Search

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]

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., Economics

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.

Despite Rawls' famous call to distinguish between justice and fairness, these and other justice-related words often seem to be used interchangeably by both ordinary people and justice researchers. Based on a survey-embedded question wording experiment (N = 4534) fielded in Germany as part of the GESIS Panel, we explore the effects of three justice words— "just," "fair," and "appropriate"—on the sense of justice about earnings for self and others. We observe differences in the just reward, justice evaluation, and justice consequences by justice word. For example, justice evaluations of one's own earnings are more negative, i.e., deeper in the underreward territory, signaling larger just rewards, when using "just" instead of "fair" or "appropriate" in the question wording. No such clear pattern emerges for justice evaluations of others' earnings. Our analyses show the decreasing effect of an underreward situation on psychosocial health to be significantly stronger in the "just" condition compared to the "fair" condition but do not reveal differential consequences by justice word for measures of satisfaction and trust. Overall, the observed differences by justice words are moderate in size. Nonetheless, our findings suggest caution for justice researchers in communicating with peers and respondents and warrant further inquiry extending research on the role of "justice language" to other language–country contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been known for a long time that (1) when graphs of income amount on income relative rank for two income distributions intersect twice, three "transfer groups" are generated, with the poorest and richest both gaining under the same alternative income distribution and the middle group losing; and (2) the linear income tax system satisfies three fundamental principles of tax justice, namely, that as pretax income increases, three quantities should also increase-posttax income, tax amount, and tax rate. This paper links those two ideas, suggesting that the linear income tax system may be the natural and most effective way to guard against poverty reduction policies which, while helping the poorest, as urged by Rawls, may harm the middle, contributing to the weakening of the middle class, thought at least since Aristotle to be the backbone of society. This paper illustrates the two approaches with one initial distribution and three alternative final distributions, contrasting their minimum, median, proportion below the mean, and inequality. It also shows how to guard the linear income tax system against violating the tax amount principle of tax fairness when there is an injection of resources (e.g., from deficit spending or oil revenues) and how to empirically estimate the parameters (e.g., the marginal tax rate) of the linear income system that the population will regard as fair., Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision., (Copyright © 2024 Jasso.)

This paper reports a first look at the founding of Social Science Research, providing a few key signposts but keenly aware that a full history must await recovery of many additional documentary materials. The journal was founded by James S. Coleman and Peter H. Rossi, who had trained at Columbia, taught at Chicago, and founded the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Johns Hopkins. The Coleman-Rossi vision statement embeds three key ideas: (1) quantitative theoretical work and quantitative empirical work are close and constant partners; (2) quantitative theoretical work and quantitative empirical work each require special methods; and (3) crossing disciplinary lines spurs the growth of knowledge. The first issue of Social Science Research appeared in 1972. Then as now, SSR welcomed papers that may be too innovative or too technical (or too long or too short) for other journals, inclusive of papers that cross traditional disciplinary lines. Examination of the first four volumes (1972-1975) reveals a beautiful realization of the founders' vision - a collection of rigorous quantitative papers from across the social sciences, pushing frontiers in both theory and empirics and in both substance and methods. There is innovation and creativity - and a touch of the playfulness that accelerates the growth of knowledge., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This paper develops a framework for analyzing migration restriction regimes, and illustrates it with the case of U.S. immigration law and policy. Nation-states regulate the entry of foreign-born persons, and this regulation comprises three elements: the type of restriction, the apparatus of restriction, and the consequences of restriction. Restriction may be based on personal characteristics, numerical ceilings, or both. Personal restriction notices the characteristics of persons, using them as criteria for granting or denying admission. Numerical restriction places numerical ceilings on admissions. The apparatus of restriction may stipulate specific ceilings, whether some groups are exempt from the ceiling and, if so, by what criteria, and whether admission under the ceiling is first-come/first-served or by lottery or instead preferential and, if so, by what criteria. Two unintended consequences follow immediately: unauthorized migration (under both personal and numerical restriction); and visa-number backlogs (under numerical restriction). These in turn generate a range of policy devices: border enforcement, procedures for legalization and deportation, and procedures for clearing backlogs. Indeed, the history of a country's immigration law may be understood as a sequence of measures for first setting up the apparatus of restriction and then altering it in order not only to re-examine provisions of the initial setup but also to address unauthorized migration and visa-number backlogs. Viewing migration through this lens enables assessment of particular legislation and, more broadly, dynamics of a migration restriction regime, subject to world circumstances, including its possible inherent instability. The migration restriction lens also generates new metrics for a country's attractiveness and its innovativeness and creativity. To illustrate, the paper examines the migration restriction regime in the United States since the country's founding. Finally, the paper provides a checklist for a migration restriction setup that doubles as the basis for table shells for summarizing a country's migration restriction regime and its history., Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Jasso.)

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., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.