TY - JOUR
T1 - Migration and stratification
AU - Jasso, Guillermina
N1 - Funding Information:
The New Immigrant Survey project is supported by the US National Institutes of Health (NICHD and NIA) under Grant HD33843, with partial support from the US National Science Foundation, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Earlier versions of portions of this paper were presented at the Workshop on Children in Immigrant Families, National Institutes of Health, May 2005; the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, San Francisco, California, February 2006; the IZA Meeting on Migrant Ethnicity, Bonn, Germany, May 2006; the Metropolis Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, October 2006; the Migration Conference, Africa House, New York University, December 2006; the Inaugural Conference of the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course, Yale University, May 2007; the Fourth IZA Annual Migration Meeting, Bonn, Germany, May 2007; and the Center for Public Policy, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, March 2008. I am grateful to participants at those meetings and other colleagues for many valuable comments and suggestions, especially Lynne C. Burkhart, Rebecca Clark, Herbert Gans, Linda Gordon, Monica Espinoza Higgins, Michael Hoefer, Samuel Kotz, Eric Larson, Jennifer Martin, Douglas S. Massey, Lisa Roney, Robert Warren, the USCIS History Office, and the Editor. I also gratefully acknowledge the intellectual and financial support provided by New York University.
PY - 2011/9
Y1 - 2011/9
N2 - Migration and stratification are increasingly intertwined. One day soon it will be impossible to understand one without the other. Both focus on life chances. Stratification is about differential life chances - who gets what and why - and migration is about improving life chances - getting more of the good things of life. To examine the interconnections of migration and stratification, we address a mix of old and new questions, carrying out analyses newly enabled by a unique new data set on recent legal immigrants to the United States (the New Immigrant Survey). We look at immigrant processing and lost documents, depression due to the visa process, presentation of self, the race-ethnic composition of an immigrant cohort (made possible by the data for the first time since 1961), black immigration from Africa and the Americas, skin color diversity among couples formed by US citizen sponsors and immigrant spouses, and English fluency among children age 8-12 and their immigrant parents. We find, inter alia, that children of previously illegal parents are especially more likely to be fluent in English, that native-born US citizen women tend to marry darker, that immigrant applicants who go through the visa process while already in the United States are more likely to have their documents lost and to suffer visa depression, and that immigration, by introducing accomplished black immigrants from Africa (notably via the visa lottery), threatens to overturn racial and skin color associations with skill. Our analyses show the mutual embeddedness of migration and stratification in the unfolding of the immigrants' and their children's life chances and the impacts on the stratification structure of the United States.
AB - Migration and stratification are increasingly intertwined. One day soon it will be impossible to understand one without the other. Both focus on life chances. Stratification is about differential life chances - who gets what and why - and migration is about improving life chances - getting more of the good things of life. To examine the interconnections of migration and stratification, we address a mix of old and new questions, carrying out analyses newly enabled by a unique new data set on recent legal immigrants to the United States (the New Immigrant Survey). We look at immigrant processing and lost documents, depression due to the visa process, presentation of self, the race-ethnic composition of an immigrant cohort (made possible by the data for the first time since 1961), black immigration from Africa and the Americas, skin color diversity among couples formed by US citizen sponsors and immigrant spouses, and English fluency among children age 8-12 and their immigrant parents. We find, inter alia, that children of previously illegal parents are especially more likely to be fluent in English, that native-born US citizen women tend to marry darker, that immigrant applicants who go through the visa process while already in the United States are more likely to have their documents lost and to suffer visa depression, and that immigration, by introducing accomplished black immigrants from Africa (notably via the visa lottery), threatens to overturn racial and skin color associations with skill. Our analyses show the mutual embeddedness of migration and stratification in the unfolding of the immigrants' and their children's life chances and the impacts on the stratification structure of the United States.
KW - Children of immigrants
KW - English fluency
KW - Gender
KW - Hispanic origin
KW - Illegal experience
KW - Immigrant visas
KW - Immigration
KW - Nativity premium
KW - New Immigrant Survey
KW - Presentation of self
KW - Race
KW - Skin color
KW - Social stratification
KW - Visa depression
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2011.03.007
DO - 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2011.03.007
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79960901246
SN - 0049-089X
VL - 40
SP - 1292
EP - 1336
JO - Social Science Research
JF - Social Science Research
IS - 5
ER -