Migration Policies

GMC Deputy Director Robert Irwin and grad student affiliate María José Gutiérrez on the increasingly precarious migration routes and processes for those heading from South and Central America and the Caribbean to northern Mexico in hopes of entering the United States.

Resumen:

La migración que hoy en día se traslada por las rutas que se extienden de América Central a Estados Unidos, y por otros caminos precarios a través de las Américas, suele implicar una búsqueda de refugio por aquéllos que no encuentran protecciones adecuadas ante las inseguridades de su país natal. Los procesos contemporáneos de migración, que pueden extenderse por años sin resolución, implican para los migrantes una exposición prolongada a los peligros de la intemperie, mientras que el sueño de asilo (sea éste legal o informal) se vuelve casi inalcanzable. Las personas son expulsadas de sus países de origen y convertidas en migrantes, estando sujetas más adelante a exclusiones o deportaciones de los países en los que aspiran reasentarse. Las nociones de refugio, abrigo y asilo se vuelven casi sinónimos de desprotección, desamparo y descuido. Para los migrantes contemporáneos, la intemperie se ha vuelto ubicua, y la migración ha asumido como atributo ineludible, y acaso perpetuo, la precariedad. Este escenario lleva a situaciones que parecen ilógicas, en las que los migrantes mismos eligen la intemperie, pero que pueden también considerarse un reflejo de la racionalidad de actores sociales cuya agencia se debe interpretar desde las precariedades de sus vidas y las volatilidades de sus entornos. En las narrativas testimoniales de migrantes se observa que éstos se acomodan a las más extremas condiciones de desamparo por necesidad. Sin embargo, en otras ocasiones parecería que donde la autonomía de la migración más se afirma es en el albergue a la intemperie.

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Abstract

This essay provides an analysis of urgent and pragmatic solutions to the persistent forced migration challenges in Central America’s Northern Triangle that President Joe Biden could undertake in the first two years of his administration. Its focus is on measures that the United States can undertake to help these nations avert the enormous humanitarian crisis brought about by the pandemic and recent hurricanes, including starvation, a surge in violence, and a rise in extreme poverty, all of which are fueling an increase in forced migration from the region. Specifically, the essay is focused on two measures: (1) Stabilizing the flow of remittances from the U.S. to the region; and (2) increasing and strategically reorienting aid to these nations to the most vulnerable communities affected by the pandemic.
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Abstract

Policies that expand the rights of marginalized groups provide an additional level of structural integration, but these changes do not always come with broad social acceptance or recognition. What happens when a legally marginalized group attains increased rights but not full political or social inclusion? In particular, what are the mental health implications of these transitions for impacted groups? We bring together theories of liminal legality and stress process to offer a framework for understanding how expansions in the legal rights of a highly politicized and vulnerable social group can be initially beneficial, but can attenuate due to renewed or new stress events, chronic stressors, and anticipatory stressors. We use the case of Latina/o immigrant youth who transitioned from undocumented legal status to temporarily protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Analyses of representative California statewide survey data from 2007 to 2018, combined with surveys and in-depth interviews with DACA recipients, suggest that without full social and structural inclusion, legal transitions that expand rights will produce short-term psychological benefits that do not hold up over time.

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Abstract

What explains why some Latinos feel strongly tied to their coethnics while others do not? Demographic context is one of the most cited predictors of identity strength, but the size and direction of its effects are disputed. Geographic differences in policy environments may explain the phenomenon. We argue that high levels of immigration enforcement indirectly lead to increased feelings of ethnic linked fate by determining where and how demographic context—in this case, the size of the immigrant population—will be salient. To test this, we combine information from local immigration-enforcement data (obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests) with the Latino Decisions' 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. The results suggest native-born Latinos have a stronger sense of ethnic linked fate when they live near large immigrant populations and rates of enforcement are high. When enforcement is low, the presence of immigrants has a negligible effect on native-born attitudes. Foreign-born Latinos' sense of linked fate is unaffected by policy context. These results suggest that as immigration enforcement becomes intensifies, conservative politicians may see increased backlash, at least in certain communities, from native-born Latinos. This is because feelings about ethnic linked fate correlate with increased participation and more proimmigrant policy stances.

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Abstract

The core of this edited volume originates from a special issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA) that goes well beyond the special issue to incorporate the stimulating discussions and insights of two Middle East Studies Association conference roundtables and the important work of additional scholars in order to create a state-of-the-field volume on Ottoman sociolegal studies, particularly regarding Ottoman international law from the eighteenth century to the end of the empire. It makes several important contributions to Ottoman and Turkish studies, namely, by introducing these disciplines to the broader fields of trans-imperial studies, comparative international law, and legal history. Combining the best practices of diplomatic history and history from below to integrate the Ottoman Empire and its subjects into the broader debates of the nineteenth-century trans-imperial history this unique volume represents the exciting work and cutting-edge scholarship on these topics that will continue to shape the field in years to come.

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This article documents the United States’ century-long efforts to humanize our borders. In the end, law has been insufficient to tame immigration law’s enforcement. How the United States enforces borders, however, can and should be more humane. Two important principles should guide this process. First, the United States should recognize that borders’ impacts are as severe as other forms of punishment especially when the means to enforce the immigration power have become indistinguishable from criminal enforcement. Second, human trauma should guide immigration policy toward meaningful inclusion. After significant reckoning over the travesty of shutting our borders, the United States has embraced certain experiences of trauma as grounds for welcoming immigrants or has shown mercy to permit immigrants to stay when family and communal bonds in the United States are strong. Yet, the discretionary nature of these central efforts to humanize borders has not translated to sustaining gains. Borders are still open and shut at the whims of xenophobia and nationalistic tendencies to blame the 'other' during difficult socio-political and economic crisis. Moreover, the lack of basic due process protections in immigration law and punitive enforcement practices function as significant barriers that undermine substantially the very efforts to expand immigration’s inclusion.

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This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote share for the Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 to 2016. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it. These effects are mainly due to the indirect impact on existing citizens' votes, and this is independent of the origin country and race of immigrants. We find that the political effect of immigration is heterogeneous across counties and depends on their skill level, public spending, and noneconomic characteristics.

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We analyze the impact of local immigration on natives’ preferences for “nationalism” as measured in parties’ programs by the Manifesto Project Database in European election data between 2007 and 2016. Using a 2SLS strategy with a shift-share IV based on immigrant shares by origin in 2005 and inflows by education-origin groups, we estimate that larger inflows of highly-educated immigrants were associated with a decrease in the “nationalistic” vote of natives, while less-educated immigrants produced an opposite-direction shift towards nationalistic parties. The aggregate results derive from individual shifts toward nationalism in response to less-skilled immigration, and from greater participation of young voters and more pro-European attitudes in response to high-skilled immigration.

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Abstract
In this paper we analyze the economic effects of changing immigration policies in a realistic institutional set-up, using a search model calibrated to the migrant flows between the US and the rest of the world. We explicitly differentiate among the most relevant channels of entry of immigrants to the US: family-based, employment-based and undocumented. Moreover we explicitly account for earning incentives to migrate and for the role of immigrant networks in generating job-related and family-related immigration opportunities. Hence, we can analyze the effect of policy changes in each channel, accounting for the response of immigrants in general equilibrium. We find that all types of immigrants generate higher surplus for US firms relative to natives, hence restricting their entry has a depressing effect on job creation and, in turn, on native labor markets. We also show that substituting a family-based entry with an employment-based entry system, and maintaining the total inflow of immigrants unchanged, job creation and natives' income increase.

Citizenship has existed for nearly three millennia. Throughout its long history, it has been the main institution regulating membership in political communities and has provided the philosophical rationale and quotidian structure for the sociopolitical organization of societies and legitimate systems of governance. In the twentieth century, the age of the nation-state, citizenship became the institutional building block of national membership and international relations. By the early twenty-first century, however, the everyday practices, as well as theoretical and legal meanings of citizenship had experienced considerable transformations. Most scholarly research has concluded that these changes have in great part been fueled by an anintricate and intertwined host of global processes ranging from the hyper-mobility of capital and people to the introduction and use of universal rights, to the expansion of transnational grassroots networks. Ensuring academic debates on the implications of citizenship transformation have generated the emergence of multiple new types of citizenship, which are often used to represent contemporary changes. Urban, international, transnational, cosmopolitan, nested, global, and environmental are among the copious types of new citizenships recently coined by social scientists.