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Researching Migration: Stories from the Field
DeSipio, Louis, Manuel Garcia y Griego, and Sherri Kossoudji, eds.
New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007.
An SSRC Book of essays by Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellows designed to offer general lessons on the selection , combination, and use of various quantitative and qualitative research methods
In this web-publication, fellows of the International Migration Program reflect upon their experience conducting research on international migration to the United States. Although their essays describe the substantive findings of their research, their main focus is on the multiple methods employed in producing those findings. The narratives of methodological practices in this publication have been selected in part because they address central themes and questions of international migration studies and will be substantively relevant to the research findings of other scholars in the field. More significantly, the experiences of these researchers have broader relevance and can be useful to all social scientists who are wondering how to cope with the methodological issues that will ultimately determine the validity of their findings, both within the social sciences and for the public debates that they hope to inform.
Migration A turning tide? Jun 26th 2008 | NOGALES From The Economist print edition Many of the past decade’s migrants to Europe and America are beginning to go home again
...For years a flow of migrants has waxed when the American economy is in rude health, waning only slightly during recessions; it flows north in the spring when agricultural and construction jobs need filling and goes south for Christmas. Where illicit traffic has been heaviest, the migrants’ many footfalls have worn narrow, winding paths into the rocks. But now a big change is visible: the flow of migrants from Latin America to the United States appears to be slumping.
For the third successive year, America’s Border Patrol reports a sharp drop in arrests on and near the frontier. In 2006 the figure dropped 8% to around 1m. Last year it dropped by a full fifth. The six months to March showed a year-on-year drop of 17%. In short (and by the imperfect measure of border arrests) the migrant flow today is roughly half the torrent seen in 2000, when 1.64m arrests were made.
Such figures miss those who cross successfully and recount those detained several times, but they show a clear trend. So does evidence from remittances. Mexico’s central bank reports that, after years of eye-popping growth, the amount of cash sent home by migrants inside America is falling. Last year such flows were worth $24 billion—more valuable than tourism. But in the first quarter of this year the year-on-year figure was down 2.9%, according to a new report by Goldman Sachs.
...
Two factors, each as ugly as the other, probably explain the double downturn in flows of people and money: hostility to migrants, especially illegal ones, and America’s deepening economic gloom. The impact of the former is plain: state-level laws that make it illegal to employ migrants without documents, ever more aggressive raids on businesses that hire such workers, and better technology to share information that will lead to catching them.
...
Hostility and fences would matter less if the economic draw remained strong. Instead America’s economy appears to be in the dumps, even if it avoids a recession. Jobs figures in May showed unemployment had risen to 5.5%. The slump in housing and construction—where many migrants, especially newer arrivals, work—has been especially painful. The Pew Hispanic Centre published a study in June showing a 7.5% jobless rate among immigrants, rising to 8.4% among Mexicans and to 9.3% for those who came to the country after 2000. Over 220,000 migrants lost construction jobs last year. And those in work are earning less: wages of Latino construction workers tumbled in 2007.
Working Paper
Immigrants and Suburbs: Growth and Distribution in Greater Philadelphia, 1970-2000: A Tract-Level Analysis
The late twentieth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the historic pattern of immigrant settlement within the United States. Since the nineteenth century, most European immigrants - with the important exception of farmers - had settled first in a small number of gateway cities where many rearticleed while a sizeable number fanned out to smaller cities along the coasts or to cities and large towns in the interior. After World War II, with the opening of suburbs huge numbers of these first generation European immigrants and their children, fresh with new prosperity, moved out of central cities. Following the 1965 lifting of nationality-based quotas, immigrants entered the United States in numbers that matched the great immigrant wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries... READ COMPLETE PAPER
Nicki Bennett is an American aid worker who bounces around from one hot spot to the next, working for Oxfam. She has been deployed to Sudan, eastern Congo, Chad, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and Guatemala. She is currently in Bangladesh working on post-hurricane reconstruction.
This week I’m back in Dhaka, the world’s undisputed rickshaw capital. With more than 300,000 of these brightly colored bicycle contraptions plying the city’s streets for trade, I rarely walk for more than a block before a rickshaw driver (known as “rickshaw-wallah”) pulls up next to me and urges me to hop on board.
I’ve learned it’s almost impossible to refuse a ride. This is partly because the rickshaw-wallahs are very persistent, partly because I feel I should be supporting people struggling to make a living (one in five of the city’s inhabitants depends on the rickshaw business for their income) and partly because Dhaka is now starting to get unbearably hot and humid (and I’m starting to get horrendously lazy).
Coming back from a meeting near my office this afternoon, I start chatting (well, mainly hand-gesturing) with my rickshaw-wallah and ask him where he’s from. I’ve heard lots of stories about families in the cyclone-affected coastal areas sending sons or brothers to urban centers like Dhaka to make a little bit of cash driving rickshaws (many people have not been able to return to their regular jobs as the cyclone destroyed their fishing boats and nets or washed away their crops). I’m wondering if my rickshaw-wallah is one of them.
Instead, he names a district that I’ve never heard of. We manage to establish that it’s somewhere north of Dhaka, near a river. “Floods,” he tells me. “In my village. Village underwater.” Finally the penny drops – he’s not just an economic migrant, he’s also a “climate migrant.”
Methodology and Assumptions for the Population
Projections of the United States:
1999 to 2100
_________________________________________________________
Population Division Working Paper No. 38
Frederick W. Hollmann,
Tammany J. Mulder,
and Jeffrey E. Kallan
Population Projections Branch
Population Division
U.S. Census Bureau
Department of Commerce
Washington, D.C. 20233
(301) 457-2428
www.census.gov
Issued January 13, 2000
ABSTRACT
This working paper discusses the methodology and assumptions used to develop the recently released
projections of the population of the United States from 1999 to 2100. The new series includes projections
of the population by single year of age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, and nativity. While the basic
methodology used to produce these projections is the same as in earlier Census Bureau national population
projections, there have been changes, in both the time horizon and reference dates of the projections, as well
as in the specific methods used to estimate population change. The extension of the series to 2100 carries
the projections 20 years further into the future than any series previously issued by the Census Bureau.
For the first time, projection results include a break on nativity, defined dichotomously by the presence or
absence of U.S. citizenship at birth, as well as its cross-classification with other variables. Also new with
this series is the projection to quarterly reference dates, allowing users to view the national population
seasonally, or simply to select annual reference dates other than July 1. In addition, international migration
in the new series is allowed to vary over time, remaining somewhat lower than the constant value in the
previous series for the first two decades of the century, but reaching considerably higher levels than in the
previous one after 2020. Fertility rates in both models are allowed to change very little over time.
However, fertility rates by race and Hispanic origin are allowed to converge in the new middle series,
whereas in the previous middle series they remained constant within race and origin category. Finally, the
new mortality assumptions show more improvement in life expectancy for all racial and Hispanic origin
groups, except the non-Hispanic White population, than did the assumptions of the previous projection
series.
tagged CIDER_Berkeley business_area_studies civic_participation community_groups indonesia industrialization migration social_capital by croninkc ...on 08-AUG-06
tagged Center_for_International_Development_at_Harvard_University business_area_studies compensating_differentials economic_growth factor_mobility income_convergence migration spatial_equilibrium by croninkc ...on 09-JUN-06
tagged Center_for_International_Development_at_Harvard_University business_area_studies compensatin_differentials economic_growth factor_mobility geography local_government migration by croninkc ...on 08-JUN-06
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