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Newly precise evidence of the trajectory of top incomes in the United States and around the world relies on shares and ratios, prompting new inquiry into their properties as inequality measures. Current evidence suggests a mathematical link between top shares and the Gini coefficient and empirical links extending as well to the Atkinson measure. The work reported in this article strengthens that evidence, making several contributions: First, it formalizes the shares and ratios, showing that as monotonic transformations of each other, they are different manifestations of a single inequality measure, here called TopBot. Second, it presents two standard forms of TopBot, which satisfy the principle of normalization. Third, it presents a new link between top shares and the Gini coefficient, showing that properties and results associated with the Lorenz curve pertain as well to top shares. Fourth, it investigates TopBot in mathematically specified probability distributions, showing that TopBot is monotonically related to classical measures such as the Gini, Atkinson, and Theil measures and the coefficient of variation. Thus, TopBot appears to be a genuine inequality measure. Moreover, TopBot is further distinguished by its ease of calculation and ease of interpretation, making it an appealing People's measure of inequality. This work also provides new insights, for example, that, given nonlinearities in the (monotonic) relations among inequality measures, Spearman correlations are more appropriate than Pearson correlations and that weakening of correlations signals differences and shifts in distributional form, themselves signals of income dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper develops a unified framework for studying justice and impartiality – identifying six opportunities for impartiality, four for observers and two for allocators; generating the person-specific impartiality profile, including separate subprofiles for observer and allocator activities; and characterizing groups and societies by the impartiality profiles of their members. The immediate challenge is to measure the six kinds of impartiality. This paper takes a first step, focusing on three kinds of observer impartiality – the classic just-reward impartiality and the two new kinds identified by justice theory, framing impartiality and expressiveness impartiality. Understanding the two new forms of impartiality is important because their absence could destroy the good effects of impartiality in other justice elements. The paper reports the results of three factorial surveys carried out among college students in the United States, assessing the students' just-reward, framing, and expressiveness impartiality with respect to the earnings of fictitious workers. The paper makes three main contributions. Theoretically, it illuminates the marriage of justice and impartiality, leading to new insights and new research avenues. Methodologically, the paper develops new analytic and graphical tools for assessing observer impartiality. Substantively, the paper shows that (1) while just gender gaps in aggregate analyses of college students are almost nil (contrary to the just gaps found among adults), closer respondent-specific analyses indicate an intricate mix of subsets of respondents favoring one or the other gender; (2) framing impartiality by gender is almost universal; and (3) expressiveness impartiality ranges from 28 to 57 percent, with an intriguing mix of results by sample and respondent gender. Overall these results suggest that there may be "little cultures" of justice and impartiality on U.S. college campuses. If that is so -- and pending future research on all six kinds of impartiality in a variety of samples across countries and over time and as well with respect to rewards other than earnings, such as grades, bequests, and prison sentences – we have offered a way to measure those cultures and understand them theoretically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration and stratification are increasingly intertwined. One day soon it will be impossible to understand one without the other. Both focus on life chances. Stratification is about differential life chances – who gets what and why – and migration is about improving life chances – getting more of the good things of life. To examine the interconnections of migration and stratification, we address a mix of old and new questions, carrying out analyses newly enabled by a unique new data set on recent legal immigrants to the United States (the New Immigrant Survey). We look at immigrant processing and lost documents, depression due to the visa process, presentation of self, the race-ethnic composition of an immigrant cohort (made possible by the data for the first time since 1961), black immigration from Africa and the Americas, skin color diversity among couples formed by US citizen sponsors and immigrant spouses, and English fluency among children age 8–12 and their immigrant parents. We find, inter alia, that children of previously illegal parents are especially more likely to be fluent in English, that native-born US citizen women tend to marry darker, that immigrant applicants who go through the visa process while already in the United States are more likely to have their documents lost and to suffer visa depression, and that immigration, by introducing accomplished black immigrants from Africa (notably via the visa lottery), threatens to overturn racial and skin color associations with skill. Our analyses show the mutual embeddedness of migration and stratification in the unfolding of the immigrants’ and their children’s life chances and the impacts on the stratification structure of the United States. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

While the United States welcomes foreign-born students and trainees and, less warmly, temporary workers such as H-1B visa holders, it places an array of requirements, obstacles, and delays upon persons who would like to make the U.S. their permanent home. The number of people in the queue for legal permanent residence (LPR) is, however, difficult to ascertain. This paper estimates the number of highly skilled foreign-born persons waiting for LPR via the three main employment-based categories, separately by whether they are living in the United States or abroad, as well as the number of family members. We find that as of the end of FY 2006 there were about half a million employment-based principals awaiting LPR in the United States, together with over half a million family members, plus over 125 thousand principals and family members waiting abroad. These numbers dwarf the visas available annually – 120,120 plus any not used in the family preferences – suggesting that the long delays in gaining legal permanent residence are a visa number problem, not an administrative processing problem, as many believe. The backlog thus cannot be eliminated without a large change in public policy. The delay in gaining legal permanent residence could contribute to the decision of many highly skilled foreign-born to leave the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- This paper aims to examine ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the USA. Design/methodology/approach -- The paper examines five classic components of ethnicity -- country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion -- among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the USA in 2003, as principals in the three main employment categories (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3), using data collected in the US New Immigrant Survey. Findings -- The visa categories have distinctive ethnic configurations. India dominates EB-2, European countries and Canada EB-1. The ethnicity portfolio contains more languages than religions. Language is shed before religion, and religion may not be shed at all, except among the ultra highly skilled of EB-1. Highly skilled immigrants are mostly male; they are not immune from lapsing into illegality; they have a shorter visa process than their cohortmates; smaller proportions than in the cohort overall intend to remain in the USA. Larger proportions in EB-2 and EB-3 sent remittances than in the cohort overall. A little measure of assimilation -- using dollars to describe earnings in the country of last residence, even when requested to use the country's currency -- suggests that highly skilled immigrants are more likely to "think in dollars" than their cohortmates. Research limitations/implications -- The paper is like an aerial reconnaissance. It is necessary to now go under the ledges and into the caves. Originality/value -- The data used are the first ever collected on a probability sample of new legal immigrants to the USA. It is expected that many researchers will use these data to generate valuable new knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework for estimating previous illegal experience among annual cohorts of new legal immigrants to the United States – using public-use administrative microdata alone, survey data alone, and the two jointly – and provides estimates for the FY 1996 cohort of new immigrants, based on both administrative and survey data. Our procedures enable assessment of type of illegal experience, including entry without inspection, visa overstay, and unauthorized employment. We compare our estimates of previous illegal experience to estimates that would be obtained using administrative data alone; examine the extent of previous illegal experience by country of birth, immigrant class of admission, religion, and geographic residence in the United States; and estimate multivariate models of the probability of having previous illegal experience. To further assess origins and destinations, we carry out two kinds of contrasts, comparing formerly illegal new legal immigrants both to fellow immigrants who do not have previous illegal experience and also to the broader unauthorized population, the latter using estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2002 ), Passel (2002 ), and Costanzo et al. (2002 ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a factorial survey experiment conducted with Iraqi judges during the early military occupation of Iraq. Because U.S. soldiers are immune from prosecution in Iraqi courts, there is no opportunity for these judges to express their views regarding highly publicized torture cases. As legally informed representatives of an occupied nation, however, Iraqi judges arguably have a strong claim to a normative voice on this sensitive subject. We are able to give voice to these judges in this study by using a quasi-experimental method. This method diminishes social desirability bias in judges' responses and allows us to consider a broad range and combination of factors influencing their normative judgments. We examine why and how the U.S. effort to introduce democracy with an indeterminate rule of law produced unintended and inconsistent results in the normative judgments of Iraqi judges. A critical legal perspective anticipates the influences of indeterminacy, power, and fear in our research. More specifically, we anticipated lenient treatment for guards convicted of torture, especially in trouble cases of Coalition soldiers torturing al Qaeda prisoners. However, the results—which include cross-level, judge-case interaction effects—were more varied than theoretically expected. The Iraqi judges responded in disparate and polarized ways. Some judges imposed more severe sentences on Coalition guards convicted of torturing al Qaeda suspects, while others imposed more lenient sentences on the same combination of guards and suspects. The cross-level interactions indicate that the judges who severely sentenced Coalition guards likely feared the contribution of torture tactics to increasing violence in Iraq. The judges who were less fearful of violence were more lenient and accommodating of torture by Coalition forces. The implication is that the less fearful judges were freed by an indeterminate law to advance Coalition goals through lenient punishment of torture. Our analysis suggests that the introduction of democracy and the rule of law in Iraq is a negative case in the international diffusion of American institutions. The results indicate the need for further development of a nuanced critical legal perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a framework for studying individuals' ideas about what constitutes just compensation for chief executive officers (CEOs) and reports estimates of just CEO pay and the principles guiding ideas of justice. The sample consists of students pursuing a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree in Sweden and the United States. The framework, based on justice theory and making use of Rossi's factorial survey method, enables assessment of ideas of fairness in CEO compensation, including (1) the just CEO compensation, in the eyes of each observer; (2) the principles of microjustice - observers' ideas about 'who should get what' based on characteristics of CEOs and their firms; and (3) principles of macrojustice - ideas about the just level and dispersion in compensation across all CEOs. Our estimates yield the following main results: First, there is broad agreement on the median just CEO compensation but substantial inter-individual variation in the principles of microjustice and the other principles of macrojustice. Second, there is remarkable similarity in the distributions of the principles of micro- justice and macrojustice across the MBA groups. Other important results include a pervasive gender attentiveness among MBA students and tolerance for large variability in CEO pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a brief summary of the Pilot for the New Immigrant Survey (NIS) and presents new information, never before available, on one important aspect of immigrant behavior - assortative mating. Our intent is to provide a flavor for the kinds of questions that can be studied with this new data base and with the larger-sample full New Immigrant Survey by presenting new information on married couples who are part of immigration flows and whose characteristics are importantly shaped by immigration law. We distinguish between two types of couples, those in which one spouse is a U.S. citizen sponsor and those in which both spouses are immigrants. Our findings include the following: First, among married couples formed by a U.S. citizen sponsoring the immigration of a spouse, husbands and wives have similar levels of schooling, with the U.S. citizen slightly better educated than the immigrant spouse; however, U.S. citizen husbands and their immigrant wives have substantially higher schooling than U.S. citizen wives and their immigrant husbands (on average, two years higher). Second, unlike immigrants from other countries, Mexico-born spouses of U.S. citizens differ markedly in schooling depending on whether they are recently married, suggesting the continuing after-effects of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Third, husband-wife schooling levels are less similar among married couples in which both spouses are immigrants than among couples involving a U.S. citizen sponsor and an immigrant spouse, except when the wife is the principal in an employment category. These findings suggest that immigration laws importantly shape the characteristics of families and thus the next generation - the children of immigrants and immigrant children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the direction and magnitude of the effects of personal, kinship, market, and contextual attributes of visa applicants on their desirability as immigrants to the United States, as judged by members of the professional staff of the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. Two classic sociological questions underlie this politically relevant topic: how do societies choose their members? and how do societies allocate scarce benefits? Using the factorial survey pioneered by P.H. Rossi, we obtained from the Commission staff, numerical ratings of the desirability as immigrants of fictitious visa applicants embodying the full range of potentially relevant characteristics discussed in the political arena. Although the ratings were obtained by a number-assignment technique believed to generate a continuous variable, we accommodate the variable's possible ordinality by performing all analyses twice- using both ordinary-least-squares techniques and maximum-likelihood ordered. response techniques. The results are unambiguous: although a lawful and coherent set of rules guides each respondent's ratings, leading to a personal point system for the selection of immigrants, no two staff members' point systems are alike, not even qualitatively. In the complex weave of agreements and disagreements, three conclusions emerge. First, there is unanimous support for granting preference to visa applicants who have a job offer or a United States-citizen sibling. Second, there is severe disagreement by applicant's region of origin. Third, there is a range of disagreement on other attributes, for example, on whether the United States should favor the immigration, ceteris paribus, of older versus younger applicants or of male versus female applicants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is sometimes thought that immigrants who are screened for occupational skills are likely to become more productive Americans than immigrants who gain admission on the basis of family ties to native-born U.S. citizens or to previous immigrants. However, the expected differential may be small or nonexistent because: 1) kinship immigrants have access to family networks; 2) whereas employers may screen for short-term productivity, family members may screen for long-term productivity; and 3) native-born U.S. citizens who sponsor spouses may be particularly adept at screening for long-term success. Longitudinal data on the 1977 immigrant cohort is used to compare initial and longer-term occupational outcomes among employment and kinship immigrants. Results indicate a narrowing of the differential, due both to higher rates of occupational downgrading among employment immigrants and of occupational upgrading among kinship immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article in this Review, George Borjas uses a standard model of self-selection to demonstrate that immigrants in the U.S. may not necessarily be positively selected, as is commonly assumed. The effects of country characteristics on the wages of the foreign-born at entry (immigration selectivity) are not comparable to the effects of such variables on the changes in the characteristics of an immigrant cohort over time (emigration selectivity). Borjas' empirical results with respect to origin-country mean income and migration costs are inconsistent with the model. While he finds that distance-the measure of migration costs and mean origin-country income reduce emigration rates, mean origin-country income is positively associated with the initial wages of immigrants in the U.S. and with his assimilation measure, while distance has no effect on entry wages and has a negative or zero effect on assimilation. Interpretation of the effects of origin-country characteristics on the changes in the earnings of age-entry cohorts of the U.S. foreign-born thus is likely to require a richer model of self-selection, incorporating decisions to migrate to the U.S. and to remain there after immigration.

This article reviews the evidence pertaining to the extent to which U.S. immigrants actually make use of the family reunification entitlements of United States immigration laws, examining the two available studies which are based on probability samples of immigrant entry cohorts. It then provides new estimates of the characteristics of the U.S. citizen sponsors of immigrant spouses and parents. The first study examined, the 1986 Jasso-Rosenzweig study of the FY 1971 immigrant cohort, suggests that the multiplier - the total number of immigrants brought in by one original immigrant - is far less than its potential size but is not trivial. The 1988 General Accounting Office (GAO) report based on the FY 1985 immigrant cohort indicates that 1) the propensity to sponsor new immigrants is substantially higher for immigrants than for native born citizens and that 2) immigrant sponsors of new immigrants tend to petition as soon as they are able to do so according to the law. With respect to the characteristics of sponsors, analysis of the information in the GAO report indicates that 80 percent of the persons who immigrated in FY 1985 as the spouses of U.S. citizens were sponsored by native born U.S. citizens. In contrast, native born U.S. citizens sponsored only five percent of the parent immigrants. Additional findings on the country of origin and sex of the sponsored immigrants are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the kinds of data required to increase scientific knowledge about U.S. immigration and, in light of those requirements, assesses the principal currently available data sets (the U. S. decennial Censuses and the administrative records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service) and makes recommendations for improving the data environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses family reunification and the immigration multiplier in context of the U.S. Immigration Law, origin country conditions and the reproduction of immigrants. Despite the importance of family-reunification provisions in determining entitlements for future U.S. visas, there has been no systematic study of the family-reunification immigration multiplier. It is the number of future immigrants who come to the U.S. as a result of the admission of one current immigrant. The family-reunification provisions in the U.S. have already resulted in large backlogs of persons eligible for visas who must wait many years to receive them. The potential for growth in excess visa entitlements is high given provisions rendering siblings, parents, spouses, and adult children of U.S. citizens eligible for visas yet limiting the number admitted each year for two of these familial categories, siblings and adult children. Indeed, the multiplier effect can in principle be infinite through "chaining."

Based on administrative and survey data as well as data-based assumptions about the bounds on alien address reporting, this study provides estimates of the lower and upper bounds for the cumulative net emigration rates, by country and area of origin, of the FY1971 cohort of legal immigrants to the United States as of January 1979. The merged data indicate that the cumulative net emigration rate for the entire cohort could have been as high as 50 percent. Canadian emigration was probably between 51 and 55 percent. Emigration rates for legal immigrants from Central America, the Caribbean (excluding Cuba), and South America were at least as high as 50 percent, and could have been as high as 70 percent. Emigration rates for Koreans and Chinese could not have exceeded 22 percent over the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the permissive interpretation of former U.S. President George W. Bush on torture law, and whether the law had created confusion on how to punish the convicts. It describes the political issue of torture when the media had reported about the Abu Gharib prison abuses. It talks about the integral training of Iraqi judiciary to the plans of the State Department in imposing legal orders to Iraq.