Discussion of Mexican migration to the United States is often infused with ideological rhetoric, untested theories, and few facts. In Crossing the Border, editors Jorge Durand and Douglas Massey bring the clarity of scientific analysis to this hotly contested but under-researched topic. Leading immigration scholars use data from the Mexican Migration Project—the largest, most comprehensive, and reliable source of data on Mexican immigrants currently available—to answer such important questions as: Who are the people that migrate to the United States from Mexico? Why do they come? How effective is U.S. migration policy in meeting its objectives?

Crossing the Border dispels two primary myths about Mexican migration: First, that those who come to the United States are predominantly impoverished and intend to settle here permanently, and second, that the only way to keep them out is with stricter border enforcement. Nadia Flores, Rubén Hernández-León, and Douglas Massey show that Mexican migrants are generally not destitute but in fact cross the border because the higher comparative wages in the United States help them to finance homes back in Mexico, where limited credit opportunities makes it difficult for them to purchase housing. William Kandel’s chapter on immigrant agricultural workers debunks the myth that these laborers are part of a shadowy, underground population that sponges off of social services. In contrast, he finds that most Mexican agricultural workers in the United States are paid by check and not under the table. These workers pay their fair share in U.S. taxes and—despite high rates of eligibility—they rarely utilize welfare programs. Research from the project also indicates that heightened border surveillance is an ineffective strategy to reduce the immigrant population. Pia Orrenius demonstrates that strict barriers at popular border crossings have not kept migrants from entering the United States, but rather have prompted them to seek out other crossing points. Belinda Reyes uses statistical models and qualitative interviews to show that the militarization of the Mexican border has actually kept immigrants who want to return to Mexico from doing so by making them fear that if they leave they will not be able to get back into the United States.

By replacing anecdotal and speculative evidence with concrete data, Crossing the Border paints a picture of Mexican immigration to the United States that defies the common knowledge. It portrays a group of committed workers, doing what they can to realize the dream of home ownership in the absence of financing opportunities, and a broken immigration system that tries to keep migrants out of this country, but instead has kept them from leaving.

JORGE DURAND is professor in the Department for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Guadalajara and codirector of the Mexican Migration Project.

DOUGLAS S. MASSEY is professor of sociology and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and codirector of the Mexican Migration Project.

CONTRIBUTORS: Patricia Arias, Maria Aysa, Marcela Cerrutti, Enrique Martinez Curiel, Katharine M. Donato, Jorge Durand, Nadia Y. Flores, Elizabeth Fussell, Ruben Hernandez-Leon, William A. Kandel, Douglas S. Massey, Margarita Mooney, Pia M. Orrenius, Emilio A. Parrado, Evelyn Patterson, Belinda I. Reyes, Fernando Riosmena, and Estela Rivero-Fuentes. 

How has American society changed over the last fifteen years? Do we raise our children differently now than in 1953? Has women's liberation produced a shift in attitudes toward marriage or altered our idea about appropriate activities for women? Have our attitudes toward race undergone a significant revision?

In this challenging volume, three eminent sociologists examine questions like these in the light of hard data which have become available, year by year, over the last two decades. The major purpose of the book is to demonstrate how measures of social change can be developed, capitalizing on past efforts in survey research. An omnibus survey, carried out in 1971, was designed almost entirely as a selective repitition of questions originally asked in the 1950s. It provides precise and reliable measures of change in such areas as marital and sex roles, social participation, child rearing, religious behavior, political orientations, and racial attitudes.

Lucid and authoritative, Social Change in a Metropolitan Community presents a unique body of information on changes in public opinion, social norms, and institutional behavior. Its large number of statistical measurements are presented in an extremely accessible form—almost always as simple percentage comparisons. The research findings included here are unduplicated by any other study, and as a source of information on current social trends they provide fascinating reading for anyone who wishes to enlarge his understanding of the temper of our times.

OTIS DUDLEY DUNCAN, HOWARD SCHUMAN, and BEVERLY DUNCAN are all professors of sociology at the University of Michigan.

"A richly erudite history of measurement and an account of its current state in the social sciences—fascinating, informative, provocative." —James S. Coleman, Unversity of Chicago

"Wise and powerful." — American Journal of Sociology

"Personal and provocative—an excellent set of historical and critical ruminations from one of social measurement's greatest contributors." —Choice

OTIS DUDLEY DUNCAN is professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.

Traces the development of the sanitary and health problems of New York City from earliest Dutch times to the culmination of a nineteenth-century reform movement that produced the Metropolitan Health Act of 1866, the forerunner of the present New York City Department of Health. Professor Duffy shows the city's transition from a clean and healthy colonial settlement to an epidemic-ridden community in the eighteenth century, as the city outgrew its health and sanitation facilities. He describes the slow growth of a demand for adequate health laws in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to the establishment of the first permanent health agency in 1866.

JOHN DUFFY is professor of history of medicine in the history department and School of Medicine at Tulane University.

Psychologists now understand that identity is not fixed, but fluid and highly dependent on environment. In times of stress, conflict, or change, people often adapt by presenting themselves in different ways and emphasizing different social affiliations. With changing demographics creating more complex social groupings, it is important to understand the costs and benefits of the way social groups are categorized, and the way individuals understand, cope with, and employ their varied social identities. Navigating the Future, edited by Geraldine Downey, Jacquelynne Eccles, and Celina Chatman, answers that call with a wealth of empirical data and expert analysis.

Navigating the Future focuses on the roles that social identities play in stressful, challenging, and transitional situations. Jason Lawrence, Jennifer Crocker, and Carol Dweck show how the prospect of being negatively stereotyped can affect the educational success of girls and African Americans, making them more cynical about school and less likely to seek help. The authors argue that these issues can be mitigated by challenging these students educationally, expressing optimism in their abilities, and emphasizing that intelligence is not fixed, but can be developed. The book also looks at the ways in which people employ social identity to their advantage. J. Nicole Shelton and her co-authors use extensive research on adolescents and college students to argue that individuals with strong, positive connections to their ethnic group exhibit greater well-being and are better able to cope with the negative impact of discrimination. Navigating the Future also discusses how the importance and value of social identity depends on context. LaRue Allen, Yael Bat-Chava, J. Lawrence Aber, and Edward Seidman find that the emotional benefit of racial pride for black adolescents is higher in predominantly black neighborhoods than in racially mixed environments.

Because most people identify with more than one group, they must grapple with varied social identities, using them to make connections with others, overcome adversity, and understand themselves. Navigating the Future brings together leading researchers in social psychology to understand the complexities of identity in a diverse social world.

GERALDINE DOWNEY is assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University.

JACQUELYNNE S. ECCLES is Wilbert McKeachie Collegiate Professor of Psychology, Women's Studies, and Education and research scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

CELINA M. CHATMAN is associate director of the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.

CONTRIBUTORS: J. Lawrence Aber, LaRue Allen, Susan M. Andersen, Yael Bat-Chava, Niall Bolger, Jennifer Crocker, William E. Crocker Jr., Andrea L. Dottolo, Carol S. Dweck, Andrew J. Fuligni, Diane Hughes, Jason S. Lawrence, Bonita London, Oksana Malanchuk, Tracy McLaughlin-Volpe, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Elizabeth Moje, Edward Seidman, J. Nicole Shelton, Abigail J. Stewart, Linda C. Strauss, Tom R. Tyler, Elizabeth Velilla, Niobe Way, Carol Wong, Tiffany Yip.

Every day, it seems, we become aware of some new technological or chemical hazard. Yet it is also possible that this very awareness is new, or at least newly heightened. Why are certain kinds of risks suddenly so salient? Are public perceptions of risk simply the sum of individual reactions to individual events, or do social and cultural influences play a role in shaping our definitions of safety, acceptable risk, and danger?

Prompted by public outcries and by the confusion and uncertainty surrounding risk management policy, social scientists have begun to address themselves to the issue of risk perception. But as anthropologist Mary Douglas points out, they have been singularly reluctant to examine the cultural bases of risk perception, preferring to concentrate on the individual perceiver making individual choices. This approach leaves unexamined a number of crucial social factors—our concepts of what is “natural” or “artificial,” for example; our beliefs about fairness, and our moral judgements about the kind of society in which we want to live.

This provocative and path-breaking report seeks to open a sociological approach to risk perception that has so far been systematically neglected. Describing first some exceptions to the general neglect of culture, Douglas builds on these clues and on her own broad anthropological perspective to make a compelling case for focusing on social factors in risk perception. She offers a challenge and a promising new agenda to all who study perceptions of risk and, by extension, to those who study human cognition and choice as well.

"An altogether brilliant piece of writing—far-reaching and a joy to read." —Amartya Sen, Oxford University

MARY DOUGLAS is a Visiting Professor at Princeton University.

A Volume in the the Russell Sage Foundation's Social Science Frontiers Series

The new economic sociology is based on the theory that patterns of economic behavior are shaped by social factors. The Sociology of the Economy brings together a dozen path-breaking empirical studies that explore how social forces—such as shifts in political power, the influence of social networks, or the spread of new economic ideas—shape real-world economic behavior.

The contributors—all leading economic sociologists—show these social forces at work in a diverse range of international settings and historical circumstances. Examining why so many American banks followed industry leaders into foreign markets in the 1970s, only to pull back within a few years, Mark Mizruchi and Gerald Davis suggest that social emulation rather than rational calculation led banks to expand globally before there was any evidence that foreign offices paid off. William Schneper and Mauro Guillé show that despite the international diffusion of the hostile takeover during the last twenty years, the practice became widespread only in countries with political institutions conducive to buying and selling entire companies. Thus during the 1990s, the United States and United Kingdom saw hundreds of hostile takeover bids, while Germany had only a handful, and Japan just one. Deborah Davis explores resistance to the globalization of Western ideas about real-estate ownership—particularly in China where the government has had little success in instituting a market system in place of traditional, family-based real-estate inheritance. And Richard Scott examines the controversial rise of managed care in the American healthcare system, as the quest for market efficiency collided with the ideal of equity in access to health care.

Together, these studies provide compelling evidence that economic behavior is not ruled by immutable laws, and is but one realm of social behavior, with its own conventions, roles, and social structures. The Sociology of the Economy demonstrates the vitality of empirical research in the field of economic sociology and the power of sociological models in explaining how markets operate.

FRANK DOBBIN is professor of sociology at Harvard University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Urs Bruegger, Karin Knorr Cetina, Deborah S. Davis, Gerald F. Davis, Bai Gao, Mauro F. Guillen, Heather A. Haveman, Kieran Healy, Lisa A. Keister, Paul D. McLean, Mark S. Mizruchi, John F. Padgett, Charles Perrow, William D. Schneper, W. Richard Scott, Richard Swedberg. 

In the two decades since a new social movement put environmental issues high on the national policy agenda, Washington has become home to a small group of people—the risk professionals—whose careers center on the identification, assessment, and management of risks to public health and safety. These men and women, experts working in federal agencies, Congress, activist organizations, and corporations, help transform mass concern into government policy, shaping the way our society responds to environmental and technological hazards.

Based on nearly 230 interviews, The Risk Professionals provides the first comprehensive sociological analysis of our "danger establishment." Dietz and Rycroft explore the social, educational, and career profiles of risk professionals; their worldviews and ideologies; their networks and norms. Not content to view risk professionals from a single perspective, the authors build an integrated description that considers commonalities in their subjects' backgrounds, interests, values, and communication patterns. The result is a uniquely revealing look into the heart of the risk policy system, and a broader illumination of the social structures and dynamics that will influence environmental policy for years to come.

THOMAS DIETZ is at George Mason University.

ROBERT W. RYCROFT is at George Washington University.

A Volume in the the Russell Sage Foundation's Social Science Frontiers Series

Is citizenship simply a legal status or does it describe a sense of belonging to a national community? For Arab Americans, these questions took on new urgency after 9/11, as the cultural prejudices that have often marginalized their community came to a head. Citizenship and Crisis reveals that, despite an ever-shifting definition of citizenship and the ease with which it can be questioned in times of national crisis, the Arab communities of metropolitan Detroit continue to thrive. A groundbreaking study of social life, religious practice, cultural values, and political views among Detroit Arabs after 9/11, Citizenship and Crisis argues that contemporary Arab American citizenship and identity have been shaped by the chronic tension between social inclusion and exclusion that has been central to this population’s experience in America.

According to the landmark Detroit Arab American Study, which surveyed more than 1,000 Arab Americans and is the focus of this book, Arabs express pride in being American at rates higher than the general population. In nine wide-ranging essays, the authors of Citizenship and Crisis argue that the 9/11 backlash did not substantially transform the Arab community in Detroit, nor did it alter the identities that prevail there. The city’s Arabs are now receiving more mainstream institutional, educational, and political support than ever before, but they remain a constituency defined as essentially foreign. The authors explore the role of religion in cultural integration and identity formation, showing that Arab Muslims feel more alienated from the mainstream than Arab Christians do. Arab Americans adhere more strongly to traditional values than do other Detroit residents, regardless of religion. Active participants in the religious and cultural life of the Arab American community attain higher levels of education and income, yet assimilation to the American mainstream remains important for achieving enduring social and political gains. The contradictions and dangers of being Arab and American are keenly felt in Detroit, but even when Arab Americans oppose U.S. policies, they express more confidence in U.S. institutions than do non-Arabs in the general population.

The Arabs of greater Detroit, whether native-born, naturalized, or permanent residents, are part of a political and historical landscape that limits how, when, and to what extent they can call themselves American. When analyzed against this complex backdrop, the results of The Detroit Arab American Study demonstrate that the pervasive notion in American society that Arabs are not like “us” is simply inaccurate. Citizenship and Crisis makes a rigorous and impassioned argument for putting to rest this exhausted cultural and political stereotype.

The Detroit Arab American Study is a collaboration between the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Dearborn, and an advisory panel of community representatives from more than twenty secular, religious, and social service organizations. The group is led by WAYNE BAKER, SALLY HOWELL, ANN CHIH LIN, ANDREW SHRYOCK, and MARK TESSLER of the University of Michigan; AMANEY JAMAL of Princeton University; and RON STOCKTON of the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Policy analysis, as a practical matter, is hardly new. Throughout history, rulers have sought advice from priests or sages, and monarchs have conferred with counselors. The emergence of empirical social research in the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for policy advice that was more than an idiosyncratic political exercise, but it was not until well into this century that the systematic examination of policy issues became feasible.

Advice and Consent traces the recent course of the "policy sciences," a term coined in 1951 to describe an analytic approach that draws on political science, sociology, law, economics, psychology, and operations research to examine specific social problems in context. Peter deLeon's unique contribution is to delineate two separate but related currents in the development of the policy sciences: first, the evolution of intellectual tools for analysis ("advice"); and second, the evolution of a perceived need for policy research as prompted by events such as the war on poverty ("consent").

Peter deLeon's concise and literate account of how these two trends shaped the policy sciences and affected each other clarifies the present state of policy research, explores its failure to realize fully its ideals, and frames the challenges facing the policy sciences as they struggle to complete their transformation from academic fancy to institutional fact.

PETER DELEON is assistant professor of public policy at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado, Denver, and advisor to several European policy research centers.