Variety Is the Spice of Life: Diverse Social Networks Are Associated With Social Cohesion and Well-Being.

Both homophily and heterophily are observed in humans. Homophily reinforces homogeneous social networks, and heterophily creates new experiences and collaborations. However, at the extremes, high levels of homophily can cultivate prejudice toward out-groups, whereas high levels of heterophily can weaken in-group support. Using data from 24,726 adults (M = 46 years; selected from 10,398 English neighborhoods) and the composition of their social networks based on age, ethnicity, income, and education, we tested the hypothesis that a middle ground between homophily and heterophily could be the most beneficial for individuals. We found that network homophily, mediated by perceived social cohesion, is associated with higher levels of subjective well-being but that there are diminishing returns, because at a certain point increasing network homophily is associated with lower social cohesion and, in turn, lower subjective well-being. Our results suggest that building diverse social networks provides benefits that cannot be attained by homogeneous networks.

The New System of Mexican Migration: The Role of Entry Mode-Specific Human and Social Capital.

Between 2000 and 2020, undocumented migration declined, temporary labor migration rose, and legal permanent residents arrived at a steady pace-together creating a new system of Mexico-U.S. migration based on the circulation of legal temporary workers and permanent residents. Drawing on data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican Migration Project, we specify multinomial event-history models to predict the likelihood of departure on first and later trips via four entry categories: no documents, noncompliant tourist visas, temporary work visas, and legal residence visas. The models reveal how the accumulation of entry mode-specific social and human capital powered a system of undocumented migration that emerged between 1965 and 1985, and how that system deteriorated from 1985 to 2000. After 2000, employers took advantage of new visa categories to recruit legal temporary workers, leading to the accumulation of migration-related human and social capital specific to that mode of entry and the emergence of a new system of Mexico-U.S. migration.

Scientific communication in a post-truth society.

Within the scientific community, much attention has focused on improving communications between scientists, policy makers, and the public. To date, efforts have centered on improving the content, accessibility, and delivery of scientific communications. Here we argue that in the current political and media environment faulty communication is no longer the core of the problem. Distrust in the scientific enterprise and misperceptions of scientific knowledge increasingly stem less from problems of communication and more from the widespread dissemination of misleading and biased information. We describe the profound structural shifts in the media environment that have occurred in recent decades and their connection to public policy decisions and technological changes. We explain how these shifts have enabled unscrupulous actors with ulterior motives increasingly to circulate fake news, misinformation, and disinformation with the help of trolls, bots, and respondent-driven algorithms. We document the high degree of partisan animosity, implicit ideological bias, political polarization, and politically motivated reasoning that now prevail in the public sphere and offer an actual example of how clearly stated scientific conclusions can be systematically perverted in the media through an internet-based campaign of disinformation and misinformation. We suggest that, in addition to attending to the clarity of their communications, scientists must also develop online strategies to counteract campaigns of misinformation and disinformation that will inevitably follow the release of findings threatening to partisans on either end of the political spectrum.

Humans adapt to social diversity over time.

Humans have evolved cognitive processes favoring homogeneity, stability, and structure. These processes are, however, incompatible with a socially diverse world, raising wide academic and political concern about the future of modern societies. With data comprising 22 y of religious diversity worldwide, we show across multiple surveys that humans are inclined to react negatively to threats to homogeneity (i.e., changes in diversity are associated with lower self-reported quality of life, explained by a decrease in trust in others) in the short term. However, these negative outcomes are compensated in the long term by the beneficial influence of intergroup contact, which alleviates initial negative influences. This research advances knowledge that can foster peaceful coexistence in a new era defined by globalization and a socially diverse future.

Debacles on the Border: Five Decades of Fact-Free Immigration Policy.

Since 1987 the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has compiled extensive data on the characteristics and behavior of documented and undocumented migrants to the United States and made them publicly available to users to test theories of international migration and evaluate U.S. immigration and border policies. Findings based on these data have been plentiful, but have also routinely been ignored by political leaders who instead continue to pursue policies with widely documented, counterproductive effects. In this article we review prior studies based on MMP data to document these effects. We also use official statistics to document circumstances on the border today, and draw on articles in this volume to underscore the huge gap between U.S. policies and the realities of immigration. Despite that net positive undocumented Mexican migration to the U.S. ended more than a decade ago, the Trump administration continues to demand the construction of a border wall and persists in treating Central American arrivals as criminals rather than asylum seekers, thus transforming what is essentially a humanitarian problem into an immigration crisis.

Evolution of the Mexico-U.S. Migration System: Insights from the Mexican Migration Project.

Since 1987 the Mexican Migration Project has collected and disseminated representative survey data on documented and undocumented migration to the United States. The MMP currently includes surveys of 161 communities, which together contain data on 27,113 households and 169,945 individuals, 26,446 of whom have U.S. migratory experience. These data are here used to trace the evolution of the Mexico-U.S. migration system from the late 19th to the early 21st century, revealing how shifts in U.S. immigration and border policies have been critical to the formation of different eras of migration characterized by distinctive patterns of migration, settlement, and return in different legal statuses. The present era is characterized by the repression of the large population of undocumented migrants and their U.S. citizen children by an ongoing regime of mass detention and deportation and the simultaneous recruitment of Mexican workers for exploitation on short term temporary visas. The future of Mexican migration to the United States will be revealed by subsequent waves of data collection by the Mexican Migration Project.

Segregation by race and income in the United States 1970-2010.

A systematic analysis of residential segregation and spatial interaction by income reveals that as income rises, minority access to integrated neighborhoods, higher levels of interaction with whites, and more affluent neighbors also increase. However, the income payoffs are much lower for African Americans than other groups, especially Asians. Although Hispanics and Asians have always displayed declining levels of minority-white dissimilarity and rising levels of minority-white interaction with rising income, income differentials on these outcomes for blacks did not appear until 1990 and since then have improved at a very slow pace. Given their higher overall levels of segregation and income's limited effect on residential attainment, African Americans experience less integration, more neighborhood poverty at all levels of income compared to other minority groups. The degree of black spatial disadvantage is especially acute in the nation's 21 hypersegregated metropolitan areas.

Geographic Effects on Intergenerational Income Mobility.

The notion that where one grows up affects future living standards is increasingly well established in social science. Yet research on intergenerational economic mobility often ignores the regional and neighborhood context of childhood, especially local purchasing power. We hypothesize that unexplained variation in intergenerational mobility is partly attributable to regional and neighborhood conditions-most notably access to high quality schools. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and other data, we find that neighborhood income has roughly half the effect on future earnings as parental income and roughly the same effect as shared sibling characteristics. Growing up in an economically segregated metropolitan area also has a large negative effect on future earnings, though somewhat smaller than the neighborhood effect. We estimate that lifetime household income would be $500,000 dollars higher if people born into a bottom quartile neighborhood would have been raised in a top quartile neighborhood. These results are robust to considerations of regional purchasing power and migration between metro areas. Finally, we replicate the results for economic segregation at the metropolitan level using aggregated metropolitan level statistics of intergenerational income elasticities based on millions of IRS records.

Race, Space, and Cumulative Disadvantage: A Case Study of the Subprime Lending Collapse.

In this article, we describe how residential segregation and individual racial disparities generate racialized patterns of subprime lending and lead to financial loss among black borrowers in segregated cities. We conceptualize race as a cumulative disadvantage because of its direct and indirect effects on socioeconomic status at the individual and neighborhood levels, with consequences that reverberate across a borrower's life and between generations. Using Baltimore, Maryland as a case study setting, we combine data from reports filed under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act with additional loan-level data from mortgage-backed securities. We find that race and neighborhood racial segregation are critical factors explaining black disadvantage across successive stages in the process of lending and foreclosure, controlling for differences in borrower credit scores, income, occupancy status, and loan-to-value ratios. We analyze the cumulative cost of predatory lending to black borrowers in terms of reduced disposable income and lost wealth. We find the cost to be substantial. Black borrowers paid an estimated additional 5 to 11 percent in monthly payments and those that completed foreclosure in the sample lost an excess of $2 million in home equity. These costs were magnified in mostly black neighborhoods and in turn heavily concentrated in communities of color. By elucidating the mechanisms that link black segregation to discrimination we demonstrate how processes of cumulative disadvantage continue to undermine black socioeconomic status in the United States today.

Beyond English proficiency: rethinking immigrant integration.

We develop and test a conceptual model of English language acquisition and the strength of the latter in predicting social and cultural assimilation. We present evidence that the path to English proficiency begins with exposure to English in the home country and on prior U.S. trips. English proficiency, then, has direct links to the intermediate migration outcomes of occupational status in the U.S., the amount of time in the U.S. since the most recent trip, and the co-ethnic residential context in the U.S. In turn, pre-migration characteristics and the intermediate characteristics work in tandem with English proficiency to determine social assimilation in the U.S., while cultural assimilation is primarily determined by pre-migration habits. A shift in focus to English use is desirable in studies of immigrant integration.

Undocumented Migration and the Wages of Mexican Immigrants.

Prior work has documented the remarkable decline in the real wages of Mexican immigrant workers in the United States over the past several decades. Although some of this trend might be attributable to the changing characteristics of the migrants themselves, we argue that a more important change was the circumstances under within Mexican immigrants competed for jobs in the United States. After 1986 a growing share of Mexican immigrants were undocumented, discrimination against them was mandated by federal law, and enforcement efforts rose in intensity. We combined data from the Mexican Migration Project with independent estimates of the percentage undocumented among Mexicans living in the United States to estimate a series of regression models to test this hypothesis. Controlling for individual characteristics helps to explain the decline in the wages of immigrants, but does not eliminate the trend, which is only explained fully when the percentage undocumented is added to the model. A key date is 1986, confirmed by a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis, when undocumented hiring was criminalized and undocumented migration revived after IRCA's legalization programs ended. As the percentage undocumented rose to new heights in the face of employer sanctions, immigrant wages fell below what we would have observed under the former policy regime. Using newly available data from Warren and Warren (2013), we examined how variation in the percentage undocumented by state and year from 1990 through 2009 affected immigrant wages and confirmed a strong negative effect, but the addition of an interaction term to the model indicated that the negative effect was confined largely to undocumented migrants, whose wage penalty rose from 8% to 18% as the percentage undocumented rose from its observed minimum to maximum.

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigration and immigrant wellbeing in the United States.

This article highlights the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigration. and immigrant wellbeing in the United States by focusing on all categories of migrants, documented and undocumented. We argue that in the wake of the pandemic, immigrants disproportionately experienced higher rates of unemployment, greater losses of income, more exposure occupational risks, and higher rates of food and housing insecurity, all of which exacerbated preexisting differentials in access to health and health care to generate higher rates of COVID infection, morbidity, and mortality among adults and stunted educational outcomes for their children. The prospects for a full post-pandemic recovery of immigrants' wellbeing are dampened by the severe nature of COVID's negative effects on immigrants; the unusually hostile context of reception immigrants face after the pandemic; the large number of immigrants lacking legal status or holding tenuous documentation; and the formidable deportation regime that prevails in the United States that puts a great strain on immigrant communities. Undocumented migration has surged to restart undocumented population growth, further clouding the future for immigrants in the country. It is unclear whether reforms proposed by the Biden Administration be enacted and successful in improving their prospects. In general, this article aims to contribute to the broader discussion about migration and health policies.

Neighborhood disorder and individual economic self-sufficiency: New evidence from a quasi-experimental study.

This paper draws on data from the Monitoring Mt. Laurel Study, a new survey-based study that enables us to compare residents living in an affordable housing project in a middle-class New Jersey suburb to a comparable group of non-residents. Building on the theoretical and empirical contributions of the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity studies, we test the hypothesis that living in this housing project improves a poor person's economic prospects relative to what they would have experienced in the absence of such housing, and that these improved prospects can be explained at least in part by reduced exposure to disorder and stressful life events. We find that residents in the Ethel Lawrence Homes are significantly less likely to experience disorder and negative life events and that this improvement in circumstances indirectly improves the likelihood of being employed, their earnings, and the share of income from work. We find no relationship between residence in the housing project and the likelihood of using welfare.

School Context and Educational Outcomes: Results from a Quasi-Experimental Study.

In this study we draw on data from a quasi-experimental study to test whether moving into a subsidized housing development in an affluent suburb yields educational benefits to the children of residents, compared to the educations they would have received had they not moved into the development. Results suggest that resident children experienced a significant improvement in school quality compared with a comparison group of students whose parents also had applied for residence. Parents who were residents of the development also displayed higher levels of school involvement compared with the comparison group of non-resident parents, and their children were exposed to significantly lower levels of school disorder and violence within school and spent more time reading outside of school. Living in the development did not influence GPA directly, but did indirectly increase GPA by increasing the time residents spent reading outside of school.

Pathways to El Norte: origins, destinations, and characteristics of Mexican migrants to the United States.

The geography Mexican migration to the U.S. has experienced deep transformations in both its origin composition and the destinations chosen by migrants. To date, however, we know little about how shifting migrant origins and destinations may be linked to each another geographically and, ultimately, structurally as relatively similar brands of economic restructuring have been posited to drive the shifts in origins and destinations. In this paper, we describe how old and new migrant networks have combined to fuel the well-documented geographic expansion of Mexican migration. We use data from the 2006 Mexican National Survey of Population Dynamics, a nationally representative survey that for the first time collected information on U.S. state of destination for all household members who had been to the U.S. during the 5 years prior to the survey. We find that the growth in immigration to southern and eastern states is disproportionately fueled by undocumented migration from non-traditional origin regions located in Central and Southeastern Mexico and from rural areas in particular. We argue that economic restructuring in the U.S. and Mexico had profound consequences not only for the magnitude but also for the geography of Mexican migration, opening up new region-to-region flows.

Stereotype Threat and College Academic Performance: A Latent Variables Approach.

Stereotype threat theory has gained experimental and survey-based support in helping explain the academic underperformance of minority students at selective colleges and universities. Stereotype threat theory states that minority students underperform because of pressures created by negative stereotypes about their racial group. Past survey-based studies, however, are characterized by methodological inefficiencies and potential biases: key theoretical constructs have only been measured using summed indicators and predicted relationships modeled using ordinary least squares. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshman, this study overcomes previous methodological shortcomings by developing a latent construct model of stereotype threat. Theoretical constructs and equations are estimated simultaneously from multiple indicators, yielding a more reliable, valid, and parsimonious test of key propositions. Findings additionally support the view that social stigma can indeed have strong negative effects on the academic performance of pejoratively stereotyped racial-minority group members, not only in laboratory settings, but also in the real world.