“Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality offers a rigorous, multifaceted and up-to-the-minute reconsideration of the linkages between the historically high rates of U.S. immigration, the opportunities for economic advancement within and between generations, and the well-being of both immigrants and natives. It is a rare pleasure indeed when a group of distinguished scholars from across the spectrum of social sciences—economics, sociology, geography, and ethnography—join forces to mount a sustained intellectual advance on the frontier of a momentously important topic.”
—David Autor, professor and associate chair, Economics Department, MIT 

“The highest and the lowest levels of education and poverty in the United States today are found among foreign-born ethnic groups. What has been the role of immigration in the widening of socioeconomic inequality? What have been the main modes of intergenerational mobility over time, between groups, and in different regions of the country? What sorts of public policies ameliorate, or exacerbate, such extraordinarily complex problems? This superb volume brings together two dozen leading economists and other social scientists to provide some of the most rigorous answers to these questions to date, setting the standard for future research into the immigration/poverty nexus.”
—Rubén G. Rumbaut, professor of sociology, University of California, Irvine

The rapid rise in the proportion of foreign-born residents in the United States since the mid-1960s is one of the most important demographic events of the past fifty years. The increase in immigration, especially among the less-skilled and less-educated, has prompted fears that the newcomers may have depressed the wages and employment of the native-born, burdened state and local budgets, and slowed the U.S. economy as a whole. Would the poverty rate be lower in the absence of immigration? How does the undocumented status of an increasing segment of the foreign-born population impact wages in the United States? In Immigration, Poverty and Socioeconomic Inequality, noted labor economists David Card and Steven Raphael and an interdisciplinary team of scholars provide a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits of the latest era of immigration to the United States.

Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality rigorously explores shifts in population trends, labor market competition, and socioeconomic segregation to investigate how the recent rise in immigration affects economic disadvantage in the U.S. Giovanni Peri analyzes the changing skill composition of immigrants to the United States over the past two decades to assess their impact on the labor market outcomes of native-born workers. Despite concerns over labor market competition, he shows that the overall effect has been benign for most native groups. Moreover, immigration appears to have had negligible impacts on native poverty rates. Ethan Lewis examines whether differences in English proficiency explain this lack of competition between immigrant and native-born workers. He finds that parallel Spanish-speaking labor markets emerge in areas where Spanish speakers are sufficiently numerous, thereby limiting the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born residents. While the increase in the number of immigrants may not necessarily hurt the job prospects of native-born workers, low-skilled migration appears to suppress the wages of immigrants themselves. Michael Stoll shows that linguistic isolation and residential crowding in specific metropolitan areas has contributed to high poverty rates among immigrants. Have these economic disadvantages among low-skilled immigrants increased their dependence on the U.S. social safety net? Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes analyze the consequences of welfare reform, which limited eligibility for major cash assistance programs. Their analysis documents sizable declines in program participation for foreign-born families since the 1990s and suggests that the safety net has become less effective in lowering child poverty among immigrant households.

As the debate over immigration reform reemerges on the national agenda, Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality provides a timely and authoritative review of the immigrant experience in the United States. With its wealth of data and intriguing hypotheses, the volume is an essential addition to the field of immigration studies.

DAVID CARD is Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

STEVEN RAPHAEL is professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

CONTRIBUTORS: Marianne P. Bitler, Irene Bloemraad, Sarah Bohn, Chistian Dustmann, Mark Ellis, Cybelle Fox, Tomasso Frattini, Robert G. Gonzales, Hilary W. Hoynes, Christel Kelser, Jennifer Lee,  Ethan Lewis, Magnus Lofstrom, Renee Reichl Luthra, Douglas S. Massey, Giovanni Peri, Michael A. Stoll, Matthew Townley, Roger Waldinger, Richard Wright, Min Zhou.

A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy

Winner of a RIPE Read Award from the Review of International Political Economy

“This important book provides insight into understanding the different ways countries are dealing with the economic crisis of our period and will thus be extremely valuable to all specialists of international and comparative political economy.”
—Peter Gourevitch, University of California, San Diego

“Coping with Crisis speaks to the crucial mysteries of life after the global economic crisis, and to the widespread confusion about what governments should and can do to rescue us from the current malaise. An impressive group of scholars reflects on policymakers’ capacities for action, the relative weight of international imperatives and domestic power balances in delimiting policy solutions, the lessons of past major downturns in charting a path for current recovery, and the capacities of states to forge a new democratic consensus. This elegantly argued, wonderfully perceptive book addresses a central fear of the twenty-first century: that the new global order is unhinged from mechanisms of democratic or even elite-expert control.”
—Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University

The financial crisis that erupted on Wall Street in 2008 quickly cascaded throughout much of the advanced industrial world. Facing the specter of another Great Depression, policymakers across the globe responded in sharply different ways to avert an economic collapse. Why did the response to the crisis—and its impact on individual countries—vary so greatly among interdependent economies? How did political factors like public opinion and domestic interest groups shape policymaking in this moment of economic distress? Coping with Crisis offers a rigorous analysis of the choices societies made as a devastating global economic crisis unfolded.

With an ambitiously broad range of inquiry, Coping with Crisis examines the interaction between international and domestic politics to shed new light on the inner workings of democratic politics. The volume opens with an engaging overview of the global crisis and the role played by international bodies like the G-20 and the WTO. In his survey of international initiatives in response to the recession, Eric Helleiner emphasizes the limits of multilateral crisis management, finding that domestic pressures were more important in reorienting fiscal policy. He also argues that unilateral decisions by national governments to hold large dollar reserves played the key role in preventing a dollar crisis, which would have considerably worsened the downturn. David R. Cameron discusses the fiscal responses of the European Union and its member states. He suggests that a profound coordination problem involving fiscal and economic policy impeded the European Union's ability to respond in a timely and effective manner. The volume also features several case studies and country comparisons. Nolan McCarty assesses the performance of the American political system during the crisis. He argues that the downturn did little to dampen elite polarization in the United States; divisions within the Democratic Party—as well as the influence of the financial sector—narrowed the range of policy options available to fight the crisis. Ben W. Ansell examines how fluctuations in housing prices in thirty developed countries affected the policy preferences of both citizens and political parties. His evidence shows that as housing prices increased, homeowners expressed preferences for both lower taxes and a smaller safety net. As more citizens supplement their day-to-day income with assets like stocks and housing, Ansell's research reveals a potentially significant trend in the formation of public opinion.

Five years on, the prospects for a prolonged slump in economic activity remain high, and the policy choices going forward are contentious. But the policy changes made between 2007 and 2010 will likely constrain any new initiatives in the future. Coping with Crisis offers unmatched analysis of the decisions made in the developed world during this critical period. It is an essential read for scholars of comparative politics and anyone interested in a comprehensive account of the new international politics of austerity.

NANCY BERMEO is the Nuffield Professor of comparative politics at Oxford University, Oxford, U.K.

JONAS PONTUSSON is professor of comparative politics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ben W. Ansell, Klaus Armingeon, Lucio Baccaro, Lucy Barnes, David R. Cameron, Eric Helleiner, Torben Iversen, Johannes Lindvall, Nolan McCarty, David Rueda, Waltraud Schelkle, David Soskice, Yves Tiberghien, Anne Wren.

“The Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities is a very timely book by an interdisciplinary group of experts that presents compelling new information about the neurobiological and systemic health consequences of socioeconomic inequalities, and it discusses some encouraging approaches for intervention using biomarkers for assessment. The emphasis on biomarkers is particularly important for demonstrating how the social environment of inequality ‘gets under the skin’ and presents both a challenge and an opportunity for this important field.”
—Bruce S. McEwen, The Rockefeller University

“The usual paradigm is to consider that socioeconomic status, environmental and genetic factors all affect a person’s health, but this book broadens that paradigm by examining also how socioeconomic and environmental factors directly affect the expression of genes and specific biological processes that themselves affect health and disease. In short, while others have shown that income affects health and health affects income, The Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities examines the mechanisms through which income affects biological processes that affect health and cognition. This interdisciplinary book provides essential reading for researchers in the social and biological sciences interested in the income-health gradient, lays a useful foundation for the new field of individually customized medicine, and improves our understanding of how behaviors, stress, and cognitive-emotional processes lead to variation in biological functioning and disease.”
—Randall P. Ellis, Boston University, and past president, American Society of Health Economist

Social scientists have repeatedly uncovered a disturbing feature of economic inequality: people with larger incomes and better education tend to lead longer, healthier lives. This pattern holds across all ages and for virtually all measures of health, apparently indicating a biological dimension of inequality. But scholars have only begun to understand the complex mechanisms that drive this disparity. How exactly do financial well-being and human physiology interact? The Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities incorporates insights from the social and biological sciences to quantify the biology of disadvantage and to assess how poverty gets under the skin to impact health.

Drawing from unusually rich datasets of biomarkers, brain scans, and socioeconomic measures, Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities illustrates exciting new paths to understanding social inequalities in health. Barbara Wolfe, William N. Evans and Nancy Adler begin the volume with a critical evaluation of the literature on income and health, providing a lucid review of the difficulties of establishing clear causal pathways between the two variables. In their chapter, Arun S. Karlamangla, Tara L. Gruenewald, and Teresa E. Seeman outline the potential of biomarkers—such as cholesterol, heart pressure, and C-reactive protein—to assess and indicate the factors underlying health. Edith Chen, Hannah M. C. Schreier, and Meanne Chan reveal the empirical power of biomarkers by examining asthma, a condition steeply correlated with socioeconomic status. Their analysis shows how stress at the individual, family, and neighborhood levels can increase the incidence of asthma. The volume then turns to cognitive neuroscience, using biomarkers in a new way to examine the impact of poverty on brain development. Jamie Hanson, Nicole Hair, Amitabh Chandra, Ed Moss, Jay Bhattacharya, Seth D. Pollack, and Barbara Wolfe use a longitudinal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) study of children between the ages of four and eighteen to study the link between poverty and limited cognition among children. Michelle C. Carlson, Christopher L. Seplaki, and Teresa E. Seeman also focus on brain development to examine the role of socioeconomic status in cognitive decline among older adults.

Featuring insights from the biological and social sciences, Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities will be an essential resource for scholars interested in socioeconomic disparities and the biological imprint that material deprivation leaves on the human body.

BARBARA WOLFE is professor of public affairs, economics, and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

WILLIAM N. EVANS is Keough-Hesburge Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame.

TERESA E. SEEMAN is professor of medicine and epidemiology in the school of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles.

CONTRIBUTORS: Nancy Adler, Jay Bhattacharya, Michelle C. Carlson, Meanne Chan, Amitabh Chandra, Edith Chen, William H. Dow, William Evans, Elliot Friedman, Tara L. Gruenewald, Daniel A. Hackman, Nicole Hair, Jamie Hanson, Arun S. Karlamangla, Catarine Kiefe, Ed Moss, Seth D. Pollak, David H. Rehkopf, Hannah M. C. Schreier, Teresa E. Seeman, Christopher L. Seplaki, Barbara Wolfe

Winner of the 2013 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Winner of the 2014 Book Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association

Runner Up, 2014 Academy of Management's George R. Terry Book Award

“Nancy DiTomaso seriously challenges the framing of racial issues in the United States. Informed by interviews with non-Hispanic whites from three areas of the country, she not only convincingly reveals how racial inequality can be maintained and perpetuated without racism, but also how most whites absolve themselves of guilt feelings about race. The American Non-Dilemma is replete with new insights on a historic domestic problem.”
—WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Harvard University

“Scholars in the humanities are expert at analyzing absences—the pause in the music’s beat, the white space in the painting, the protagonist’s missing child in the novel. But social scientists are generally very poor at analyzing nonevents. In The American Non-
Dilemma, Nancy DiTomaso expertly reveals what Americans do not say, because of what they do not see. Whites’ inability to perceive the benefits of racial privilege, even in the context of economic struggles, helps us to understand how racial hierarchy persists in a nation committed to equal opportunity.”
—JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD, Harvard University

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s seemed to mark a historical turning point in advancing the American dream of equal opportunity for all citizens, regardless of race. Yet 50 years on, racial inequality remains a troubling fact of life in American society and its causes are highly contested. In The American Non-Dilemma, sociologist Nancy DiTomaso convincingly argues that America's enduring racial divide is sustained more by whites' preferential treatment of members of their own social networks than by overt racial discrimination. Drawing on research from sociology, political science, history, and psychology, as well as her own interviews with a cross-section of non-Hispanic whites, DiTomaso provides a comprehensive examination of the persistence of racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights era and how it plays out in today's economic and political context.

Taking Gunnar Myrdal's classic work on America's racial divide, The American Dilemma, as her departure point, DiTomaso focuses on "the white side of the race line." To do so, she interviewed a sample of working, middle, and upper-class whites about their life histories, political views, and general outlook on racial inequality in America. While the vast majority of whites profess strong support for civil rights and equal opportunity regardless of race, they continue to pursue their own group-based advantage, especially in the labor market where whites tend to favor other whites in securing jobs protected from market competition. This "opportunity hoarding" leads to substantially improved life outcomes for whites due to their greater access to social resources from family, schools, churches, and other institutions with which they are engaged.

DiTomaso also examines how whites understand the persistence of racial inequality in a society where whites are, on average, the advantaged racial group. Most whites see themselves as part of the solution rather than part of the problem with regard to racial inequality. Yet they continue to harbor strong reservations about public policies—such as affirmative action—intended to ameliorate racial inequality. In effect, they accept the principles of civil rights but not the implementation of policies that would bring about greater racial equality. DiTomaso shows that the political engagement of different groups of whites is affected by their views of how civil rights policies impact their ability to provide advantages to family and friends. This tension between civil and labor rights is evident in Republicans' use of anti-civil rights platforms to attract white voters, and in the efforts of Democrats to bridge race and class issues, or civil and labor rights broadly defined. As a result, DiTomaso finds that whites are, at best, uncertain allies in the fight for racial equality.

Weaving together research on both race and class, along with the life experiences of DiTomaso's interview subjects, The American Non-Dilemma provides a compelling exploration of how racial inequality is reproduced in today's society, how people come to terms with the issue in their day-to-day experiences, and what these trends may signify in the contemporary political landscape.

NANCY DITOMASO is professor of organization management at Rutgers University.

“Documenting Desegregation uses remarkable data to chart the history of workplace integration since 1966, showing where, when, and hence why firms changed. The lessons are many: black men’s gains stalled when Reagan took the White House; white women saw progress until the new millennium; affirmative action played a positive role. This meticulously researched, compelling book provides not only a much needed history of the revolution in the labor market, but important lessons for how the United States can continue to pursue equality of opportunity.”
—Frank Dobbin, Harvard University

“With comprehensive data on private-sector employers, this book reveals the changing narratives of inequality by race and gender in American society from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through 2005. The Civil Rights Act ended hypersegregation by race and sex, but employment progress for African American men and women has largely stalled since 1980. White women have continued to see gains over the period, but the employment advantages of white men have persisted and taken on new forms in the modern workplace. The sweeping patterns of racial and gender inequality that marked the beginning of the Civil Rights era have been replaced by workplace-level inequality regimes that are shaped by labor-market, legal, political, and normative environments. Documenting Desegregation is a landmark contribution to our understanding of the shifting character of inequality in American society.”
—Robert L. Nelson, Northwestern University

Enacted nearly fifty years ago, the Civil Rights Act codified a new vision for American society by formally ending segregation and banning race and gender discrimination in the workplace. But how much change did the legislation actually produce? As employers responded to the law, did new and more subtle forms of inequality emerge in the workplace? In an insightful analysis that combines history with a rigorous empirical analysis of newly available data, Documenting Desegregation offers the most comprehensive account to date of what has happened to equal opportunity in America—and what needs to be done in order to achieve a truly integrated workforce.

Weaving strands of history, cognitive psychology, and demography, Documenting Desgregation provides a compelling exploration of the ways legislation can affect employer behavior and produce change. Authors Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey use a remarkable historical record—data from more than six million workplaces collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) since 1966—to present a sobering portrait of race and gender in the American workplace. Progress has been decidedly uneven: black men, black women, and white women have prospered in firms that rely on educational credentials when hiring, though white women have advanced more quickly. And white men have hardly fallen behind—they now hold more managerial positions than they did in 1964. The authors argue that the Civil Rights Act's equal opportunity clauses have been most effective when accompanied by social movements demanding changes. EEOC data show that African American men made rapid gains in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Similarly, white women gained access to more professional and managerial jobs in the 1970s as regulators and policymakers began to enact and enforce gender discrimination laws. By the 1980s, however, racial desegregation had stalled, reflecting the dimmed status of the Civil Rights agenda. Racial and gender employment segregation remain high today, and, alarmingly, many firms, particularly in high-wage industries, seem to be moving in the wrong direction and have shown signs of resegregating since the 1980s. To counter this worrying trend, the authors propose new methods to increase diversity by changing industry norms, holding human resources managers to account, and exerting renewed government pressure on large corporations to make equal employment opportunity a national priority.

At a time of high unemployment and rising inequality, Documenting Desegregation provides an incisive re-examination of America's tortured pursuit of equal employment opportunity. This important new book will be an indispensable guide for those seeking to understand where America stands in fulfilling its promise of a workplace free from discrimination.

KEVIN STAINBACK is assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University.

DONALD TOMASKOVIC-DEVEY is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.