Winter 2021 New from IMR: Health Outcomes, Identity, and Immigrant Status
December 16, 2021
The Winter 2021 edition of the International Migration Review (IMR) is now available online and in print through paid or institutional subscription. This edition is thematically sorted into three sections. The first section discusses migration, family, and health outcomes. The second section has articles about identity, life satisfaction, and migration. The third section is about economic assimilation, immigrant status, and employment. Lastly, this edition includes 8 book reviews, which are free to access.
Wanli Nie and Pau Baizan
This article investigates the impact of international migration to the United States on the level and timing of Chinese migrants’ fertility. The authors compare Chinese women who did not leave the country (non-migrants) and were subject to restrictive family policies from 1974 to 2015 to those who moved to the United States (migrants) and were, thus, “emancipated” from these policies. They develop and empirically test the emancipation hypothesis that migrants should have both a higher fertility and an earlier timing of childbearing than non-migrants but that such differences decline across birth cohorts. Using data from the 2000 US census, the 2005 American Community Survey, the 2000 Chinese census, and the 2005 Chinese 1 percent Population Survey, the results show that Chinese migrants to the United States had substantially higher childbearing probabilities after migration, compared with non-migrants in China, especially for second and third births. Moreover, the analyses indicate that the migration process is selective of migrants with lower fertility. Overall, the results show how international migration from China to the United States can lead to an increase in migrant women’s fertility, accounting for disruption, adaptation, and selection effects. This pattern might also be found in other migration contexts where fertility in the origin country is dropping rapidly while that in the destination country is relatively stable.
Bargaining Power: A Framework for Understanding Varieties of Migration Experience
Michael C. Ewers, Justin Gengler, and Bethany Shockley
This article introduces the concept of bargaining power as a framework for understanding varieties of migration experience and behavior. The authors argue that migration and settlement experiences vary according to a migrant’s leverage — or bargaining power — afforded by their individual cultural and socioeconomic capital (internal bargaining power) and their home country’s political and physical security characteristics (external bargaining power). These two dimensions of bargaining power interact with a host country’s social and political structures to produce specific experiences of (dis)advantage. The authors apply their framework to the Arab Gulf states, where large and diverse foreign populations experience complex and interconnected forms of inclusion and exclusion. Utilizing data from a nationally representative survey of a highly diverse sample of foreign residents in Qatar, they generate a typology of Gulf migration experience and, then, statistically predict migrants’ reported life satisfaction in the host country and intentions for long-term settlement. The authors also use widely available secondary data to examine objective correlates of bargaining power, offering an alternative pathway for future research that does not require individual-level survey data. The article concludes by describing the relevance of the bargaining power framework to the study of varieties of migration experience in other migration regimes.
Rebecca Galemba and Randall Kuhn
Day laborers are a highly vulnerable population, due to their contingent work arrangements, low socioeconomic position, and precarious immigration status. Earlier studies posited day labor as a temporary bridge for recent immigrants to achieve more stable employment, but recent studies have observed increasing duration of residence in the United States among foreign-born day laborers. This article draws on 170 qualitative interviews and a multi-venue, year-long street corner survey of 411 day laborers in the Denver metropolitan area to analyze how duration in the United States affects day laborers’ wages, work, and wage theft experiences. The study found that compared to recent immigrants, foreign-born day laborers with longer duration in the United States worked fewer hours and had lower total earnings but also had higher hourly wages and lower exposure to wage theft. Through qualitative interviews, they address whether this pattern represented weathering, negative selection, or greater discernment. Interviews suggest that day laborers draw on experience to mitigate the risk of wage theft but that the value of experience is undercut by the fierce competition of daily recruitment, ultimately highlighting the compounding vulnerabilities facing longer-duration and older immigrant day laborers. The article highlights duration as an understudied precarity factor which can adversely impact the economic assimilation of long-duration immigrants who persist in contingent markets like day labor.
Migration, Family, and Health Outcomes
A Global Meta-analysis of the Immigrant Mortality Advantage
Eran Shor and David Roelfs
Does Emancipation Matter? Fertility of Chinese International Migrants to the United States and Non-Migrants During China’s One-Child Policy Period
Wanli Nie and Pau Baizan
Identity, Life Satisfaction, and Migration
“New White Ethnics” or “New Latinos”? Hispanic/Latino Pan-ethnicity and Ancestry Reporting among South American Immigrants to the United States
Rebecca A. Schut
International Migration and the (Un)happiness Push: Evidence from Polish Longitudinal Data
Jan Brzozowski and Nicola Coniglio
Bargaining Power: A Framework for Understanding Varieties of Migration Experience
Michael C. Ewers, Justin Gengler, and Bethany Shockley
Economic Assimilation, Immigrant Status, and Employment
Bonding Social Capital, Afghan Refugees, and Early Access to Employment
Matteo Vergani, Ihsan Yilmaz, Greg Barton, James Barry, Galib Bashirov, and Siew Mee Barton
Bridges or Barriers? The Relationship between Immigrants’ Early Labor Market Adversities and Long-term Earnings
Tingting Zhang and Rupa Banerjee
“No Place for Old Men”: Immigrant Duration, Wage Theft, and Economic Mobility among Day Laborers in Denver, Colorado
Rebecca Galemba and Randall Kuhn
Immigrant Women’s Economic Outcomes in Europe: The Importance of Religion and Traditional Gender Roles
Agnieszka Kanas and Katrin Müller
BOOK REVIEWS
The Braided River: Migration and the Personal Essay
Diane Comer
Reviewed by Azadeh Ghanizadeh
The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity
Paul Apostolidis
Reviewed by Adrián Félix
Soviet Signoras: Personal and Collective Transformations in Eastern European Migration
M. Cvajner
Reviewed by Ievgeniia Zasoba
Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration
D Di Cesare and David Broder
Reviewed by Mark F. N. Franke
Stagnant Dreamers: How the Inner City Shapes the Integration of Second-Generation Latinos
M. G Rendón
Reviewed by Eli R. Wilson
The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History
Francis-Fallon Benjamin
Reviewed by Álvaro J. Corral
What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home
S. Boon
Reviewed by Sabrien Amrov
Global Nomads: An Ethnography of Migration, Islam, and Politics in West Africa
S. Fioratta
Reviewed by Cathy Conrad Suso