of manual labor
immigrants, professional immigrants, immigrant entrepreneurs, and political refugees as
the framework for our description of contemporary U.S.- bound immigration (Portes and
Rumbaut, 1996). Typologies such as these are valid intellectual exercises, but they are
not theories. This is self-evident in administrative categories, such as those employed by
the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
o Example of overcoming this problem is ZOLBERG: Zolberg’s theory of the role
of the state system in the origins and control of international migration flows
provides a second example. His insight that enforced borders represent the crucial
dividing line between the developed world or "core" and the increasingly
subordinate economic periphery can be transformed into a series of propositions
about between-country economic inequalities, the role of migration flows in
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ameliorating them, and that of political borders in reproducing the global
hierarchy… AND
o One of the significant merits of this theory is that it links anew the study of
immigration with broader issues of political economy, thus avoiding an exclusive
focus on the characteristics and adaptation process of individual migrants.
o For Portes, this is the area that needs the greatest attention, as it has the most
weaknesses.
4) Grand Theory: There does not seem to be much danger that someone might be
attempting a grand theory of immigration any time soon but, just in case, I would like to
argue that this kind of endeavor would be futile.
o WHY? 1) The theory that colonial capitalist penetration played a significant role
in the initiation of large-scale labor migration from less developed countries says
nothing about who among the population of those countries was more likely to
migrate, nor can it be tested at the level of individual decision making.
o 2) Similarly, individual-level processes of acculturation and labor market
incorporation cannot simply be aggregated into structural effects. A hundred
thousand Mexican immigrants trying to learn English and find jobs in Houston,
Texas, will have a very different impact there than the same number doing this in
Boston, Massachusetts,..
Sample of Promising Theories:
 Transnational communities
o DEFINED: This character is defined by three features: the number of people
involved, the nearly instantaneous character of communications across space, and
the fact that the cumulative character of the process makes participation
"normative" within certain immigrant groups.
 Research on the New Second Generation
o Patterns of adaptation from the first generation play an important role for success
of later generations
o Experiences from earlier Europeans cannot be applied here. Segmented theory
(assimilation downward and upward) comes in (discrimination of non-whites);
transnational connections;
o Role of Gender (e.g. difference in a person’s perceptions and actual behavior)
o States and State Systems (Zolberg)
o Cross-National Comparisons
1. Theory (Various Sorts)
Date: 10.07.2011
Title: The Age of Migration
Author: Stephen castles and Mark J. Miller
Source: Book, 1993 (2009),The Guilford Press
Category and Keyword: migration, theory
Purpose:
 All chapters give reader overview of issues on migration.
Theory:
 Two Groups:
o Determinants, processes and patterns of migration
o The ways in which migrants become incorporated into receiving societies.
 Migratory Process: Sums up the complex set of factors and interactions which lead to
international migration and influence is course.
Economic Theories
 Neoclassical theory:
o The dominant paradigm in economics and has had an important role in migration
studies.
o Began with no study of migratory movement, but laws (Ravenstein 1800s);
people move from densely to highly populated areas, low to high income areas
o Ideas of Push – Pull Factors
o Assumes potential migrants have perfect knowledge of wage levels and
employment opportunities in destination regions – decisions overwhelmingly
based on economic factors
 Segmented or Dual Labor Market Theory:
o Importance of institutional factors and race and gender – brining about labor
market segmentation. (Sassen) (Waldinger)
o This focuses on the demand-side, focusing on this, emphasizing that migration is
driven by structural factors in modern capitalist economies;
 New Economics of Labor Migration:
o migration decisions are not made by isolated individuals, but by families,
households or even communities. (Massey)
o =new unit of analysis – not individual but social group
o Like neo-classical, focuses on supply side of migration: that is, the factors that
impel people to cross borders in search of work
 MASSEY 1998: migration occurs for reasons more than economics
o States Play a role
o Nation building
o Refugee and asylum policies
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Think this way: It seems crucial to reconceptualize migration as a complex process in
which economic, political, social and cultural factors all work together.
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Historical-Institutional:
o A way the world mobilized cheap labor (70s & 80s)
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o Dependency Theory
o World Systems Theory
o Human AGENCY: (The motivations and actions of the individuals and groups
involved) – not paid to – enough in neo-classical theories
Migration Systems Theory
o is constituted by two or more countries which exchange migrants with each other.
o suggests that migratory movements generally arise from the existence of prior
links between sending and receiving countries based on colonization
o BASIC principal: is that any migratory movement can be seen as the result of
interacting macro- micro-structures.
o Macro-Structure: includes political economy of the world market, interstate
relationships, and the laws, structures and practices established by the states …
o Micro-structure: are the informal social networks developed by the migrants
themselves, in order to cope with migration and settlement …
 rule of cultural capital (information, knowledge of other countries,
capabilities for organizing travel, finding work and adapting to a new
environment)
 Social capital (personal relationships, family and household patterns,
friendship and community ties and mutual help in economic and social
matters)
o Meso-Structures: Certain individuals, groups or institutions take on the role of
mediating between migrants and political or economic institutions. – Migration
industry (formal / informal); i.e. law
Transnationalism:
o This notion puts the emphasis on human agency. Linkages easier to maintain.
(Portes has transnationalism from above versus from below); (=powerful actors
like multinational corporations versus grass-roots initiatives by immigrants and
their home country counterparts)
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2 Theories in Stratification
Date: 09.13.2011
Title: New Light on Old Issues: The Relevance of “Really Existing Socialist Societies” for
Stratification Theory
Author: Gerhard Lenski
Source: 2001 Book Ed. by D. Grusky Social Stratification
Category and Keyword: Stratification; Socialism; Communism; Capitalism
Purpose:
 To argue that stratification scientists will benefit from studying why Marxism as
practiced in socialist countries, failed.
Thesis:
 By abolishing private property, rewards shifted from material incentives to moral
incentives. Marxism’s critical flaw was its unrealistic assumptions about human nature.
Findings:
 Economic inequalities after the Fall of Eastern states were larger than Lenski was aware.
= Nicolae Ceaucescu had 40 villas / Swiss Bank account. / Sandinistas in Nicaragua lived in
palaces of former dictator.
 Not aberrations to European socialism
 Nevertheless, these inequalities never reached the level of inequalities in Western
Democracies, i.e. of Western businessmen. Still, political inequality was greater under
Marxist societies.
 Marxist societies were the result of inadequate motivational arrangements of the sort
debated by Davis and Moore (1945), Tumin (1953).
=1. undermotivation of ordinary workers and 2. misdirected motivation of managers, bureaucrats,
and other decision-makers.
 Hypocrisy: The Marxist elite preached socialism and the need for sacrifice while
enjoying special privileges (like special stores and neighborhoods).
 Internal factors (wage leveling of Brezhnev) VS External factors (Western espionage)
 Problem: Marx’ understanding of human nature of 19th century, whereby corrupting
social institutions may be eliminated by rational social engineering. Marx sees private
property as the source of the problem. (=faulty assumption of human nature)
 Problem: Defective organizational arrangements spawned by the command economies
(i.e. bonus’ for quantity by manager)
 Worker performance deteriorated when freed from fear of unemployment and lacking
adequate material incentives. (E.G. East German workers)
 Workers become cynical – quantity over quality.
 Davis correct: successful incentives 1) motivate the best qualified people for the most
important positions 2) Motivating them to the best of their ability once there in them.
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Point: capitalism not better; we have mixed economies. Rewards partly based on NEED,
WORK, and PROPERTY.
Mixed Economies recognize need for material motivations and benefits of economic
inequality.
2 Theories in Stratification
Date: 09.13.2011
Title: Immigration and the Wages of Native Workers: The Spatial Versus the Occupational
Approaches
Author: ChangHwan Kim AND Arthur Sakamoto
Source: Sociolgoical Focus 2011
Category and Keyword: immigration, wages, native workers, occupations, spatial analysis
Purpose:
 Investigate the multivariate association between the proportion immigrant and the wages
of native workers using the occupational approach, so as to avoid the endogenous
problems of the spatial approach.
Thesis:
 Conventional wisdom: immigrants do the jobs that Americans will not do.
 Be skeptical of pseudo-functionalist assumptions which purport that changes in economic
conditions have no negative impacts on any less advantaged social groups.
Methods:
 Fixed-effects panel regression models are estimated using occupational categories as the
unit of analysis.
 Data: CPS from 1994 to 2006: Outgoing Rotation Group;
 Who in Data: non-institutionalized, non-military population aged 18 to 64 who were
employed in the private sector. In this study, the three-digit occupation is the unit of
analysis.
 Also, estimated are state-level models to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using
a spatial approach.
 to investigate the association between the change in occupation-specific wages and the
change in the proportion of immigrants over time.
Hypothesis:
 the greater the increase in the proportion of immigrants in an occupation over time, the
lower will be the change in the mean wage in that occupation over time after controlling
for other relevant factors
 As the demand of certain occupations rises, their wages may be driven up as well. To
take these effects into account, we control for the share of occupation in the labor force as
a whole.
Findings:
 d
Table 1: Descriptive Statistics
 Mean log hourly-wage for native workers increased
 Proportion of immigrants in the whole labor force increased from 9.8 to 13.9% over
period studied.
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Immigrant workers hourly and weekly wages increased slower than natives’
Immigrant workers more likely to have lower levels of education
Figure 1: State-level as unit of analysis
 the increase in immigrants in a state, then the higher the hourly wage of native workers
tends to be in that state. Statistical at .05.
Figure 2: the two-digit occupation is the unit of analysis
 No positive association; not significant, but negative coefficient.
Table 2: results for various fixed-effects models using states as a unit of analysis
 DV: state-specific mean log hourly-wage for native workers
 Result: 10 percentage point increase of immigrant is associated with 2.7% increase of
native’s hourly wage (positive, significant association);
 Models 1 to 4: proportion of low-skilled immigrant and the proportion of high-skilled
immigrant are positively associated with native’s wage.
 PROBLEM: The geographic selection of immigrant seems to involve a substantial
endogenous component.
 i.e. well educated may be residing in states where the economies are booming;
 Models 5 and 6 using 20th and 80th income percentile: These results suggest that
immigrants are complementary to high-skilled native workers or that the geographic
selection of immigrants is largely endogenous (or both).
Table 3: the effect of the proportion immigrant varies by their skill levels: Models 8 and 9
 These results reveal that the impact of the proportion of low-skilled immigrants on native
workers’ wage is significantly negative net of other variables, while the impact of the
proportion of high-skilled immigrants is positive but non-significant.
 Additional Testing: Although the CPS-MORG does not include information on annual
earnings, we obtained occupation-specific mean annual personal earnings of native
workers from the corresponding March CPS files and then merged it to our data set
Limitations:
 Our estimates in Table 3 may be thought of as referring to the direct within-occupational
effect of immigration on the hourly wages of native workers, but it does not indicate any
indirect occupational displacement effects associated with native workers changing
occupations.
Table 4: two digit occupational classification
 provides more a long term indication of the net effect of immigration
 10 percentage point increase of immigrants in a broad occupation between 1994 and 2006
incurs a 3.5% hourly wage decline for natives in that occupation net of other variables.
 Informs a bit more on Hirschman’s idea of natives being “pushed out” to lower jobs or
“pushed up” to higher paying jobs (2005).
 State analysis in Models 13 and 14 show different picture
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Model 13 becomes insignificant but is still positive. When broken down by skill level in
Model 14, a 10 percentage point increase in low-skilled immigrants in a state is
associated with a 4.3% increase in native workers’ wages. This latter finding is
essentially the opposite of what was found in Model 17 using two-digit occupations as
the unit of analysis.
Similar results with one digit occupations (Model 18)
Table 5: unit of analysis refers to the combination of states, one-digit occupations, and age
 (inserted after discussion): While future research is needed to integrate regional
adjustment processes into a more complete national level model, we speculate that this
more complex approach may find perhaps even larger effects of rising immigration on
the wages of lesser skilled native workers.
 The results for these models in Table 5 indicate a negative effect of the proportion
immigrant among native workers who have less than a high school degree but a positive
effect among native workers who have at least a bachelor’s degree.
Findings:
 If such groups are negatively affected while higher skilled groups are not, then rising
immigration could contribute to a significant increase in inequality.
19
3 Demography Items, including Adaptation
Date: 09.14.2011
Title: Unhealthy Assimilation: Why Do Immigrants Converge to American Health Status
Levels?
Author: Heather Antecol and Kelly Bedard
Source: 2006 May 337-360 Demography
Category and Keyword: Health, Immigration, Assimilation
Purpose:
 Examine the “healthy immigrant effect” (HIE) over time, to find out when it converges to
“unhealthy American BMI levels.
 Document the HIE and to examine the BMI assimilation pattern of immigrants to the
United States
Thesis:
 The healthy immigrant effect is lost for females after 10 years of being in the US and for
men it is 15 years. US Census: 32 million foreign born in US in 2000. (20 million in
1990);
Methods:
 National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) from 1989 to 1996 (these years, since years
when residence was put into survey); Age from 20 – 64 (in case obese people die earlier)
 self-reported health indicators
Findings:
 Immigrants a burden on Medicaid (also Borjas and Hilton 1996)
 Healthy immigrants self-select when coming to US
 Unhealthy ones stay in country of orgin
 Healthy ones that are economically successful stay and are healthier
Table 1: summary statistics – women by race/ethnic origin and nativity
Table 2: summary statistics – men by race/ethnic origin and nativity
 Both tables include BMI and cohort rows
Table 3: immigrant cohort and assimilation effects for our three health measures by race, women
Table 4: Men, immigrant cohort and assimilation effects for our three health measures by race
 Americans get less healthy over time (in all categories, but less pronounced for Blacks
and Hispanics than Whites)
Findings:
 Holds for Hispanic immigrants but not Black immigrants (to Black natives)
 White immigrants assimilate the most and Blacks the least.
 Hispanic immigrant women increase in BMI, but live longer; Hispanic immigrant men do
not assimilate with BMI, but have die earlier (seems at odds)
20


Males never fully assimilate across all races
White females don’t assimilate, but Hispanic females do.
Figure 1: Body Mass Index (ME: don’t see how this proves author’s point??)
Figure 2: Proportion overweight – when compared to natives, don’t see HIE decrease for
immigrants. ??
3 Demography Items, including Adaptation
Date: 09.14.2011
Title: Moving Out and Not Up: Economic Outcomes in the Great Migration
Author: Suzanne Eichenlaub, Steward Tolnay and J Trent Alexander
Source: 2010 75:101 ASR
Category and Keyword: Great Migration, Migration Outcomes
Purpose:
 Revise our interpretation of the economic success of migrants who left the south between
1910 and 1970.
Thesis:
 Poor economic conditions in the south caused poor black people in the south to migrate
to the Midwest and northeast.
 We examine whether southerners who left the South benefited economically as a result of
migration by comparing them with their counterparts who remained in Dixie
 Encouraged migration: segregation leading to inferior schools, no political voice, even
violence.
 Migrants from south normally more educated and from the cities, not the country areas
 Assumption of past scholars: participants in the Great Migration fared better, socially and
economically, in their non-southern destinations than they would have if they had
remained in the South.
 It is possible that the economic benefits from exiting the South were neither as great, nor
as universal, as the conventional view suggests.
Methods:
 public use microdata samples (PUMS) of the decennial U.S. population censuses
(Ruggles et al. 2004) for 1940, 1950, 1970, and 1980.
 Compared economic outcomes across 3 groups of southernborn males 1) S to N /W 2) S
intra-regional migrants 3) sedentary south
 1950 and 1980 data of PUMS to estimate long term benefits of migration
 4 DVs: employment status, income, relative income, and occupational status
 Key IV: Individual migration history
 Control variables used too
Table 1: Regression Analysis of Selected Economic Characteristics for Southern-Born Males,
Age 25 to 60 Years, 1940



Table 1 presents the findings from our analysis of all post-migration dependent variables
for both blacks and whites in 1940.
Migrants in N no more likely to be employed than migrants in the S
Migrants to the W had income disadvantage than intra S and sedentary S
22

our findings indicate that, on aver- age, migrants of both races who left the South for
either the North or the West between 1935 and 1940 did not benefit in terms of
employment status, income, or occupational status, at least in the short run.
Table 2: Regression Analysis of Selected Economic Characteristics for Southern-Born Males,
Age 25 to 60 Years, 1970


Table 2 presents the findings from analyses for recent migrants in 1970.
we again find no substantial short-term advantage for migrants who left the South
compared with migrants within the South between 1965 and 1970.
Table 3: Regression Analysis of Selected Economic Characteristics for Southern-Born Black and
White Males, Age 35 to 60 Years, Who Were Living in Their Current State of Residence
One Year Earlier, 1950

Consistent with our findings for 1940, the evidence from this supplementary analysis of
possible long-term benefits for inter-regional migrants points to no consistent or
significant economic advantage gained by leaving the South in the mid-twentieth century.
If any- thing, the results, like those for 1940, are consistent with a modest disadvantage
associated with inter-regional migration versus intra-regional migration.
Table 4: Regression Analysis of Selected Economic Characteristics for Southern-Born Black and
White Males, Age 35 to 60 Years, Who Were Living in Their Current State of Residence
Five Years Earlier, 1980


Consistent with the evidence for 1950, the findings for both blacks and whites in 1980
indicate that southern males who moved to the North or the West enjoyed no long-term
benefits to migration, on average, when com- pared with migrants within the South
The main exception to this general pattern is for black inter-regional migrants in 1950
and 1980, who earned higher incomes than individuals who moved within the South.
Findings:
 Specifically, individuals who left the South during the Great Migration, on average, fared
no better than those who stayed behind; in fact, based on some criteria, they may have
done worse. These somewhat surprising conclusions are true whether we consider black
or white migrants, short- or long-term economic outcomes, or earlier or later stages in the
Great Migration.17 It is also true whether we compare the inter-regional migrants with
those who remained in the South but migrated across state lines or, in many cases, with
those who were sedentary.
 Our findings cast doubt on the widely shared assumption that southern migrants escaped
poverty and penury when they left the South for the urban and industrial North and West.
 Rational choice on migration tend to support findings that are contrary to what we found.
 Should our evidence, which contradicts the common wisdom regarding the Great
Migration, also be viewed as inconsistent with prevailing migration theory? Yes and no.
 It will no longer be possible to rely on the simple explanation that migrants left the South
because they were assured of improving their economic condition.
23

Why: The children of mi- grants benefited from access to better educational
opportunities and longer school years. This was especially true for blacks and for whites
who left rural areas of the South (Anderson 1988; Margo 1990). It is easy to forget, but
important for our story, that black students were prevented from attending most southern
universities until the 1960s.18 Black migrants to the North and the West enjoyed a less
segregated society, with fewer formal restrictions on their behavior and on their access to
public and private spaces. Southern blacks, unlike their northern counterparts, were
largely denied a political voice until the passage of voting rights legislation in the mid1960s.19 And, of course, levels of racially motivated violence were considerably higher
in the South than in the North or the West (Pfeifer 2004). Even though the last ‘‘mass
lynching’’ occurred in Walton County, Georgia in 1946, periodic lynchings and other
forms of southern racial violence continued long after that (Wexler 2003).
3 Demography Items, including Adaptation
Date: 09.14.2011
Title: Educational Selectivity in US Immigration: How do immigrants compare to those left
behind?
Author: Cynthia Feliciano
Source: 2005 Feb, 131-152, Demography
Category and Keyword: Migration, Education, Global, US Immigration
Purpose:
 To understand the kinds of immigrants that come to the U.S. better, helping explain
socioeconomic differences among immigrant groups in the U.S.
Thesis:
 How do immigrants' characteristics compare to those of persons who remain in the
sending society (Gans2000)?
 Immigrants from sending countries are not random samples, as previous studies have not
challenged (Borjas, 1999).
 Why important? Remaining population may be “drained” of important resources
 Educational selectivity may affect how will adept to the U.S.;
 May explain why others are more successful than others. Understanding the relative
position of immigrants in their country of origin is necessary to test theories of
assimilation that predict upward or downward mobility in the United States among the
second generation.
Findings/Past Theories:
 Old View (B. Franklin): they escape desperate poverty and unemployment (see Portes &
Rumbaut 1996).
 Newer: All immigrants are self-selective, i.e. more ambitious/willing to work, have some
education / exposure (also see Portes & Rumbaut 1996).
 Push and Pull factors (Lee 1966) – Pull = immigrants leave because of “plus factors” =
positively selected; Push = “minus factors” in the sending society.
 Borjas (economic): more positively selected in more egalitarian societies; negatively
selected in more unequal societies like Mexico (sends unskilled here, skilled have jobs)
 Even if immigrants are all positively selected, there may be substantial variability in the
level of selectivity by origin country, such that immigrants from some countries are more
positively selected than others.
 Given the greater costs associated with migrating long distances, migrants from countries
that are farther from the United States should be more highly selected.
 Massey (1987b, 1999) contended that although migrants tend to be positively selected
initially, they become less highly selected over time as successive waves migrate from a
particular country. Social capital is a major force in perpetuating migration;
Method:
 Using Mexican and U.S. census data, I examined whether successive waves of
immigrants from Mexico were less educated relative to Mexican nonmigrants than were
those who immigrated earlier.
25



Most of the country-of-origin data were available from UNESCO (1975-1997), which
compiles census data from the various countries and presents the data in comparable
ways.
To summarize educational attainment on the receiving side of migration, I created
extracts of census data on U.S. immigrants from each of the 32 countries from the
Integrated Public Use Micro Samples.
I combined the Mexican and U.S. census samples for 1960-2000 to create a data set for
each year that consisted of a large sample of Mexicans in Mexico and Mexican
immigrants in the United States.
Table 1: Summarizes the variation in educational selectivity by country of origin for all
immigrants, as well as for women and men separately.
Findings:
 The findings show that even though all immigrant groups are positively selected, the
degree of positive selectivity varies considerably by country of origin. Immigrants from
Asia tend to be more positively selected than those from Latin America or the Caribbean.
 although educational selectivity often differs between male and female immigrants from
the same country, these differences are generally not great.
Table 2: Relationships Between Select Factors and Immigrants' Educational Selectivity (Net
Difference Indexes.
 correlations between the included variables and immigrant selectivity (NDI), bivariate
regression coefficients for the NDI regressed on each variable, and multivariate
regression coefficients for a model including all significant bivariate relationships.
 immigrants from highly educated populations are less likely to be as highly positively
selected as those from less-educated populations.
 Greater distance from the United States is associated with greater positive selectivity
 immigrants from countries who only recently began migrating to the United States tend
to be more positively selected than those who came primarily in the 1960s or 1970s;
however, this relationship is not statistically significant in the bivariate model. Thus,
these findings challenge the popular perception that immigrants' skills have declined as
the regional origins of immigrants have changed over time.
 Some support for Borja: but: immigrants from more-egalitarian countries are more
positively selected, income inequality is not a statistically significant predictor of
selectivity in the bivariate model. This finding contradicts the theory that immigrants
from highly unequal societies are less likely to be positively selected.
 Political reasons and immigration = +selection
Figure 1: Educational Selectivity of Migrants to the United States, by Average Decade of
Migration and Region
 Most immigrant groups whose major waves arrived in the 1960s and 1970s are from
Europe, whereas most immigrant groups who arrived more recently are from Asia, Latin
America, and the Caribbean.
 This figure suggests that immigrant groups today, especially those from Asia, are actually
more likely than were earlier immigrants to come from the top of the educational
distribution in their countries of origin. Thus, any suggestions that immigrants are
26
currently less selective than in the past owing to their changing regional origins are
overstated.
Table 3: Coefficients of the Determinants of Years of Schooling Among Mexicans in the United
States and Mexico, Aged 25-64
 those who migrated within the past five years, there is a pattern of strong positive
selection from 1960 to 2000. Migrants consistently averaged more than one additional
year of schooling than nonmigrants




Overall, the findings do not indicate substantial changes in selectivity. These mixed
results may have to do with the changing nature of migration from Mexico. While
migration from Mexico has historically been dominated by migrants from rural Mexico,
in recent years, a growing number have come from urban areas.
Questions Massey’s thesis of declining selectivity over time. // Thus, it may be possible
that selectivity is declining among migrants from rural areas, where social capital
mechanisms operate most strongly in reducing the costs of migration, whereas urbanorigin migrants, who are more educated, may be responding to a different set of factors
(Fussell and Massey 2004).
I found that there is substantial variation in the degree of educational selectivity
depending on the country of origin and the timing of migration from a particular country,
but that nearly all immigrant groups are more educated than their nonmigrant counterparts.
Although scholars have agreed that immigrants do not represent a random sample of their
home countries' populations, from the vantage point of the average U.S. native, who sees
only immigrants and not those who remain in the homeland, it is easy to attribute
immigrants' characteristics to an entire national group
3 Demography Items, including Adaptation
Date: 10.06.2011
Title: Immigrant residential segregation in US metropolitan areas, 1990-2000
Author: Iceland, J. & Scopilliti, M.
Source: Demography; 42(1) 131-152
Category and Keyword: Immigrants, Residential Segregation, 1990-2000
Purpose:
 To examine the extent of spatial assimilation among immigrants of different racial and
ethnic origins.
Method:
 1990-2000 restricted US Census Data
 CALCULATE: Levels of Dissimilarity by 1) Race 2) Hispanic origin 3) Nativity 4) Year
of Entry
 Multivariate Models are then Run
Findings:
 Broad support for spatial assimilation theory.
 Segregation: foreign-born Hispanics, Asians and Blacks are more segregate from nonHispanic whites than are the US born of these groups
o How Explained for Hispanics and Asians?
o 1) lower levels of income
o 2) English language ability
o 3) Homeownership
 Those in the US longer are less segregated than those who more recently arrived.
 BUT: Blacks have much higher levels of immigration than Asians, Hispanics and Whites
 ODDITY: Black immigrants have higher SES than native blacks in U.S. – SO the above
things that EXPLAIN for other race segregation, doesn’t explain it for Blacks
Conclusion:
 Some support for segmented assimilation theory for Black immigrants – but not
unequivocal.
 Support for Spatial assimilation model? Overtime, they are less segregated;
 Why do we have cautions?
o 1) Blacks and Black immigrants continue to be “considerably” segregated from
whites.
o 2) Short and medium run, we expect high levels of Hispanic immigration, of low
SES, and therefore longer periods of time of segregation. Will this polarization
close over time?
o 3) need to look at intra-group variation
28
3 Demography Items, including Adaptation
Date: 10.06.2011
Title: Growing up American: The Challenge Confronting Immigration Children and Children of
Immigrants
Author: Zhou, Min
Source: ARS 23:63-95
Category and Keyword: Immigrants, Children, Family
Purpose:
 The purpose of this article is to pull together existing studies that bear directly or
indirectly on children’s immigrant experiences and adaptational outcomes and to place
these studies into a general framework that can facilitate a better understanding of the
new second generation.
 How will children be assimilated? Classical theory (straight line assimilation) or other?
Period of Study:
 Looking at the children of immigrants SINCE 1980s –
Findings / Other Researchers:
 Ruben Rumbaut: coined the term, 1.5 generations, to refer to children who straddle both
worlds but are not part of either of the two.
o Broken down 6-13 for 1.5 generation
o 13-17 aged children are similar to first generation children;
o BUT 0-4 foreign born children put with second generation children – often.
 Page 70: reviews THEORIES, i.e. classical assimilation (Park 1928) then with added
variation, but maintaining basic thesis (Gordon 1964); e.g. cultural or behavioral,
structural, identificational, attitude- receptional, behavior-receptional, and civic
assimilation. AND more recently: social mobility across generations of immigrants and
increasing rates of intermarriages, as determined by educational attainment, job skills,
length of stay since immigration, English proficiency, and levels of exposure to American
cultures (Alba 1985 .. Greeley 1976);
 ANOMOLIES:
 Specifically, children of highly educated immigrants consistently fare much better in
school than do fourth- or fifth- generation descendants of poorly educated ancestors
regardless of religio-ethnic backgrounds. (e.g. Hirschman)
 GANS (1992): immigrant with low education continue to pass it on 3rd / 4th generation;

SEE OTHER Article on THIS by ZHOU

PLURALIST:
o The pluralist perspective offers an alternative way of viewing the host society,
treating members of ethnic minority groups as a part of the American population
rather than as foreigners or outsiders and presenting ethnic or immigrant cultures
as integral segments of American society.
29




However, the questions of “second-generation decline” and “secondgeneration revolt” have been unanswered within this theoretical
framework.
Conclusions:
Measurement problems: Perlmann & Waldinger (1996) note that, because of high rates of
intermarriages in the third generation, the respondent’s choice of ethnic identity is
selective, making it difficult to accurately predict the independent effect of ethnic origin
on intergenerational mobility.
No contextual measures in the US Census: the census data do not have any direct
measures for contextual effects of the family, the school, the neighborhood, and the
ethnic community, nor do they have detailed information on school performance.
o NELS has it; and Add Health;
3 Demography Items, including Adaptation
Date: 10.06.2011
Title: Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality
Author: Robert Samson and Patrick Sharkey
Source: Demography 2008 V45 N1
Category and Keyword: Racism, Segregation, Household units, Chicago, also Spatial
(neighborhood structures)
Purpose:
 To show how Neighborhood Selection is a social process central to the reproduction of
racial inequality in neighborhood attainment.
Point of study:
 (Dr. Raley): Boundaries are discreet. In this context we are talking about living near:
1994 Farley ARS/AJS - gave whites a picture with a neighborhood; measure of tolerance
for immigration; whites fairly quickly felt discomfort; blacks wanted more integration;
bottom line: I don't think segregation is driven by choices by Black people, but rather the
white population;(and Hispanics) who move OUT of Black neighborhoods;
Data:
 All clusters of Chicago’s 343 neighborhoods – then 80 were randomly selected (first part
of study = 4,000 households that were followed over a period of 7 years); (PHDCN
study);
Conclusions:
 Residential stratification falls powerfully along racial/ethnic lines and socio-economic
location, especially income and education. // for the most part only surviving factors that
explain a significant portion of the variance in neighborhood attainment conditions.
 Only 10% explained – so individual characteristics only go so far to explain
neighborhood stratification.
 Sorting as a social process (whites / Hispanics leave city where there are growing nonwhites)
 Decisions made by movers and stayers.
 Thus poverty traps are likely to remain unless there is state interventions **
 Therefore, neighborhood selection is a process of stratification.
3 Demography Items, including Adaptation
Date: 10.06.2011
Title: Migration and Spatial assimilation among U.S. Latinos: Classical versus Segmented
Trajectories
Author: Scott J. South, Kyle Crowder, and Erik Chavez
Source: Demography 2005 V42 N3
Category and Keyword: Migration, Spatial Assimilation, Segmented Theory, Assimilation
Theory
Purpose:
 To study Hispanic Immigrant Mobility in the U.S.
Data:
 Latino National Political Survey / Panel Study of Income Dynamics / US Census
 1990-1995 – 2,074 US residents from: Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba
Findings:
 Support central tenants of Spatial Assimilation Theory
o Latino residential mobility into neighborhoods that are inhabited by greater
percentages of non- Hispanic whites (i.e., Anglos) increases with human and
financial capital and English-language use.
 Supports Segmented Assimilation Theory, too
o Puerto Ricans are less likely than Mexicans to move to neighborhoods with
relatively large Anglo populations.
o He generational and socioeconomic differences that are anticipated by the
classical assimilation model emerge more strongly for Mexicans than for Puerto
Ricans or Cubans. (Harder for Mexicans)
o Among Puerto Ricans and Cubans, darker skin color inhibits mobility into Anglo
neighborhoods.
Varia:
 Many versions of this classical model of ethnic assimilation view spatial assimilation -an ethnic group's geographic proximity to the majority group – as an especially salient
dimension of this general process (Massey 1985).
Conclusions:
 Classical Assimilation theory affirmed: For example, among Mexicans, residential
mobility out of origin neighborhoods and into neighborhoods that are occupied by larger
percentages of Anglos is greater among later generations than among the first generation.
 AND Latino migration into more-Anglo neighborhoods tends to increase with human and
financial capital and with English-language use.
 Segmented Assimilation theory affirmed: Puerto Ricans stand out as having both low
rates of intertract (interneighborhood) mobility overall and, conditional upon moving,
low rates of mobility into more-Anglo neighborhoods compared with Mexicans.
 It appears that Cubans move to neighborhoods that are less Anglo than the neighborhoods
that Mexicans move to primarily because Cubans are concentrated in metropolitan areas
that contain comparatively few Anglos.
 Among Cubans and especially among Puerto Ricans, residential mobility into Anglo
neighborhoods is sharply segmented by skin color, with dark skin a substantial
32
impediment to moving to neighborhoods that are inhabited by the non-Hispanic white
majority.
 Other, not in either theory: For all three Latino ethnic groups, residential mobility into
more-Anglo neighborhoods increases sharply as the percentage of the metropolitan area
population that is Anglo increases.
Future research examples:
 Furthermore, research designs that trace the internal residential mobility experiences of
immigrants upon their entry to the United States -- and the mobility experiences of their
children as they leave the parental home-hold promise for providing a more complete
description of intergenerational patterns of spatial assimilation.
 Finally, future research on ethnic residential mobility and assimilation will need to deal
with the growing complexity and temporal dynamics of U.S. neighborhoods.
** Send to Mauritius: ZHOU 1997 **
33
4 Inequality, Social Mobility and Labor
Date: 09.19.2011
Title: Is Rising Earnings Inequality Associated With Increased Exploitation? Evidence For U.S.
Manufacturing Industries, 1971–1996
Author: Arthur Sakamoto and Changwan Kim
Source: Sociological Perspectives, 2010 V53 Issue 1, pp 19-43
Category and Keyword: exploitation, earnings inequality, manufacturing industry
Purpose:
 Investigate whether or not there is exploitation among workers in the manufacturing
industry.
Thesis:
 Exploitation of workers has not been empirically investigated since Marx.
 Definition of Exploitation: the extent to which the earnings of various groups in the labor
force are underpaid relative to the market value of their productivities.
 Concept of exploitation different from the process that generates it;
 “the value of what one produces”: no consensus yet on how to conceptualize
o For this study: The “value of what is produced by labor,” on a per-unit basis, is
then defined as the increment in the total output value that accrues by employing
another unit of labor of a particular type, holding constant the other factors of
production by way of the multivariate production function.
o Exploitation: We then define exploitation as the underpayment of a particular
category of workers relative to its marginal revenue product.
 What they Add to this Science: Our analysis can empirically identify which groups (if
any) may receive some of the surplus generated by the exploitation of some types of
workers. This approach contrasts with the Marxist view that begins with the theoretical
assumption that only capitalists benefit from exploitation and that no groups of
employees can ever be exploitative (Wright 2000).
o Weakness: do not use capital incomes (but note: bulk of income comes via wages
and salaries.)
 Durkheim: functionalist view of stratification; Weber: none; Marx: between
classes/capital income. Weber used: Weber’s concept of class as “market situation” is
compatible with the idea that exploitative economic relations can be generated by
processes relating to market closure affecting economic actors in the same class category.
Our investigation of exploitation is consistent with Weber’s general perspective on social
stratification.
Method:
 Variables included are 1) occupational structure (Grusky 2005); 2) Demographic and
ascribed sources of inequality (external characteristic used to exclude, i.e. Weber); 3)
Gender segregation in lower sector jobs; 4) Labor market discrimination against African
Americans; 5) Education (more means more productivity); 6) Marital status (married
people have higher earnings, esp. men); 7) Age (correlates with developmental work
skills);
 Authors use a model of productivity and earnings differentials
 Limited to the Manufacturing Sector
34

DATA: A) annual information on productivity and other related factors for
manufacturing industries is the Manufacturing Industry Data- base (NBER-CES MID),
which is compiled by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for
Economic Studies of the U.S. Census Bureau. B) this database does not provide any
information on workers’ characteristics in each manufacturing industry. We therefore use
the NBER-CES MID in conjunction with other annual data from the Current Population
Survey (CPS).
 Unit of Analysis: We matched the NBER-CES MID data on productivity (and other
related factors) and the CPS data on workers’ characteristics on the basis of three-digit
Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. That is, our unit of analysis is the threedigit SIC code. Panel data set of 1,456 CASES consisting of 56 manufacturing industries,
observed annual from 1971 to 1996.
 Two Regression models:
o DV: Productivity
o DV: Total earnings paid to all workers in the particular industry during a given
year.
o IVs for both: include the proportions indicating the various characteristics of
workers in that industry during a given year.
 Measuring inequality: As explained above, when a particular group has a higher relative
marginal productivity compared to the reference group (on average), then its ∂ will be
greater than one, while in the opposite case, it will be less than one. When a particular
group has higher earnings compared to the reference group (on average), then its ∂ will
be greater than one, while in the opposite case, it will be less than one. When workers of
a particular category are paid exactly according to their marginal productivities (on
average), then there should be no difference between ∂ and ∂ for that group.
 Workers relative in the distribution of earnings: To the extent that the relative earnings
differential for workers in a particular quintile is matched by a corresponding increase in
its relative marginal productivity, then ∂ should equal , which can be again assessed
with a Wald chi-square test.
Findings:
 Table 1: Descriptive Statistics; Value of earnings/capital investment in terms of 1984
dollars: 1971: $13,913 – 1996: $19,913 millions. Mean # of workers: 313 to 309
thousand (shows manufacturing productivity increased);
 Table 2: Nonlinear Least Squares Estimates of Productivity and Earnings Model
 Overpayment for various groups, based on what one group is paid compared to another
group (i.e. reference group); These estimates of differentials in productivity, earnings,
and exploitation refer to proportionality contrasts relative to a particular reference
category.
o i.e. women 39% underpaid compared to men (women are only 85% of
productivity than men, but earn only 47% of what men earn, i.e. 85.5% - 46.8%)
o Hispanics: underpaid by 29%
o African Americans: underpaid by 23%
o Overpayments: Middle aged workers of 40% and Old Age 47%
 Table 3: Nonlinear Least Squares Estimates of Productivity and Earnings Models of the
Effects of Relative Position in the Distribution of Earnings
35

o Overall, the findings reported in Table 3 indicate that exploitation increased in the
later period relative to the earlier period. In the period from 1971 to 1982, the
statistical significance tests confirmed that only one quintile was clearly overpaid
(i.e., the fifth) and only one quintile was undoubtedly underpaid (i.e., the first). In
the period from 1983 to 1996, however, the statistical significance tests indicated
that two quintiles were overpaid (i.e., the fourth and the fifth) while two quintiles
were underpaid (i.e., the first and the second). Thus, exploitation increased in the
later period because the second and fourth quintiles were no longer being paid
according to their marginal productivities but instead had become either exploited
or exploiting groups. Although the level of exploitation of the first quintile
changed only slightly in the later period compared to the earlier period, the
exploitative over- payment of the fifth quintile increased substantially from 134
percent to 162 percent (i.e., an increase of 28 percentage points).
Explaining the result via power: This trend towards increasing exploitation may be
interpreted in terms of Hirsch and De Soucey’s (2006) discussion regarding the role of
power in influenc- ing the economic outcomes associated with organizational
restructuring in recent years. Rather than reflecting only a rising organizational
imperative for greater ef- ficiency, the increased inequality that has occurred is at least
partly a reflection of bargaining power differentials between workers. The decline in
unions, the falling real value of the minimum wage, the increased number of part-time
workers, and the dismantling of internal labor market practices have all increased
inequality but may be less important to improving productivity than is usually assumed in
popular discussions (Kim and Sakamoto 2008b).
4 Inequality, Social Mobility and Labor
Date: 09.19.2011
Title: Inequality Of Opportunity In Comparative Perspective: Recent Research on Educational
Attainment and Social Mobility
Author: Richard Breen and Jan O Jonsson
Source: ARS 2005; 31:223-243
Category and Keyword: educational inequality, comparative studies, intergenerational
inheritance, social reproduction
Purpose:
 Show that stratification research has moved beyond merely descriptive analyses. // Our
aim here is to review research relating to inequality of opportunity, and we concentrate
on studies that focus on the social origin of individuals (most often indicated by parental
occupational status or education).
Findings:
 Distinction in the area: inequality of opportunity (person’s chances to get ahead should
not be limited by ascribed characteristics; ) and inequality of condition (distribution of
differential rewards and living conditions).
 Social Origins are studied from three frameworks: 1) prestige scales 2) socioeconomic
indices (SEI) 3) social class typologies;
 Educational Inequality: Change Over Time and Differences Between Countries
o Prior to 1990s: linear regression of years of education on social origin.
o Began now: logit models of transition propensities at successive levels of the
educational system, revealing the “pure” association between origin
characteristics and educational attainment. (E.G. book by Shavit & Blossfeld,
titled Persistent Inequality.
o Three hypotheses not supported (modernization, reproduction or socialist
transformation); Why? Stability in origin effects on educational transitions.
o NEXT: to assess country differences in the degree of inequality of opportunity. A)
Müller & Karle (1993) and B) Jonsson et al (1996) who found associations
between class origin and educational attainment declined across cohorts in
Sweden and Germany but not in England, and that inequality was clearly greatest
in Germany, with Sweden being somewhat more equal than England.
 Micro-Level and Institutional Explanations of Educational Inequality
o One of the most significant trends in the study of inequalities in educational
attainment in the past decade has been the resurgence of rational choice models
focusing on educational decision making (Breen & Goldthorpe 1997).
 In these models the choices pupils and their parents make are determined
by expected benefits, costs, and probability of success for different
educational alternatives.
 The fact that social origin is more strongly associated with educational
attainment at younger ages (e.g., Breen & Jonsson 2000, Mare 1993,
Shavit & Blossfeld 1993) implies that comprehensive school reform in
which the earliest decision point is postponed reduces inequality of
educational opportunity.
37
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Studies support the view that there are additional effects of social context
on educational attainment, beyond the school, such as growing up in a
poor neighborhood, thus boosting the influence of social origin (Erikson
1994 …) (effected by endogeneity problems, i.e. parents motivation)
Social Mobility
The traditional measure of a society’s openness is the degree to which the attain- ment of
social position is associated with social origin.
Erikson & Goldthorpe 1992: (comparing countries) Their interpretation was that the
unequal distribution of resources and power so permeates the social structure as to lead to
a general and unchanging level of inequality of opportunity.
Others
Which Are the Most Rigid and the Most Open Countries?
Studies of father-to-son (and sometimes -daughter) income mobility as well as sibling
correlations of income show the United States to be noticeably more rigid than the
countries with which it has been compared (mostly the Nordic countries). In the United
States and England, father- to-son elasticities are about 0.45; they are between 0.13 and
0.28 in Sweden and Finland, and 0.34 in Germany (Solon 2002).
How Can We Explain Change and Inter-Country Differences in Social Fluidity?
Sieben & de Graaf (2001), analyzing brothers’ correlations from six countries, find mixed
support for the hypotheses that more socialist seats in parliament and modernization are
associated with more equality of opportunity.
Several analyses have pointed to the importance of the educational system as the driving
force behind changes in social fluidity and differences between countries.
o But as more people attain higher levels of education, the origin-destination
association at these higher levels might strengthen (as shown by Vallet 2004),
thus offsetting the compositional effect.
Whereas differences in societal characteristics such as modernization, inequality of
condition, or the school system are often discussed as causes of international differences
in social fluidity, variations in family structure are not. (But it may be in U.S.)
Methods and Data
1970s: log-linear and log-multiplicative models
1990s: “log-multiplicative layer effect model” (Erikson & Goldthorpe 1992, Xie 1992)
Now: The 1990s witnessed improvements in access to reliable data, many of which are
summarized in the comparative volumes cited above (e.g., Breen 2004).
Developments and Challenges
Among the most robust findings of stratification research are that origin effects are
stronger at earlier than later educational transitions; that education me- diates a
substantial part of the association between origins and destinations; that women display
more social fluidity than men; and that the pattern of social fluidity is overwhelmingly
shaped by inheritance, hierarchy, and sector effects (distinguish- ing, in particular, farm
from nonfarm sectors), although the relative importance of each of these has been
debated (see the December 1992 issue of the European Sociological Review).
38
4 Inequality, Social Mobility and Labor
Date: 09.30.2011
Title: Segmented Assimilation: issues, Controversies, and Recent Research on the New Second
Generation // Chapter 10
Author: Min Zhou
Source: Book, 1999; in The Handbook of International Migration by Hirschman, Kasinitz &
DeWind
Category and Keyword: Segmented Assimilation, Second Generation, Immigration, Theories,
Migration
Purpose:
 The authors examine the issues and controversies surrounding the development of the
segmented assimilation theory and review the state of recent empirical research relevant
to this theoretical approach. This examines patterns of adaptation (assimilation).
Findings: (from Portes and Zhou 1993) (below known as “segmented assimilation”)
1) Like of old, there is growing acculturation and parallel integration into the white
middle-class
2) A second leads straight into the opposite direction to permanent poverty and
assimilation into the underclass
3) A third associates rapid economic advancement with deliberate preservation of the
immigrant community’s values and tight solidarity.
History:
 Classical Assimilation Theories: Predict assimilation is a function of length of US
residence and succeeding generations.
 1928 / Park: among others, argue that migration leads to the situation of the “marginal
man”: the immigrant is pulled in the direction of the host culture but drawn back by the
culture of his or her origin. Park emphasizes the natural process that leads t the reduction
of social and cultural heterogeneity (abandon old ways and melt into mainstream, i.e. via
social forces and impersonal (biotic) forces.)
 1945 / Warner, L. (and Srole, L.): ADDS structural constraints // They highlight the
potency of such institutional factors as social class, phenotypical ranking, and racial and
ethnic sub-systems in determining the rate of assimilation (also by residential and
occupational mobility). Tough for minority groups to immigrate. Why? Their
subordination based on ascribed characteristics.
=interaction effects between internal group characteristics and external institutional factors
 1964 / Gordon, Milton: ADDS complexity // Immigrants begin their adaptation to their
new country through cultural assimilation, or acculturation. This does not automatically
lead to further assimilation (i.e. large-scale entrance into the institutions of host or
intermarriage). Acculturation may continue indefinitely. (Need structural assimilation
for other forms of assimilation to occur.) (ME: interesting Segway into transnational M)
o Assimilation means losing ones old cultural habits (Warner).
 1985 / Alba: MEASURING assimilation: social mobility trends across generations – rates
of intermarriage, educational attainment, job skills, length of stay, English proficiency,
level of exposure to American culture.
Anomalies:
39
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1988 / Rumbaut and Ima (among others): the longer the US residence, the more
maladaptive the outcomes, whether measured in terms of school performance, aspirations,
or behavior (across immigrant groups);
 1963 / Becker // Goffman: Intergenerational mobility – educational and occupational
mobility not passed on.
 1985 / Hirschman and Flacon: Educational outcomes are influenced by 1) education of
parents (higher educated immigrant parents’ children fared better than 4th or 5th
generations of Americans, no mater religious-ethnic background, similarity being all are
from lower educated strata);
= this will continue as long as immigrants move into poorer neighborhoods rather than
middle-class neighborhoods.
 1992 / Gans: Three possibilities – 1) education-driven mobility, 2) succession-driven
mobility, and 3) niche improvement. Means: e.g. Darker skinned immigrants face more
difficulties, don’t want to work at immigrant mom/dad’s wages and don't get hired
otherwise, i.e. lack of social capital.
 1999 / Perlmann and Waldinger: = second generation revolt; includes these exogenous
factors and endogenous factors like pre-immigration class standing;
 1992 / Zhou: SKILLED IMMIGRANTS: their children excel beyond being “atypical” i.e.
take most science prizes and are often at the top of their classes.
Defense of Classical Theories, Modifications: (= process of Acculturation)
 1992 / Gans: Advanced a bumpy-line approach to defend classical assimilation.
o Children receive powerful influences; (schools, media, etc.)
o develop higher expectations than their parents
o may not be able to fulfill parents dreams or their socialized beliefs
o bumps develop by host society or children themselves
o Nevertheless, on the road to “non-ethnic” America
o “Delayed acculturation” explains problems with darker skinned migrants.
 1999 and 2003 / Alba and Nee: Enthusiastic defenders of classical assimilation;
o Worked in past, will work now – but not as fast because
 high rate of mass immigration prevents host to integrate migrants
 stratification in the kinds of jobs has taken away several rungs of the
mobility ladder for lower skilled migrants/children to climb up
 political and ideological structure of multiculturalism has slowed
assimilation down
=overtime they will assimilate into American middle class through
intermarriage, residential integration and occupational mobility
Alternative Theories:
Multicultural Theorists: (= selective Americanization)
 1973 / Handlin: Forcefully rejects the assimilation assumption of a unified core.
o Society is a heterogeneous collection of ethnic & racial minority groups and
European Americans.
o 1976 / Greeley: pre-migration cultural attributes should not necessarily be
absorbed into culture; they are reinvented and reshaped by interaction with host
society.
40
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= way to treat members of ethnic minority groups as a part of the American population
rather than as foreigners or outsiders and presenting ethnic or immigrant cultures as
integral segments of American society.
 CANNOT ANSWER: question of 2nd generation revolt; OR how they construct their
own acculturation.
 PROBLEMATIC: maintaining a distinctive ethnicity can both help and hinder the social
mobility of ethnic groups members. (Perlmann & Waldinger 1999 find that Mexicans
have less social mobility than Chinese & Koreans);
Structural Perspective:
 ADDS more explanation to the complexities
 = offers a framework for understanding the difference in the social adaptation of ethnic
minority groups in terms of the advantages and disadvantages inherent to social structures.
 American society: a stratified system of social inequality;
 1994 / Zhou & Kamo: minorities are systematically limited to access of social resources
o What matters is what stratum of American society absorbs the new immigrant.
 These theories have considerable plausibility: takes into account the effects of structural
constraints. It’s constructed to predict macroprocesses and general patterns of social
mobility; It is insufficient to explain the varied and disparate outcomes of a given process
or pattern for diverse ethnic groups – (i.e. diverse socio-economic levels in a given
group);
Segmented Assimilation Theory (middle-range theory)
 focuses on why different patterns of adaptation emerge among contemporary immigrants
and on how these patterns necessarily lead to the destinies of convergence or divergence.
 The theory attempts to explain what determines the segment of American society into
which a particular immigrant group may assimilate.
o Individual factors
 1) Education 2) aspiration 3) English-language ability 4) place of birth
5)age on arrival 6) length of residence in US.
o Contextual (or structural) factors
 1) racial status 2) family socioeconomic background 3) place of residence
=unlike Classical Assimilation, each set above is of MINIMAL importance; what is
important is the INTERACTION between these two sets;
Conceptualization of the interaction effects (of Segmented Assimilation Theory):
 New contexts for immigrants of today (2000) than earlier (1900)
 Inequality:
o Inequality gap grew from 1980 to 2000
o Gap closed from period when European migration began
o Research on inequality: Top 5% wage earners increased wages; bottom 20%
decreased; 80% of American workers saw real hourly wages decrease (1980s);
o welfare prevented starvation
o 1996 welfare reform bill hurts legal immigrants and others (ME: 2010 census
shows Hispanic children as the largest group of children in poverty by absolute
numbers – consequence?)
41
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o poverty concentrated in urban areas; thus uneven landscape and institutional
discrimination and segregation exacerbate social and economic processes of
minority concentration in low-income communities (Massey and Denton 1993);
o increase in female heads of households (greater poverty)
o Neighborhoods have shrinking opportunities, i.e. education for youth, and thus
greater desperation
o Lowered chances for mobility create frustration and pessimism for all American
young people (especially those at bottom);
Class and “Color:
o 1997 / Oropesa and Landale: (using 1990 census); poverty rates of immigrant
children: 21%, 24%, 27% and 41% for non-Latino Euro-Americans, non-Latino
African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans.
o Poverty drops for 1st and 1.5 generations for all groups;
o Again drops for 2nd generations, but less equally with greater drops for non-Latino
Euro-Americans
o 3rd generation only Asian Americans improved; one class dropped to 40% (26%
more than previous generation) = non-Latino African Americans.
o 1978 / Wilson: whereas Wilson argued that contemporary racial inequality is
rather a matter of social class rather than race;
 segmented theorists place more emphasis on continuing racial
discrimination
o 1993 / Portes and Zhou: Adversarial subcultures are developed by those trapped
in inner-city ghettos.
The Ethnic Factor: Advantages and Disadvantages:
 Lower income Chinese integrated into community, and therefore succeeded in upward
mobility (Ogbu 1989); Also found parental pressure to stay close to one’s community and
avoid Americanization (Punjabi Indians); Or Vietnamese (Rumbaut & Ima 1988);
 1996 / Portes & Rumbaut: Controlling for socioeconomic status, length of US residence
and homework hours; these factors STILL did not take away ethnicity effect.
 1991 / Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo: Mexican Americans reacting to their exclusion and
subordination with resentment, regarded efforts toward academic achievement as “acting
white,” and constructed an identity in resistance to the dominant majority white society
(psychological survival).
Immigrant Cultures Versus Leveling Pressures:
 Neighborhood and peer-groups settings – effecting contemporary immigrants;
o better psychological conditions, etc. if have tighter social networks
 Ethnic networks are conceptualized as a form of social capital that influences children’s
adaptation through support as well as control.
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= This original culture may be seen as hindering the adaptation of members of the ethnic
group (assimilationist perspective) or as promoting this adaptation (the multiculturalist
perspective). (207)
Groups (i.e. Asians) may select from their culture, habits that are acceptable to
mainstream America, and downplay habits not acceptable.
42
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The clash between the parents’ social world and the children’s is the most commonly
cited problem of intergenerational relations in immigrant communities.
E.G. 1996 ch7 / Portes & Rumbaut: Generational consonance versus dissonance;
o When contextual factors are unfavorable …consonant acculturation enables
immigrant children to lean on the material or moral resources available in the
family and the immigrant community; it thus increases the probability of upward
assimilation. By contrast, dissonant acculturation severs ties between children
and their adult social world, deprives children of family or community resources,
and leads them further and further away form parental expectations.
Social Capital: Networks of Support and Control:
 Point: How is it possible to ensure that immigrants and their offspring maintain their
cultural values and work habits and learn the skills for socioeconomic advancement? Or
what enables immigrant families and their children to withstand the leveling pressures
from the inner city? The key is to examine the networks of social relations – namely,
how individual families are related t one another in the ethnic community and how
immigrant children are involved in these networks.
o Shared Obligations
o Social supports
o Social controls
o = The outcomes of adaptation, therefore, depend on how immigrant children fit in
their own ethnic community, or in their local environment if such an ethnic
community is absent, and how their ethnic community or the local environment
fits in the larger American society. In the case of the Vietnamese, being part of a
Vietnamese network appears to offer a better route to upward mobility than being
Americanized into the underprivileged local environment—or for that matter into
the native-born mainstream youth subcultures.
 James Coleman’s concept of Social Capital
 is a system of relationships that promotes advantageous outcomes
for participants in the system.
 participation in social relationship and acceptance of group norms
and values are interrelated: the more individuals associate with a
particular group, the greater their normative conformity to the
behavioral standards and expectations prescribed by the group.
 Segway: The ethnic context also serves as n important mechanism
for social control …for this reason, the concept of social capital
can be treated as a version of Durkheim’s theory of social
integration.
 Durkheim’s concept of normative integration
 he maintains that individual behavior should be seen as the product
of the degree of integration of individuals in their society.
 Problems: family and ethnic ties tend to deteriorate with longer duration of US residence;
 and, strong cultural identities and social ties (source of social capital) may sometimes be
insufficient because of racial or class disadvantages.
43
4 Inequality, Social Mobility and Labor
Date: 09.19.2011
Title: Why Education Matters
Author: Paul W. Kingston, Ryan Hubbard, Brent Lapp, Paul Schroeder, & Julia Wilson
Source: Sociology of Education, V76, No1; 2003 53-70
Category and Keyword: educational inequality, socio-economic index, social reproduction
Purpose:
 Identifying the extent to which education links to social status and economic status.
Thesis:
 To what extent does education have apparent social consequences because it certifies or
is, at least, linked to particular economic backgrounds?
 To what extent do educational effects reflect the allocative role of schooling in the labor
market?
 Variables: commitments to civil liberties, attitudes toward gender equality, endowments
of social capital, participation in elite culture, and civic knowledge.
 Non-economic Outcomes
o Socialization: 1) Education fosters social participation and life as well as
cognitive and non-cognitive ability (causal direction?) 2) Human capital theory.
o Allocation: 1) Education can be a valuable credential, creating opportunities for
the group that has a particular degree in that education is considered as low-cost
signals of unmeasured productivity (Spencer, 1974)
o The Cognitive Effect: 1) The obvious issue is the extent to which education is
socially consequential because it develops cognitive ability. 2) The reason why
cognitive ability is related to such diverse matters as tolerance, parenting behavior,
and marital stability is unclear. In part, basic intellectual competencies could
directly shape behavior by increasing a person's ability to make good judgments
about how social processes operate, to perceive the connection between actions
and outcomes, and the like.
o The Class Connection: while schooling affects location within the occupational
hierarchy, distinctive experiences within this hierarchy may be what is critical in
shaping interests, outlooks, and social behavior.
o DVs: Civil liberties; gender equality; social capital, cultural capital; Civic
Knowledge;
 METHODS
 We compare the bivariate correlations between years of education (a continuous
measure) and attainment of a degree (a categorical measure) and each dependent variable.
o DVs: Dependent variables: civil liberties, gender equality, social capital, cultural
capital, environmental knowledge, newspaper reading;
o IVs: years of education, educational credentials (high school, college, graduate),
cognitive ability (Wordsum)
o Controls: sex, race, parents’ SES, parents’ education, occupation prestige, age,
household income
o OLS used // with 7 models
 Table 4: Bivariate and Net Effects (Standardized Coefficients) of Education Variables in
Multivariate OLS Regression Models for Six Outcomes
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Results: The largely linear relationships in the models do not make the case for any
particular socialization explanation, but they are more consistent with a general
socialization argument than an allocation argument.
o The more educated (1) are more supportive of civil liberties, a difference totally
accounted for by their greater cognitive ability and higher SES
o 2) Have greater environmental knowledge, a difference modestly accounted for
by their greater cognitive ability and higher SES
o 3) tend to read newspapers more often, a matter that our models cannot account
for at all
o Class is independently related to adult cultural capital, but education and
cognitive ability are as well, and, indeed, education is more strongly so, and the
impact of cognitive ability at least matches any indicator of class
o Education often significantly shapes the texture of our social lives for reasons
other than that the more educated have greater cognitive ability and enjoy socially
advantaged lives.
LIMITATIONS: To explore the socialization perspective further, what is needed are
details about individuals' experiences in schools.
4 Inequality, Social Mobility and Labor
Date: 09.19.2011
Title: Explaining Education Differentials
Author: Richard Breen and John Goldthorpe
Source: Rationality and Society, 1997 V9 N3
Category and Keyword: education, class, gender, educational inequality, odds-ratios
Purpose:
 To provide an explanation for increasing educational participation rates, little change in
class differentials in these rates, and a recent and very rapid erosion of gender
differentials in educational attainment levels.
Thesis:
 Class and gender differences in patterns of educational decision are explained as the
consequence of differences in resources and constraints.
 Primary Effects: Association that exists between children’s class origin and their average
levels of demonstrated academic ability.
 Secondary Effects: Actual choices children make in their educational career (perhaps
with their parents); and this is more crucial that primary.
 Cultural accounts of class differentials in educational attainment are unsatisfactory so far
(i.e. Goldthorpe 1996).
 They suppose the existence of class structure and educational system.
Method:
 Developed a mathematical model, using a Rational Action Approach.
 Explains these 3 things from by individual decisions made in light of resources available
to and the constraints facing individual pupils and their families.
 Working class and Service class are analyzed (service class = more privileged)
Figure 1:
 To decide whether to remain in school? 1) cost 2) likelihood of success of pupil 3)
conditions on the parameters in question (with four sub points)
Assumptions and Findings:
 Families want their children to be in the same or a class above (not downward spiral);
 Solely because of the relative risk aversion that is seen as being common across classes,
there will be a stronger preference among service than working-class pupils for remaining
in education given that no costs attach to doing so.
 Our second mechanism then allows for class differences in average ability levels and in
turn in expectations of success.
 Our third mechanism takes account of the costs of continuing in education and allows for
a further source of class differentials, the average resource levels available to meet these
costs.
 Other assumptions include for example that the working class may see social immobility
as an equal value as social mobility, while the service class seeks education to maintain
and go up in status.
 Again, there should be some outcome that can be considered as implying an inferior
position to that from which children begin and that, for children of some class origins,
46
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this outcome should be less likely if they opt for less ambitious but ‘safer’ educational
careers.
Included in the model: at a point all service class families will possess resources that
exceed the costs of remaining in education and thus the proportion in this class who
choose to continue in education will be equal to the proportion who perceive it to be in
their interests…
For women, their gradient in their returns to education has steepened in the past 20 years.
This means 1) gender differentials in educational attainment declines (it has) and 2)
magnitude of class differences among women should increase.
ME: seems odd to separate out women from households with men, thinking that they may be in
two different classes, but share the same household – this white women can claim oppression
when they are part of a very privileged household; (see Asian book on women in China); but
then they form part of the societal privileged group that supposedly maintains and perpetuates
oppression of every other major minority group.
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Support of their models here, support rational choice over cultural explanations of
inequality.
4 Inequality, Social Mobility and Labor
Date: 09.19.2011
Title: Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families
Author: Annette Lareau
Source: American Sociological Review, V 67 N5, 2002, 747-776
Category and Keyword: Social Class, Family, Inequality, Race, Childrearing
Purpose:
 To understand better the mechanisms through which parents transmit advantages to their
children in family life, as a measure of the impact of children’s life chances.
 Thus, my second goal is to offer "conceptual umbrellas useful for making comparisons
across race and class and for assessing the role of social structural location in shaping
daily life
Methods:
 Ethnographic Data Set of white and black children, 10 years old, showing the effects of
social class in the homes
Findings:
 Middle-class parents engage in concerted cultivation by attempting to foster children’s
talents through organized leisure activities and extensive reasoning.
 Working class and poor parents engage int eh accomplishment of natural growth,
providing the conditions under which children can grow but leaving leisure activities to
children themselves. These parents also use directives rather than reasoning. They do
not focus on developing their children’s special talents.
 Middle-class children, both white and black, gain an emerging sense of entitlement from
their family life.
 Race had less impact than social class [ME: makes sense as there is socialization going
on here – and so our society socializes more blacks to be poor, it seems]
 Differences in a cultural logic of childrearing gave parents and their children differential
resources to draw on in their interactions with professionals and other adults outside the
home.
o Middle-class children gained individually insignificant but cumulatively
important advantages.
o Working-class and poor children did not display the same sense of entitlement or
advantages.
 Kingston’s work (2000) concluded there were thin evidence for social class differences;
class distinguishes neither distinctive parenting styles or distinctive involvement of kids"
in specific behaviors.
Table 2:
 The pattern of concerted cultivation fostered an emerging sense of entitlement in the life
of Alexander Williams and other middle-class children. By contrast, the commitment to
nurturing children's natural growth fostered an emerging sense of constraint in the life
of Harold McAllister and other working- class or poor children. (These consequences of
childrearing practices are summarized in Table 2.)
Findings:
 By contrast, when Wendy Driver is told to hit the boy who is pestering her (when the
teacher isn't looking) or Billy Yanelli is told to physically de- fend himself, despite
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school rules, they are not learning how to make bureaucratic institutions work to their
advantage. Instead, they are being given lessons in frustration and powerlessness.
For example, many working-class and poor parents who wanted more activities for their
children were seeking a safe haven for them. Their goal was to provide protection from
harm rather than to cultivate the child's talents per se.
4 Inequality, Social Mobility and Labor
Date: 09.29.2011
Title: The Intersection of Work and Gender: Central American Immigrant Women and
Employment in California, in Gender and US Immigration: Contemporary Trends
Author: Cecilia Menjivar
Source: Book, 2003
Category and Keyword: Migration, Gender, US Immigration
Purpose:
 My intention in this study was to understand the intersection of US paid work and gender
relations in the family lives of Central American immigrant women. (120).
 To examine how gender relations are transformed or affirmed through contemporary
immigration, as sociocultural patterns and broader forces are configured differently
across time and locales.
Thesis:
 Changes not simply the result of earning a wage.
 To put front and center the experiences of women (Hagan has done this, i.e. 1996), few
others.
 Context of reception and context of original home are vital to understanding dynamic.
 AND With the increasing feminization of the workforce around the world, insights
gained from these studies may enhance our understanding of a growing immigrant
population.
Method and Data:
 26 Salvadoran women in San Francisco and 25 Guatemalan women in L.A., arrived no
longer than 5 years, about 1 hour interview.
 Guatemalans: 14 ladinas and 11 indigenous women
Context of Exit:
 Crisis of the 1980s (her analysis seems weak and would benefit from i.e. Susan Jonas);
 Sum: These events drove thousands of Central Americans from all sectors of society to
abandon their usual places of residence.
Context of Arrival:
 As Portes and Rumbaut (1996) note, the context of reception channels immigrants in
differing directions, often altering the link between individual skills and expected rewards.
As we shall see, the receiving context has a powerful homogenizing effect on these
Central American immigrants.
 She talks about TPS and Asylum (107) but has serious errors in her understanding of the
law – (ME: how immigrants perceive the law and how the law really is – there is a gap.)
Effects of US Employment:
 Employment has been seen a a source of women’s increased bargaining power and
control over resources, which, in turn, is believed to be the basis for personal liberty and
more egalitarian relationships within the home (Benería & Roldán, 1987; Safa, 1995).
 More complex: Entry into paid work in the US is not an unqualified indication of
empowerment and improved status within the family.
50



Comparisons of gender relations between ladino and indigenous Guatemalans have
emphasized the greater male dominance among ladino men, whereas indigenous gender
relations have been characterized as more equalitarian…
Conditions for Domestic Violence: Women who are main providers – correlate with men
who believe they are not fulfilling their expected social role, turn to bad habits (drinking).
Ethnic Differences: Whereas the women’s increased ability to procure jobs became an
affront for some ladino Guatemalan and Salvadoran men, indigenous men saw it as an
opportunity for both to get ahead.
Social Class, Meaning of Work:
 WORK: not liberating for women, as viewed by them, but as a way to meet the survival
requirements of their families. (Different from indigenous Guatemalans)
o They do not have the same ethnic- and class-specific perceptions of work and
aspirations as the women in the other two groups (ladinas and Salvador)
o e.g. ladina women crystal party! (reinforced middle-class ideal of housewife)
 Maintaining separate finances, however, may actually worsen the women’s burden,
particularly for ladina Guatemalans and Salvadorans. Some of the men, already felling
constrained by their own inability to command adequate earnings and realizing the
women’s potential to support the households, have responded by evading their own
financial responsibilities.
o PREDATES migration: two types of patriarchy in Guatemala: For instance,
Maynard (1974) analyzes two types of patriarchy in Guatemala: a “responsible
patriarchy” among indigenous groups and an “irresponsible patriarchy” among
ladino Guatemalans. Although men are seen as dominant in both groups
indigenous men are more likely to prove regular support for their families,
whereas ladino Guatemalan men seemed less reliable.
 Ambivalence or opposition to a working wife seemed to be a particularly important issue
among the ladino Guatemalans with aspirations for middle-class status, for whom it was a
matter of prestige to support their wives. (114)
 (non-indigenous) – NOT helping in the household: In a way, this serves to assure the men,
conceivably threatened by the women’s improved economic opportunities, that they still
hold authority.
Ideology formation: Work Context:
 The lives of most of these immigrants are structured so that they do not actively interact
with the wider society; instead they live, shop, and socialize mainly with other Latinos.
However, the organization of women’s and men’s work differs, and it exposes them to
dissimilar worlds where they observe behaviors and practices and behaviors beyond their
immediate groups, which they may selectively incorporate in their own routines. (STILL
a difference with indigenous. Why? maybe social world of employer too distant)
Conclusions:
o Men in restaurants, construction, etc, with other men of like minds
o Women in households, isolated, witnessing the women’s and men’s roles together
as more equal.
51
5 Migration / Policy / World Inequality
Date: 09.20.2011
Title: The Trend in Between-Nation Income Inequality
Author: Glenn Firebaugh
Source: American Review of Sociology; 2000 26:323-339
Category and Keyword: Income Inequality, convergence theory, cross-national, income growth
Purpose:
 Review evidence of inequality between-nations, its origin and leveling off. It also makes
suggestions for strategic research to further understand how the world’s income is
distributed both across and within nations.
Findings:
 Earliest theorists at dawn of Industrial Revolution (Thomas Malthus, 1798), framing the
population-trap model: In this model, economic gains are short-lived as the geometric
growth of population inevitably catches up with linear economic gains.
 Today we have unprecedented population growth (> 5x that of 1800) and even higher
per-capita incomes (8-fold increase in constant dollars): $650 per capita in 1820 to $5150
in 1992.
 Central issue: not whether there is enough to go around – but how evenly the worlds’
income is distributed.
 National incomes have diverged greatly: Europe 14 x wealthier today than Africa
compared to 1820; Individual nations are 30x wealthier, however.
 Population-trap models: contradicted by rise in income per capita; Convergence theory
contradicted because of the uneven distribution of wealth, increasing.
Thesis:
 Relevance to sociologists: when nations are weighted by population size, the distribution
of income across nations has remained relatively stable in recent decades.
 Why? (arguing) Because change in the level of inequality for the world overall is a
function of change in population-weighted between-nation inequality (plus change in
population-weighted within-nation income inequality).
 Convergence Theory of Economics: (neo-classical growth theory)
o National economies tend to converge because of the principle of diminishing
returns to capital and labor. As rich industrial nations experience diminishing
returns, poorer nations …will tend to catch up as they industrialize.
o Endogenous growth theory: In today’s world the principle of diminishing
returns can be overcome by specialized inputs made possible by research.
o Firebaugh weights nations by population size, therefore adds a new element into
research.
 Theories in sociology (not about between-nation income inequality), but on determinants
of national economic growth.
o Theory: Dependency-Induced Divergence
o Offers evidence why the strata tend to diverge, i.e. theory of world stratification
of why some nations are rich and others poor (i.e. core versus periphery nations).
In effect, it argues that Marx’s law of uneven development applies to the world
economy as a whole rather than to classes within individual industrial nations.
52

o Theory: Population-Induced Divergence
o National income is income per capita, so change in national income is determined
by rate of population growth as well as by rate of economic expansion. If 2
countries have the same national income, but different population growths, then
the nation with the slower population growth rate will exhibit the more rapid
growth in income per capita.
Within-Nation VERSUS Between-Nation Inequality
5 Migration / Policy / World Inequality
Date: 09.20.2011
Title: Metropolitan Migrants: The migration of urban Mexicans to the united states
Author: Ruben Hernandez=Leon
Source: Book, 2008
Category and Keyword: Migration, Mexico, Networks, Development
Purpose:
 Explain the migration circuit between Mexico and the U.S., using the Monterrey-Houston
migratory circuit to observe the causes and social organization of metropolitan
emigration.
Thesis:
 The restructuring of the Mexican economy—prompted by the transition from a
development model of import substitution industrialization (ISI) to a policy of exportoriented industrialization (EOI) – has driven urban households in Monterrey to
increasingly deploy the labor of their members internationally.
Chapter 1:
 Questions: E.G. What are the distinctive causes, dynamics, and outcomes of the
international migratory flows that originate in Mexican cities and metropolitan areas?
How are the types of networks and social capital, household arrangements, experiences of
labor market incorporation at the destination, and the overall social process of migration
associated with the city origin of migrants? Does transnationalism and transnational
forms of social organization develop in cities and metropolitan source areas of
international migration? etc. (9)
 Migratory Circuit: this is between Monterrey and Houston. Mexico and US shaped the
kind of migration between the 2 countries, i.e. urban dwellers could not migrate to the US
Southwest for agricultural work in the Bracero program (10).
 Transnational Migration Circuit? Confusion between migratory circuits and transnational
studies with scholars (12). Houston-Monterrey NOT a transnational community; (14)
o Point 1: structural origin of Migratory Circuit (MC) between Monterrey-Houston
(MH). AND, patterns that have evolved.
o Point 2: Nature of Networks, Households, Extended Families
o Point 3: Migration Industry


Networks: (17)
o Massey (1987) Strong ties. Roberts (1995) Weak ties // both their ideas come
from Durkheim’s ideas on urbanization.
o New Conceptual Theory: 1) first wave establishes social infrastructure 2) then it
matures; 3) the social capital of urban areas is not strong enough for robust
network development (Massey 2004);
o (22) Hernandez-Leon shows how urbanites establish social ties and social capital
and networks (this book);
Migration Industry (MI): (24)
o Hypothesis is that the infrastructure for migration is distinct from networks that
facilitate it (mobility). MI helps sustain mobility.
54
Chapter 2: Urban-Industrial Development in Mexico, 1940 to 2005.
 ISI from 1940 to the 1980s enabled the worker sector to grow; This is 1930s to 1982 and
we see the growth of the urban industrial working class. “Peripheral Fordism” was
created, such that there was no incentive for these urban workers to migrate to the US
with better wages, as they had comparable wages in Mexican industry. 1929 crisis
provoked Mexico to industrialize. Export agriculture used to finance industrial
development (36). Social consequences of ISI: made urban working class & salaried
urban middle-class (37). Social Programs: for Industrial Worker (1943); for public
servants (1961); for housing (1972); By 1970, 24% of Mexico’s exports were servicing
the foreign debt. GNP increased, along with the economically active population in urban
areas, but decreased in rural areas. (35) Rapid urbanization (1940 – 22%, 2000 – 75%).
ISI was abandoned with the 1982 crisis. By 1980, the social wage was 44% of the
industrial worker income (39). Rural and urban poor not included. In 1980, 56.26% of
the population was urban.
o ISI is exhausted and collapsed. Why? 1) Large part of population excluded from
benefits 2) Agriculture in the 1960s could not subsidize industrial development 3)
Dependent on foreign borrowing. (to 42)
 Export Orientated Industrialization (EOI) since the 1980s changed this. This is an UrbanIndustrial Restructuring.
o From 1982 to 1985, the urban labor work force declined from 83.4% to 76.2%.
More people joined the workforce and unemployment increased. Women entered
the workforce. 1982 – 1986 cities bear the brunt of the downturn, but the
maquiladoras along the border spur city growth there.
o Now international migration becomes an alternative.
 Transition to EOI (see p. 48 for scholars on this topic); 1) Modernize! link local and
foreign capital. 2) Liberalize Trade (reduce Fordism); 3) Goal was to “compete” in the
world market for flexible technologies, labor process, sell inventories, do away with
unions and welfare protections, etc. 4) Deregulate labor market via changing the federal
code; [ME: can this be understood better by envisioning this as a “dialogue” and “change”
internally within capitalists? Is there a better grasp, therefore, of these changes and the
dangers capitalists saw between themselves as they competed worldwide?]
 Asia shift: by 1996 only 9.42% of TOTAL employment was in manufacturing, excluding
the Maquiladoras (52) By 2004, 45% of all manufacturing jobs (but what does this mean
compared to this other figure??) with the Maquiladoras (54);



Case of Monterrey:
1846 to 1848 border moves south (U.S.); A political and military region was formed to
ensure commerce. The industrialists in Monterrey sold items to the South during the US
Civil War and accumulated capital. Regional growth helps (i.e. economic and
demographic growth of Texas); Transportation links (Railroad); (to 58); after returning
to Monterrey from exile in the US (1910-1917), they returned and created employee
cooperatives; subsidies grew; company unions created while government unions
prevented. ISI takes off as a reconciliation between the government and business (61).
With the downtown (as described earlier), workers desired the success of ISI, so migrated
when income and jobs weakened to maintain what they knew under ISI. Idea: (67): “The
55
urban working class is now bearing the brunt of industrial modernization and the creation
of a competitive manufacturing sector through migration to the U.S.”
Chapter 3:
 Purpose: I show how such causal forces (just outlined) operate at the urban neighborhood,
household, and individual levels in La Fama, the working-class district in the
metropolitan area of Monterrey where I conducted fieldwork.
 My research in the Bayou City suggested the presence in La Fama of a critical mass of
individuals with international migratory experience, a precondition I deemed necessary to
analyze the causes and social organization of U.S.-bound migration.
 It is predominately a working class district (today).
Table 1: Sociodemographic and housing characteristics of la Fama residents.
 Tural to urban migration is indeed a central experience of most households in La Fama,
as 63.5 percent of the heads and 62.7 percent of the spouses reported having conducted at
least one internal migratory move (1997-1998 survey). In many cases, such move has
been a single trip to permanently settle in Monterrey. (to page 84 – where the are
employed).
 (85) Through my field work in Monterrey and Houston, I identified a set of pioneers and
their children from La Fama and neighboring districts who have personally facilitated the
migration of fellow urbanites.
 (89) Migration to the U.S. became a more common practice among the residents of La
Fama during the 1980s and the 1990s, the period when Mexico’s urban-industrial
economies went through a profound process of restricting.
 (90) Data collected in La Fama and Houston show that women migrate not only as part of
a process of family reunification (usually following males) but also as household heads
responsible for the sustenance of their children.
 (92) Migration is never the outcome of personal and household motivations exclusively.
Instead, the frequency and duration of migration reflects the circumstances in which the
overall social process takes place. EG A) Labor Market Incorporation (now year round
jobs); B) Policy Changes (IRCA in 1986);
 (94) Not surprisingly, the data from La Fama show few instances of U.S.-bound
migration in the first of these phases, corresponding to the Bracero program (1942-64),
during which only 12.4 percent of all individuals with U.S. experience conducted their
first migratory trip.
Table 4: Selected Migrant characteristics by period of Migration (First Trip) (42-64, 65-82, 8399).
 (96) In the aftermath of the economic transformations taking place in Mexico, during the
most recent period (1983-99), migration from La Fama to the U.S. virtually exploded: 2/3
of all migrants conducted their first US trip during this phase—a 3-fold increase from the
previous period.
 Today, some may not be returning, because of the border enforcement strategy being
used by the U.S.
 (95) As the case of pioneer migrant Raul Trevino illustrated above, at least a portion of
this migration was connected to the recruitment of skilled industrial workers conducted
by U.S. companies in Monterrey in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
 (107) conclusion
56
o 1) Bracero Program years = first phase; returning men settled in Monterrey area
instead of going back to rural area; US earnings helped finance a rural-to-urban
migration within Mexico.
o 2) US firm recruitment = second phase; they went for jobs in the aerospace and
oil industries in LA and Houston; these pioneer migrants are bracero turned
urbanites and industrial workers who first moved to CA and IL and relocated to
TX.
o 3) Restructuring = third phase. Houston has emerged as the most important
destination.
o chapter 4 describes this mc.
Chapter 4: The Monterrey-Houston Connection: The social organization of migration and the
economic incorporation of immigrants
Purpose:
 to analyze the kinds of networks and social capital these urbanites use to migrate to the
U.S. and specifically to Houston. He links social contacts / activities with immigrants,
families and friends in the mc of hm.
 Networks and kinship ties are central to urban migration (and social relations used); The
neighborhood of La Fama (which had economic cooperation and residence and social
ties) was recreated in Houston (in part allowed by the 1970s oil boom in Texas).
 (112) Mexican laborers now attracted by need to build the infrastructure (which was
influenced by NYC which made financial decisions on oil and Detroit (cars))
 (115) demands of the oil industry spurred illegal immigration in the 1970s. This became
problematic in 1931 when oil dropped from $34 a barrel (1981) to $16 (1985-1986);
 (118) IRCA (1986): social capital enhanced for some by this law;
 Social Capital refers to which relatives knew which relatives which facilitate immigrating
(SEE TABLE 5, p. 120 – includes neighbors and coworkers); Siblings are an important
source of migratory capital.
 role of women (121-123)
 Neighbors as source of weak ties: but a key source to migrate; there are strengths and
weaknesses of neighborhood weak ties. E.G. Trust, reciprocity and sense of obligation;
(exogamy helped in migration in urban area)
 (128) Labor Market: not the poorest migrated, rather mixture of skilled and semi-skilled;
 (134) HM connection: Transnational community or segmented immigrant populations?
The workers are now a part of the segmented immigrant population.
 (141) Resident undocumented population: consequences, for example, of IRAIRA. A)
immigration slowed B) aggravated felony C) infidelity of spouse D) Native working poor
do not fear deportation
 (151) Among concluding remarks: despite these transformations, during the 1990s,
skilled manufacturing workers from La Fama could still find employment as machinists
and industrial mechanics in the Bayou City’s large network of small-and medium-sized
shops servicing the oil industry and NASA. AND (152) In the hm circuit, cross-border
activities were conducted individually and through families, households, and
neighborhood-based networks in te form of private social and economic ventures.
57
Chapter 5: The Migration Industry [providing mobility across international borders for financial
gain] (mi) in the hm connection.
Purpose:
 I identify the components and characterize the role of the mi in the social organization of
international mobility; and second, through the lens of a case study, I tease out the
interactions between the migration industry, its entrepreneurs, and its activities, on the
one hand, and social and political actors, such as migrants, their social networks, and
state institutions, on the other.
 Why? Vital to understand whether entry into the migration industry is contingent on the
migration entrepreneur’s membership in the social network and the ethnic group he or
she serves.
Findings:
 (in the conclusion)
 1) The shutdown of Transportes Garcia did not leave the migrants from La Fama and
surrounding neighborhoods without a camioneta service to tend to their remittance and
transportation needs. (181). Jorge’s trusted driver started a business, for example.
 2) All of the new migration entrepreneurs arising in his wake were members of he same
social network as their clients, were acquainted with the needs of fellow migrants, and
had a sense of how to satisfy them in a cost-effective manner.
 3) the camionetas that link the urban neighborhoods of hm are part of a larger matrix of
businesses catering to the mobility, communication, legal, and financial needs of
immigrants and their families and households on both sides of the border. (e.g. wire
transfer companies)
 4) Given the availability of multiple low-cost options, can the camionetas compete and
survive? not in the short run. Their advantage: specialization and social embeddedness
in distinct migratory circuits, a combination of multiple services under one roof, and the
negotiation of risks and costs by moving between formality and informality in the two
political and legal contexts where they operate.
Chapter 6: Metropolitan Migrants: A New Dimension of Mexico-U.S. Migration
Purpose:
 Extrapolate four findings about the causes and the socioeconomic and sociopolitical
organization of migration.
o Note: there are various causes of urban migration (i.e. recruiters) and researches
of migration need to pay attention to urban settings.
o 1) The evidence collected in Monterrey shows that, in addition to kinship
networks, these Mexican urbanites use the weak ties that connect them to their
neighbors and coworkers to support their cross-border sojourning.
o 2) Monterrey and Houston constitute a circuit because of the constant migrationdriven movement of people, information, money, and goods in both directions
across the border—to paraphrase Durand (1988). A) International migration is a
trans-state process. B) implication: scholars cannot fully understand immigration
if they do not systematically study the economic, political, and sociological
realities of sending localities and countries.
o 3) MI: Often marginalized and viewed as an appendage to the core phenomenon
and its central actors, the migration industry and migration entrepreneurs make
58

several important contributions to the social process of international migration,
opening markets for foreign labor, establishing regular connections between
origin and destination, and structuring opportunities for immigrants.
o 4) Rural and Urban migrants move because of different reasons. Rural migrants:
embedded in peasant household economy; Mexican urbanites appear to migrate
internationally as a result of dislocations produced by industrial modernization
and the declining quality of urban-industrial labor markets. In their case,
migrationn substitutes for local employment instead of supplementing it…
Conclusion: I content that the continuation and deepening of economic restricting in
Mexico will advance the dislocation of urban-industrial workers, creating conditions for
their migration to the U.S.
5 Migration / Policy / World Inequality
Date: 09.21.2011
Title: Transformations in New Immigrant Religions and their global implications
Author: Yang, Fenggang and Helen Rose Ebaugh
Source: ASR 2001; 66:269-289
Category and Keyword: Immigrant Religions, Global, New Paradigm, Transnationalism, U.S.
Immigrants
Purpose:
 In the study of the new immigration, religion, and social changes, an important question
is yet to be answered: What institutional changes do new immigrant religious
communities undergo? As in the past, religion is important to newcomers for integrating
into new country.
Overview:
 Old Paradigm: religious secularization is associated with modernization and pluralismhas been challenged as scholars demonstrate that religion is not declining, but that indeed
it is thriving in pluralist American society (Finke and Stark 1992; Warner 1993).
NEW: But it hasn’t been declining, as predicted and new data shows that pluralism actually
promotes institutional and theological transformations that energize and revitalize the
religions.
Findings:
 There are three ways in which immigrants “transplant” their religion from their old place
of living to their new place of living – a transformation.
1) adopting the congregational form in organization structure and ritual
2) returning to theological foundations
3) reaching beyond traditional boundaries to include other people
= a way to Americanize
=but also has global implications and transnational influences
≠ secularization; a refute against it
Methods:
 Data looking at religious institutions primarily composed of “new immigrants” and use
this data: Religion, Ethnicity and New Immigrants Research (RENIR) of Houston, TX.
All major religions represented.
Problems of Immigrants:
 Face marginality, i.e. minorities in a racially hierarchical society
 Have an opportunity to capitalize on strength of being in a core country and influence
religion in their country of origin.
 Highly skilled (or educated) immigrants come to the US (lots more since 1965)
Assimilation:
 Contemporary immigrant religions are adopting the congregational form in 1)
organizational structure and 2) ritual formality
60
1) e.g. call to prayer in Muslim countries does not exist in US, so go to mosque now.
e.g. Catholic Hispanic priests “bemoan” loss to evangelicals
e.g. Buddhists start congregations (not so in China)
Services Expand, a characteristic of a congregational structure
Organizational Networks created: develop regional, national and international networks
and organizations (and resemble Protestant denominations); (E.G. Buddhist and Hindu
congregations)
2) Ritual formalities like times for worship, ways to pray, roles of clergy (expand outside
church ritual), language of worship (more translation into English i.e. from Sanskrit),
Returning to Theological Foundations:
 Example: For many Muslim immigrants in our study, the evolution of the mosque from
simply a place to pray to a center of social activity and learning means a reversion to the
dynamic role the mosque was given in the days of Prophet Muhammad.
 OR, When achieving a consensus among people of diverse subtraditions and ethnic
backgrounds is the goal, one common strategy is to go back to the original founder and/
or some historic, authoritative leaders of the religion, and to the commonly recognized
holy scriptures.
=overall, returning to theological foundations among immigrant religions is often ecumenical
within a religion—that is, the process unites groups that vary in ideology, ethnicity, and national
origin. It provides the theological foundation for social inclusiveness.
Social Inclusiveness:
 Immigrant religious communities are generally moving from particularism to greater
universalism in membership. This is the third process we observe in the transformation of
immigrant religions in the United States.
Implications for Global Religious Systems:
 However, they represent more than Americanization: These changes are also taking place
in other parts of the world; and the changes in the United States have enabled these
immigrant religious communities to exert power within their global religious systems.
 For example, while Israel or Jerusalem remains the holy center of Judaism, the United
States has become an important organizational and resource center of Judaism (284).
5 Migration / Policy / World Inequality
Date: 09.21.2011
Title: The South-to-North Migration of Women
Author: Hania Zlotnik
Source: Chapter 13.3 in book 2006, The Migration Reader: Exploring Politics and Policies (ed.
by Messina and Lahav)
Category and Keyword: Migration, Women, Americas,
Purpose:
 Using what data is available, document the migrant flow of women, particularly from
developing to developed countries.
Findings:
 Role of migrant women in developed countries: maintain the identity of migrant
communities; foster the integration of the family.
 Foreign-born populations in the Americas: women were 50% or more. Tendency to be
higher in developed rather than developing countries.
Oddity: (590-591) not sure what she means with “foreign born” and “foreign population.”
It seems that she means that the foreign born may not be a part of the foreign population because
of naturalization – OR – they may be a part of the foreign population if they are born in that
country, but not considered a citizen (Germany) (jus sanguinis).

In 1960 – 1964, immigrants originating in the developing world accounted for only 12
and 42 percent, respectively of the immigrants admitted by Canada and the US. By
1985-1989, their share of total immigration to those countries had increased to 71 and
88 % respectively (Zlotnik, 1991).

In general, the proportion of women in gross immigration is lower when flows originate
in developing than in developed countries. For immigrants originating in the different
developing regions, high proportions of women are more likely among those from Latin
America and from East and Southeast Asia …than among those from either Southern
Asia or West Asia and North Africa (594).
5 Migration / Policy / World Inequality
Date: 09.22.2011
Title: Patterns of International Migration Policy: A Diachronic Comparison
Author: Aristide R. Zolberg
Source: Chapter 4.2 in book 2006, The Migration Reader: Exploring Politics and Policies (ed.
by Messina and Lahav)
Category and Keyword: International Migration Policy, History Migration
Purpose:
 The policy of states across their borders is examined. Why? To foster a contextual
understanding of contemporary trends.
Findings:
 Using Rational choice language to study the issue: The determinants of such policy are
multifaceted because the human beings involved are simultaneously assessed in two very
different ways: as market actors, and within this most prominently as workers, and as
actors within political institutions and cultural arenas.
= economic and 2) moral perspectives
e.g. immigrants may be desirable from an economic perspective, but not from a cultural
perspective (moral) (xenophobia)
 international migration as a distinctive phenomena:
=when global space was organized into territories and controlled by sovereign states – with
rights to control their borders.
Three components: 1) importation of about 7.5 million West African slaves; 2) relocation of
2 to 3 million Europeans in New World colonies, mostly under some form of bondage 3)
expulsion or flight of about 1 million from newly-forming Euro states in 16 & 17th centuries
Bondage: point was to prevent laborers from taking advantage of scarce labor supply

What such segregation entails, institutionally, is the erection of an internal boundary,
which prevents the group under consideration from becoming incorporated into the
receiving society.
= cultural homogeneity: Last massive wave of refugees were the Protestants who fled France
when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes (1685).


By 1830, transition to new migration policies ended: to this time reflected the interrelated
global changes known as the demographic, industrial, and democratic revolutions.
At this time, Britain swept away all rules for their populations to go to Australia, South
African and U.S. In the U.S., the flow of population from the British isles contributed to
higher returns on capital by increasing the supply of US labor and hence lowering its cost.

US DID NOT become a nation of immigrations until after the 1850s. From 1780 to 1830
estimates are that immigrants comprised only 6% of decennial growth.

Although there were no longer any immigration restrictions based on religion, it is well
established that Americans viewed themselves very much as a protestant nation and
regarded Catholicism as incompatible with a republican political culture.
63

Overall, the country’s immigration policy can be understood as one of the great triumphs
of US capitalism.
 19th Century: abolition of slave trade did not effect South, as natural increase supplied the
need.
 Owners then turned to indentured servants to solve problem, and US had a version of this
with Chinese workers.
Contemporary Patterns:
 Restriction of who comes in since 20th century, and liberal states maintain this today.
Refugees now outnumber the number of voluntary migrants (119).
 Transportation spurs rapidity (RR & ship); The unevenness of world conditions was
accentuated by a growing gap between a small number of capital-rich, technologically
advanced, and strategically powerful countries …affected more than ever by way of
colonial control and of the transnational economic, social, cultural, and political
processes they generated.
 The availability of such a vast reserve of cheap labor located abroad provides obvious
opportunities for capitalists in the industrial countries, most prominently the possibility of
cushioning the effects of the business cycle by procuring labor when it is needed and
divesting themselves of it when it no longer is, without bearing the costs of maintaining it
when unproductive.
 US businesses adjusted to the exclusion of Asians and to the reduction in European
immigration by turning to cheap labor from Mexico and the Caribbean;
 1964 – Bracero eliminated – allowed massive flow of undocumented;
Conclusion:
 It is obviously rational for affluent societies to erect walls in order to protect the desirable
economic, cultural, and political conditions they have achieved, and there is no
gainsaying that these states owe it to their own populations to provide them with such
protection. But one should understand these policies for what they are: a collective
device to prevent the redistribution of existing world resources to the benefit of the
disadvantaged.
5 Migration / Policy / World Inequality
Date: 10.07.2011
Title: Give Us Your Best, Your Brightest: Immigration Policy Benefits U.S. Society Despite
Increasing Problems
Author: Stephen Moore
Source: Chapter 8.3 in book 2006, The Migration Reader: Exploring Politics and Policies (ed.
by Messina and Lahav)
Category and Keyword: International Migration Policy, Skilled Labor, Educated Labor
Purpose:
 Article explains the benefits of skilled labor, contrasting it with headlines negative
towards immigrants. Purpose: Convince readers that skilled immigration is good for
America and to influence policy makers in that direction.
Points, Argument:
 (Article was in the Atlantic Monthly); Describes Intel and Du Pont-Merck as companies
whose famous products were created by immigrant labor (skilled);
 Immigrants create jobs
o Small businesses important (few turn into Intel, many fail) and are small and
marginally profitable – but significant source of jobs.
o Immigrant children take top honors in high schools and science competitions
(valedictorians, Westinghouse on National Science Search Awards etc.);
o With 1 million immigrants per year, the nation gains about $20 billion more than
cost. Rather than fiscal burdens, immigrants are huge bargains.
 By pursing a liberal and strategic policy on immigration, American can ensure that 21st
century, like the 20th will be the American century.
5 Migration / Policy / World Inequality
Date: 10.07.2011
Title: Foreign Investment: a Neglected Variable
Author: Saskia Sassen
Source: Chapter 13.4 in book 2006, The Migration Reader: Exploring Politics and Policies (ed.
by Messina and Lahav) (ORIGINALLY: 1990 article in BOOK)
Category and Keyword: Immigration, Foreign Investment, Labor Demand, Migration
Purpose:
 Examine evidence on international labor migrations and on the internationalization of
production – to help scholars understand the foreign investment variable.
To be Explained:
 Understanding why a migration flow continues and sustains high levels invites an
examination of demand conditions in the receiving country
 The continuing concentration of the new immigration in several major cities which are
global centers for highly specialized service and headquarters activities, an economic
base we do not usually associate with immigrant labor.
Points:
 Immigrant levels are high (absolute number wise) (esp. from Caribbean Basin and
Southeast Asia)
 Direct foreign investment has increased in developing countries that send migrants to the
U.S. (growth rate): (all major industrial country investment) from 7% to 9.2 % (19681973) and 19.4% from 1973 to 1978.
Method:
 Analysis of Export Processing Zones (EPZs)
Thesis points / Background points:
 1965 legislation: because most immigrants were European – the thinking was that the
family unification would help them.
 In sum, the push of unemployment, the pull of an existing immigrant community, and the
need for cheap labor in declining and backward industries are elements for an explanation
about high immigration in a period of high unemployment in the U.S.
 Goal: Just capture what is happening IN THIS MOMENT.
 AIM: How the existence of an immigrant workforce itself contributes to new conditions
for the internationalization of production…
MAIN THEORY / INSIGHT
 The expansion of export manufacturing and export agriculture, both inseparable related
with direct foreign investment from the highly industrialized countries, has mobilized
new segments of the population into regional and long-distance migrations.
 MECHANISM: The development of commercial agriculture, which is almost completely
for export, has directly displaced small farmers who are left without means of subsistence.
This forces them to become wage-laborers in commercial agriculture or to migrate to
cities. Sometimes the move from sharecropper or subsistence farmer to rural wage-
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laborer becomes a move to another country, e.g. Colombians in Venezuela agriculture or
Mexicans in US agriculture. Dominicans to New York City for urban job;
MEDIATED: by massive recruitment of young women into newly created jobs –
[maquiladoras]; becomes an indirect emigration inducement among males results from
the disruption of traditional work structures;
Not a function of foreign investment per se: BUT: Developing countries could not have
penetrated the export market in the absence of these arrangements with foreign investors
which have access to those markets. 2) creates cultural-ideological and objective lings
with the countries providing this capital.
o under these conditions emigration may begin to emerge as an option actually felt
by individuals
o The ideological effect is not to be underestimated: the presence of foreign plants
not only brings the US or any other ‘western” country closer, but is also
“westernizes” the less developed country and its people.
o Highly MEDIATED process.
Conclusions:
 Immigration can be seen as providing labor for 1) low-wage service jobs, including those
that service a) the expanding, highly specialized export-oriented service sector and b) the
high-income lifestyles of the growing top level professional workforce employed in that
sector; 2) the expanding downgraded manufacturing sector including but not exclusively,
declining industries in need of cheap labor for survival, as well as dynamic electronics
sectors, some of which can actually be seen as apart of the downgraded sector. 3) the
immigrant community itself.
 Two analytical distinctions important to my argument are a) the distinction between job
characteristics and sector characteristics, and b) the distinction between sector
characteristics and growth status.
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6 Inequality / Race & Ethnicity
Date: 10.07.2011
Title: The New Economics of Immigration: Affluent American Gain, Poor Americans Lose
Author: George J. Borjas
Source: Chapter 8.2 in book 2006, The Migration Reader: Exploring Politics and Policies (ed.
by Messina and Lahav) (ORIGINALLY: 1996 in Atlantic Monthly)
Category and Keyword: Immigrants / Policy suggestions
Purpose:
 Let economics frame the debate
Thesis:
 Formula: how many immigrants the country should admit, and what kinds of people they
should be
 What lives should US immigration policy improve? 1) natives 2) immigrants 3) rest of
world?
o Answered by: what does US care most about
 Increase the size of the pie – no matter the impact on the distribution of wealth in society.
Policy:
 Linking immigration to the business cycle: admit more immigrants when the economy is
strong and the unemployment rate is low, and cut back on immigration when the
economy is weak and the unemployment rate is high.
 Reward skilled workers, since they help economy by having a greater portion of earnings
paid in taxes.
 Less skilled may increase a companies profits – argument for
Conclusion:
 The net gains from current immigration are small, so it is unlikely that these gains can
play a crucial role in the policy debate.
 the economic impact of immigration is essentially distributional
 Current immigration redistributes wealth from unskilled workers, whose wages are
lowered by immigrants, to skilled workers and owners of companies that buy immigrants’
services, and from taxpayers who bear the burden of paying for the social services used
by immigrants to consumers who use the goods and services produced by immigrants.
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Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.15.2011
Title: The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field
Author: Alejandro Portes, Luis Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt
Source: Ethnic and Racial Studies, V2 N2 March 1999
Category and Keyword: Transnationalism (economic, political, and socio-cultural); immigrant
adaptation; national development; social networks; technological development; social capital
Purpose:
 To define the concept of transnationalism, provides a typology of this heterogeneous set
of activities, and reviews some of the pitfalls in establishing and validating the topic as a
novel research field.
Note: SEE 1. Theory article in 1997 by Portes of similar idea
Thesis:
 Creation of a transnational community, linking immigrant groups in advanced countries
with their respective sending nations
 A critical mass has been arrived for this emergent social field
 Three conditions are necessary before this phenomena exists:
o involves a significant # of persons in the relevant universe (high intensity of
exchanges)
o activities posses a certain stability and resilience over time (new modes of
transacting)
o the activities cannot be captured by another concept (multiplication of activities)
 EG: the travels of a Salvadoran viajero delivering mail and supplies to
immigrant kin on a monthly basis
 Unit of Analysis: the individual and his/her support networks as the proper unit of
analysis in this area.
o Other units, such as communities, economic enterprises, political parties, etc also
come into play at subsequent and more complex stages of inquiry. Often these
activities developed in reaction to governmental policies and by dependent
capitalism.
 Organized: This working typology of economic, political and socio-cultural transnationalism has undergirded our empirical study of the topic and has proved useful in
organizing what otherwise would be a chaotic set of activities.
Table 1: Transnationalism and its types (Nature of Activities X level of institutionalization)
 Low and High / with economic / Political and Socio-cultural rows
Thesis:
 Did not happen earlier, because technological conditions did not make communication
very rapid or easy. (Necessary condition for Transnationalism)
 Historical antecedents are there (i.e. Spanish visiting home after fascist induced diaspora)
o Itinerant merchants
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o circular labor migrations of the 19th century (advanced industrial capitalism);
expansion of industry and commercial agriculture ran up against the barrier of
dwindling domestic labor supplies (Lebergott 1964)
Contemporary Transnationalism: corresponds to a different period in the evolution of the
world economy and to a different set of responses and strategies by people in a condition
of disadvantage to its dominant logic. Herein lies the import of its emergence. (different
forms of grass-roots transnationalism)
Broad Dynamics of the Phenomena: 1) tied to the logic of capitalist expansion 2) a
phenomenon at variance with conventional expectations of immigrant assimilation 3) It
has greater potential as a form of individual and group resistance to dominant structures
than alternative strategies.
o Motivation for immigrant: The presence of multinational corporations and the
efficient marketing of their products in most sending countries fuels these desires
by creating new consumption aspirations, difficult to fulfill by people within the
limits of Third World economies (Alba 1978; Portes and Böröcz 1989; Grasmuck
and Pessar 1991)
o Resisting capitalists: The international expansion of capitalism in search of
broader markets and cheaper labour has led to various attempts to resist its
depredations. A prominent example is the ‘labour standards’ movement which has
sought to halt the wholesale transfer of low-tech industry to less developed
countries by imposing First World labour standards on these nations (Piore 1990).
Findings:
 Four CASE STUDIES are given to support this outline of transnationalism, the ties of
U.S. immigrants to their home countries (i.e. El Salvador, Dominican Republic and
Colombia).
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.15.2011
Title: Transnational migration: Taking stock and future directions
Author: Peggy Levitt
Source: Global Networks, 2001; pp 195-216 V1No3
Category and Keyword: Transnationalism (economic, political, and socio-cultural); immigrant
adaptation; national development; social networks; technological development; social capital
Purpose:
 Give an overview of everyday transnational practices, the institutional actors that
facilitate or impede them, and outlines questions for future research.
Thesis:
 Migration spreads through networks.
 The more diverse and thick a transnational social field is, the greater the number of ways
it offers migrants to remain active in their homelands. The more institutionalized these
relationships become, the more likely it is that transnational membership will persist.
 Social field: more complete, i.e. more institutionalized (political, religious, social), the
greater are the transnational practices (and reverse).
 Second, focusing on social fields also calls attention to non-migrants and those who move
only periodically but who also enact aspects of their lives within these arenas.
 “core transnationalism” (frequent traveller); “expanded transnationalism” (periodic
traveller); those who stay in one place;
Table 1: variations in the dimensions of transnational practices
Thesis:
 Transnational communities from above: global governance and economic activities
 Transnational communities from below: everyday grounded practices of individuals
o Rural to urban transnational village: arise when a large proportion of a relatively
small community leaves a well-defined rural locale and settles near one another in
a specific receiving-country neighborhood or town.
o Urban to urban transnational villages: In the Valadares/Massachusetts case, it is
primarily elites who have promoted transnational community formation. It
remains to be seen whether ordinary individuals, who earn their livelihoods or
raise their families across space, will heed calls to organize collectively.
 Definition: Transnationalism generally refers to the cultural, economic, and political
linking of people and institutions within a variety of contexts including business and
organizational practices, foreign investment and production, or cultural interchange
(Sørensen 2000).
 ORIGINATION
o migrant networks
o capitalist development: some scholars contend these networks are themselves a
product of late capitalism. Nonini and Ong (1997), for example, argue that
transnational migration began in response to capitalist flexible accumulation and
its need for transnational functionaries.
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Definition: Globalization: Globalization refers to the political, economic, and social
activities that have become interregional or intercontinental and to the intensification of
levels of interaction and interconnectedness within and between states and societies (Held
et al. 1999).
Both mutually reinforce each other;
Definition: Diaspora: form out of the transnational communities spanning sending and
receiving countries and out of the real or imagined connections between migrants from a
particular homeland who are scattered throughout the world.
Findings:
 Common patterns of Institutional Activity are described.
 1. States: encourage emigrants in nation building of home country; symbolically in favor
of democracy and political rights; ensure continued economic involvement; offer dual
nationality; e.g. Jewish Americans advocating for Israel; create government agencies to
serve migrant needs or interests; offer programs in host country (where their migrants
reside); events to strengthen cultural identity
 2. Political Parties organize transnational (MEX – PRD; Brazilian Workers Party, etc.);
assimilate in US and stay connected in home country;
 3. Hometown organizations (promote transnationalism); they provide some combination
of social and economic support to migrants in the receiving country and raise significant
sums to support public works and social service projects in communities of origin.
 Sending-country officials and political party operatives often pay more attention to
migrant entrepreneurs and influential community leaders than to those who remain
behind.
o EG: By first holding open meetings with the entire community and then holding
closed meetings with immigrant entrepreneurs, for example, the Mexican State
governors who visit Los Angeles reinforce existing class divisions (Guarnizo
1998).
 Religious Institutions: In the case of Christian denominations, these groups generally link
sending and receiving-country chapters of the same institution at various levels of the
organizational hierarchy.

LIMITATIONS: Single case studies do not tell us how widespread transnational practices
are or how they vary among groups. While the kinds of activities states, political parties
and religious organizations engage in are being documented, not enough is understood
about the numbers and kinds of people participating in these programs, how enduring
they are, or what their long-term impact will be.
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the US
Immigration Experience
Author: Nina Glick Schiller
Source: Chapter 5 in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience ed.
by Hirschman, Kasinitz and DeWind 1999
Category and Keyword: Transnational Migration, US Immigration, Paradigm
Purpose:
 Transnational Migration: How new is transnational migration? What is the relationship
between transnational migration and nation-states?
note: she does not use the term “transmigration” of Guarnizo (1997) because migration is one
of many transnational processes.
Argument:
 transnational migration and the transnational political practices of nation-states are not
new phenomena. Two things are new.
1) the restructuring of the global accumulation and organization of capital
2) modifications in the relationships between state structures and global economic processes;
3) and altered conceptualizations of nation-states, expressed in the rhetoric of political
leaders, the writings of political theorists, and the paradigms of social scientists.
Findings:
 There are three phases of the relationship between transnational migration and nationstate-building.

The Paradigm: In transnational migration, persons literally live their lives across
international borders. (This is different from people with a diasporic tradition). Does not
include all people who immigrate. The contribute to the building of two states.

Still, research is needed that investigates the range and multiplicity of social networks
that immigrants establish.
o Some scholars use the concept of transnational community to help define this,
including Alejandro Portes (1997) (97).
o By evoking an imagery of transnational community, researchers foster the false
impression that immigrants create their own autonomous cultural spaces outside
of either sending or receiving states.

Although migrants kept ties to their country of origin (e.g. remittances), “By 1951, in his
prizewinning history of U.S. immigration, The Uprooted, Oscar Handlin portrayed
immigrants as people who permanently leave their home and country behind, and this
view was widely accepted both by the general public and by scholars.
o Tilly (1990) would be an example of this recently (networks created, but no
possibility of transnational migration).
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NEW UNIT OF ANALYSIS: The significance of the sustained social interaction that
immigrants maintained across borders. (not the nation-state)
o Long distance nationalism binds together into a single national body with a shared
political project both emigrants and their descendants and person who have
remained in the homeland.
PHASE ONE: The late 19th century, nation-state building processes in Europe, the US,
LA and Asia took place within the global ascendancy of monopoly capitalism, the growth
of finance capital, and a renewed scramble for colonies on the part of competitive
European states and the US … In this phase, a significant proportion of many migrating
populations established transnational relationships that contributed to the nation-statebuilding projects of both their ancestral states and their new homelands.
 e.g. Seasonal migrants in the continents helped fund village projects like homes
 Chinese saw advantage when steamships developed for work in America
 Ties initially maintained because of family loyalty / network tie loyalty
 Social ties and image back home motivated immigrant in US
 POLANYI (1957) 19th century Britain subordinated social and political processes
in the creation and maintenance of the capitalist market system – strong state to
implement.
 This effected the way dominant classes in other continents organized their nationstates.
 e.g. By 1925 Italy was subsidizing fifty-eight Italian organizations based in Italy
and twenty-seven based abroad to help immigrants.
 Thus Italians, Poles, Chinese described their immigrant populations, i.e. in the US
as being a part of their nation-state (nationalism!)
 Glick Schiller reforms the idea that these immigrant Americans were going
through a temporary nostalgic stage, but actually had a reciprocal relationship of
nation-state building.
 e.g. Galician peasants – identified with US polish based organizations (Part of
Poland in 1382 (was Kingdom before that); 1872 annexed by Austro-Hungarian
empire.
 RACE: “Transnational politics became the base area from which racialized
immigrants sought to join white America (Ignatiev 1995; Miller 1990; Roediger
1991).”
 POLITICS as a means to REDUCE unionization: “they took for granted that
immigrants settling in the US would continue to have separate national identities
that linked them to their homeland because national identities were seen as rooted
in blood ties and as fundamentally racial.
 Republicans and Democrats: saw nationality divisions as a critical element in
their electoral strategies.
PHASE TWO: began after WWII, during an epoch of decolonization. Most European
colonies gained their independence, and a vision of the world as a terrain of independent
nations. Immigrants’ transnational networks and political projects were no longer noted
by political leaders, scholars, or the immigrants themselves.
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Roots could be celebrated, but immigrants’ home ties and concomitant political
identifications were rendered invisible in the new paradigm, even as they
continued to play a role in cold war politics.
Their migration was fueled (1965 – 1996 20.1 million LPRs) by both personal
hopes for a better life abroad and the need to ensure that family members who
remained at home had the money to buy imported goods and private services.
Attacks on immigrants by politicians – 1970s and 1980s.
The decay of the public education system, particularly in big cities, led
immigrants to fear their children’s future and to use wages earned in the US to
educate their children back home (Guarnizo 1997a). These pressures encourage
immigrants to maintain or build transnational networks.
Legal insecurity encourages migrants to maintain home networks.
Racialized categories for immigrants continue the construction of “white identity”
PHASE THREE: begins with the end of the 20th century. The restructuring of the
processes of capital accumulation accompanied by the implementation of a neoliberal
agenda began to alter the relationship between states and more global economic processes
(Gill 19987). Transnational migration and the transnational political activities of
immigrants again have become a topic of interest and concern to political actors and
researchers alike. Political leaders of emigrant-sending states began to reenvision their
states as transnational. At the same time, scholars developed a paradigm of transnational
migration. Because the scholarship on international migration began to be read by
political actors responsible for changing state policies, the new paradigm has not only
reflected but also contributed to the changing relationship between nation-states and
immigrants.
 Multinational corporations are finding new ways to use the legal structures of
strong states such as the US, as well as the military and police capacities of states,
in their efforts to maintain a structure of law and to compete for greater shears of
capital and markets (Sassen 1996b).
 Multi-culturalism helps migrants adopt these identities.
 Expected to stay abroad but to send money home often.
 Dual nationality versus dual citizenship (nationals don’t vote, i.e. Mexico)
 Re-defining as transnational states.
 Given these disparities, many transnational states define the connection between
immigrants and their state of origin in terms of shared descent or “common blood.”
 One American strain builds on white identification – nationalist sentiments.
 Another strain builds on multiculturalist discourse – and new immigrants have a
sense of shared destiny in the US. Why good? Helps in competition, for example,
with Asia.
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: Between “Here” and “There”: Immigrant Cross-Border Activities and Loyalties
Author: Roger Waldinger
Source: IMR 2008, V42 N1
Category and Keyword: Transnational Migration, (against), Migrants, US Immigration
Purpose:
 While international migrants regularly engage in trans-state social action, the paper
shows that neither transnationalism as condition of being, nor transmigrants, as
distinctive class of people, is commonly found.
Conclusions:
 As a rule, cross-border activities and exchanges do not cluster together. Thus, the sending
of remittances is most extensively undertaken by new arrivals, with frequency
diminishing as settlement in the United States grows.
 The gradual withering away of home country ties can be interpreted as evidence of
assimilation; however, doing so would miss the fundamental tensions produced when
international migration encounters the liberal state and its bounded, political community.
 Other Scholars: Alba and Nee: Assimilation: “the decline of an ethnic distinction and its
corollary cultural and social differences” (2003:14)
 (EL SALVADOR in particular) While symbolic ethnicity remains strong – as evidenced
by respondents’ persistent propensity to identify themselves in home country rather than
host country terms – the newcomers are no less aware of the fact that the future is to be
found in the United States. Of course, it is no surprise to discover that the immigrants are
realists. The only question is why the professional students of immigration refuse to see it
that way.
Thesis:
 Moreover, social and political incorporation in the United States reduces affective ties
and provision of material support, all the while facilitating other forms of cross-state
social action (4).
 AGAINST GLICK-SCHILLER / Portes: From this perspective, transnationalism is the
“condition of being” of the transmigrants, engaged in a complex but fundamentally
closed set of relationships, so encompassing as to virtually erase the distinction between
“here” and “there.” (NOTE: G.-S. uses transnational migrants to fit into
transnationalism)
 PORTES 2003: transnationalism = a distinct immigrant minority; (based on survey of
Colombia, Dominican, and Salvador); don’t generalize, says Waldinger (5).
 Normal international transactions, not transnationalism: large flows of remittances,
migrant associations raising funds to help hometowns left behind, and trains or airplanes
filled with immigrants returning home for visits to kin and friends are features
encountered wherever large numbers of international migrants are found throughout the
contemporary world.
 NOT ASSIMILATION: Migrants only do what their states allow (not what Portes says
regular coming and going); AND what the literature calls assimilation is better
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understood as political resocialization, in which the foreigners discard one political
identity for another, all the while attaching a hyphenated, cultural modifier (of Mexican-,
Put somewhat differently, states “cage” the populations residing on their territory,
constraining social ties beyond the territorial divide, while reorienting activities toward
the interior (Mann, 1993).
Methods:
 2002 Pew Hispanic Survey, a nationally representative telephone survey of 4,213 adults,
18 years and older, who were selected at random.
 We focus attention on the five largest nationality groups represented in the 2002 Pew
Hispanic Survey: Mexicans, Cubans, Dominicans, Colombians, Salvadorans (listed in
order of their size in the sample). Not only do these comprise the major streams of Latin
American migration to the United States, each is distinct, both with respect to history,
and to organization of the migration stream. Migration from Mexico is the largest, and
longest-standing; it is also largely a labor migration …
 Mexicans the omitted category, all being dummy variables.
 Used odd ratios, not coefficients.
 Tested each nationality as a reference groups with the others.
Findings:
Table 2:
 Eight dependent variables; (votes in country elections, send remittances, made
one trip or more home, plans to move back, real home is home country, identifies
as national first – then USC Qs – registered to vote – and vote?)


E.G. In general, the survey reveals that, for the majority of respondents, subjective
attachment to the country of birth and its people remains strong.
E.G. After five years of settlement, the probability that a respondent will report a plan to
move home is already below 0.5; at the same point in time, however, the probability of
identifying the home country as the “real home” is just above 0.8. That view then
changes dramatically with time: at 25 years of residence, the probability of identifying
the home country as the “real home” is barely two in five.
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: Haven’t We Heard This Somewhere Before?: A Substantive View of Transnational
Migration Studies By Way of a Reply to Waldinger and Fitzgerald
Author: Nina Glick Schiller and Peggy Levitt
Source: Working Paper, Princeton, the Center for Migration and Development; 2006
Category and Keyword: Transnational Migration, US Immigration, Paradigm
Purpose:
 Among the latest set of scholars to see the transnational light are Roger Waldinger and
David Fitzgerald (2004). Because their article American Journal of Sociology article,
“Transnationalism in Question,” epitomizes the pitfalls of neglecting or negating fifteen
years of scholarly development, we feel it deserves to be critiqued at some length.
Thesis/Proposal:
 To appreciate the utility of a transnational approach, in this rejoinder we first reflect on
the scholarship that Waldinger and Fitzgerald largely ignore. We then highlight important
emerging areas of study and future research directions. This is the kind of overview of the
field is needed to drive theoretical progress.
Findings:
 Capital versus Labor
o By using a corresponding parallel term, scholars of migration in a range of
disciplines were able to contrast the free movement of capital with the barriers to
movement faced by labor.
o Fail to distinguish between migrants and migrants who maintain a home in their
home country, both subject to the country of emigration.
o They only concentrate on nation-states (i.e. politics): Transnational migrants
engage in economic, social, religious, as well as political practices.
o It was post-World War II social science, in forms ranging from Parsonian social
systems theory to modernization theory, which legitimated and popularized the
container perspective. These ideas rendered transnational connections either
invisible, because they were not researched, or problematic, because they violated
the desirable global order of a world divided into seemingly discrete nation states.
o Scholars did not see the need to abandon “push” and “pull” theories of migration,
even Wallerstein.
o VIEW of GLICK SCHILLER / her school: Others have preferred to link the
saliency of transnational social fields established by migrants to moments of
intense economic interconnection or “high points of globalization” (Basch, Glick
Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994). This second school, building on an earlier body
of scholarship articulated by Wallerstein and Braudel, linked trends in migration
to changes in global flows of capital and trade in the 19th and 20th century (Held
1999; Portes and Walton 1981; Sassen 1992). These scholars recognized that
intense economic global restructuring produced a wide range of transborder
connections.
o WRONG: It was the changed paradigm that allowed scholars of migration to
firmly shed the tendency to think of nation-states as the containers within which
social processes should be analyzed.
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o WRONG: Since then, work by Itzigsohn (2000), Portes, Haller and Guarnizo
(2002), R. Smith (2003), and others empirically examine how migrants engage in
the politics of their homelands and their new localities at the same time.
o WRONG: Their container theory treats migrants as a single, unified, outside force
who, by their very transborder movement, threatens the stability of receiving
states by unraveling the social fabric. They see migration and cross border
connections as problematic, while accepting the receiving state as the
unproblematized unit of analysis.
o WRONG: Despite their espousal of a new framework, Waldinger and Fitzgerald
end up “seeing like a nation-state” and embracing the very methodological
nationalism they warn against (12).
o LOYAL TO BOTH: The concept of a transnational social field as a network of
networks---called by various authors a transnational space, circuit or social
formation--- allows us to examine how migrants can live within and across states
at the same time (Faist 2000; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001; Levitt and Glick
Schiller 2004; Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999; Portes 2001; Pries 2001;
Smith and Guarnizo 1998).
 Current work at the intersection between globalization theory and Transnational
Migration Studies is producing new insights into transnational processes that carry us
past Waldinger and Fitzgerald’s archaic division between the state and civil society and
call our attention to other important institutional players that they discount. We will
mention three (15).
o 1) In a seminal work, Carolyn Brettell (1999), building on the scholarship of
Anthony Leeds argues for the need for urban studies to pay much closer attention
to the “city as context.”
 The interplay between transnational movements of capital and the power
and significance of specific places is of course not new. However, the
recent restructuring of global capital has strengthened the significance of
cross-border forces and brought them to the attention of researchers.
 The development of theories linking modes of migrant simultaneous
incorporation to city-scale is just beginning, however, despite the fact that
the terms like “global city” and “gateway city” center the analytical lens
on the relationship between cities and their migrant populations (Clark
2004; Ley 2003; Waldinger 2001).
o 2) Transnational Social Fields that extend between several states without a
homeland politics
o 3) Globality
 When we talk about processes that cross borders, we are also talking about
scholarship that extends beyond migration to include flows of capital,
media, objects, and ideas.
 Their primary identification is not to the nation but to the global religious
community.
Conclusion:
 Instead, good scholarship requires us to place the cross-border actions of migrants and
their descendants, including their long distance nationalism, within an accurate
79

accounting of the world of cross-border processes in which we all live. Migrants’
transnational social fields are one part of a larger global process.
Transnational studies have four pillars: Empirical Transnationalism, Theoretical
Transnationalism, Philosophical Transnationalism, Public Transnationalism.
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: Immigrant Incorporation and Sociocultural Transnationalism
Author: Jose Itzigsohn and Silvia Saucedo
Source: IMR 2002 V36 N3
Category and Keyword: Transnational Migration, US Immigration, Paradigm
Purpose:
 To analyze sociocultural transnational linkages among Colombians, Dominicans and
Salvadorans (in US)
Thesis:
 This study contributes to our expanding knowledge of immigrant transnational- ism by
exploring and analyzing three previously neglected issues: the scope and degree of
participation of immigrants in transnational practices, the determinants of transnational
participation, and the relationship between immigrant incorporation and transnationalism
 Our focus is on sociocultural transnationalism, that is, transnational practices that recreate
a sense of community based on cultural understandings of belonging and mutual
obligations.
Findings:
 Old Paradigm:
o The previous paradigm for the analysis of immigration held that once migrants
entered a new country they broke the ties with their country of origin and engaged
in the processes of incorporation/acculturation/assimilation (Gordon, 1964;Alba
and Nee, 1997; Portes and Rumbaut, 1996).
 New Paradigm:
o Scholars working within the new paradigm have argued that incorporationoriented studies fail to capture an important part of immigrants’ social lives that
takes place across national boundaries. Being a transnational immigrant implies
living and being part of two societies linked through the transnational social
practices of the immigrants.
Methods:
 The data to address these analytic questions come from a survey conducted in the
framework of the Comparative Immigrant Enterprise Project (CIEP), a collaborative
study that involved a survey of immigrant households among three immigrant
communities - Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Colombians - in four cities of the United
States - New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D C and Providence, Rhode Island.
(headquarters @ Princeton)
Conclusion:
 We had three goals in this article: 1) to measure the extent of participation in
transnational activities; 2) to analyze its determinants; and 3) to explore the relationship
between incorporation and transnationalism.
o The picture that emerges from this study is that the percentage of participation for
any particular activity is low.
o When we look, however, at civic engagement in transnational practices over all
the different forms of transnational participation, the percentages are rather high.
81
o Furthermore, the analysis shows that there is more than one set of circumstances
that can give rise to transnational sociocultural practices. Our three explanations linear transnationalism, resource-based transnationalism, and reactive
transnationalism - receive support.
o Salvador:
 Salvadorans have the more vulnerable legal position and experience more
discrimination, hence the prevalence of reactive transnationalism in this
community.
o Dominicans:
 Dominicans are characterized by a dense pattern of residential
concentration and ethnic organization, hence the strength of linear
transnationalism in this community.
o Colombians:
 Colombians are much less organized and more individually oriented than
Dominicans. Their incorporation depends on individual class resources,
hence the strength of resource dependent transnationalism.
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: International Perspectives on Transnational Migration: An Introduction
Author: Peggy Levitt, Josh DeWind and Steven Vertovec
Source: IMR 2003 V37 N3
Category and Keyword: Transnational Migration, US Immigration, Paradigm, New
Purpose:
 1) Reflecting the organization and ensuing discussion at the two meetings, the first group
of articles in this volume is concerned with general analytical challenges posed by
transnational migration research.
o Steven Vertovec suggests ways in which scholarship about transnational
migration might benefit by borrowing concepts from research on other types of
transnational social formations such as social movements and business networks.
 2) The second group of articles in the volume presents the broader implications of
empirical research on particular aspects of transnational migration. To clarify some of the
conceptual muddiness that has characterized earlier scholarship, we asked each
contributor to focus on a particular aspect of transnational social life - economic, political,
sociocultural, and religious.
 3) Portes: Alejandro Portes supplements theoretical arguments contained within the
earlier papers by summarizing results of some of the research upon which they are based.
He outlines the ideas he feels reflect a general consensus in the field and places them
within the context of a survey he and several colleagues conducted to measure the extent
of transnational economic, political, and sociocultural activities among various immigrant
groups. His contribution ends with recommendations for future research.
Premises:
1) transnational migrants are embedded in multi-layered social fields and that, to truly
understand migrants’ activities and experiences, their lives must be studied within the
context of these multiple strata.
2) states continue to exert a strong influence on transnational migration.
3) whether or not transnational migration has a “liberating” effect on migrants is a
question that needs investigation.
4) aspects of migrants’ lives that were largely ignored by much of the early transnational
migration scholarship ought to be taken into account. Religion, for example, is salient in
many migrants’ day-to-day lives
5) enduring transnational ties are not new but were also a factor in earlier flows, such as
the wave of transatlantic migrations at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth centuries.
A) (I DON’T SEE THIS: It offers stable employment to the relatively small
portion of the immigrant labor pool who are highly-educated and skilled and more
short-term employment to unskilled migrants with little English.
6) not all migrants are engaged in transnational practices and that those who are, do so
with considerable variation in the sectors, levels, strength, and formality of their
involvement.
7) host- country incorporation and transnational practices can occur simultaneously.
83
8) all of our contributors question the applicability of the terminologies that have been
traditionally used in the emigration-immigration- assimilation paradigm.
9) the subjective as well as objective dimensions of transnational practices matter.
Second Set of Articles:
 In the first article in the more empirically-based set of articles in this volume, Luis
Guarnizo draws our attention to the intersection between migrants’ economic activities,
their sociocultural impacts, the state, and glob- al economic processes that shape and are
shaped by transnational practices.
o Migrants’ remittances, entrepreneurial activities, and support for local projects
generate demands for goods and services that produce backward and forward
economic linkages, involving small-scale businesses, corporate activities, and the
state.
o These dynamics reorganize the relationship between local and global economic
life, inextricably connecting the activities of individual migrants with those of
global capital.
o When the creditworthiness of highly- indebted countries is updated on the basis of
expected future remittances, Guarnizo argues, transnational migration’s
significant impact on global capital is clear. Within the context of global capitalist
expansion and migration, not only does labor follow capital but capital also often
follows labor.
 Eva 0stergaard-Nielsen wants to bring to light the “how” and “then what” of
transnational political engagements. She conceives transnational politics as a multilevel
process enacted through the interaction between sending and receiving country political
authorities, global human rights norms and regimes, and networks of other nonstate
actors with which migrants’ transnational political networks are often intertwined.
 Robert C. Smith also calls for an expanded notion of transnational politics. He argues that
to understand relations between sending states and their diasporas, we must analyze
migrants’ evolving relations to the global system, their domestic politics, and their ability
to exercise autonomous or semi- autonomous political action with respect to their
homelands.
 Peggy Levitt introduces what has been, until now, an understudied sphere of transnational
activism - religion. Her article summarizes what is known to date about religious life
across borders, focusing in particular on religious institutions, the relationship between
religious and political landscapes, and the interaction between transnational religion and
politics.
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: “You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant:” Religion and Transnational
Migration
Author: Peggy Levitt
Source: IMR 2003 V37 N3
Category and Keyword: Transnational Migration, US Immigration, Paradigm, New
Purpose:
 1) First, I provide a brief overview of related bodies of work on global, diasporic and
immigrant religion and differentiate them from studies of migrants’ transnational
religious practices.
 2) I selectively summarize what we have learned about the role of religion in
transnational migration from prior research.
 3) I propose an approach to future research on these questions.
Points:
 The study of transnational migration and religion, therefore, provides an empirical
window onto one way in which religious globalization actually gets done (849).
 One way that migrants stay connected to their sending communities is through
transnational religious practices. (851)
 The transnational religious practices of individuals are often reinforced by the
organizational contexts within which they take place.
 So while research on religion and transnational migration focuses on individuals and the
local, regional and national organizations in which they participate, it must nest these
processes within the multilayered social fields in which they take place. (852)
 Finally, global culture and institutions clearly shape migrants’ transnational religious
practices.
Variations in Religion:
 Ebaugh and Chafetz (2002) propose using network analysis to under- stand religious
connections across boundaries. (e.g. RCC in Monterrey & Houston)
 Yang (2001) also uses a network approach to analyze transnational Chinese Christian
communities. He finds three-layered trans-pacific networks formed by contacts between
individuals, single churches and parachurch international organizations.
 LEVITT: From the mid 1800s to the present, the Catholic church has sent out religious
orders, mounted missionary campaigns, operated schools, built pilgrimage shrines, and
organized international encounters that produced a vast, interconnected network of
transnational activities (Casanova, 1994). (855)
 CASTELLS on Protestants: They function like what Manuel Castells (2000) has called a
network society - decentralized, flexible yet connected networks providing customized
services and goods. Just as decentralized, adaptive modes of production are better suited
to compete within the global economy, so flexible production and dissemination of
religious goods may be better suited to serve contemporary religious consumers. (858)
Religion as Transnational Civic Engagement
85


Religious institutions differ from other immigrant institutions in that they see themselves
as embodying universal and timeless truths. … As global interconnectedness expands,
to what extent do religious traditions articulate globally-oriented theologies?
PENTECOSTALS: not apolitical: The Salvadoran Pentecostal churches in Washington
that Menjivar (1999) studied kept in close touch with their sister congregations in El
Salvador. They supported community development projects in their home com- munities,
sponsored speaking exchanges between sending and receiving- country pastors, shared a
monthly newspaper, held conventions that brought congregations together, and
participated in international Evangelical church councils. Evangelization rather than
community development motivated these efforts. Members’ primary goal was to
strengthen and extend the community of God and any political or civic achievements
were of secondary importance.
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: Conclusion: Theoretical Convergences and Empirical Evidence in the Study of Immigrant
Transnationalism
Author: Alejandro Portes
Source: IMR 2003 V37 N3
Category and Keyword: Transnational Migration, US Immigration, Paradigm, New
Purpose:
 I intend to supplement the abundant theoretical arguments contained in this issue with a
summary presentation of actual results.
Methods:
 Surveys of the Comparative Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project (CIEP)
Conclusions: (I)
 First, the existence of this field creates an alternative path of socioeconomic and political
adaptation to the host society not envisioned by traditional models of assimilation.
 Second, cross-border initiatives, even when enacted occasionally, are of great importance
to the development of home nations. As Guarnizo emphasizes in his contribution to this
issue, remittances and migrant investments are no longer a marginal phenomenon, but
have become one of the pillars of the financial stability and prospects for development of
sending countries.
 Third, the ramifications of the phenomenon and the forms that it can take in different
countries are not yet fully understood. As the article by Levitt in this issue shows, the
field of transnationalism is not composed exclusively of economic and political
transactions. Religion plays a decisive role in many cases, and the extent of its presence
and impact in host and sending nations stands in need of additional investigation (Levitt,
2003).
Conclusions: (II)
There is a need for additional comparative and quantitative studies of transnationalism
based on surveys or aggregate official statistics for three reasons.
 1) The first is to place the phenomenon in perspective by ascertaining its true dimensions.
(e.g. money transfers – immigrants). (ME: much greater are institutional transfers, e.g.
grants by missionaries, like OSBs.)
 2) Second, comparative quantitative studies are necessary to test hypotheses about
determinants, forms and consequences of transnationalism. The theoretical concepts
discussed by Vertovec (2003) as relevant to the study of the phenomenon, such as
embeddedness, social networks and social capital, have been illustrated in a number of
case studies.
 Third, longitudinal data are required to examine the crucial issue of generational
transmissibility. Is transnationalism mostly or exclusively a first generation phenomenon,
or can children of immigrants be expected to participate in large numbers?
87
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration
Author: Richard Alba and Victor Nee
Source: BOOK, 2003
Category and Keyword: Assimilation, Transnationalism,
This book appears to be about how America will continue to move forward to assimilate its
immigrants. Racism will diminish, as exemplified in the examples of Texaco and Coca Cola,
who have (in the 1990s) agreed to pay fines for discrimination and in the case of Coca Cola to
have on oversight by the government to monitor employment (55).
150 As for Transnationalism, he would fall on the side of Waldinger: “We suspect that a similar
degradation will happen across generations in most immigrant families in the United States, even
when (151) immigrant generation is able to maintain ties in multiple places. Few families will
be truly at home in more than one place.
“Political transnationalism may also come under threat from the host state. There is a risk in
extrapolating into the future from very recent developments, such as the spreading possibilities
for plural citizenship.”
151 use the example of Germany: (152) As described earlier, the German language was
unusually tenacious across the generations, supported by bilingual public education in many
states. Germany also did not lose sight of its sons and daughters abroad, in the U.S. and other
nations, the so-called Auslandsdeutsche. In 1913, on the eve of WWI, a new citizenship law
there made German parentage the key determinant, thus allowing the Auslandsdeutsche and their
descendants to retain German Citizenship.
Note: after Germans in America agitated for an embargo against the allies, “Theodore Roosevelt
responded with a thundering denunciation of “hyphenated Americans”; some states banned the
teaching of German, ….” “The hold of German Kultur had been decisively broken.” (They had
become 100% Americanized.
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and
Nationalism Reconsidered
Author: Edited by Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, & Cristina Blanc-Szanton
Source: BOOK, 1992
Category and Keyword: Immigration, Transnational Migration (at this time Transmigrants)
The book gives theory first (i.e. by Glick Schiller) and then ethnographic cases about what they
see as transnationalism taking place.
EG page 125 essay by Aihwa Ong, “Limits to Cultural Accumulation: Chinese Capitalists on the
American Pacific Rim.”
Writes about the Hong Kong elite occupying 15% of an exclusive community in Northern
California. RE: Beneficiaries of the Financial Enterprise that is Hong Kong.
135 White upper class does not fully accept them, however.
136 They retreat into their own networks.
141 “A frustrated investor told me, “They [the Anglos] want your Pacific Rim money, but they
don’t want you.” Nevertheless, the continuing influx of affluent Chinese immigrants has begun a
process that will change the way Asian-Americans negotiate their relations with the wider
society.”
Transnational Migration (7)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: The Economic Sociology of Immigration: Essays on Networks, Ethnicity, and
Entrepreneurship
Author: Edited by Alejandro Portes
Source: BOOK, 1995
Category and Keyword: Immigration, Transnational Migration (at this time Transmigrants)
This book has several essays that look at immigration from an economic perspective, including
Saskia Sassen in Immigration and Local Labor Markets (i.e. segmented assimilation – downward
versus upward). Bryan Roberts has an article too.
What struck me the most in this book, was their quoting of a German economist from the early
20th century, that the ECONOMIST magazine has made into a weekly column. It is apt.
vii The forward is written by Robert Merton, a follower of Talcott Parsons.
Such a move might resemble the Schumpeterian program for Sozialökonomik that comprises
“economic theory,” “economic sociology,” “economic history,” and “statistics.” Whey, then,
allow a misplaced contest among diverse but complementary theoretical perspectives to
reintroduce a latter-day version of Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness? A discipline
pluralism, constrained by the norm of “socially organized skepticism” that has long been
institutionalized in science, seems indicated.
Several of the chapters in this volume that center on ethnic entrepreneurial patterns bring
Schumpeter back to mind. Precisely because he had gone to some pains to exclude ethnic
variation in his analysis of class formation by confining himself to an “ethnisch homogenen
Milieu” …there is reason to suppose that Schumpeter, as the prime mover of a theory of
entrepreneurial innovation as the spur to economic development, would have resonated to these
studies of ethnic entrepreneurial patterns embedded in institutional structures. Along with their
theoretical contributions to economic sociology, the studies greatly advance a sociological
understanding of our multicultural and multi-ethnic society.
Chapter 1 by Alejandro Portes goes over all the main elements of the economic theories and
applies them to immigration. The chapter is titled, “Economic Sociology and the Sociology of
Immigration: A Conceptual Overview.”
For example, he offers five sets of concepts from the field of economy to relate to the
interrelationship of the two fields (he will do this for immigration as well).
What are they?
3 Socially Orientated Economic Action
For example, he states, “economic action is socially orientated in the sense that even the
unrestricted pursuit of gain is constrained by reciprocity expectations built up in the course of
social interaction.
6 Embedded Transactions
90
Portes writes, “In later work, Granovetter distinguished between “relational” embeddedness,
referring to economic actors’ personal relations with one another, and “structural” embeddedness,
referring to the broader network of social relations to which these actors belong.”
8 Social Networks
(…most important types of structures in which economic transactions are embedded)
Networks are important in economic life because they are sources for the acquisition of scarce
means, such as capital and information, and because they simultaneously impose effective
constraints on the unrestricted pursuit of personal gain.
12 Social Capital
Social capital refers to the capacity of individuals to command scarce resources by virtue of their
membership in networks or broader social structures.
17 Cumulative and Unintended Effects
{Becker} sought to demonstrate how past events and decisions progressively lock individuals
into a given career path, increasing the costs and decreasing the probability of shifting to others.
In economic sociology, cumulative causation is frequently used as an explanation; unlike the
notion of path-dependence in economics, however, the emphasis here is on the social contexts
that make such spiraling possible.
NOW, four concepts from the field of the sociology of immigration
19 Core-Periphery Influence and Structural Imbalancing
Countries with large labor supplies and small amounts of capital produce low equilibrium wages.
The opposite is the case for countries where labor is scarce and capital abundant. The result is
migration of the factors until wages decline sufficiently in capital-rich countries and rise
sufficiently in labor-rich nations to produce a new international equilibrium.
23 Modes of Incorporation
24 Immigrants are viewed not simply as individuals who come clutching a bundle of personal
skills, but rather as members of groups and participants in broader social structures that affect in
multiple ways their economic mobility. The concept of modes of incorporation refers to the
process of insertion of immigrants into these various social contexts. Contextual effects interact
with human capital brought from abroad, determining the extent to which it can be productively
used and increased.
25 Middleman Groups and Ethnic Enclaves
27 The forms adopted by immigrant enterprise are not homogenous, and several distinct types
have been described and classified by researchers in this field. Bonacich employed the term
“middleman minorities” to refer to those groups that specialize in commercial and financial
services among a numerically larger but impoverished population. Middlemen are distinct in
nationality, culture, and sometimes race from the dominant and subordinate groups to whom they
relate. They occupy economic spaces abandoned or disdained in mainstream businesses and
simultaneously provide a buffer between these businesses and the poor population they serve.
91
29 The Informal Economy
The informal economy is defined as the sum total of income-earning activities that are
unregulated by legal codes in an environment where similar activities are regulated. Informal
activities are distinguished from criminal ones in that they encompass goods and services that are
legal, but whose production and marketing is unregulated. Drugs and prostitution are criminal
activities in the US, while production of garments in clandestine sweatshops and unlicensed
street vending are informal.
(Part of 7 Transnational Migraion)
Date: 09.25.2011
Title: U.S. Deportation Policy, Family Separation, and Circular Migration
Author: Hagan, Jacqueline, Karl Eschbach & Nestor Rodriguez
Source: IMR 200 V42 N1
Category and Keyword: Immigration, Deportation Policy, United States, Circular Migration
Purpose:
 we examine how family relations, ties, remittance behavior, and settlement experiences
are disrupted by deportation, and how these ties influence future migration intentions.
Findings:
 a significant number of deportees were long-term settlers in the United States.
 Many had established work histories and had formed families of their own.
 These strong social ties in turn influence the likelihood of repeat migration to the United
States.
Thesis:
 Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the
Anti- Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) into law.
AND USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law by George W. Bush.
= these exclusionary laws represent a dramatic departure from post-WWII immigration
policies, which had granted increasing rights to immigrants and their families.
 Some things with IIRAIRA: expedited removal, aggravated felony expanded, drugs (5
grams of marijuana) etc. judicial review: “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”
versus the past “hardship” of family member for LPR
 AEDPA further bolstered the enforcement arm of immigration authority by virtually
doing away with judicial review for all categories of immigrants eligible for deportation.
= In effect, IIRIRA and AEDPA removed the legal barriers that protected immigrants from
deportation by curtailing judicial review, restricting due process, and eliminating relief for
immigrants with family ties in the United States, regardless of the severity of the crime. (and the
Patriot Act said you can detain and deport immigrants who are perceived to have threats to
national security)
EFFECT: 1990-95 40,000 yr; 1996-2005 180,000 yr; 2005 – 208,000; 85% deported in 2005
were Mexican & Central American (HON/GUATE/EL SAL)
 Studies on Mass deportations and effect, not many studies;
o 1st time border crosses versus long time residents being deported
o Questions: First, how are family relations and ties, remittance behavior, and
settlement experiences disrupted by deportation? Second, how do these family
ties and disruptions influence the future migration intentions of deportees?
Methods:
 To address these research questions, we draw on findings from retrospective face-to-face
interviews with a random sample of 300 Salvadoran deportees in their home communities.
 The arrival and reintegration of deportees in El Salvador is largely organized by a
program established in 1999 and in operation through 2004 called Bienvenido a Casa
(BAC) or “Welcome Home.”
93

The interviewers were instructed to approach every third attendee who arrived at the job
placement meetings and request an interview.
 The interviews, which were conducted in Spanish, averaged about an hour in length.
(Trust created because not recorded AND all interviewers were former deportees who
worked with BAC)
Table 1: Deportee Sample Compared To BAC Census Of Deportees And Census 2000
Characteristics Of Resident Noncitizen Immigrants From El Salvador In The United States
 Differences: Compared to the settled population of Salvadorans, the deportees in both the
BAC and study samples were overwhelmingly male and young.
o These age and gender differences are not surprising when we consider that
migration is selective; most authorized and unauthorized recent arrivals are young
o Indeed, in FY 2003, the median age of all persons deported from the United States
was 28, with women (primarily Mexican) constituting just 15% of all removals
(USDHS, 2004:151).
 more than half of those in our study sample and in the BAC census reported speaking
English well or very well, percentages that closely match those reported in the 2000
census.
 deportees were much less likely than their settled counterparts to have com- pleted 12 or
more years of schooling,
 A number of deportees, however, had spent a large part of their lives in the United States;
roughly a fourth of the persons in both our study sample and in the BAC census reported
residing in the United States for more than 10 years.
o As we shall see, these residential and work histories have major implications for
the future settlement intentions of many Salvadoran deportees.
Families in the U.S.
 In recent decades, the structure of immigrant households in the United States has become
increasingly complex, often comprised of extended horizontal and vertical kin linkages
… Glick, Bean, and Van Hook, 1997)
 Several studies, for example, find that Mexicans and Central Americans tend to move
from larger and more extended household structures to smaller nuclear families over time
(Browning and Rodriguez, 1985; Rodriguez, 1987).
Table 2: Household composition
1) In the first type, the deportee reported living with a parent, aunt, or uncle.
2) The second type included households in which the deportee lived with siblings and
cousins, but without either a parent, aunt, or uncle, or spouse or own child.
3) In the third type, the deportee lived with a spouse or child, with or without other kin,
but without a parent or other relative from the parent’ generation.
Another 4 percent of deportees reported that they lived in a household in the United
States with nonkin, combinations of relatives not enumerated above, or both.
Analysis:
 As Table 3 shows, persons deported within a year of their arrival in the United States
were most likely to live in a sibling/cousin household type, or to report living without
relatives in the United States. This type of living arrangement is consistent with young,
unattached labor migrants from Central America and Mexico (Chavez, 1990).
94

With 15 years of settlement history in the United states, only 2 percent of the deportees
were living in nonfamily house- holds and close to half had formed either nuclear
household families or were living in mutigenerational households with parents and aunts,
some of which included children and thus spanned three generations.
Transnational Family Life:
 Side One: On the one hand, if deportees have a spouse and/or child in the United States –
who may or may not be legal – then they could find themselves in a situation in which
they are separated temporarily or permanently from loved ones who, more often than not,
depended on the deported family member’s earnings for survival.
 Side Two: if deportees left a spouse and/or child in their home country, then ironically
deportation may lead to family reunification. This reunification may not be necessarily
welcomed, since the deportee may no longer be able to remit earnings
 Table 4:
o Among these, 58 percent reported that their spouses lived in the United States,
while 39 percent reported that their spouses lived in El Salvador.
o Leaving children behind in care of relatives is a strategy employed by many labor
migrants, including those from Latin America.
 Motherhood: In more recent years, as labor migrant streams have become increasingly
feminized, mothers too are leaving their children in the care of others, a concept that
Hondangneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) refer to as transnational motherhood.
o Transnational parent- hood, however, is only part of the story. Several of the male
deportees formed families (wife and children) in both the United States and El
Salvador,
Remittance Disruption:
 Ranking high among remitter groups in the United States are Central Americans, who,
controlling for other factors, are more likely to remit than Mexicans.
 remittances to El Salvador surpassed national exports as a source of foreign exchange,
comprising between 6 and 17 percent of household income (de la Garza et al., 1997).
 increased by 33 percent since 2001 to reach an all-time high of $2.5 billion –
approximately 16.1 percent of the GDP.
 Most of the scholarship on international migration and remittances in Latin America
concentrates on the social and economic impact of remittances on communities of origin,
with an eye toward assessing their potential for investment and economic development
(Lozan, 1993; Massey and Parrado, 1994; Lowell and de la Garza, 2000; Parrado,
2004).1
o In terms of who remits, older and more educated immigrants are less likely to
remit, while those with higher earnings are more likely to remit.
o as the period of settlement in the United States increases, the likelihood of
remitting declines.
o Immigrants with immediate family members in the United States – including
spouses and children – were dramatically less likely to remit than those who have
the same immediate family members living abroad.
o being a member of social networks that maintain ties to communities of origin
increases the likelihood of remitting (De Sipio, 2000).
o Table 5: As Table 5 shows, more than half (51 percent) of all deportees sent
money home. However, this figure includes persons who were deported from the
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border or a port of entry and persons without employment, who may have had no
opportunity to make remittances.
o After 6 months, a large majority (78 percent) of the more settled immigrants in
the sample sent remittances home.
o As Table 5 highlights, 71 percent of the sample who reported sending remittances
had wives and children in the United States. Perhaps this finding is not so very
surprising when we consider that by far the most common recipients of
remittances were the parents of the deportee.
o Most remittances go to sustain recipients: In general, only a small fraction of
remittances sent to Latin America are devoted to savings and investment (Durand
et al., 1996).
Future Return:
 Although 38 percent reported that they would migrate back to the United States, another
34 percent stated that they did not plan to return to the United States, and 25 percent
stated they did not know if they would migrate again to the United States
 many deportees are leaving spouses and children behind in the United States, especially
those who have been in the United States for long periods of time. This factor alone
subsequently generates a return migration of thousands of deportees.
 The issue that this creates is not simply that it is inaccurate to characterize Latin
American immigration as mainly an economic phenomenon, but that policy efforts that
seek to restrict unauthorized immigration through economic controls
 Apply the 208,000 figure to the figure of those in El Salvador who said they will go back
and divide by 2: you get 39,500;
o One reason is that Mexican migrants are the largest national category of deportees
(70 percent), and they have a much easier time in migrating again because of
accumulated social capital and years of experience in migrating, along with their
close proximity to the United States.
o While a deportee may initially be undecided about migrating again or even have
decided against it, over time family needs either in the country of origin or in the
United States may create pressures for a return trip.
Conclusion:
 These enforcement policies – which target broad classes of immigrants – undermine
long-standing family reunification principles of U.S. immigration policy and pose dire
social, economic, and psychological costs for deportees and their family members both in
the United States and their communities of origin.
 for the family members left behind, many of whom suffered emotional, financial, and
psychological trauma as a result of losing loved ones who may have also been the
primary breadwinners of the U.S. household (Rodriguez and Hagan, 2004; Jokinen, 2005;
Lopez, Connell, and Kraul, 2005).
 This paper represents a first research attempt to systematically address the extent to
which family ties, remittance behavior, and settlement experiences are disrupted by
deportation.
 Thus an unintended consequence or latent function of U.S. deportation policy may very
well be the creation of circular migratory patterns within the larger migration streams.
o i.e. the policy does not end the migration of unauthorized or criminal migrants; it
simply raises the human costs for migrants and their families.
96
1. Theory (Various Sorts)
Date: 10.07.2011
Title: The Resilient Importance of Class: A Nominalist Interpretation
Author: Alejandro Portes
Source: Political Power and Social Theory Vol 14, pages 249-284 (book)
Category and Keyword: Immigration, Deportation Policy, United States, Circular Migration
Purpose:
 Contrary to the arguments that have been formed (i.e. USSR collapse meant that
capitalists societies did not have class inequalities OR they didn’t matter);
 I seek to demonstrate that the concept, defined according to its original Marxian and
Weberian roots, continues to occupy a central role for sociological theory even in the
absence of everyday indicators of its existence – advances 3 interrelated points:
o The validity of the concept of class for explanation and prediction does not
depend on individual self-definitions.
o A class framework is necessary to provide systematic guidance for many analyses
of social processes. In the absence of such framework these accounts are often
swayed by surface manifestations of phenomena.
o The utility of class analysis does not depend on dogmatic adherence to 19th
century typologies, buy on the use of such mappings as heuristic tools, modifiable
according of evolving conditions.
Critique:
 POINT: REALIST FALLACY:
 It is possible for social classes to remain inert politically, their members never explicitly
conscious of their particular position, and still play an essential role in the organization of
society and in long-term social change.
 Criticism of Grusky and Sorensen (1998): They re-defined class (academic construct) to
occupation based. Problem: does not get at a lot of nuances in the actual population like
grand capitalists, rentiers, and even the redundant workers.
 POINT: CLASSLESS FALLACY:
 National Research Council report on immigrant economic + and – s. “There is no hint in
the NRC report of the major social cleavages splitting the nation on the question of
immigration or of the possibility that some sectors may benefit mightily from the arrival
of newcomers and others pay a hefty price for their presence.” [ME: Thus the grand
capitalists’ desire for economists!]
 – Classless analysis assumes implicitly that society is an aggregate of individuals,
families, or communities with comparable levels of power and similar access to
opportunities and rewards.
o The classless fallacy consists of assuming that the incidence and effects of major
processes occur evenly across society with variations being affected by individual,
family or at best community characteristics.
 REMEDY: Class analysis makes references to gradational hierarchies of prestige or
income only secondarily because the latter are seen as consequences of more fundamental
structural cleavages.
 POINT REIFICATION FALLACY:
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

E.G. too rigid of definitions; Grusky and Sorensen are essentially right that occupationbased organizations are far more active and produce greater closure than those based on
classic Marxist definitions of class. However, calling occupations “classes” leave no
baby after the bath water.
REMEDY
o Basic cleavages of political and economic power change over time, giving rise to
different class configurations.
o Classes are theoretical constructs devised for the structural interpretation of social
phenomena
 The number, composition, and patterns of interaction of social classes will
vary over time.
 Particular “maps” of the class structure used for the explanation of
different social phenomena may vary without rendering such variations
necessarily invalid.
THE ARGUMENT /
 The four points below represent the core of class analysis and can be accepted as valid a
priori. A nominalist approach can be grounded on these foundations by considering
different dimensions of power and the major social cleavages to which they give rise.
o 1) Social phenomena are not explainable by their superficial manifestations.
There is “deep structure” defined by durable inequalities among large social
aggregates
o 2) Classes are defined by their relationships to each other and not simply by a set
of “gradational” positions along some hierarchy. In this sense, status rankings are
a manifestation, not a defining feature of class.
o 3) Classes are defined by differential access to power within a given social system.
o 4) Class position is transmissible across generations.
XEROX 270 =
Table 2: A Typology of the Modern Class Structure (and Table 1, p 256 = Social Phenomena
from Different Analytic Perspectives)

Some points:
o The possession of wealth represents a fundamental divide in modern capitalist
society with possessors and non-possessors expected to behave differently and
line up systematically on opposite sides in many political issues.
o Common to the three classes of wealth possessors is that individuals need not be
born into them, but can access them through extraordinary skill and luck.
o In other words, individual abilities are important as a class-conferring attribute to
the extent that they are in demand by members of the dominant classes and the
institutions that they control.
o Regular salaried and waged workers are in a much better position to come
together in defense of their interests than isolated home workers and those paid on
apiece rate basis …. Mutual visibility and awareness of a common position
among regular workers facilitate their association and the search for occupational
closure. This is also the reason why corporate managers in the service of capital
98
o
o
o
o
have energetically pursued employment “flexibility” in recent years – a codeword
for breaking the power of employee associations through fragmentation (267) of
the labor process and the use of manifold subcontracting arrangements …The
success of this strategy has pushed a number of common workers into one of the
two remaining classes…
Through a variety of strategic ploys, described at length in the specialized
literature, the dominant classes succeeded in imposing the logic of globalization
on their unionized work forces, converting a significant portion into redundant
workers..)
REDUNDANT: It represents, in a sense, the living sequel to the defeat of past
efforts by organized segments of the working-class to impose its terms on capital.
American capitalists confronted the challenge of global competition by discarding
the social pact with organized labor and promoting flexibility and
entrepreneurship.
Petty Entrepreneurship rebounded
Immigration and Class Structure: (XEROX Table 3)
 Flexible specialization and the movement of capital abroad have been accompanied by
the rise of labor migration into the advanced countries. (274)
 Thus, unlike the situation at the beginning of the 20th century where immigrants entered
mostly at the bottom of the American class structure, at present they add to all
economically active classes – from elite workers to petty entrepreneurs. (275)
 The only class negatively affected by immigration is that of common workers, but as seen
previously, this class lacks the internal cohesiveness and power to effectively oppse the
flow.