'Descended from immigrants and revolutionists': how family immigration history shapes representation in Congress

Does recent immigrant lineage influence the legislative behavior of members of Congress on immigration policy? We examine the relationship between the immigrant background of legislators (i.e., their generational distance from immigration) and legislative behavior, focusing on roll-call votes for landmark immigration legislation and congressional speech on the floor. Legislators more proximate to the immigrant experience tend to support more permissive immigration legislation. Legislators with recent immigration backgrounds also speak more often about immigration in Congress, though the size of immigrant constituencies in their districts accounts for a larger share of this effect. A regression discontinuity design on close elections, which addresses selection bias concerns and holds district composition constant, confirms that legislators with recent immigrant backgrounds tend to support pro-immigration legislation. Finally, we demonstrate how a common immigrant identity can break down along narrower ethnic lines in cases where restrictive legislation targets specific places of origin. Our findings illustrate the important role of immigrant identity in legislative behavior and help illuminate the legislative dynamics of present-day immigration policy.Accepted manuscrip

Making their Way: Helping Kentucky's Immigrant Youth Successfully Transition into Adulthood

All youth in Kentucky need high quality educational experiences to become successful adults. Children must have access to educational opportunities at every stage of development, from early child care and preschool to post-secondary education or vocational training.Education improves each young person's ability to get a good job and become self-sustaining community members. Education also creates a strong workforce, which contributes to the overall growth and productivity of Kentucky's economy.In Kentucky, as across the nation, children in immigrant families represent a small but growing part of the population and future workforce. Currently, children in immigrant families make up 5 percent of the total child population in Kentucky. In a highly globalized world, educated bilingual and multicultural youth in immigrant families will be an enormous future asset to businesses, service providers and government agencies.1Many immigrant families in Kentucky possess positive child well-being influences, including high rates of parent educational attainment, strong rates of home ownership and low rates of poverty.2On the other hand, there are also some immigrant families living in low-income households and parents who do not have a high school degree. Kentucky's older immigrant youth sometimes face additional challenges to completing high school and pursuing higher education, including English language acquisition, cultural skills and social adaptation.3English proficiency, for example, is the greatest predictor of the success of older immigrant youth. The lack of adequate English language and education programs for older immigrant youth prevents Kentucky from taking advantage of a great resource for our future workforce.This brief presents a snapshot of older immigrant youth ages 16 to19 and will examine how well they are being prepared to successfully transition into higher education and the workforce.4To better understand how this population is faring, data on school drop out rates and on disconnected youth who are not in school and do not have a job is presented. The data compares Kentucky's immigrant youth born outside the U.S. to all youth born in the U.S. (which includes U.S.-born youth with immigrant parents).

Immigrant Student Identities in Literacy Spaces

The United States has a long history of marginalizing immigrant populations. Anti-immigration laws and ideologies have not only marginalized immigrant populations, but they have shaped the American educational system. Language policies, curricula, and standardized tests threaten the erasure of immigrant students’ languages, cultures, and identities while favoring and privileging white middle-class ways of learning. This is particularly true for immigrants of color. This backgrounder discusses immigrant identities in school spaces. Specifically, I provide an overview of how immigrant students’ identities are constructed in literacy classrooms through literacy practices.Educatio

Immigrant Small Business Owners: A Significant and Growing Part of the Economy

Immigrant entrepreneurship is widely recognized as an important aspect of the economic role immigrants play. Surprisingly, until now, there has been relatively little basic information available about the number and characteristics of immigrant small business owners.This report breaks new ground in identifying small immigrant businesses and immigrant small business owners. It gives a detailed profile of who immigrant business owners are, based primarily on two data sources: the Survey of Business Owners (SBO), looking at businesses with between 1 and 99 employees; and the American Community Survey (ACS), looking at people who own an incorporated business and whose main job is running that business

Our Children Our Schools: A Blueprint for Creating Partnerships Between Immigrant Families and New York City Public Schools

Eighty percent of immigrant parents surveyed indicated that they would like to be more involved in their children's schools. However, immigrant parents are often under-utilized as critical resources in their school communities. In New York City, where more than 60% of students are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, schools cannot afford to allow immigrant families to remain alienated. Schools need to determine what keeps immigrant parents away and address these hurdles proactively. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive picture of what hinders immigrant parent participation in the New York City public schools and what can be done to make schools more inclusive of immigrant parents so that they can be active partners in their children's education. We asked 82 immigrant parents and representatives from ten community-based organizations (CBOs) that work with immigrant parents across the City's diverse communities to tell us about their experiences in the schools and what could be done to improve those experiences. Their stories and recommendations are the heart of this paper. We also identified a number of promising practices in New York City and other cities around the country and provide a number of concrete steps the New York City Department of Education (DOE) and individual schools can take to build true partnerships with immigrant families

Immigrant Networks and the U.S. Bilateral Trade: the Role of Immigrant Income

This paper examines the role of immigrant networks on trade, particulalry through the demand effect. First, we examine the effect of immigration on trade when the immigrants consume more of the goods that are abundant in their home country than the natives in a standard Heckscher-Ohlin model and find that the effect of immigration on trade is a priori indeterminate. Our econometric gravity model consists of 63 major trading and immigrant sending countries for the U.S. over 1991 - 2000. We find that the immigrants income, mostly through demand effect, has a significant negative effect on the U.S. imports. However, if we include the effect of the immigrant income interacted with the size of the immigrant network, measured by the immigrant stock, we find that higher the immigrant income lower is the immigrant network effect for both U.S. exports and imports. This we find in addition to the immigrant stock elasticity of 0.27% for U.S. exports and 0.48% for U.S. imports. Capturing the immigrant assimilation with the level of immigrant income this paper finds that the immigrant network effect on trade flows is weakened by the increasing level of immigrant assimilation.immigrant networks, immigrant assimilation, demand effect, trade.

Unions and Upward Mobility for Immigrant Workers

This report reviews the characteristics of the immigrant workforce and analyzes the impact of unionization on the pay and benefits of immigrant workers. According to the most recent available data, immigrant workers are now over 15 percent of the workforce and almost 13 percent of unionized workers. Even after controlling for systematic differences between union and non-union workers, union representation substantially improves the pay and benefits received by immigrants

Creating Opportunity for Immigrant Women and Girls in the Chicago Region: Recommendations for the Chicago Foundation for Women's Civic Plan

Division sought to understand what economic, health, and violence-related issues are most pressing for immigrant women in the Chicago region, their families, and their communities. These findings are the result of a research and information gathering process with Chicago-area immigrant women, social service providers who work with immigrant communities, a literature review on related topics, and a scan of change efforts in other states and localities related to issues impacting immigrant women and their families. This report documents the key issues facing immigrant women in the Chicago region and prioritizes those concerns into actionable micro- and systems-level recommended change efforts. The Chicago Foundation for Women is building the concerns of immigrant women into their Civic Plan, and other community organizations and advocates can learn from the voices of impacted women themselves to ensure their efforts are aligned with the true needs and desires of the community

Immigrant Entrepreneurs Creating Jobs and Strengthening the U.S. Economy in Growing Industries

The focus of this report evolved from a 2010 conference at Babson College on "Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Massachusetts" sponsored by The Immigrant Learning Center, Inc. (ILC) from which two key ideas emerged. One is that there is an "immigrant entrepreneurship ecology" that includes immigrant neighborhood storefront businesses; immigrant high-tech and health science entrepreneurs; immigrant non-tech growth businesses; and immigrant transnational businesses. A second idea was that these growing, non-tech industries (including transportation, food and building services) have not attracted much attention. Interestingly, these sectors can be crucial to the expansion of the green economy. Within this context, The ILC decided to look at these three sectors in Massachusetts as well as in New York and Pennsylvania.Moreover, the report dramatically illustrates how immigrant entrepreneurs look for niches in underserved markets. For example, vans and other alternatives to mass transit serve unmet transportation needs in urban areas. Food intended to be a "taste of home" for compatriots in local restaurants and grocery stores becomes popular and influences the eating habits of other Americans. Workers who enter industries like landscaping or cleaning because they don't require much English gain experience and see opportunities to start their own companies. Businesses like these add value to American life by expanding the economy rather than taking away from native businesses

Economic Mobility of Immigrants in the United States

Explores how immigrant economic mobility has changed over time, and to what extent immigrant economic mobility is similar to that of U.S. citizens