Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Economic Incorporation of Immigrants Across the 50 United States

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Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Economic Incorporation of Immigrants Across the 50 United StatesThe past two decades have seen an explosion in the number of U.S. state laws targeted at immigrants. To regulate immigrant settlement, states have passed immigration laws that either sought to remove unauthorized immigrants from state jurisdiction or limited state involvement in immigrant removal. To regulate immigrant incorporation, states have passed immigrant rights laws that either excluded immigrants from work opportunities and state benefits or extended these opportunities and benefits to immigrants. While research has shown the detrimental effects of federal enforcement policies on immigrants' economic outcomes, little is known about how state laws impact immigrants' economic well-being. This dissertation asks how state policy shapes the economic incorporation of immigrants and their adult U.S.-born children. It tests the hypothesis that integrative immigrant rights laws are more effective at ensuring a productive immigrant population than laws seeking to remove unauthorized immigrants from state jurisdiction. Because state-level immigration and immigrant rights laws are two distinct types of policy initiatives that could differentially influence immigrants' economic incorporation, the researchers create a state typology by categorizing states on these two axes. The typology is used to: 1) investigate the association between state policy arrangements and immigrants' labor force participation and employment; 2) examine if state policy context exacerbates or decreases the authorized-unauthorized immigrant wage gap; and 3) explore whether the effects of immigration and immigrant rights laws spill over to the U.S.-born children of immigrants' unemployment outcomes. The project applies multi-level quantitative methods to American Community Survey (ACS) and Current Population Survey (CPS) data from the years 1997 through 2014. Because the ACS and CPS do not provide data on legal status, cross-survey multiple imputation will be used to infer unauthorized status. This project anchors public discourse on immigrant integration in objective comparisons of immigrants' economic outcomes over time and across states. Results will enhance our understanding of the factors that foster immigrants? workforce participation and economic security, and can be used to inform future scholarly research and policy alike.