The United States is currently experiencing the largest immigrant and refugee resettlement since the early decades of the twentieth century. Foreign-born newcomers are increasingly heading to southern cities in search of jobs, more affordable housing, safer neighborhoods, and, in some cases, a friendlier welcome. Reactions to immigrants in these communities appear to be mixed, with business and cultural elites praising immigrants for enriching the community, while policy makers, school officials, and social service providers decry the immigrant presence as a strain on local infrastructure.

Mexico is the single most important source of both documented and undocumented migration to the United States. The now twenty-year long Mexican Migration Project (MMP) is a unique source of data that enables researchers to track patterns and processes of contemporary Mexican immigration to the United States. The project is a multi-disciplinary research effort that generates public use data on the characteristics and behavior of Mexican migrants. Every year, the project collects data from representative samples of households in four to six strategically selected Mexican communities.

Throughout American history, political involvement has been essential to immigrants’ full incorporation into public life. But in contrast to the experiences of earlier immigrants, urban political machines and labor unions no longer represent the typical route to political incorporation. What other pathways are open to newcomers? Sociologists Elaine Ecklund and Michael Emerson hypothesize that religious organizations provide immigrants with opportunities to shape their civic identity as Americans, and that civic identity is the prelude to formal political participation.

Although immigrants are still largely underrepresented in American politics, they are beginning to exert significant influence on political parties. Urban political coalitions are emerging across the country, particularly in large multi-ethnic cities. In 2005, the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles successfully fashioned an electoral coalition that surmounted racial, ethnic, and geographic divisions. With an award from Russell Sage, Raphael Sonenshein and Mark Drayse will study emerging ethnic coalitions in Los Angeles by looking at five elections.

Researchers disagree about how competition from immigrant workers affects the economic well-being of native workers. Neeraj Kaushal and Robert Kaestner will address this question by studying individual level-data on registered nurses in the thirty largest metropolitan regions of the United States. Because they intend to restrict their analysis to a single occupation, Kaushal and Kaestner will be able to surmount many of the empirical difficulties that have plagued this line of research in the past.

Few U.S. institutions contribute as notably to immigrant political integration as religious organizations. Many of the churches that new immigrants join preach relatively conservative political and social views, but whether immigrants unanimously adopt these conservative views or instead slowly influence the general orientation of their churches remains unclear. How do religious institutions affect the political affinities of their immigrant members, and conversely, how do immigrants affect the political orientations of the denominations they join?

Second supplemental appropriation: February 2002, $947,347
First supplemental appropriation: February 2000, $25,919

Under the direction of David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, an interdisciplinary working group of economists and political scientists will study the links between economic inequality and systematic differences in family structure, college enrollment, political participation, and civic engagement.

Voter turnout has been in decline in the United States for many decades, but the fall-off has been particularly precipitous among the poor. This disturbing trend has produced a growing gap between the political participation of rich and poor, and not surprisingly, a political system which seems increasingly skewed to the interests of the wealthier voting class. We know very little about why the poor are dropping out of the electoral system.

Research on social inequality has produced mounting evidence that disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in other advanced countries - in fact, the very richest one percent of Americans have pulled away not only from the poor, but also from the middle class. As this disparity becomes more pronounced, scholars have sought to analyze the political implications of rising inequalities.