Today, nearly four million people live in U.S. territories. While they live under the U.S. flag and hold U.S. passports, they cannot vote in federal elections. Despite promises of equal citizenship under the 14th Amendment and international law that enshrined self-determination and complete sovereign independence as fundamental human rights, U.S. territories continue to exist as exceptions. As the norms of international law, the U.S.
Self-reported race and ethnicity change over time and across different contexts. Changes in self-reported race/ethnicity are especially common among American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) groups. Research shows a larger increase in the self-reported AIAN population than would be predicted using standard demographic projections. This increase could be due, in part, to changes in self-identification.
This grant is funded in part by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation.
More than $100 billion in allocated public benefits go unclaimed annually, due, in large part, to administrative burdens. Artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to reduce these burdens at scale. However, we lack rigorous evidence on AI’s ability to do so. Sociologist Steven Lauterwasser investigate how AI assistance compares to human assistance on reducing administrative burdens when enrolling in public benefits. He will conduct a randomized controlled trial for his study.
Books
RSF: The “Model Minority” Goes to Work
Publication Date
1 in. × 1 in.
216 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-945-7
About This Book
Stereotyped as “model minorities” who excel in the classroom, Asian Americans are more highly educated than all other US groups. Once in the labor market, they outearn White Americans. Some believe this is evidence that White privilege, racial bias, and gender discrimination are fictitious narratives of a liberal “woke” agenda. Others use it as proof that confirms their stereotypes that Asian Americans are inherently smarter and harder working than other groups. While much attention has focused on Asian Americans’ academic achievement, far less research considers whether their later careers mirror their early success. In this issue of RSF, sociologists Jennifer Lee, Kimberly Goyette, Xi Song, and Yu Xie, management scholar Jackson G. Lu, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how Asian Americans fare in the workplace.
The ten articles in this issue examine the ways in which Asian Americans, because of geographic clustering, are advantaged at a national level but disadvantaged at the regional level; how gender, family, and marriage impact Asian Americans in the workplace; and the different ways Asian Americans strategically adapt to the labor market. Robert Manduca and Jane Furey reveal that while on aver-age Asian Americans outearn White Americans at a national level, when compared to Whites living in the same metropolitan area, Asians earn only 88 percent as much. Sharon Sassler and Gabrielle Sorresso find that among computer science professionals, Indian women have a larger gender wage gap than White and Chinese women and experience larger marriage and parenthood penalties in earnings. Sojung Lim and Wonjeong Jeong show that Asian women are more likely to live with extended family than White women, leading to higher rates of employment among Asian women with children. Angelina Grigoryeva finds that Asian Americans are more likely to receive stock-based compensation than White Americans because they are more likely to work in jobs where stock options are provided. Asians and Whites working in the same types of jobs are equally likely to receive stock-based compensation and in similar amounts. Shih-Chun “Steven” Chien and colleagues find that despite being the fastest-growing racial minority group entering the legal profession, Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership positions. They attribute this pattern in part to employers’ pervasive stereotypes that Asian Americans lack traits typically associated with leadership, such as creativity and assertiveness.
This issue of RSF reveals that the perception of the Asian American advantage in the workplace is illusory, and the contributors shed light on the lived experiences of the “model minority” when it goes to work.
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Children of farmworkers on California’s Central Coast experience a legal and social regime that allows agricultural child labor while limiting educational protections. This dissertation examines how statutory exemptions in U.S. child-labor laws produce legally stratified childhoods and educational inequality for these children. Drawing on historical analysis, ethnography, and legal critique, the study traces how agricultural exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act position immigrant children as economic contributors rather than protected minors.
Remote work blurs boundaries between paid employment and household life, often producing overwork and gendered divisions of unpaid labor. This project moves beyond the “work-life balance” metaphor to study how remote households reorganize space, time, and labor. Using interviews and ethnographic observation, it examines household-level arrangements among remote workers, including partners, children, paid domestic workers, and extended support networks.
With roughly 2.3 million migrants awaiting asylum decisions, this project examines how Americans perceive asylum-seekers relative to refugees and undocumented migrants, and how perceptions vary by respondent race. Using a conjoint-design survey, respondents evaluate randomized hypothetical migrant profiles across multiple attributes. The analysis estimates average marginal component effects for each attribute, tests interactions among key variables, and assesses heterogeneity by respondent racial identity.
This project studies how bureaucratic politics shape migration policy outcomes, especially under large backlogs. Bureaucrats routinely make consequential prioritization choices that affect migrant lives, yet the internal dynamics of these decisions are underexamined. Using a comparative-historical approach, I analyze U.S. and Canadian migration bureaucracies from 1960 to present.
Older Mexican immigrants in the U.S.—many with limited or no legal status—face particular vulnerabilities in later life due to restricted access to public safety nets. This qualitative project explores how legal status shapes retirement planning, reliance on family versus public supports, and decisions about where to age. It will conduct 90 life-history interviews with Mexican immigrants aged 50+, 30 interviews with their adult children, and ethnographic observation of family and community interactions in San Diego County.