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Prior research has examined the incorporation outcomes among unauthorized migrants after implementation of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). However, few studies have evaluated how legalization opportunities produce gendered outcomes among the second-generation children of unauthorized immigrants. We examine the association of legalization opportunities provided through IRCA with the years of schooling attained by the sons and daughters of Mexican American immigrants. By distinguishing likely eligibility for one of two programs implemented under IRCA—the Legally Authorized Workers and Special Agricultural Workers programs—we consider whether type of legalization program matters by assessing gender differences in schooling among children of Mexican immigrants. Although legalization provides a substantial educational premium for the children of Mexican immigrants regardless of gender, the size of the legalization premium is smaller, on average, for sons than daughters. The advantage to daughters is especially notable among those with parents eligible for the Special Agricultural Workers program. We consider these findings in the context of theories of immigrant incorporation and intergenerational mobility.

This chapter examines the size and scope of international migration, its theoretical underpinnings, and measures of migration. More than 3% of the world’s population consists of international migrants, who are not evenly distributed but concentrated in high-income destination countries. The countries of origin are becoming more diverse, with India now providing more migrants than any other. Immigration policies in destination countries increasingly favor highly educated immigrants. The chapter focuses also on the United States, the largest receiving country for immigrants. There, the ongoing retirement of the Baby Boom, decades of below-replacement fertility among the native-born population, and growth in college attendance have given rise to a need for more less-skilled workers, many of whom are immigrants.

This paper invokes a membership-exclusion theoretical model of immigrant integration to investigate political incorporation. Specifically, we examine the extent to which unauthorized migration status is associated with general and particular political knowledge and with other kinds of structural incorporation. In the analyses, we use data from the initial wave of the 2012 Latino Immigrant National Election Study (LINES) targeting adult immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we find that unauthorized Latino immigrants have significantly lower levels of general political knowledge than green card holders, those with other government IDs, or naturalized citizens, and that the difference between the unauthorized and the legal groups holds up when controls are introduced for exposure (quantity and quality of time in the country) and various kinds of structural incorporation, although differences among the legal groups do not. Thus, forms of structural integration mediate the effects of exposure on acquisition of general political knowledge by legal immigrants, but they do not for unauthorized immigrants, providing evidence that membership exclusion severely restricts political incorporation. At the same time, unauthorized immigrants show more awareness about changes in the unemployment rate than legal immigrants do, a result consistent both with their main reason for migration (to work) and with their having recourse only to collective action as a form of political expression.

This paper examines the degree to which fertility and socio-demographic changes are reducing the size of the U.S.-born less-skilled working-age population in the United States. By less-skilled, we mean persons with a high school diploma or less. By consequences of fertility change, we mean the repercussions of both high fertility in past decades (the Baby Boom) and below replacement native-born fertility in more recent decades. By consequences of socio-demographic change, we refer to the rise in the proportion of the population starting and finishing college. In the context of evidence indicating that the relative size of economic sectors hiring less-skilled workers has not diminished in recent decades (with the exception of manufacturing employment), we suggest these demographic and social changes imply that the country will continue to rely on less-skilled immigrant workers. We assess this idea based on analyses of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data for decennial census years starting in 1970 and running through 2010. The results show a net decline of more than 7 million persons in the U.S.-born less-skilled working-age population since 1990, and a looming decline of more than 12 million between now and 2030. Educational upgrading, especially among women, contributes a notable share to these shifts, but so does earlier high fertility (the aging of the Baby Boomers) and more recent low native fertility. Interestingly, the number of less-skilled unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2010 is smaller than the decline in the size of the less-skilled U.S.-born working-age population over the same period.

This research compares cities between and within the United States and Europe with respect to their dimensionality and degree of immigrant incorporation. Based on theoretical perspectives about immigrant incorporation, structural differentiation and national incorporation regimes, we hypothesize that more inclusionary (MI) cities will show more dimensions of incorporation and more favorable incorporation outcomes than less inclusionary (LI) places, especially in regard to labor market and spatial variables. We use data from recent major surveys of young adult second-generation groups carried out in Los Angeles, New York, and 11 European cities to assess these ideas. The findings indicate that second-generation immigrants in New York (MI) and in European MI places (i.e. cities in the Netherlands, Sweden and France) show greater dimensionality of incorporation (and thus by implication more pathways of advancement) respectively than is the case in Los Angeles (LI) or in European LI places (i.e. cities in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland). We discuss the significance of these results for understanding how the structures of opportunity confronting immigrants and their children in various places make a difference for the nature and extent of their integration.

This article assesses the labor market implications of less-skilled migration to the United States. It emphasizes how recent social, demographic, and economic trends have reduced the availability of less-skilled native workers, while new low-education immigrant workers compete with other less-skilled immigrants for available low-skilled jobs. Declines in native fertility to substantially below replacement levels, together with native educational upgrading, have substantially reduced the size of the less-skilled native-born labor pool in the past 30 years, even below the level of need. This trend cannot be explained by declines in low-skilled manufacturing employment. Other factors also serve to exacerbate the size of the shortfall in the availability of less-skilled natives, including mismatches in the locations of low-education natives and less-skilled jobs. Nativity differences in health, physical disability, and substance abuse also operate to widen the gap. The resulting void has largely been filled by increasing numbers of less-skilled immigrant workers. These patterns underscore the need for public policies that provide both less-skilled labor and reductions in social and economic inequalities in the United States.

This article investigates the transnational behaviour of the children of immigrants – the second generation – in 11 European and two U.S. cities. We find evidence that transnational practices such as visits to the home country, remittances and use of ethnic media persist only among a minority of the second generation. At a personal level, these second-generation transmigrants are less socio-culturally integrated but more economically integrated in the host country. They also tend to live in those cities and countries with policies that are more assimilationist or exclusionary than multicultural. keywords: Immigrant integration; second generation; transnationalism; comparative immigration contexts; multiculturalism

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 generally restricted immigrants' eligibility for welfare to those who had naturalized. By increasing the salience of naturalization, the law provides a unique opportunity to examine how social and economic contexts of reception influence immigrants' pursuit of citizenship. This paper summarizes instrumental-legal (IL) and social-contextual (SC) theoretical perspectives on the foundations of citizenship and develops hypotheses on how social and economic contexts of immigrant reception after welfare reform influence naturalization behavior. Using General Social Survey (GSS) data and longitudinal data from the Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD) for 1988-2002, the research finds that hypotheses about the influence of the social context of reception, as reflected in state-level favorability of attitudes toward immigrants, are most consistently supported in the data. The results hold important implications for both theories of immigrant incorporation and ideas about what constitutes the most effective policy instruments to enhance the social and economic status of immigrants.

Classical assimilation theory postulates that over time, members of immigrant groups will develop more primary ties with native members of the host society. However, lack of data has led most research to rely on the study of either spatial mobility or other secondary variables as proxies of primary ties. Using data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, this research examines primary relations, comparing the number of cross-ethnic strong ties among foreign- and native-born generations of persons of Mexican origin in Los Angeles County. The fi ndings indicate that the native-born are substantially more likely to report cross-ethnic ties than immigrants. Spatial variables only partially explain the effect of primary structural assimilation, implying that both primary group and spatial dynamics play important roles in structural incorporation.

This paper invokes a theoretical model of immigrant membership exclusion to assess the political integration of second-generation Mexican Americans. Specifically, we examine the extent to which the migration status of parents, especially mothers, is associated with the political engagement, community engagement, and voting registration of their adult offspring. In each type of engagement, respondents whose mothers have remained unauthorized show lower overall levels of political incorporation. The effect is indirect in that it is mediated by the respondents’ educational level, in keeping with prior research showing that persistent unauthorized status by mothers reduces the years of schooling of children. This study thus contributes to the literature finding that the unauthorized status of parents has repercussions for the overall integration of their offspring.

This research compares several national-origin groups in terms of how parents’ entry, legalization and naturalization (i.e., membership) statuses relate to their children's educational attainment. In the case of Asian groups, the members of which predominantly come to the United States as permanent legal migrants, we hypothesize (1) that father's and mother's statuses will be relatively homogenous and few in number and (2) that these will exert minimal net effects on second-generation attainment. For Mexicans, many of whom initially come as temporary unauthorized migrants, we hypothesize (1) that parental status combinations will be heterogeneous and greater in number and (2) that marginal membership statuses will exert negative net effects on education in the second generation. To assess these ideas, we analyze unique intergenerational data from Los Angeles on the young adult members of second-generation national-origin groups and their parents. The findings show that Asian immigrant groups almost universally exhibit similar father–mother migration statuses and high educational attainment among children. By contrast, Mexicans manifest more numerous discrepant father–mother combinations, with those in which the mother remains unauthorized carrying negative implications for children's schooling. The paper discusses the theoretical and policy implications of the delays in incorporation that result from Mexican Americans needing extra time and resources compared to the members of other groups to overcome their handicap of marginal membership status {i.e., being more likely to enter and remain unauthorized).

Over the past four decades, Mexican immigration has garnered much of the public and legislative attention devoted to reforming immigration policy in the United States (Bean and Lowell 2004). Part of the reason is that Mexicans have constituted the largest of the country’s recent legal immigrant groups. In 2005, for example, 161,445 Mexicans gained legal permanent residency, or 14.4 percent of the all such persons (Office of Immigration Statistics 2006). But much of the focus falls on Mexicans because they comprise such an overwhelming component of unauthorized migration flows. Roughly 300,000 (net) unauthorized Mexicans established de facto U.S. residency in 2005, bringing the total number of unauthorized Mexicans to 6.2 million, or 56 percent of all unauthorized persons in the country (Passel 2006). These numbers dwarf those from any other nation. Moreover, many observers have long argued that policies to curtail or “regularize” unauthorized migration should be adopted before changes in legal immigration policy are considered, thus ensuring that unauthorized Mexican migration occupies a prominent place in any debate over immigration policy (U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform 1994).

As the United States begins the twenty-first century, it remains the world's leading immigration country. In 2000 (the latest year for which migration data are available on a global basis) the United States was home to almost 35 million legal and unauthorized migrants, or 2.7 times as many as any other country. Although other nations have higher proportions of foreign-born residents (e.g., nearly 25 percent in Australia and 20 percent in Canada), the globally dominant position of the United States in regard to numbers of new immigrants reinforces its self-image as a “nation of immigrants,” as does the fact that immigration is generally seen as contributing to the country's economic and demographic strength. However, over the past three decades, more and more new arrivals with non-European origins have come to the country (more than four-fifths are Latino and Asian), many with very low levels of education and illegal status at entry. These changes have fueled public concerns and led to heated debates over whether U.S. admissions and settlement-related policies ought to be modified.Frank D. Bean is Professor of Sociology (fbean@uci.edu), Susan K. Brown is Assistant Professor of Sociology (skbrown@uci.edu),and Ruben G. Rumbaut is Professor of Sociology at University of California, Irvine (rrumbaut@uci.edu). Some of the research results reported in this paper come from a research project entitled “Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles” and supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.