Challenges When Identifying Migration from Geo-Located Twitter Data

Given the challenges in collecting up-to-date, comparable data on migrant populations the potential of digital trace data to study migration and migrants has sparked considerable interest among researchers and policy makers. In this paper we assess the reliability of one such data source that is heavily used within the research community: geolocated tweets. We assess strategies used in previous work to identify migrants based on their geolocation histories. We apply these approaches to infer the travel history of a set of Twitter users who regularly posted geolocated tweets between July 2012 and June 2015. In a second step we hand-code the entire tweet histories of a subset of the accounts identified as migrants by these methods. Upon close inspection very few of the accounts that are classified as migrants appear to be migrants in any conventional sense or international students. Rather we find these approaches identify other highly mobile populations such as frequent business or leisure travellers, or people who might best be described as “transnationals”. For demographic research that draws on this kind of data to generate estimates of migration flows this high mis-classification rate implies that findings are likely sensitive to the adjustment model used. For most research trying to use these data to study migrant populations, the data will be of limited utility. We suspect that increasing the correct classification rate substantially will not be easy and may introduce other biases

Social politics: The importance of the family for naturalization decisions of the 1.5 generation

How do migrants make the decision to naturalize? The majority of the literature focuses on the economic costs and benefit calculus of individual migrants, usually those who arrived as adults. Yet a large and growing population of foreign-born individuals arrived as children. Despite spending their formative years in the United States, many remain foreign nationals into adulthood. Based on results from a discrete-time event history model of naturalization of 1.5 generation respondents in California we argue that the cost-benefit tradeoffs underlying most accounts of naturalization decisions will apply in different ways to this population. We show that especially for this population the decision to naturalize cannot be conceptualized as an individual choice but is strongly embedded within the family and co-ethnic context which, in turn, introduces symbolic concerns and country of origin related factors into the decision

The Ambiguities of Political Opportunity: Political claims making of Russian-Jewish Immigrants in New York City

How, and as what are immigrant minorities incorporated into the political process? A set of prominent approaches focus on the political opportunity structure immigrants encounter. Though promising in many aspects, political opportunity approaches fail to consider the internal heterogeneity of both immigrant populations and opportunity structures. This is partly a result of taking ethnic groups rather than political entrepreneurs as the unit of analysis and of not disaggregating the political context properly. This paper shows how Russian-Jewish immigrant political entrepreneurs in New York City used very di�fferent strategies of ethnic mobilization, each emphasizing a di�fferent ethnic cleavage: one was making claims in the name of Russians, the other downplaying the Russianness and highlighting the Jewish identity dimension. Both strategies had good chances at success thus illustrating that political opportunity structures may encourage di�fferent claims making strategies at the same time. Ethno-political entrepreneurs navigate complex and di�fferentiated political landscapes that are ex-ante only partially transparent

Renee Reichl Luthra Who assimilates? Statistical artefacts and intergenerational mobility in immigrant families Who assimilates? Statistical artefacts and intergenerational mobility in immigrant families

One in five US residents under the age of 18 has at least one foreign-born parent. Although the distribution of immigrants in terms of human capital is bimodal -the foreign born have disproportional concentrations at the highest and lowest skill levels -it is especially the large group of immigrants with little formal education that raises concerns about the impact of immigration on social inequality. Whether their educational disadvantage will persist and shape stratification in the over the long run is determined by the degree of intergenerational Who assimilates? Statistical artefacts and intergenerational mobility in immigrant families Renee Luthra ISER, University of Essex Thomas Soehl Dept of Sociology, McGill University Abstract: This paper assesses estimates of immigrant intergenerational mobility that are based on aggregate data sources. We show that aggregation bias strongly inflates estimates of the relationship between immigrants' educational attainment and the educational attainment of their children. Compared to natives, the educational transmission process between parent and child is much weaker in immigrant families. A number of group-level processes, such as societal discrimination, ethnic segregation, or ethnic networks, may render group characteristics more important predictors of second generation educational attainment than parental education

The Ambiguities of Political Opportunity: Political claims making of Russian-Jewish Immigrants in New York City

How, and as what are immigrant minorities incorporated into the political process? A set of prominent approaches focus on the political opportunity structure immigrants encounter. Though promising in many aspects, political opportunity approaches fail to consider the internal heterogeneity of both immigrant populations and opportunity structures. This is partly a result of taking ethnic groups rather than political entrepreneurs as the unit of analysis and of not disaggregating the political context properly. This paper shows how Russian-Jewish immigrant political entrepreneurs in New York City used very di�fferent strategies of ethnic mobilization, each emphasizing a di�fferent ethnic cleavage: one was making claims in the name of Russians, the other downplaying the Russianness and highlighting the Jewish identity dimension. Both strategies had good chances at success thus illustrating that political opportunity structures may encourage di�fferent claims making strategies at the same time. Ethno-political entrepreneurs navigate complex and di�fferentiated political landscapes that are ex-ante only partially transparent