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This article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the Mariel boatlift crisis, in which an estimated 125,000 Cuban refugees migrated to Florida between April and October, 1980. The author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock, drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration. That literature shows that the wage impact must be measured by carefully matching the skills of the immigrants with those of the incumbent workforce. Given that at least 60% of the Marielitos were high school dropouts, this article specifically examines the wage impact for this low-skill group. This analysis overturns the prior finding that the Mariel boatlift did not affect Miami's wage structure. The wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, by 10 to 30%, suggesting an elasticity of wages with respect to the number of workers between -20.5 and -21.5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami's labor market to rapidly absorb the Mariel immigrants was largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of immigrants in the two decades before the Mariel Boatlift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the 1980 Cuban Mariel migration marked a turning point in American perceptions and media representations of female Cuban immigrants, and Cuban exiles in the United States more generally. By examining how sexualized representations of Mariel women coincided with a more general stigmatization of Mariel migrants, I contend that single Cuban women arriving in the boatlift underwent a process of racialization, in which they became increasingly undifferentiated from historical stereotypes of the sexually threatening Latina immigrant in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In public diplomacy, states are often called upon to defend themselves rhetorically when they are blamed by foreign actors for untoward action. Why do states engage in rhetorical defense and how do they go about it? To answer this question, the author employs social accounts theory to theorize the motivation and structure of rhetorical defense. Following a discussion of social accounts, he analyzes the tactics of blame avoidance and argues that they are constructed from validity claims of truth, rightness, and sincerity, as stipulated by Habermas in his theory of communicative action. This structure of rhetorical defense as accounts is then examined in a case study of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense of his government’s actions in the 2010 Turkish flotilla incident. The empirical study suggests that rhetorical defense is indeed composed of validity claims, but more specifically that these revolve mostly around norm-in-context claims, namely arguments that seek to establish a fit between norms and situations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study examines the mediating effects of gender, race, and class in the Mariel Cuban immigrant adaptation process. It explores the significance of the Mariel identity by comparing the experiences of pre-1980 arrivals with those of the Mariel cohort (1980–1981) and post-Mariel arrivals (1982–1990, 1990–2000). The central question of the study is the extent to which the Marielitos’ experience as a group with stigmatization and being labeled as “different” and pathological has persisted in having a different effect on their adaptation to the U.S. from that of other Cuban arrivals before and after Mariel. This study bases its definition of stigma on sociologically grounded theoretical orientation of the construction of a social identity in which a dominant group(s) attribute an undesired difference from what was anticipated to an out-group such that it leads to varieties of discrimination that reduce one's life chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]