The Impact of State Immigration Policy on Immigrant Communities: Political Engagement and Child Well-Being

This dissertation is set in the context of a 21st-century America undergoing rapid immigration-driven demographic change accompanied by highly polarized debates about immigrants and immigration policy. With this research I seek to answer questions related to the impact of contemporary immigration policymaking in the U.S. states on the political participation of adults and the well-being of children from immigrant communities nationally. I focus on the impacts of state immigration policy enacted during the decade 2003-2012 among legal immigrants, naturalized immigrants, and U.S.-born children of immigrants from among the four largest U.S. racial/ethnic groups. I place this research in the theoretical tradition of policy design-social construction theory and also draw heavily from the literatures of immigrant political incorporation and immigrant political behavior. Findings confirm that for some subpopulations within immigrant communities public policy is an active social structure conferring benefits and burdens that impact adult political engagement and child wellbeing, with effects persisting even after statistically controlling for other known individual-level predictors. Taken together, the findings reveal a pattern of between-group differences in which the greatest impacts of state immigration policy are occurring in the Hispanic immigrant community, followed by the Asian and White immigrant communities. I find little impact of state immigration policy on the Black immigrant community. Within the Hispanic immigrant community the findings reveal a pattern across generations, with state immigration policy producing little effect on political engagement among new legal immigrants, a modest effect among naturalized immigrants, and its strongest effects among children of Hispanic immigrants. This research makes important contributions to the knowledge base of political incorporation of immigrant communities and of policy design-social construction theory that will inform future research in these fields. In addition to the main findings, this research reveals important variation among states in the strength of the impact state immigration policy is exerting on political participation, extends knowledge of target group contestations of social constructions contained in public policy, and deepens our understanding of the important role that values play in the recursive cycles of political participation and policymaking

Negotiating survival: undocumented Mexican immigrant women in the Pacific Northwest

Current analyses of Mexico–U.S. migration theory generally are based on socioeconomic contexts and decision-making processes of male respondents. Further, limited data available on undocumented Mexican immigrant women mainly address the Mexico–U.S. border area, and adjacent U.S. urban centers. Our qualitative study focuses on undocumented Mexican immigrant women residing in central Washington State, where the regional economy is dominated by agribusiness development and dependent on immigrant and migrant farm labor. This paper assesses propositions of neoclassical economic and social capital theories of international migration in explaining the women’s migration decision-making processes. Project data indicate that while the Pacific Northwest has been a primary migration destination for sometime, it now may be increasingly a second-stage U.S. migration site, following initial migration to more traditional destinations such as California

Studying Public Policy through Immigration Policy: Advances in Theory and Measurement

This essay provides a critical review of the field of immigration policy studies from the perspective of measurement and modeling. It serves to contextualize and broaden the views presented in the special issue. As such, we combine insights from American and comparative politics, pinpoint key limitations and challenges in the field, and identify areas of strength within each subfield which could inform theory and measurement development for the other. Ultimately, the concerns about conceptualization, definition, and measurement that we identify and discuss herein, do not apply only to immigration policy studies but to policy studies writ large