The combination of “work-first” legislation and a booming economy in the 1990s propelled many poor individuals into employment and off of welfare. But for all too many poor families, marginal gains in income were washed out by new costs for transportation, child care, health insurance, and housing. With support from the Foundation, Carolyn Heidrich, John Karl Scholz, and Thomas Kaplan will organize a multidisciplinary conference in September, 2007 to develop more effective policies for enhancing self-sufficiency and financial independence among the working poor.
New England became a favored destination for Mexican immigrants throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Nontraditional receiving states like Connecticut saw their Mexican population increase by 180 percent. Mexican immigrants arriving in New England find a very different environment than immigrants coming to nontraditional gateways in southern and central states. In North Carolina, for example, Mexican immigrants usually represent the first Latino community in the area.
In November 2004, the Russell Sage Foundation made an award to Alejandro Portes and Cristina Escobar in support of the Comparative Immigrant Organizations Project (CIOP), a comparative study of organizations serving first-generation Colombian, Dominican, and Mexican immigrants. CIOP collects information on organizations’ origins, membership, and goals and builds on the findings of Portes and others who have demonstrated that the role of immigrant organizations is central to the adaptation and incorporation of immigrants into the host society.
At $4 billion a year, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) is the largest source of federal aid to cities, and is targeted at cities with the highest levels of poverty. CDBG originated as part of Nixon’s New Federalism initiative, and replaced funding for several existing urban assistance programs with a single open-ended grant to city governments to use at their discretion. Block grants have become a popular policy tool since then, with proponents arguing that they empower local decision-makers who know best how funds should be spent.
Until the 1980s, few studies challenged the gender ratio “law of migration” set forth by E. G. Ravenstein in the late nineteenth century. Examining British censuses of 1871 and 1881, Ravenstein stated that within-country moves were usually dominated by women while between-country moves were dominated by men. Researchers continued to reiterate Ravenstein’s law throughout most of the twentieth century, until the U.S. Department of Labor finally released a study in 1984 documenting a “remarkable shift” in the gender ratio of migrants.
With the dramatic rise in the U.S. prison population over the past several decades, there has been a concomitant increase in the number of offenders released annually – well over half a million in 2005. Conditions facing recently released prisoners are daunting. Prisoners reenter communities with limited employment opportunities and severely depleted local resources. The chances for committing a crime again are extremely high - about 60 percent within three years of release.
Classic models of immigrant assimilation define success as incorporation into the non-Hispanic, white middle class. By comparing immigrants with the white middle class, however, researchers have implicitly assumed that all newcomers and their children define success using the same standard. Previous research has failed to raise the question of whether second-generation outcomes are perceived and defined differently by the scholars who study immigrant incorporation and the people they study.
California is home to more than 25 percent of the United States’ immigrants. Of the state’s huge immigrant population, 55 percent reside in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The share of U.S. citizens born to immigrant parents has also increased. America’s “second generation” population now numbers over 30 million, 26 percent of whom live in Los Angeles County.
Mexicans have migrated to the United States in greater numbers than any other nationality in the history of the United States. People of Mexican ancestry now make up nine percent of the American population, and Mexican immigrants constitute 31 percent of the foreign-born. In an era characterized by fierce debate over immigration policy and diversity, it is becoming increasingly important to gain a systematic understanding of immigrant incorporation along a number of dimensions.
Latin American indigenous populations are arriving not only to work in U.S. farm fields, but in small and medium-sized cities, where they are becoming a new source of labor in old manufacturing industries and in a growing service sector. Guatemalan Maya began arriving in the United States in the 1980s, fleeing a bloody civil war.