NEW FROM IMR Recessions, Wage Gaps, Gender, and Immigrant Families across Generations

November 29, 2018

The Fall 2018 edition of the International Migration Review (IMR) is now available online and in print through paid or institutional subscription. This edition is sorted thematically into three sections. The first section – which is on recessions, wage gaps, and immigration policies – includes a paper on the earning advantages of former skilled temporary foreign workers in Canada. The second section is on gender and migration flows. It features a paper on the subversive use of space by female migrant workers in Lebanon. The third section is on generations, immigrant families, and contexts of reception. It includes a paper on how country context impacts the educational attainment of immigrant children. Lastly, this edition has four new book reviews, which are open access and freely available.

Highlights from the Fall 2018 edition include:

Selections Before the Selection: Earnings Advantages of Immigrants Who Were Former Skilled Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada
Feng Hou and Aneta Bonikowska

This study examines the earnings advantage of immigrants to Canada who initially arrived as temporary foreign workers (TFWs) over immigrants who were directly selected to immigrate to Canada as permanent residents (“landed immigrants”). Using the Longitudinal Immigration Database, it finds that prior skilled work experience matters significantly to earnings after migration. Former skilled TFWs had much higher initial earnings than landed immigrants. This earnings gap narrowed in the first 10 years but did not disappear. In comparison, former nonskilled TFWs had significantly lower initial earnings and slower earnings growth than landed immigrants without prior Canadian work experience.

Intimate Counter-Spaces of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon
Amrita Pande

This article challenges the established focus on married mothers in the literature on migration and gender by examining how migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Lebanon use “counter-spaces” (public spaces used in subversive ways) to forge intimate and sexual bonds despite the presence of intense racialized and gendered surveillance in Lebanon. Counter-spaces help to illuminate the wider politics of resistance by MDWs in their everyday lives. It also complicates debates about divisions like public and private, sacred and sexual, and state restrictions on migrant workers’ sexuality. Despite the subversiveness of counter-spaces, they can also reinforce the hypersexualization of the female migrant, thus raising questions about the paradoxical effects of everyday subversive practices used by migrant workers across the world.

Reconceptualizing Context: A Multilevel Model of the Context of Reception and Second Generation Educational Attainment
Renee Luthra, Thomas Soehl, and Roger Waldinger

This paper seeks to return scholarly attention to a core intellectual divide between segmented and conventional (or neo-) assimilation approaches. Segmented assimilation theory posits that assimilation can have both positive and negative effects on immigrant groups, so that some immigrant groups assimilate into a lower segment of society. The conventional assimilation approach argues that assimilation has positive effects on immigrant groups. This paper evaluates multiple theoretical approaches to measuring the contextual effects of the receiving country and measuring its impact on the educational attainment of the children of immigrants. It demonstrates that its proposed measures better predict second-generation educational attainment than current approaches, enabling a modelling strategy which better accounts for the structure of immigrant families within different receiving-country contexts.

The full table of contents for the Fall 2018 issue of IMR is available below:

Issue Information

Table of Contents

Recessions, Wage Gaps, and Immigration Policies

Determinants of Homeownership among Immigrants: Changes during the Great Recession and Beyond
Kusum Mundra and Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere

Selections Before the Selection: Earnings Advantages of Immigrants Who Were Former Skilled Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada
Feng Hou and Aneta Bonikowska

Job Mobility as a New Explanation for the Immigrant-Native Wage Gap: A Longitudinal Analysis of the German Labor Market
Hanna Brenzel and Malte Reichelt

Assessing the Effectiveness of Pay-to-Go Policies: Evidence from Spain’s Voluntary Return Program
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Susan Pozo

Gender, Migration, and Mobility across Scales

Intimate Counter-Spaces of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon
Amrita Pande

Estimates of Global Bilateral Migration Flows by Gender between 1960 and 2015
Guy J. Abel

Generations, Immigrant Families, and Contexts of Reception