The U.S. Department of State and the Immigration and Naturalization Service conduct an annual "Diversity Lottery" that allows adults who were born in under-represented source countries a chance to gain legal, permanent residency in the United States. In recent years, 8 to 12 million people from over 150 countries applied for a chance to obtain one of 50,000 green cards through a random selection. Despite the lottery's impact on these millions of people and the immigrant population in the United States, little is known about the role the program plays in contemporary U.S.

Immigrants from the Dominican Republic have faced a difficult transition to life in the United States. They and their children suffer from high poverty rates as well as poor educational and occupational outcomes. They are currently undergoing a large geographic shift - moving out of the areas in which they initially settled and into new communities, which are often smaller and have weaker economies.

For most of the last century, the promise of upward mobility proved true for highly motivated and hard-working immigrants to the United States. Each succeeding generation of these white ethnic groups achieved more education and better jobs than the one before, notwithstanding initial social and economic discrimination, and harsh living conditions. At the beginning of a new century, however, the assumptions of upward mobility for new immigrants and their children have become more uncertain.

Because older members of immigrant families are assumed to be less economically active and less likely to learn English and assimilate to American ways, researchers have overlooked and understudied this demographic group. But older relatives make significant contributions to immigrant families. Economically, they provide valuable childcare for young children, allowing younger adults to enter the workforce. Socially, they help to transmit ethnic identity to children born in America and maintain transnational ties with the family’s native land.

Throughout history, immigrants have held ties with their native lands after migrating; but today’s immigrants have greater opportunities to forge transnational identities. Does this mean that we are moving to a higher-level civil society that transcends citizenship and legal residency boundaries, or is the new transnationalism simply a more technologically advanced expression of old migrant behaviors? What difference does this make for immigrant political incorporation?

Supplemental Award: $34,415, June, 2010

Technology has allowed people the world over to stay connected despite great distance. This has permitted immigrants to maintain strong connections to their native countries after coming to the United States. Do those connections dampen the likelihood that immigrants will incorporate into American civic life?

In 2003, the Foundation set forth on an ambitious research initiative to assess how well the young adult children of recent immigrants in Los Angeles fare as they move through American schools and into the labor market. The project, dubbed the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) study, began with a telephone survey that collected data on the young adult children of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino immigrants, as well as three comparison groups of native parentage.

Recent evidence indicates that immigrants are moving away from, or bypassing altogether, traditional destinations and settling in new metropolitan and suburban areas, where previously they had scant representation. But we know relatively little about the context of their reception, the social and economic infrastructure, and their outcomes in these communities. Sometimes these new arrivals go directly to suburban areas, bypassing the central cities. Sometimes, these new destinations constitute the second step in a migration out of more expensive metropolitan areas.

The greatest predictor of one’s political attitudes and behavior is the political behavior exhibited by one’s family while growing up. However, we know relatively little about how knowledge, attitudes, and expectations about the political process are transmitted within immigrant families, especially families in which some members are citizens and others are not.