Today, roughly 70 percent of all visas for legal immigration are reserved for family members of permanent residents or American citizens. Family reunification—policies that seek to preserve family unity during or following migration—is a central pillar of current immigration law, but it has existed in some form in American statutes since at least the mid-nineteenth century. In her 2013 RSF book, Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration, sociologist Catherine Lee delves into the fascinating history of family reunification to examine how and why our conceptions of family have shaped immigration, the meaning of race, and the way we see ourselves as a country.
In a new interview with the Foundation, Lee discusses some of the groundbreaking research from her book and offers recommendations for future immigration policies. To learn more about Fictive Kinship or to purchase a copy, click here.
Q. As you point out in your book, family reunification has long been a guiding theme of U.S. immigration policy and has significantly influenced the changing demographics of the country. Can you give some examples of how family reunification policies have shaped the way we think about race and ethnicity in the U.S. today?
Below is an early look at new and forthcoming books from the Foundation for Spring 2014. The list includes a major new study on the role of private equity firms in today’s economy, an in-depth analysis of how Obama’s 2008 campaign has changed racial attitudes in the U.S., and a volume examining what we know about policies to help low-wage workers. To request a hard copy of the full catalog, please contact Bruce Thongsack at bruce@rsage.org, or click here to visit our publications page.
On Monday, January 13, 2014, RSF Visiting Scholars Jane Waldfogel (Columbia University) and Miles Corak (University of Ottawa) will lead a working session at the Social Mobility Summit hosted by the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families. With Bruce Bradbury (University of New South Wales) and Elizabeth Washbrook (University of Bristol), Waldfogel and Corak are currently part of an RSF working group investigating educational inequality in four countries.
Monday’s Social Mobility Summit will open with a public keynote address from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the morning and close with a public keynote address from Congressman Paul Ryan. Senator Gillibrand and Representative Ryan will each lay out their personal vision for how we can promote social mobility in the U.S. today. During the day, the Center on Children and Families will hold a series of private working sessions with leading scholars. Each session will address a critical life stage for the promotion of social mobility: family formation, the early years, K-12 education, college education, and transitions into work. Click here to register to attend this event, or sign up to join the live webcast.
In a move that could signal the end of the deadlock on immigration reform that stifled Congress for the better part of 2013, Speaker of the House John Boehner has indicated his willingness to address immigration laws. As the New York Times reports, though Boehner continues to voice reservations about a single, comprehensive bill to create additional pathways to U.S. citizenship, he also condemned the hardline stance of conservative Tea Party groups opposed to any immigration compromises.
Republicans have increasingly struggled to find a balance between appeasing their conservative constituents while also attempting to court Latino voters. According to the New York Times, Romney won only 27% of the Latino vote in the 2012 presidential election due to his views on immigration. But the Democratic Party has also suffered for its failure to implement significant immigration reform. A September 2013 Pew study showed that the Obama administration deported more immigrants annually than the George W. Bush administration, and that 59% of Latinos disapproved of Obama’s handling of deportations.
The 2013 RSF book Immigration, Poverty and Socioeconomic Inequality, co-edited by David Card and Steven Raphael, explores the rapid rise in immigration to the U.S. since the 1960s and analyzes the economic and political shifts that have occurred as a result of this increase—including changes in the national poverty rate, labor market fluctuations, and the evolution of immigration policies. In his chapter, “Immigration Enforcement as a Race-Making Institution,” sociologist Douglas Massey traces the surge in deportations, border patrol budgets, and border enforcement agents over the last several decades:
At the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associates in Philadelphia, the University of Michigan’s Martha J. Bailey, co-editor of the 2013 Russell Sage Foundation book Legacies of the War on Poverty, received the 2013 IZA Young Labor Economist Award for her paper “The Opt In Revolution,” co-authored with Brad Hershbein (Upjohn Institute) and Amalia Miller (University of Virginia). The paper examines the role of the birth control pill in increasing women’s human capital investments and, ultimately, wages. It concludes the Pill can account for 10 percent of the convergence of the gender wage gap in the 1980s and 30 percent in the 1990s.
The IZA Young Labor Economist Award, awarded annually since 2002, recognizes one outstanding paper each year in labor economics by an author or authors younger than 40 years of age. The recipients are awarded €5,000 between them for their research.
Books
Private Equity at Work
When Wall Street Manages Main Street
About This Book
Finalist for the 2016 Academy of Management's George R. Terry Book Award
“Private Equity at Work is the first comprehensive examination of private equity—its history, economic performance, and social consequences, especially for employees. The authors cast a gimlet eye on private equity’s business model, whose shortcomings are dissected with razor-sharp analysis. The material is timely and original. It includes detailed case studies as well as proposals to better regulate this invisible but omnipresent industry.
—SANFORD M. JACOBY, Distinguished Professor, UCLA
“In this brilliant new book, Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt pull back the curtain on the shadowy world of private equity and its role in the management and mismanagement of our economy. Their rigorous, balanced, and well-written study shows how inadequate government regulation, biases in the tax code, and a permissive Wall Street culture combine to put private equity financiers in charge of important American companies, often to the detriment of the long-term interests of workers, investors and the broader economy. Appelbaum and Batt develop a program of common sense policy changes that will help us tap the socially productive potential of private equity while trimming its worst excesses. This terrific book will be of interest to policymakers, students, and scholars, and should be read anyone wanting to understand why America's widely shared prosperity got derailed and how to get it back on track.”
—GERALD EPSTEIN, professor of economics and codirector, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic, Private Equity at Work provides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence—including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship—to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers.
Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors. Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies—representing almost 8 million employees—have been purchased by private equity firms. As their role in the economy has increased, they have come under fire from labor unions and community advocates who argue that the proliferation of leveraged buyouts destroys jobs, causes wages to stagnate, saddles otherwise healthy companies with debt, and leads to subsidies from taxpayers.
Appelbaum and Batt show that private equity firms’ financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. Their risky decisions include buying companies and extracting dividends by loading them with high levels of debt and selling assets. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized.
Because the law views private equity firms as investors rather than employers, private equity owners are not held accountable for their actions in ways that public corporations are. And their actions are not transparent because private equity owned companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thus, any debts or costs of bankruptcy incurred fall on businesses owned by private equity and their workers, not the private equity firms that govern them. For employees this often means loss of jobs, health and pension benefits, and retirement income. Appelbaum and Batt conclude with a set of policy recommendations intended to curb the negative effects of private equity while preserving its constructive role in the economy. These include policies to improve transparency and accountability, as well as changes that would reduce the excessive use of financial engineering strategies by firms.
A groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model, Private Equity at Work provides an unprecedented analysis of the little-understood inner workings of private equity and of the effects of leveraged buyouts on American companies and workers. This important new work will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public alike.
EILEEN APPELBAUM is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C. and Visiting Professor in the Management Department, University of Leicester, UK.
ROSEMARY BATT is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School, Cornell University.
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On Monday, December 16, the Federal Reserve celebrated its centennial. Among those who delivered speeches were current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and former chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan. Greenspan focused his remarks on the stock market crash of October 19, 1987, which marked the steepest one-day drop in stock prices in U.S. history. At the time Greenspan was credited with successfully diverting the economy from a deeper financial crisis, but his role in the financial crash that would occur 20 years later proved less positive.
In a new review of Greenspan’s book, The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting, RSF Robert K. Merton Scholar Robert Solow assesses Greenspan’s theory of how people can better predict the economic future. “Greenspan’s new book is obviously intended to show that his errors were only partial and that he has found useful ways to correct them, and thus to refurbish his reputation as oracle-in-chief,” Solow writes. “It fails.”
Solow elucidates the shortcomings of Greenspan’s “Iron Law,” or the claim that whenever the U.S. adds money to programs such as Social Security or Medicare, it also forces a reduction in family and business savings, or an increase in government deficits. Solow points out that many of the linear regressions Greenspan offers in his book are too general to provide solid proof for the claims of his theory. As Solow puts it, “Greenspan’s Iron Law is built not so much on evidence as on ideology.” That ideology is the argument that an unregulated or only lightly regulated market is the solution to the failures of the economy.
On Wednesday, December 18, 2013, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation announced the eight winners of their 2014 Anneliese Maier Research Award, including Kathleen Vohs, a current RSF Visiting Scholar and Land O'Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing at the University of Minnesota. The award funds research collaboration between humanities and social science scholars in Germany and candidates from other countries, who are nominated by their colleagues at German universities and research institutions. Each award recipient is granted €250,000 to pursue their research interests.
Vohs was nominated by the Institute of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg for her influential research on self-regulation and experimental consumer psychology. In her time at the Russell Sage Foundation, Vohs is working in collaboration with Roy Baumeister to further develop a model of self-control as a limited resource. The two scholars are also researching the self-sufficiency theory of money, or the idea that money is a source of independence for people that has both negative and positive effects on their behavior.