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The article reports that the U.S. is currently experiencing one of the largest waves of immigration in its history. Mexican nationals constitute a major component this flow, although much of this migration is illegal under present U.S. law. As the number of illegal aliens increases yearly, public officials are increasingly hard pressed to reconcile the stated policy of this country with the facts of the migration. The dilemma is whether to enforce existing laws more vigorously, in an effort to stem the flow, or to recognize that the immigration will persist nevertheless and should perhaps be sanctioned and extend the protection of U.S. law to persons who are now commonly exploited. In the present instance, the problem is all the more complicated by its illegality, which makes it difficult to assess its impact on the welfare both of the native and immigrant populations. Professor Wendell C. Gordon is an institutionalist, with special interests in Latin America and international economies. In his paper he adopts an historical perspective, tracing the origins of the current migration, and argues for the relaxation of laws prohibiting immigration from Mexico.

The article analyzes the status of African American women in the U.S. The relationship between sexual and racial oppression uniquely affects the African American woman, who experiences both, and who is sometimes forced to choose whether her interests lie primarily with other women or with other blacks. But despite the difficulty of characterizing the women's movement and its goals, at least one thing seems sure. As part of a general trend toward self-definition, the black woman will undoubtedly determine for herself whether and when to align with white women or black men, or whether to identify primarily with other black women whose interests may sometimes coincide with, but are not exhausted by, the more general interests of others of her race and sex.

The article discusses urbanization, social diversity, voter turnout, and political competition in U.S. elections. The argument forwarded in the paper is that as voter turnout increases in sheer numbers alone so do the number and degree of political differences within the electorate simply because more people are voting. This makes it more difficult for one candidate or party to be appealing to all voters which, in turn, should make the election more competitive. However, while some studies report a positive association between turnout and competition, other studies have reported no relationship or an indeterminate one. Moreover, these previous studies on the turnout-competition hypothesis have many of the same limitations and comparability problems as those for studies testing the urbanization-competition hypothesis. This paper also tested the hypothesis that greater social diversity within congressional districts would have a positive relationship with greater competition independently of the urbanization level of districts.

This paper investigates factors contributing to the rapid rise in participation rates among mothers of pre-school children despite their considerable child-care responsibilities. The analysis, confined to trends in participation rates of white married women from 1960 to 1970, compares women with children under six years to all married women. Thus, the paper focuses on those changes with a particularly strong impact on mothers of pre-school children. Women selected for study comprise white married women, aged 14-64, living with their husbands. Data are drawn from the 1/1000 samples of the U.S. population in 1960 and 1970. For these women, the rate of increase in participation from 1960 to 1970 was 51.7 percent for women with children under six years, compared to 29.9 percent for all women. Women are finding it easier to combine child rearing and employment, either because of changes in the type of work available, such as more part-time jobs, or because women with young children find work in the home less time consuming, and the constraint of young children has not diminished, but has been offset by other factors.

The article focuses on issues related to women and crime in the U.S., during the period between 1960-1970. In spite of the paucity of theory and research on crime and women, one fact seems evident — crime rates for women are increasing. Although the phenomena discussed here seem insignificant when compared with the more pervasive impact of male criminality, these trends in female crime should be documented and analyzed for the development of social theory. This paper attempts to document trends as well as to offer a possible explanation for the observed patterns. The data used in this analysis, abstracted from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "Uniform Crime Report: 1970," are comparable for 1960 and 1970. In attempting to assess changes not only in volume of crime by women, but also shifts in violent and property crimes, the lack of population bases is problematic. Only those units which used the same data reporting system in 1960 and 1970 are included. Since no evidence permits a conclusion that these units are unrepresentative, they are treated as generally representative of the nation as a whole.

The article focuses on issues related to equality for blacks and women in the U.S. The relative size of a minority group directly influences the course of its progress toward equality with the majority and the consequences of this progress. Looking at the differences in comparative occupational distributions for males and females, and blacks and whites, we suggest that the degree of structural change required to incorporate blacks and females into the occupational system is quite different, based on the relative numbers in each group. Since an analogy is only a resemblance in some aspects between items which are otherwise unlike one another, the notion of similarity must not be carried too far. Specific differences which have also been neglected are discussed. The intent of this paper is simply the reintroduction of information which has been neglected in recent lines of research. Viewing women as a minority provides the framework for understanding much of the current research on women's roles and the "women's movement."

The article presents a paper that systematically examines corporate interlocks among major U.S. corporations from the standpoint of the theory of bank control. Sociologists Robert Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer have produced the latest major restatement of this theory. Fitch and Oppenheimer argue that through the concentration of banking and the convergence of interests among banks, the stockholdings of bank trust departments, the dependence of non-financial corporations on external financing, and the practice of interlocking directorates, a few major banks are able to control the policies of major U.S. corporations. Probably most unfavorable for the theory is the finding that being a bank is only modestly associated with interlocking. This fact could be made consistent with the theory if it was argued that many interlocks occur for reasons unrelated to bank control. Also detrimental to the theory is the finding that all except the very largest insurance companies interlock more like non-financial corporations than banks.

The article analyzes structural differentiation and continuity in the organization of a municipal government in the U.S. The relative importance of three factors shaping community development are considered in the paper. This includes the often neglected force of local tradition deriving from historical political cultures and early institutional forms, the growing power of the state in attempting to rescue an interdependent private economy from social injustice, and the pressure of urbanization on local government to provide more services and to splinter into the characteristic metropolitan mosaic. The analysis suggests that the nation-state, not the metropolitan community, is the final inclusive system and the appropriate unit of analysis for assessing the environmental determinants of organizational change in the urban community. The analysis also supports the inference that organizational change in functional assignment to governments varies over time by function. It has stressed on the importance of historical residues in the organization of city government.

The article presents the response of the authors to the comments made by the authors Frank Breen and David Marcinko, that appear in the paper "Away From a Federal Reserve Reaction Function," published in the March 1976 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly." A reaction function is a reduced-form equation and Breen and Marcinko are wrong when they indicate that it is the same as a utility function, which is a behavioral equation. The authors said that their paper used reduced-form statistical results to draw inferences about the U.S. Federal Reserve's apparently changing concern for unemployment, price inflation and other issues. If one assumes that the Federal Reserve's hypothesis about the structure of the economy is unchanged, then changes in estimated reaction coefficients will reflect changes in Federal Reserve utility or preference parameters but we never purport to estimate those parameters directly. Breen and Marcinko contend that estimating a reaction function in which explanatory variables would enter as differences between actual and desired values would have changed the absolute magnitudes of the authors' estimates.

The article discusses the model put forward by authors Thomas M. Havrilesky, Robert Sapp, and Robert Schweitzer, in their paper "Tests of the Federal Reserve's Reaction to the State of the Economy: 1964-1974," that appeared in the March 1975 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly." Havrilesky, Sapp and Schweitzer seem to want to judge the U.S. Federal Reserve by some ideas they harbor about desired levels. But they don't get to do this because they don't put the explanatory variables in the forms of differences between the actual values and the values that they believe desirable. If the world thinks that five percent unemployment is fine and dandy, then changes in the unemployment rate when it is at or below five percent might well elicit no response from the System. If the Federal Reserve System had the four percent unemployment, then during the period under discussion the Federal Reserve, even if it were totally gung-ho about unemployment, might not have been doing anything about it since unemployment was approaching and then dipping below the four-percent level.