Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America
Douglas S. Massey,Karen A. Pren +1 more
TLDR
This article describes how restrictions placed on the legal entry of Latin Americans, and especially Mexicans, set off a chain of events that in the ensuing decades had the paradoxical effect of producing more rather than fewer Latino immigrants.Abstract:
Immigration reforms in the United States initiated in the 1960s are widely thought to have opened the door to mass immigration from Asia and Latin America by eliminating past discriminatory policies. While this may be true for Asians, it is not the case for Latin Americans, who faced more restrictions to legal migration after 1965 than before. The boom in Latin American migration occurred in spite of rather than because of changes in US immigration law. In this article we describe how restrictions placed on the legal entry of Latin Americans, and especially Mexicans, set off a chain of events that in the ensuing decades had the paradoxical effect of producing more rather than fewer Latino immigrants. We offer an explanation for how and why Latinos in the United States, in just 40 years, increased from 9.6 million people and 5 percent of the population to 51 million people and 16 percent of the population, and why so many are now present without authorization.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Latino threat: constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation : Leo R. Chavez, Stanford University Press 2008. 272 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0804759342 ()
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Ethno-nationalist populism and the mobilization of collective resentment.
TL;DR: It is concluded that both the supply and demand sides of radical politics have been relatively stable over time, which suggests that in order to understand public support for radical politics, scholars should instead focus on the increased resonance between pre-existing attitudes and discursive frames.
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Shift-Share Instruments and the Impact of Immigration
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present evidence that estimates based on this "shift-share" instrument conflate the short-and long-run responses to immigration shocks, and propose a "multiple instrumentation" procedure that isolates the spatial variation arising from changes in the country-of-origin composition at the national level and permits them to estimate separately the short and long run effects.
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Why Border Enforcement Backfired.
TL;DR: Using an instrumental variable approach, the authors show how border militarization affected the behavior of unauthorized migrants and border outcomes to transform undocumented Mexican migration from a circular flow of male workers going to three states into an 11 million person population of settled families living in 50 states.
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Immigration in American Economic History.
TL;DR: The literatures on historical and contemporary migrant flows are reviewed, yielding new insights on migrant selection, assimilation of immigrants into US economy and society, and the effect of immigration on the labor market.
References
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Book
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
TL;DR: In this paper, illegal aliens: A Problem of Law and History is defined as "a problem of law and history" where the goal is to "make and unmake of illegal aliens".
Posted Content
Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition
TL;DR: This paper developed the politicized places hypothesis, an alternative that focuses on how national and local conditions interact to construe immigrants as threatening, and tested the hypothesis using new data on local anti-immigrant policies.
Book
The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation
TL;DR: Chavez as discussed by the authors investigates the media stories about and recent experiences of immigrants to show how prejudices and stereotypes have been used to malign an entire immigrant population - and to define what it means to be an American.
Journal ArticleDOI
Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition
TL;DR: This article developed the politicized places hypothesis, an alternative that focuses on how national and local conditions interact to construe immigrants as threatening, and tested the hypothesis using new data on local anti-immigrant policies.