Carolyn Pinedo Turnovsky, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
Abstract: While there have been many studies researching the incorporation of immigrants in the general labor market, few studies highlight the immigrants’ understandings of their own participation as influenced by positions of race and ethnicity, particularly in the informal economy. This presentation concerns the social processes and organization of day labor among Latino and Eastern European immigrants and American citizens at an informal worksite in New York City. The overall research project challenges conventional perceptions about day laborers, explores the social construction of identity, and analyzes the …

Susan Eckstein, Boston University
Abstract: This article offers a new approach for deepening our understanding of the immigrant experience. It describes how and explains why a historically grounded cohort analysis brings to the fore aspects of émigré views and involvements, including within a single immigrant generation, other approaches leave undocumented and unexplained. Differences in pre-migration experiences are shown to shape both how immigrants adapt to their new country of settlement and how they relate to their homeland. The utility of the approach is illustrated by contrasting the experiences of different cohorts of Cuban immigrants: how they have adapted here and the …

Xavier Escandell, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
Abstract: Research in the area of attitudes towards immigration could benefit from a more thorough discussion of the relationship between degrees of political engagement and trust towards specific social institutions and the variance of political and social tolerance towards immigrants. Drawing upon three general theories: realistic group conflict theory, social identification theory, and institutional theory, I further refine a theory of ethnic competition and xenophobia in the Southern European context. I argue that popular attitudes towards immigration are correlated with a set of individual level factors (e.g. perceptions of personal and collective threat, as …

Adam Sherry, University of California – San Diego
Abstract: Current theoretical models do much to explore the economic motivation for the migration, the social networks through which information could pass, as well as the factors within sending communities that may serve to promote migration. These models rest largely on the assumption that migrants are rational actors who use the information available to them to make a decision to pursue marginal increases in well-being. But the scholars using such models usually fail to assess the quality of the information entering into decisions to migrate. This thesis investigates migrants’ information about the costs, …

Frank Pieke, University of Oxford
Abstract: I will first briefly describe the ways and means of Fujianese migration to Europe. I will then turn to the larger conceptual issue of how to account for the growing variety and scale of Chinese migration as part of fundamental changes in the world order, avoiding the dangers of feeding the fears of Chinese domination drummed up by politicians, journalists and certain scholars alike that Wang Gungwu so rightfully warned against. Concluding that it is neither possible nor desirable fully to stem the tide of the new Chinese migration, I then turn to the question …

Pia Orrenius, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Abstract: This paper examines the effect of changes in migration determinants on the skill level of undocumented immigrants from Mexico. We focus on the effect of changes in economic conditions, migrant networks, and border enforcement on the educational attainment of Mexican-born men who cross the border illegally. Results from hazard models using data from the Mexican Migration Project indicate that improvements in U.S. and Mexican economic conditions are associated with a decline in the average educational level of undocumented immigrants. Stricter border enforcement is associated with higher average skill levels. Access to a network …

Wayne A. Cornelius, University of California – San Diego
Abstract: This paper evaluates the strategy for controlling ‘unwanted’ immigration that has been implemented by the US government since 1993, and suggests explanations for the failure of that strategy to achieve its stated objectives thus far.  Available evidence suggests that a strategy of immigration control that overwhelmingly emphasises border enforcement and short-changes interior (especially workplace) enforcement has caused illegal entries to be redistributed along the south-west border.  The evidence also suggests that the financial cost of illegal entry has more than quadrupled; that undocumented migrants are staying longer in the United States; …

Nadia Kim, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS)
Abstract: In recent years, students of gender and migration have established that ethnic immigrant families and communities are sites of both oppression and resistance. Less is known, however, about how immigrant women respond to their “double-edged” lives; how, in light of cultural globalization, their responses are forged in a global/local context; and what these responses reveal about larger processes of assimilation and transnationalism. As Korean immigrants hail from a country that has had long-standing ties to the US via US imperialist projects starting in World War II, they are a fitting case study …

Gustavo Verduzco Igartúa, El Colegio de México
Summary: During the early years of the Program (1974-1980), there was not much promotion for recruiting workers, and this was done only in states near Mexico City. By 1994, 80% of the participants came from six states in the central part of the country: Puebla, Tlaxcala, México, Morelos, Hidalgo, and Guanajuato. With the increase in the demand for workers and the decentralization of certain procedures for selecting and documenting workers, these have been incorporated from all the states. However, 70% of the participants still come from the central region of the country.
Since 1974, the …

Zoltan Hajnal, University of California – San Diego
Abstract: Since the 1950s, there has been roughly a two-fold rise in the proportion of Americans who identify as political Independents. We argue that the ethnic and immigrant experiences of Latinos shed new light on why and how individuals self-identify with a political party. For Latinos, we argue, party identification is defined by social and political identity formation under uncertainty. We argue that for immigrant-based ethnic groups like Latinos, identification as Independent is a rationally adaptive strategy given uncertainty and ambivalence about one’s social group attachments, one’s core political predispositions, and the benefits …