literature review on immigration policies

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Analyzing migration restriction regimes.

• Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, NY, United States

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.

Introduction

Restriction is central to the history of international migration. Indeed, restriction is central to the human experience, playing out in a variety of social domains: whom to admit – to college, to particular employment, to an apartment building, to a neighborhood, to an honor society, to a club. Religions have rules of admission, elaborate rules for deciding, for example, who can become a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, etc. For countries, the stakes are high. As the American legislator Representative Peter W. Rodino put it, “Immigration and refugee policies… both reveal and define what kind of a nation we are and what kind of a nation we will become” ( U.S. Select Commission on Immigration Refugee Policy, 1980a , p. 3).

Migration restriction operates in a variety of contexts, both within and across countries (i.e., both in internal migration and in international migration) – whom to admit as tourists, whom to admit for temporary sojourns, whom to admit for permanent settlement, and (in the case of international migration) whom to admit to citizenship and nationality. The framework introduced in this paper covers all migration contexts (and indeed is generalizable beyond migration). However, for concreteness, description is in terms of permanent immigration from one country to another. The section on Migration Restriction Regimes provides a brief overview of the framework for studying migration restriction regimes, describing three main elements – types of restriction, apparatus of restriction, and consequences of restriction. The section on Migration Restriction Regimes in the Broader Social Science Context considers the broader social science context, discussing matters of measurement and theory. Next, the section on Migration Restriction Regimes in the United States illustrates with the case of U.S. immigration law and policy. The paper concludes with a brief Afterword on possible creative policy devices and one dimension of personal restriction in the United States.

Migration Restriction Regimes

Two types of migration restriction.

There are two ways to restrict immigration – personal and numerical. A country may use personal criteria to screen prospective immigrants (for example, barring persons who are poor or illiterate) or numerical criteria (for example, setting an overall ceiling), leading to four possible restriction regimes. A priori, all four regimes are possible. One can envision a society with numerical restriction but no personal restriction (i.e., everyone is eligible but only a subset is admitted) or the opposite (i.e., only a subset is eligible and everyone in the subset is admitted). The two other regimes include the fully restricted regime with both personal and numerical restriction and the fully unrestricted regime. Thus, the two types of restriction lead naturally to four migration restriction regimes and thence, as will be seen below, to a periodization of the history of a country's immigration law.

The Apparatus of Migration Restriction

Restriction is not easy. Restriction requires fitting together a set of moving parts. Consider the main parts of the apparatus, separately for personal and numerical restriction.

Elements of Personal Restriction

The main challenge is to define the set of personal characteristics that will be used to render prospective immigrants eligible or ineligible for legal permanent residence. If the characteristic is qualitative, like gender, eye color, nativity, religion, or native language, the decision must be made about which category or categories to favor or to bar. Should the destination country prohibit the immigration of blue-eyed persons? Or persons with certain illnesses? Or persons born in certain countries? Conversely, should the country accept only brown-eyed persons? Or persons with specified health characteristics? Or persons born in certain countries? Moreover, if origin country is to play a part, how should it be defined? As country of birth, or country of current or last residence, or country of citizenship? If the characteristic is quantitative, like wealth or age, the decision must be made which end of the continuum to bar and where to draw the line. Should the country prohibit the immigration of rich people, and where should it draw the line between rich and poor? Should the country prohibit the immigration of older persons, and where should it draw the line between young and old?

None of these questions is easy. And one can imagine that legislative bodies, as well as the citizenry, will have a diversity of views and spirited discussions. The documents of every policymaking body that has considered these questions display the great difficulties.

Elements of Numerical Restriction

Numerical restriction requires several difficult interrelated decisions. The first decision pertains to the number at which to set the ceiling. The second decision is whether to place a ceiling on all immigration or instead to have two immigration streams, one numerically limited, the other numerically unlimited. If the second decision is to have two streams, then the third decision pertains to the characteristics to be used for exempting one stream from the ceiling. The fourth decision, applying to all numerically limited immigrants, is how to choose from among a pool of applicants, for example, by a first-come/first-served rule or by lottery or by granting preferences or points. If the outcome of the fourth decision is to grant preferences or points, then the fifth decision pertains to the criteria to be used. A sixth decision is whether to add unused visas to the next year's supply of visas.

These are complicated matters, and it bears emphasizing that they engender much debate, as will be seen in the illustration in the section on Migration Restriction Regimes in the United States. The history of a country's immigration may be viewed as a history of asking and re-asking these questions, collected in Table 1 .

Table 1 . Apparatus for migration restriction: initial setup.

Moreover, as already hinted, both personal restriction and numerical restriction can be elaborated, further complicating setup of a migration restriction regime.

Personal restriction can be elaborated by noticing whether the characteristics constituting the criteria for restriction are fixed or alterable, a dimension crosscutting their qualitative or quantitative character. In general, one cannot change physical attributes or the things of the past. This set includes parental characteristics (such as parental religion), childhood characteristics (such as first language), and previous behaviors (such as previous membership in a political organization), as well as race and ancestry. However, other personal characteristics can be changed – e.g., schooling, occupation, bank account, religious affiliation – and a new language can be learned ( Jasso, 2009b , p. 29, 34–36).

Similarly, numerical restriction differs importantly according to (1) whether there is a single numerically limited stream or dual streams (one numerically limited, the other not) and (2) whether the type of selection is first-come/first-served or random selection or preferential selection. Random selection is a “pure” numerical restriction. Preferential selection incorporates forms of personal restriction and thus is not a pure numerical restriction. First-come/first-served embeds additional processes, possibly including personal characteristics (e.g., in the urgency to flee and the resources to flee quickly).

Thus, the setup of migration restriction may be even more difficult and contentious. Still, the basic skeleton in Table 1 provides a foundation for analyzing migration restriction regimes.

The Consequences of Migration Restriction

When the country restricting immigration is attractive, the immediate consequences of restriction are unauthorized migration (for both personal and numerical restriction) and visa-number backlogs (for numerical restriction) 1 .

As long as personal restrictions exist, ineligible people will enter the country in secret, or, if a temporary visit was permitted, remain, building a set of unauthorized residents.

Similarly, as long as numerical restrictions exist, eligible people will apply to immigrate, even when immigration is not possible for many years. And backlogs will accumulate. Moreover, some persons in the backlogs may enter/remain as unauthorized residents.

These immediate consequences spawn second-order consequences, in particular, policy devices to deal with them. The policy devices include enforcement measures as well as mechanisms for legalization and periodic clearing of backlogs 2 .

As well, restriction yields two interesting new metrics. For one way to assess the attractiveness of a country that restricts immigration is by the magnitude of unauthorized migration and visa-number backlogs. And one way to gauge the innovativeness and creativity of a country's government is by the policies it formulates to deal with unauthorized migration and visa backlogs. These policies are also a gauge of the country's humaneness and deepest values, as noted by Bhagwati and Rivera-Batiz (2013) .

Periodization by Migration Restriction Regime

Each of the four possible migration restriction regimes – fully unrestricted, personal restriction only, numerical restriction only, and fully restricted – has a distinctive apparatus and distinctive consequences, as discussed above. Accordingly, it may be useful to characterize the history of a country's immigration law by a periodization highlighting the four possible migration restriction regimes. For example, a country may or may not have a fully unrestricted migration regime in its history and/or it may or may not have an exclusively personal-restriction regime in its history, and so on. And the ordering of the regimes may be distinctive – and linked to the country's economic, social, and political features.

It may also happen that a country treats different parts of the world or different sets of countries differently, generating a somewhat more elaborate periodization. As will be seen in the section on Migration Restriction Regimes in the United States, the United States exemplifies this case, as for a period of over 40 years it had different rules for prospective immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere.

Migration Restriction Regimes in the Broader Social Science Context

Before proceeding to take a close look at migration restriction in the United States, it is useful to consider two broader social science matters. The first pertains to measurement, the second to substance, specifically the link between migration restriction and attitudes to immigration. Both embed a concern for fuller understanding of the determinants of migration restriction and the larger consequences beyond unauthorized migration and visa-number backlogs.

Measurement of Migration Restriction Regimes

Across the social sciences, as appreciation has grown of the importance for human behavior of the social/economic/political environment, so, too, have efforts to measure relevant features of the environment and as well to understand their origins (see, inter alia, Weber's, 1892 pioneering examination of Polish workers in Germany; Thomas and Znaniecki's, 1927 pathbreaking work, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America; and Elder's foundational work on life course analysis, summarized in Elder et al., 2003 ). Some of these features are simple and straightforward to measure (e.g., length of the school year or length of the school day), others less simple but with a rich scholarly tradition (e.g., Gross Domestic Product), and still others quite challenging (e.g., migration policy regimes). Research organizations, policy institutes, and government offices have contributed data and insights, sometimes jointly, to advance measures of these important macro features.

Valuable exemplars include the Human Development Index ( United Nations Development Programme, 2020 ), the Gender Gap Index ( World Economic Forum, 2019 ), and the Human Capital Index ( World Bank, 2019 , 2020 ) 3 .

The field of migration has seen a major creative surge of efforts to conceptualize and measure migration policies ( Bjerre et al., 2015 ; Filindra and Goodman, 2019 ), culminating in several large-scale projects: the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project covering 33 OECD countries in 1980-2020 ( Helbling et al., 2017 ); the Determinants of International Migration Policy (DEMIG) project covering 45 countries in 1945-2014 ( de Haas et al., 2015 ); the International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) project covering 9 countries in 1999-2008 ( Beine et al., 2016 ); and the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) project covering 52 countries in 5 continents, including all the EU member states and all the OECD countries, in 2007-2019 ( Solano and Huddleston, 2020 ).

These projects have produced a rich literature that promises to substantially advance knowledge about international migration ( Filindra and Goodman, 2019 ). By comparison, the framework introduced in this paper is modest. It has no intent to create an index or measure degree of restrictiveness. Moreover, its focus is largely on the internal structure of migration restriction regimes – their moving parts, conceptualized as two main types of restriction, personal restriction and numerical restriction – and while these moving parts affect the lives of migrants and all who enter migration systems (such as citizens sponsoring relatives and workers for immigration), it is also understood that the precise consequences depend not only on the migration restriction regime but also on the context. For example, the same policy may be thought exceedingly restrictive in a context of high demand and wonderfully generous in a context of low demand.

Yet both this framework for analyzing migration restriction regimes and the large migration policy projects arise from the same spirit, and both their points of convergence and their differences could yield useful synergies. To illustrate, both this framework and the larger policy projects encompass legal categories (such as legal permanent resident or citizen) and personal characteristics (such as language or religion); both cover long time spans; both implicitly or explicitly seek to understand both determinants and consequences of particular policies (considerations noted by Filindra and Goodman, 2019 ). Both are tools for understanding a wide range of domains – e.g., rights and responsibilities of non-citizens across the great diversity of legal categories. Indeed, description of a country's migration policy at a given point in time could benefit from both the policy indexes and the migration restriction framework, the latter classifying the regime as fully unrestricted, with personal restriction only, with numerical restriction only, or fully restricted. Additionally, it may be useful to go more deeply and distinguish within types of personal restriction and numerical restriction, as suggested in the section on The Apparatus of Migration Restriction above (e.g., distinguishing between fixed and alterable personal characteristics).

Finally, note a further immediately useful feature of the migration restriction framework proposed in this paper. Look again at Table 1 . Each of the questions that the policymaker must address when setting up or revising a migration restriction regime is also an important feature of that regime. Examples include the presence or absence of personal restriction, of numerical ceilings, of dual numerically limited and numerically unlimited streams, and of the criteria embedded in them. Accordingly, any summary of a country's migration restriction regime would benefit from including the questions in Table 1 .

Indeed, Table 1 leads immediately to the design of table shells for annual reports on migration systems, including both an overview table for all countries, in which the major features appear on rows and the countries in columns. One could then see at a glance, for a given year, whether each country's immigration law includes personal restriction or not and numerical restriction or not. Additional rows for each major feature could provide further information such as the numerical ceiling, if any, and the major personal characteristics used for personal restriction, if any. As well, this table could have a second panel, in which the rows represent persons of possible migration-relevant characteristics – including spouses, minor children, and parents of citizens and permanent residents, other relatives, and persons with a job offer in the country, as well as independent migrants with no familial relationship or prospective employment. In such a table, the reader could see at a glance which countries provide visas for specific kinds of individuals, for example, parents or siblings or independent migrants.

A second kind of table shell follows from the first. This would be a historical table for each country separately. Such a table would inform about changes over time in each country's migration restriction regime, reporting the start and end of particular provisions. One can envision an annual report whose first table is the worldwide table and this is followed by individual historical tables for each country.

A more detailed annual worldwide table could also display the number of persons admitted to permanent residence, separately by the number who are new arrivals and the number who are already in the country and adjusting their immigration status to permanent resident. Of course, the table could also display some of the consequences, such as the number in the visa-number backlogs for numerically limited visas and the estimate of unauthorized residents. The foregoing could also be incorporated into the historical country-specific tables.

Migration Restriction Regimes and Attitudes Toward Immigration

Where do migration restriction regimes come from? Not from thin air. Migration restriction regimes reflect the attitudes and thinking of people and their countries. Even the briefest review of the literature on attitudes toward immigration suggests non-trivial variation across individuals, across countries, and over time (e.g., see for Europe, Heath et al., 2020 ; and for the United States, Smith and Edmonston, 1997 , p. 389–393 and Waters and Pineau, 2015 , p. 47–50, 147–148). As Heath et al. ( 2020 , p. 475) observe, “Understanding what drives these… variations in public support for or opposition to immigration is therefore an issue of central importance for academics and policymakers alike.”

In general, the ensuing basic questions include, in classical terms, those emanating from the “functional prerequisites of a society” ( Aberle et al., 1950 ), summarized in Jasso ( 1988b , p. 920): “How do societies recruit their members? How do groups decide membership criteria? What traits are deemed desirable in prospective members and what traits are not?” 4 Other basic questions include philosophical questions about basic human rights and about how to allocate scarce benefits, as well as empirical questions about whether immigration policies awaken the sense of justice.

A subset of ethical questions may pertain to countries with particular historical origins. For example, discussing attitudes toward immigration in the United States, Weissbrodt et al. ( 2017 , p. 52–53) observe, “Given the U.S. tradition as a country of immigrants, it is difficult to comprehend how current citizens – almost all of whom have benefited from immigration – can claim any right to exclude future immigrants.”

With respect to whether migration restriction awakens the sense of justice, justice theory offers three ways to think about this question. First, there is little doubt that migration restriction awakens the sense of justice, at least in people who experience the sense of justice, that is, all but the justice-oblivious who are thought to be a small set ( Jasso, 2017 , p. 612–613) 5 . Second, however, given the inherent subjectivity of the sense of justice – enshrined in the Hatfield-Friedman Principle, “Justice is in the eye of the beholder” ( Walster et al., 1973 , p. 152, 1976 , p. 4; Friedman, 1977 ) – there is no a priori conclusion that any element of migration policy is just or unjust or that one policy might be more, or less, unjust than another. Third, justice theory yields a range of testable implications deduced from the basic postulates in the theory. The implications cover the behavior of migrants as well as people and policymakers in both origin and destination countries ( Jasso, 1986 , 1988a , 1996 ). Like all the implications of justice theory they are ceteris paribus implications, because justice is thought to be only one of the basic forces governing behavior ( Jasso, 2008 ). Here is a sampling 6 :

1. Societies in which immigration and population growth are welcomed must be societies in which people value at least one cardinal good, such as wealth.

2. If the origin and destination countries have the same average wealth, they cannot both favor or both oppose the migration; they can only both be indifferent to it.

3. A necessary condition for the origin and destination countries to both want the migration is that they be unequal in average wealth.

4. Two conditions jointly necessary and sufficient for the origin and destination countries to both want the migration are that migration be from a poor country to a rich country and that the migrant lie above the mean of the origin country and below the mean of the destination country.

5. Two conditions jointly necessary and sufficient for the origin and destination countries to both oppose the migration are that migration be from a rich country to a poor country and that the migrant lie below the mean of the origin country and above the mean of the destination country.

There is ample evidence that people often have diametrically opposed ideas about what is just in the world of migration policy. These ideas come to be formalized in political party platforms and non-governmental advocacy groups 7 . Notwithstanding the subjectivity of ideas of justice, it is possible that a general justice principle could emerge via sustained theoretical analysis. For example, while one would think that, given the Hatfield-Friedman Principle, ideas of what constitutes “the just society” would differ among persons, deductive reasoning yields the surprising prediction that “The just society has a mixed government; distribution of benefits is by the many, and distribution of burdens is by the few” 8 . Thus, it remains possible that migration too would be surprised by a general justice principle. Such a general justice principle would transcend the competing ideas of what is just, calming what might appear to be an inherent instability of migration restriction regimes. Indeed, the multi-country empirical work reported and discussed in Heath et al. (2020) and the references cited therein, such as Davidov et al. (2020) , together with single-country studies such as Jasso (1988b) , Diehl and Steinmann (2012a , b) , and Diehl et al. (2018) , may yield the components for a new general principle of justice about migration.

As for migration and human rights, there is a curious asymmetry. Human rights documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 9 , protect the right to leave one's country but leave unaddressed the corresponding right to enter another country. The conversation between President Jimmy Carter of the United States and Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping of China during Deputy Premier Deng's state visit to Washington in late January 1979, after the two countries had normalized relations on the 1st of January, is illuminating ( Foster, 2015 ):

[When the United States] established diplomatic relations in 1979, the United States considered whether the Jackson-Vanik Amendments to the Trade Act of 1974, which required the US to impose trade restrictions on any country that restricted emigration, applied to China as it did to the Soviet Union. However, during the historic 1979 visit of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to the United States, when he was asked by then President Jimmy Carter about Chinese restrictions on outbound emigration, Deng Xiaoping's reported response was “How many millions do you want?” Thereafter, the United States showed little or no interest in Chinese emigration policy.

Yet symmetry is much on the mind of Pope Francis (2020) who proposes “safe corridors” for migrants to move from one country to another.

Migration Restriction Regimes in the United States

To begin, consider restriction on admission to legal permanent residence (LPR), popularly known as getting a “green card” – considering the types of restriction, the apparatus for restriction, and the consequences of restriction. This leads naturally to a restriction-focused periodization of U.S. immigration history 10 .

To set the stage, Figure 1 depicts annual admissions to legal permanent residence in the United States since 1820. Annual totals are from Table 1 of the 2019 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the most recent annual report of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The graph shows the spike in 1991 and surrounding years due to persons acquiring LPR via the legalization provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). This graph is probably the best-known graph in the entire field of U.S. immigration, published widely in the annual reports of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Annual Flow Reports of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security 11 .

Figure 1 . Immigration to the United States: 1820-2019. Annual totals represent the number of persons admitted to legal permanent residence ( U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2019 , Table 1).

Previewing fuller description below, restriction is of two kinds, personal (noticing characteristics of persons, inclusive of national origin) and numerical (placing a ceiling on all or a subset of immigrants). Both types of restriction require an apparatus (what characteristics to favor or bar, whether to exempt some visa applicants from a ceiling and by what criteria, what ceiling to place on numerically limited immigration, etc.). Both types of restriction engender unauthorized immigration; numerical restriction also engenders backlogs. The twin consequences of unauthorized and backlogs in turn lead to new policy devices, such as mechanisms for enforcement, legalization, and periodic clearing of backlogs.

The elements of personal and numerical restriction, as well as the policy devices to deal with consequences of restriction, are codified in U.S. law and policy. For example, the elements of personal restriction appear in laws that establish the grounds of inadmissibility, distinguishing between admissibility for temporary or permanent residence and providing exceptions as well as waivers. Important sources for studying U.S. migration restriction, besides original pieces of legislation, court cases, and executive actions, include the United States Code (USC), Title 8, which is a compilation of all legislation on immigration, and the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Title 8, which is a compilation of all immigration procedures. Both 8 USC and 8 CFR are titled “Aliens and Nationality.” Also indispensable is the Policy Manual of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The USCIS Policy Manual, still under construction, is the successor to the Adjudicator's Field Manual; these provide the basics of immigration law and policy as guidance to immigration officers. They also provide links to 8 USC and 8 CFR 12 .

As well, the two types of restriction, combined with the geographic and historical distinction between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, lead to a periodization of U.S. immigration history to date into Four Immigration Eras, beginning with an era of neither personal nor numerical restriction (to 1874), continuing to a Second Immigration Era, characterized by personal restriction only (to 1920), and a Third Immigration Era, with numerical restriction on the Eastern Hemisphere. Finally, the 1965 Immigration Act, by extending numerical restriction from the Eastern Hemisphere to the whole world, ushered in the Fourth Immigration Era.

This section ends with a close look at the 1965 Act, an assessment from the migration restriction perspective and a look ahead, asking whether there might be a Fifth Immigration Era and how it might look.

Elements of Migration Restriction in the United States

Types of migration restriction in the united states.

As noted and as will be described in fuller detail, during its history, the United States has had a period of no restriction, a period of personal restriction only, a period of personal restriction combined with numerical restriction on one hemisphere, and a period of personal restriction combined with worldwide numerical restriction. It has never had numerical restriction without personal restriction.

Apparatus of Migration Restriction in the United States

As discussed above, questions of personal restriction are not easy, and they have been and continue to be vigorously debated by both legislators and citizenry. For example, in 1980 when the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy was exploring the possibility of a point system for the selection of immigrants, the Commission's professional staff was surveyed using a sophisticated factorial survey method that made it possible to estimate the point system each person would favor 13 . Notably, no two estimated point systems were alike ( Jasso, 1988b , p. 928–929). For example, only two characteristics were signed the same way by all staff members, having a job offer and having a sibling who is a U.S. citizen, both increasing the applicant's desirability; however, staff members differed with respect to which characteristic would provide more points. Staff members disagreed on whether to grant more points to men or to women and on whether to grant points for knowledge of English. Similarly, while staff members were unambiguously attentive to continent of birth, net of the percentage of visas received by the prospective immigrant's co-nationals in the last 5 years, they disagreed on the ordering, providing points in distinctive ways. For example, one staff member gave applicants from Africa 53 more points than applicants from Latin America, while giving 24 points for having a citizen sibling and 23 points for having a job offer; thus, for that staff member, an applicant from Latin America with both a citizen sibling and a job offer would get a lower score than an applicant from Africa with neither 14 .

As discussed above, questions of numerical restriction require several interrelated decisions (as shown in Table 1 ). These are visible in a country's history, for example, in the summaries of briefings and consultations in the reports of the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. Indeed, the history of U.S. immigration law can be viewed as a history of asking and re-asking these questions, continually modifying the answers – for example, exempting professors from the numerical ceiling in one law and subsequently moving them to the numerically-limited stream, or placing husbands of U.S. citizens in the numerically-limited stream and subsequently moving them to the exempt stream 15 .

Vocabulary of Migration Restriction

Migration restriction requires a special vocabulary. Two words in the vocabulary pre-exist migration restriction: alien and immigrant. Derived from Latin (“stranger” or “foreigner”) and inherited from English common law, the word alien was first used in 1798 in the Alien and Sedition Acts. It is defined in U.S. immigration law as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States,” and the USCIS Glossary adds, “‘Foreign national’ is a synonym and used outside of statutes when referring to non-citizens of the U.S.” The word immigrant, also derived from Latin, originally referred to anyone moving to the United States. But numerical restriction would give it a new and restricted meaning.

If numerical restriction classifies aliens into distinct legal categories, then special words are needed to refer to these distinct situations. The Immigration Act of 1924, building on the basic ideas in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, provided a new definition of immigrant – in essence a precursor to the contemporary permanent resident – excluding diplomats, tourists, aliens in transit, merchant seamen, and treaty traders from the set of immigrants and giving these a new name: non-immigrant ( Parker, 1924 ; U.S. Public Law, 68-139, 1924 ).

Next, the Immigration Act of 1924 distinguished two kinds of immigrants, non-quota and quota. The 1924 Act's non-quota and quota immigrant classifications are the precursors, respectively, of the contemporary numerically unlimited immigrant and numerically limited immigrant categories. The non-quota class included wives and unmarried children under 18 of U.S. citizens residing in the United States, returning residents, natives of the Western Hemisphere, ministers and professors and their wives and unmarried children under 18, and students at least 15 years of age entering an approved course of study ( Parker, 1924 ; U.S. Public Law, 68-139, 1924 ).

The Act defines quota immigrants as immigrants who are not non-quota immigrants. Quota immigrants were subject to numerical restriction based on national origins plus a system of preferences. For example, preference would be given to the unmarried children under 21 years of age, parents, and spouses of U.S. citizens age 21 or over, and to agricultural workers and their wives and dependent children under 16 years of age ( Parker, 1924 ; U.S. Public Law, 68-139, 1924 ).

Finally, the 1924 Act introduced the word visa. Also based on Latin (for “to see”), a visa certified that a prospective immigrant's application had been seen and approved by a consular officer abroad ( Parker, 1924 ; U.S. Public Law, 68-139, 1924 ). Indeed, the Act uses both noun and verb, referring to “an immigration visa which shall consist of one copy of the application…, visaed by such consular officer” (in the section on Migration Restriction Regimes) 16 .

Of course, words are living things. They come and go, and their meaning changes. Perhaps due to film and television, the word alien became associated with extraterrestrial life forms (some friendly, some not), and increasingly the synonym “foreign national” was used in immigration discourse (as in the USCIS Glossary, noted above).

But words are also vulnerable to conscription by political wordsmiths. On 8 October 2019 the USCIS Policy Manual published a “Technical Update” subtitled “Replacing the Term ‘Foreign National’.” The Update states:

This technical update replaces all instances of the term “foreign national” with “alien” throughout the Policy Manual as used to refer to a person who meets the definition provided in INA 101(a)(3) [“any person not a citizen or national of the United States”].

Nothing was safe from the new deployment, not even the venerable annual reports published by the Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) at DHS, which form the statistical foundation for much immigration research – the Annual Flow Reports and the annual Population Estimates 17 . The opening sentence of the “Annual Flow Report” on legal permanent residents went from

Immigration law defines a lawful permanent resident (LPR) or “green card” recipient as a person [italics added] who has been granted “the status of having been lawfully accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States as an immigrant in accordance with the immigration laws, such status not having changed.

for the 2018 cohort ( Baugh, 2019 ) to

Immigration law defines a lawful permanent resident (LPR) or “green card” recipient as an alien [italics added] who has been granted “the status of having been lawfully accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States as an immigrant in accordance with the immigration laws, such status not having changed.

for the 2019 cohort ( Baugh, 2020 ). A footnote was added to “alien” providing the definition in the Immigration and Nationality Act (and in the USCIS Glossary), namely, “An alien is any person not a citizen or national of the United States.”

Similarly, in the Population Estimates reports for LPRs, the phrase “unauthorized immigrants” ( Baker, 2019a , p. 2) was changed to “illegal aliens” ( Baker, 2019b , p. 1). The change in the Population Estimates reports for the unauthorized was more extensive, changing not only the opening sentence but also the title. The opening sentence went from

This report provides estimates of the size of the unauthorized immigrant [italics added] population residing in the United States as of January 2014 by period of entry, region and country of origin, state of residence, age, and sex.

for the January 2014 estimate ( Baker, 2017 ) to

This report provides estimates of the size of the illegal alien [italics added] population residing in the United States as of January 2015 by period of entry, region and country of origin, state of residence, age, and sex.

for the January 2015 estimate ( Baker, 2018 ). A footnote was added to “illegal alien” with the following text:

The Department of Homeland Security refers to foreign-born non-citizens unlawfully present in the United States as “illegal aliens.” Previous versions of this report used the term “unauthorized immigrants” to refer to this population.

Further adventures in this “war of the words” no doubt await ( Shear and Jordan, 2021 ).

The Consequences of Migration Restriction in the United States

As discussed above, when the country restricting immigration is attractive, the immediate consequences of restriction are unauthorized migration (for both personal and numerical restriction) and visa backlogs (for numerical restriction). The United States provides a prime example that the immediate consequences of restriction are unauthorized migration and visa backlogs. As noted by Masanz ( 1980 , p. 33), “According to the Immigration Bureau [in the Annual Reports of 1922 and 1923], the increase in the various restrictions on alien entry into the United States was accompanied by an increase in the number of surreptitious entries and, eventually, in the establishment of a thriving smuggling industry.” The 1922 Annual Report ( U.S. Commissioner General of Immigration, 1922 ) specifically mentions that prospective immigrants desiring “to evade the restrictions of the ‘quota’ act have proceeded to both Canada and Mexico in large numbers, and it is these who have endeavored, and are endeavoring, to gain admission by stealth, usually with the aid of hired smugglers” (quoted in Masanz, 1980 , p. 3). The official INS history of immigration ( U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1979-2001 , p. 11) states, “An unintended result of the quota system's limits on immigration was a great rise in illegal immigration by 1923.” Ninety years later, Bhagwati and Rivera-Batiz ( 2013 , p. 12) observe, “as long as immigration restrictions exist, people will continue to enter the United States illegally,” and, one might add, overstay legal visas and work without authorization.

Similarly, as long as numerical restrictions exist, eligible people will apply to immigrate, even when immigration is not possible for many years. And backlogs will accumulate. Virtually every primary and secondary source on the history of U.S. immigration since 1921 includes some mention of backlogs. For example, the official U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ( 1991 , p. 21) history of immigration refers to “quota backlogs [becoming] too large” in the 1950s, and Vialet ( 1979 , p. 62–63), in the history of immigration law prepared for the use of the newly established U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, describes the rapid development of a Western Hemisphere backlog after imposition of the numerical ceiling in 1968.

These immediate consequences spawn second-order consequences, in particular, policy devices to deal with them. The policy devices include enforcement measures as well as mechanisms for legalization and periodic clearing of backlogs.

Enforcement measures include deportation and border measures. It is no accident that, as noted by Masanz (1980) , the Border Patrol was established as part of the provisions of the Act of 28 May 1924 – 2 days after the Immigration Act of 1924.

Another policy device is legalization. Again, it is no accident that the registry provision of U.S. law was established within 5 years of the Immigration Act of 1924, via the Registry Act of March 2, 1929. Under this provision, a record of admission is created for aliens whose record of admission cannot be found and who meet certain criteria, including residence in the United States since before a certain date. In 1929 that date was set in 1924. Subsequently it was moved several times, and currently stands at 1 January 1972. Table 2 reports the date required for inception of residence by each law since the registry provision was established.

Table 2 . Legalization of unauthorized: U.S. immigration registry law.

Although the registry provision was ostensibly intended for persons who wanted to naturalize but did not have or could not locate the requisite record of admission, and deportable aliens were not explicitly mentioned until legislation in 1958, it may have been used as a legalization tool ( Bruno, 2001 ; Wasem, 2010 ). Indeed, a 1936 description in the Statistical Abstract ( U.S. Department of Commerce, 1936 , p. 104) states that the registry legislation “legalizes permanent residence in the United States.” And the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) describes the registry files for the period March 2, 1929, to March 31, 1944, available for genealogical searches, as documenting “the first ‘legalization program’ authorized by Congress” 18 .

Other policy devices include temporary legalization. The 1952 Act granted the Attorney General parole authority, whereby persons otherwise inadmissible can be granted temporary entry on humanitarian grounds ( Wasem, 2010 ).

Similarly, the 1990 Act introduced a new way to allow unauthorized migrants to remain in the United States temporarily, authorizing the Attorney General to grant temporary protected status (TPS) to undocumented alien nationals of designated countries undergoing armed conflict, natural disasters, epidemics, or other conditions which temporarily prevent the migrants' safe return ( U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1979-2001 , Appendix 1–20).

As for backlogs, virtually all discussions of immigration legislation include earnest discussions about how to structure eligibility for LPR so that backlogs do not accumulate. Additionally, modifying the basic apparatus for restriction can clear backlogs. For example, the U.S. Select Commission Staff Report of 1981 notes that the Senate Committee charged with reviewing the immigration system in 1947-1950 considered moving parents of U.S. citizens and husbands of U.S. citizens (regardless of the date of the marriage) from the numerically-limited stream to the numerically-unlimited stream, moves which would clear the parent backlog (then facing a wait of 7 to 8 years) and reduce the backlogs for Greece, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Turkey ( U.S. Select Commission on Immigration Refugee Policy , 1981 , p. 313).

Moving a subset to the numerically unlimited stream would of course clear the backlog for that subset. However, given the high demand for permanent visas, it is unlikely that any modification of the criteria for numerically-limited immigration would prevent backlogs.

This discussion has focused on the consequences of migration restriction for the migration restriction regime. Of course, there are also consequences for all actors and countries in the migration process – from talent lost or delayed for the destination country and remittances lost or delayed for the origin country to a range of effects on the life chances of individuals and the stratification structures of both origin and destination countries ( Jasso, 2011 ).

A Periodization of U.S. Immigration History Based on Migration Restriction

Before 1875 immigration to the United States was largely unrestricted, although there was substantial restriction on citizenship and naturalization. For example, the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to “free white persons” and there was legislation on such matters as the residency period required for naturalization and the link between gender, marriage, and naturalization ( Smith, 1998 ). But immigration per se was largely unrestricted. Thus, the period 1789-1874 was a no-restriction era and may be considered the First Immigration Era, a Pre-Restriction Era.

The Immigration Act of 1875 marks the start of personal restriction on U.S. immigration and thus may be considered the start of the Second Immigration Era. It prohibited for the first time the entry of persons considered undesirable, barring prostitutes and convicts. It would be followed by a long string of laws, noticing a large variety of personal characteristics, conditions, and behavior, starting with race in 1882 (Chinese Exclusion Act) and accumulating a rapidly growing list of inadmissibles, such as paupers, contract laborers, persons with certain contagious diseases, polygamists, anarchists, feeble-minded persons, unaccompanied minors, illiterates, and other Asians.

But personal restriction did not mitigate the growing discontent with immigration, and 1921 brought the Emergency Quota Act of May 19, 1921, introduced above, placing a ceiling of 357,000 on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere, the first numerical restriction on U.S. immigration and thus marking the start of the Third Immigration Era. However, a subset was exempt from the numerical ceiling, including actors, singers, professors, and ministers. The Quota Law, which was temporary “emergency” legislation, was quickly extended for 2 years (with an amendment to increase from 1 to 5 years the requisite period of residence in the Western Hemisphere to qualify for exemption from the ceiling), then followed by the Immigration Act of 1924, which revised and codified all elements of the apparatus for restriction. It reduced the ceiling to 164,000, modified the criteria for exemption from the ceiling, and modified the national origins formula and introduced a system of preferences for the numerically limited stream. It also introduced the provision that aliens ineligible for citizenship could not be admitted to legal permanent residence, as discussed by Parker (1925) .

There followed a long string of new laws, including the 1924 law establishing the Border Patrol and the 1929 law establishing the registry provision, discussed above, as well as laws modifying the apparatus for restriction (e.g., a 1932 law exempting from the numerical limit the husbands of U.S. citizens, provided that the marriage occurred prior to issuance of the visa and prior to July 1, 1932) 19 .

World War II brought new concerns and new legislation, mostly for security but also dismantling some of the elements of restriction – for example, two 1940 laws extending naturalization to military personnel regardless of race and permitting the naturalization of indigenous races of the Western Hemisphere, a 1943 law extending naturalization to Chinese persons and persons of Chinese descent (now that China was a close wartime ally of the United States), a 1946 law which gave non-quota status to the Chinese wives of U.S. citizens, a 1948 law extending naturalization to Filipino persons or persons of Filipino descent and to persons of races indigenous to India, and a 1950 law providing non-quota status to the spouses and minor children of members of the American armed forces, regardless of race (provided that the marriage occurred before 19 March 1952), as well as the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which eliminated all racial and gender bars to naturalization but, over President Truman's veto, retained the national origins formula for the numerically limited stream.

Other laws provided for clearing backlogs, for example, a 1962 law giving non-quota visas to certain applicants for fourth preference (brothers, sisters, and children of citizens) and first preference visas (special occupational skills). Notably, not long after President John F. Kennedy issued the groundbreaking Executive Order 10925 prohibiting discrimination in government employment and employment by government contractors on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin” (6 March 1961), legislation was enacted eliminating the requirement that visa applicants provide their race (26 September 1961).

Pressure mounted for elimination of the national origins quotas, and after 13 years Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), abolishing the national origins quotas. The price was extending the numerical ceiling to the Western Hemisphere, thus ushering in the Fourth Immigration Era, as shown in Table 3 .

Table 3 . Four immigration eras in the United States, classified by type of migration restriction and hemisphere.

The 1965 Act also modified the apparatus for restriction, inclusive of the numerical ceiling, the criteria for exemption from the numerical ceilings, and the criteria for prioritization within the numerically limited stream 20 .

Figure 2 provides a view of the restriction-focused periodization of U.S. immigration history. It includes vertical lines at 1875, 1921, and 1965, marking the start of the Second through Fourth Immigration Eras 21 .

Figure 2 . Immigration to the United States: Four Immigration Eras, 1820-2019. Vertical lines at 1875, 1921, and 1965, marking the start of the Second through Fourth Immigration Eras.

A Close Look at the 1965 Act

The migration restriction perspective enables focused assessment of each piece of legislation. To illustrate, consider the 1965 Act. Of course, each Immigration Era and, within each Era, each piece of legislation merit sustained assessment. For example, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, the “smaller” Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendments Act of 1986, the Immigration Act of 1990, and the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 produced far-reaching changes to both personal criteria and numerical criteria for LPR admission as well as to associated procedures and requirements. Here the focus is on the 1965 Act, in part because it is “boundary” legislation, ushering in the current era, the Fourth Immigration Era, in part because two of its provisions are central to the history of U.S. immigration law – abolition of national origins quotas and the end of distinctive treatment for the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.

What did the 1965 Act accomplish? Look at Table 1 . The Act provided modified answers to the questions underlying the apparatus of numerical restriction. It provided a new ceiling for numerically-limited immigration (at first separate ceilings for the two Hemispheres, subsequently a single worldwide ceiling starting in 1977). It modified the criteria for numerically-unlimited immigration, moving parents of U.S. citizens from the second preference to the unlimited stream. It altered the preferences for the numerically-limited stream (at first only in the Eastern Hemisphere, extended in 1976 to the Western Hemisphere), for example, moving employment immigrants from first preference to third and sixth preference (skilled and unskilled, respectively) and moving spouses of legal permanent residents from third preference to second preference.

What about unauthorized migration and visa backlogs? Whatever the modifications of the 1965 Act to the apparatus for restriction, they did not prevent either unauthorized migration or visa backlogs. Both grew quickly – unauthorized migration to about 3.5 to 5.0 million and backlogs to over a million by 1980, as noted in the staff report of the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration Refugee Policy ( 1981 , p. 377, 482).

And what about policy devices for dealing with unauthorized migration and visa backlogs? The 1965 Act did not invent the registry provision (1929) or the Attorney General's parole authority (1952) or temporary protected status (1990). It did not invent the Diversity Visa Program (1990), which has made it possible for persons from all over the world to come legally to the United States, competing by lottery for 50,000 visas annually.

Indeed, within less than a decade and a half, pressure would mount to review immigration law, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the great champion of the 1965 Act, would write, in the Introduction to the history of immigration law prepared in 1979 for use by the newly established U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy ( Vialet, 1979 , p. 1):

The current Immigration and Nationality Act is a generation out of date. It is out of touch with the times, and inadequate to meet modern needs. It was enacted in 1952 over President Truman's veto, at the depth of the cold war and the restrictionist atmosphere of that era. It was flawed from the beginning with discriminatory and anti-alien provisions. Some of the more blatantly racist and objectionable sections – such as the national origins quota system and the Asia-Pacific Triangle provisions – were repealed in 1965.

But not much else has changed. The 1952 Act is still the basic statute governing immigration. But after more than a quarter century, its provisions and administrative procedures are seriously inadequate. And, until the last 2 years, little has also been done to strengthen the role of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in implementing the law.

Without doubt the greatest contribution of the 1965 Act was abolition of the national origins quotas – a strong and proud statement that the United States pays no attention to race and nationality.

In years to come, however, a case may be made that the imposition of numerical restriction on the Western Hemisphere dealt a mortal blow to cherished ideas about the New World, about countries which started as colonies of European powers and threw off the bonds, about countries with a weaker link between ancestry and nationality, about Good Neighbors. Perhaps it was valuable to affirm that not only American Indians born in Canada can move freely to the United States (as per the John Jay Treaty of 1794), and obtain LPR, but that so too could all natives of the Americas.

Prospects for a Fifth Immigration Era

Might there be a Fifth Immigration Era in the United States? What would it look like? First, a Fifth Era could reprise one of the three Eras before the current Fourth Era. That is, U.S. immigration law could return to the fully unrestricted migration regime, as the First Immigration Era. Or it could return to an exclusively personal-restriction regime, as the Second Immigration Era. Or it could return to worldwide personal restriction but numerical restriction only on prospective immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, as the Third Immigration Era.

Second, a Fifth Era could continue to disregard Hemisphere but, unlike the Second or Fourth Eras, it could institute an exclusively numerical-restriction regime, with no personal restriction at all.

Third, a Fifth Era could revive the Hemisphere distinction and institute one of several variants: (1) exclusive personal restriction on the Western Hemisphere and exclusive numerical restriction on the Eastern Hemisphere; (2) exclusive personal restriction on the Eastern Hemisphere and exclusive numerical restriction on the Western Hemisphere; (3) a fully unrestricted regime for the Western Hemisphere and a fully restricted regime for the Eastern Hemisphere; (4) a fully unrestricted regime for the Eastern Hemisphere and a fully restricted regime for the Western Hemisphere.

One can imagine other possibilities for a Fifth Era. For example, a new migration restriction regime could retain the current disregard for Hemisphere but notice something entirely new such as planetary provenance. The fully restricted regime of the Fourth Era could continue for earthlings but extra-terrestrials would face neither personal nor numerical restriction.

For the time being, however, it would seem that the Fourth Immigration Era will continue. Of course, and compatible with the Fourth Immigration Era, there could be many changes in the personal criteria used to favor or bar immigrants and many changes in the numerical ceilings, as well as changes in immigration procedures.

Indeed, a new change has begun almost imperceptibly. It was noted above that soon after President John F. Kennedy's Executive Order 10925 prohibiting discrimination in government employment and employment by government contractors on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin” (6 March 1961), legislation was enacted eliminating the requirement that visa applicants provide their race (26 September 1961). Recently, questions on race and Hispanic origin have begun to appear in the USCIS forms used by immigrant applicants and their sponsors, for example, in the basic form used by sponsors of relatives (Form I-130, Petition for Alien Relative), in the form used by applicants for legal permanent residence who are already in the United States (Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status), in the form used to file for removal of conditionality restrictions by immigrants who qualified for legal permanent residence on the basis of a marriage of less than 2-years' duration (Form I-751, Petition to Remove Conditions on Residence), and in the form used to file for naturalization (Form N-400. Application for Naturalization).

Toward Possible New Creative Policy Devices

Perhaps the 1965 Act has been held to an impossible standard. Perhaps the apparatus of restriction does not admit of more creative innovations. Perhaps neither do the policy devices to deal with restriction. Past history suggests two incantations (visible in Figures 1 , 2 ), and they are not happy to contemplate: economic crisis and war.

Moreover, with the exception of lotteries and parole authority and temporary protected status, creative and happy policy devices are scarce. It is telling that although probably the entire country agrees that the “immigration system is broken,” there is pervasive disagreement about what precisely is broken. To some, what is broken is one or another element of the apparatus for restriction – ceiling too high or too low, persons included or excluded from the numerically exempt categories, and so on. To others, what is broken is one or another of the consequences of restriction – too much unauthorized migration (currently estimated at about eleven million), too large backlogs (currently at 3,978,487 approved and waiting in line for the approximately 366 thousand preference category visas given annually, as reported by the U.S. Department of State, 2020 ) 22 . To still others, what is broken pertains only to administrative matters – too many processing delays or too high fees associated with the immigration application process.

Interestingly, it seems to be generally accepted that, as the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration Refugee Policy ( 1981 , p. 384) observed almost 40 years ago, “the United States can never return to a policy of open migration or the massive migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…” Numerical restrictions appear here to stay, albeit, as Zolberg ( 1983 , p. 13) put it, “with no precise rationale offered for them other than their self-evident necessity.”

Still, there may be a few policy devices useful all around. Consider unauthorized migration. Immigration researchers believe that a portion of the set of unauthorized consists of persons in the backlogs, who rather than wait in the origin country for the visa to become available, wait in the United States. Some were in the U.S. with temporary visas and have U.S.-born children. Like all parents, they want the best for their children, and in this case there is a happy coincidence of interests among the parents and the larger citizenry, for the longer and deeper the experience of Americanization, the more fluent in English and the more productive Americans the children will be. The challenge is how to provide this experience of Americanization without increasing unauthorized migration. The possible numbers are not trivial. As noted above, the backlogs are massive – almost four million persons waiting for numerically-limited visas granted at the rate of about 366,000 a year, suggesting, on average, a wait of over 10 years, not counting a further period for administrative processing.

One approach is to make unauthorized residence in the United States less urgent for prospective immigrants in the backlogs by utilizing the vast American network around the world to provide advance training in English as well as some modicum of socialization into American life. The American network around the world has many components, emanating from both the public and private sector, that could be enlisted in this effort. Consider four: The first component of the U.S. global network that could be used in this effort consists of the schools operated by the Department of Defense, via the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) for the children of military personnel stationed at military installations abroad. The second component of the international U.S. network consists of the American-sponsored overseas schools assisted by the Department of State via the Office of Overseas Schools. The third component includes all the programs of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, including the Office of English Language Programs. The fourth component is the growing network of American universities with branches abroad.

It would be useful to assess the possibilities for enlisting the substantial American presence abroad in the service of providing English language training and early Americanization for future LPRs around the world who are in the visa-number backlogs waiting for numerically-limited visas, thus tamping down the urgency to take up residence in the United States.

Another approach would bypass countries and their immigration laws. Suppose that migration restriction regimes are indeed inherently unstable – with fundamental disagreements on their moving parts and continual discussions of the questions in Table 1 —and that a general justice principle remains elusive, unlike the case of the just society noted earlier or economic inequality, where it is possible to say with some albeit limited confidence that “inequality in the distribution of a good is a bad” ( Jasso, 2017 ). Suppose further that natural disasters and political upheavals continue to generate large numbers of displaced persons urgently in need of refuge. Finally, suppose that at least one important sector of society – research and education – depends on free exchange of ideas and unrestricted travel to conferences. Then it might be possible, with international cooperation and generous philanthropy, to establish a network of conference centers around the world, governed by an international consortium, on land or islands contributed by countries or new artificial islands, staffed by migrants and refugees, providing not only all the amenities of a high-functioning conference center but also training for its staff, which – as is well known, and certainly in the hospitality industry – spans a large swath of occupations and trades. The staff could also include people from around the world taking a year or two to be part of a great and noble experiment while also learning a trade or serving as medical recreation/school staff. For scholars there would no longer be the constant worry of obtaining a visa in time to attend a conference, as all “citizens of the world” would be immediately admissible. For migrants and refugees, there would be a place to build a new life. Indeed, the conference centers would use the wonderful diversity of backgrounds and languages and ideas to develop cognitive and noncognitive skills, helping everyone achieve their highest potential and thereby advancing both the own good and the common good.

Revisiting One Dimension of Personal Restriction in the United States

As a final exercise, one might venture onto perilous territory to think again about the increasing emphasis on high-skilled immigrants, a dimension of restriction based on personal characteristics. Should the United States favor the immigration of the more educated or the less educated? If the less educated are less educated due to lack of opportunities, their children will inherit their drive and energy and in the American world of opportunity will achieve much. Thoughts like this were in the minds of two members of the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy – Cabinet secretaries, heads of executive departments – when they met, as part of their regular schedule of meetings, on 18 June 1980 in The Great Hall of the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, with the Honorable Theodore M. Hesburgh, Chairman, presiding, to consider criteria for selecting new-seed independent immigrants ( U.S. Select Commission on Immigration Refugee Policy , 1980b , p. 325).

– The Honorable Patricia Roberts Harris, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare:

“Some of the models before us suggest standards for admission in the third category – English competency, education. I have a very non-legalistic reaction to that which goes to Emma Lazarus's poem, ‘Give Me Your Huddled Masses.’ Those are not people with degrees or people who speak English. We should maintain a place in this country for people who have the ‘get up and git’ to come here.”

– The Honorable Benjamin Civiletti, Attorney General:

“I would agree with [Secretary Harris]. I'm not sure how I come up. But I do know that if we had an exclusionary system with regard to language and occupation in our historical preferences, I would not be sitting here now!”

Author Contributions

This paper was written by GJ.

Conflict of Interest

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.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of portions of this article were presented at the Conference on Immigrant America: New Immigration Histories from 1965 to 2015, in Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, October 2015; at the Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, January 2016; at the 9th Conference of the International Network of Analytical Sociologists (INAS), Utrecht University, Netherlands, June 2016; at the 2017 Population and Public Policy Conference, Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston, January 2017; at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA), Montreal, Canada, August 2017; at the 30th Anniversary Conference of the Research Partnership Between the University of Tel Aviv and the University of Konstanz, sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, University of Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2017; at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA), Denver, CO, April 2018; and at the XIX World Congress of the International Sociological Association (ISA), RC31, Toronto, Canada, July 2018. I thank conference participants, the referees, and the Editor for valuable comments and suggestions. I also gratefully acknowledge the intellectual and financial support of New York University.

1. ^ These backlogs pertain to what are called “visa numbers” – visas for numerically limited permanent immigration. Of course, all applications are vulnerable to processing delays; the backlogs that arise from processing may be called visa-processing backlogs, as opposed to visa-number backlogs. The focal backlogs in this paper are visa-number backlogs.

2. ^ That restriction leads to unauthorized migration and visa-number backlogs and these in turn to new policy devices to address them has long been recognized and discussed, especially in historical accounts of migration restriction regimes, as will be seen in the section on The Consequences of Migration Restriction in the United States (e.g., Vialet, 1979 ; Masanz, 1980 ; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1991 ; Bruno, 2001 ; Wasem, 2010 ). Social science discussions of these phenomena include Czaika and Hobolth (2016) , Brekke et al. (2017) , and Poston (2019) .

3. ^ The Human Development Index dates to 1990 and the Gender Gap Index to 2006, while the Human Capital Index was introduced in 2019.

4. ^ Aberle et al. ( 1950 , p. 101) define a society as “a group of human beings sharing a self-sufficient system of action which is capable of existing longer than the life-span of an individual, the group being recruited at least in part by the sexual reproduction of its members.” Thus, a tribe and a nation are societies, but a monastery is not. The elements of a self-sufficient system of action include a shared form of communication (i.e., language), shared cognitive orientations, and a shared articulated set of goals. The recruitment mechanism must yield a supply of “effectively socialized individuals from the maturing generation,” possibly supplemented by recruits acquired through “immigration and conquest,” ( Aberle et al., 1950 , p. 101), the latter also effectively socialized ( Aberle et al., 1950 , p. 109). Thus, the non-sexual recruitment practices of nation-states and the development of screening and socialization systems – as well as associated policymaking processes – constitute an important topic of study. Note that, in classic Aberle et al. (1950) terms, personal characteristics are good indicators of the probability of effective socialization into the country-specific system of action. But note also that individuals may disagree on the characteristics that render desirable a prospective immigrant, as will be illustrated below.

5. ^ For example, the Mission Statement for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, states: “USCIS administers the nation's lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly [italics added] adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values” (USCIS Policy Manual, Vol 1, Part A, Ch 1).

6. ^ Predictions 2–5 are for the special case in which the valued good is cardinal, the migrant does not pay a tax or receive a bonus at either origin or destination, and there is no economic growth from pre- to post-migration in either the origin or destination country ( Jasso, 1996 , p. 30–42).

7. ^ For example, in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, a Trump supporter was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “Everything I worked for, Biden wants to give to the immigrants to help them live, when they don't do nothing but sit on their butts” ( Herndon, 2020 ).

8. ^ Derivation of the just society result relies on two earlier results. The first is a theorem that states, “If an observer regards a cardinal thing as a good, then that observer implicitly regards inequality in the distribution of that thing as a bad; and if an observer regards a cardinal thing as a bad, then that observer implicitly regards inequality in the distribution of that thing as a good” ( Jasso, 2017 ). The second is a set of results showing that the larger the number of independent-minded decisionmakers distributing a thing, the smaller the inequality in the distribution ( Jasso, 2009a , 2018 ).

9. ^ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Drafting Committee, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, worked in 1947-1948 to prepare the UDHR.

10. ^ The green card (technically, Form I-551, the Permanent Resident Card) is the paper evidence of legal permanent residence. The card is called green because it was green from 1946 to 1964; it became green again in 2010.

11. ^ The graph appears, for example, in U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ( 2001 , p. 2) and Baugh ( 2020 , p. 3). As for the underlying numbers (initially published in the annual reports – e.g., U.S. Commissioner General of Immigration, 1898-1932 ; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1943-1978 , 1979-2001 ; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2002-2019 ), DHS continually updates the data, as noted in U.S. Department of Homeland Security ( 2002-2019 , p. 1), for example, revising the data for the years 1973-2004 to remove duplicates, as discussed in U.S. Department of Homeland Security ( 2002-2019 , p. 1). Accordingly, the source data are from the most recent Statistical Yearbook, namely that for 2019; although the 2019 yearbook is not yet published, the tables are already available on the DHS website. Figure 1 includes in the total for 1976 the number admitted during the Transition Quarter 1976, when the United States changed from a July-June fiscal year to an October-September fiscal year. Of course, not everyone admitted to legal permanent residence remains in the United States; estimates of the U.S. foreign-born population are prepared by DHS and by the U.S. Census Bureau ( Jasso and Rosenzweig, 2020 ).

12. ^ The USCIS Policy Manual can be accessed via the USCIS website ( https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual ). Additional material critically useful for students of U.S. immigration may be found at the main USCIS website ( http://www.uscis.gov ), including a Glossary ( https://www.uscis.gov/tools/glossary ), the website of the Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) at DHS ( https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/ ), and the website of the Office of Visa Services, a unit of the U.S. Department of State ( http://travel.state.gov ).

13. ^ Staff deliberations are described in U.S. Select Commission on Immigration Refugee Policy ( 1980b , p. 14–15, 23–24, 281–291). For exposition of estimation procedures and each staff member's point system, see Jasso (1988b) .

14. ^ These results suggest that having a job offer and a U.S. citizen sibling are consensually viewed as plausible indicators of effective screening and socialization into the classic Aberle et al. (1950) shared “self-sufficient system of action”.

15. ^ For a vivid account by a contemporary of the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act), enacted 26 May 1924, which revised and codified the numerical restrictions first tried as an experiment in the First Quota Law of 1921 (also known as the Emergency Quota Act or the Johnson Quota Act), enacted 19 May 1921, see Parker (1924 , 1925) ; for the 1924 Act itself, see U.S. Public Law, 68-139 ( 1924 ).

16. ^ See Parker ( 1924 , p. 739, 741) for a lively account about how the two chambers of the U.S. Congress had envisioned “certificates” and “visas” and the two conceptions were in the end merged into a visa system.

17. ^ For example, the estimates of the foreign-born population reported in Jasso and Rosenzweig (2020) would not have been possible without the Population Estimates reports.

18. ^ For further information, see http://uscis.gov/history-and-genealogy/genealogy/registry-files-march-2-1929-March-31-1944 .

19. ^ As might be expected, the single most numerous class of admission is that for spouses of U.S. citizens – e.g., 304,334 (or 29.5%) of the 1,031,765 persons granted legal permanent residence in 2019 ( U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2019 ). A longstanding question pertains to the nativity of the U.S. citizen sponsors of spouses. The three pieces of information currently available indicate that the estimated percentage native-born among the U.S. citizens who sponsored the immigration of their spouses declined from 80.3 in 1985, to 55.0 in 1996, and to 47.4 in 2003 ( Jasso and Rosenzweig, 2006 , p. 354; Jasso, 2011 , p. 1300).

20. ^ For further information and discussion, see Vialet ( 1979 , p. 161–351).

21. ^ For further detail on the legislation passed in the four Immigration Eras, see Jasso and Rosenzweig (2006) .

22. ^ The backlog figures suggest, on average, a wait of over ten years, not counting a further period for administrative processing. Of course, the waiting times differ across visa category and origin country, as well as for new arrivals and adjustees ( Jasso, 2011 , p. 1307-1309).

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Keywords: international migration, U.S. immigration law, personal restriction, numerical restriction, consequences of migration restriction, visa backlogs and unauthorized migration, periodization of U.S. immigration history, creative immigration policy devices

Citation: Jasso G (2021) Analyzing Migration Restriction Regimes. Front. Sociol. 6:610432. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.610432

Received: 25 September 2020; Accepted: 22 February 2021; Published: 13 April 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Jasso. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Guillermina Jasso, gj1@nyu.edu

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Immigration to the United States: Recent Trends and Future Prospects +

Charles hirschman.

University of Washington

Almost 13 per cent of the American population is foreign born, and if the children of the foreign born are included, about 1 in 4 Americans can be counted as part of the recent immigrant community. Although there is lingering prejudice and popular fears of immigrants, there is growing evidence that, on balance, immigrants make a positive contribution to the American economy and society. There is little evidence that immigrants have an adverse impact on the wages and employment of native born Americans. Moreover, immigrants and their children are disproportionately represented in a broad variety of scientific and cultural fields.

1. Introduction

The United States is, once again, in the midst of an age of immigration. In 2010, there were 40 million foreign-born persons living in the United States ( Grieco et al. 2012 ). Of the 220 million international migrants in the world in 2010—defined as persons living outside their country of birth—almost one in five were residents in the United States ( UN Population Division 2013 ). An even larger number, upwards of 75 million persons in the United States—almost one quarter of the current resident American population— is part of the immigrant community, defined as foreign born and the children of the foreign born ( U.S. Bureau of the Census 2010 ). 1

In spite of lingering prejudice and discrimination against immigrants, most Americans are beginning to acknowledge the positive contributions of immigrants. These beliefs are partially rooted in the historical image of the United States as a ‘nation of immigrants.’ The story that America was populated by peoples seeking economic opportunity, fleeing injustice or oppression in their homeland, and hoping for a better life for their children has a strong grip on the American immigration. Moreover, there is a growing body of research that shows that most immigrants do assimilate to American society and that immigration has net positive impacts on the American economy, society, and culture.

In this paper, I survey the trends in immigration to the United States with a focus on the most recent period—the Post 1965 Wave of Immigration, named for the reforms in immigration law that were enacted in the late 1960s as part of the Civil Rights revolution. I also review recent research on the demographic, economic, social, and cultural impact of immigration on American society.

2. Trends in Immigration to the United States

Figure 1 shows the history of the absolute and relative levels of the foreign born population in the United States. The histogram—the solid bars—shows the numbers (in millions) of foreign born persons in the country from 1850 to 2012. The foreign born includes everyone who is born outside the United States, including students and workers residing here temporarily. This category also includes many undocumented immigrants—those residing in the country illegally. The curved line shows the ratio of foreign born persons to the total US population in each decennial census from 1850 to 2000 and the comparable figures for recent years from the American Community Survey.

Source: US Bureau of Census, Census of Population, 1850–2000 (in Gibson and Jung, 2006 ), and American Community Survey, 2010.

The absolute number of the foreign born population rose rapidly from the mid-19th century through the early decades of the 20th century—popularly known as the ‘Age of Mass Migration.’ With the cessation of large-scale immigration after 1924, the absolute numbers of foreign born declined to below 10 million by 1970. With the renewal of immigration in recent decades, the number of foreign born persons has risen dramatically and is currently around 40 million.

The visibility of the foreign born—at work, in schools, and in neighbourhoods—is measured by the proportion of foreign born to the total population, that is, the curved line in Figure 1 . It is to be noted that the contemporary presence of immigrants is actually less than it was in the early 20 th century. For most of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, the foreign born constituted around 14 to 15 per cent of the American population. Then, during the middle decades of the 20 th century, the figure dropped precipitously to below 5 per cent in 1970. With the renewal of mass immigration after 1965, the percent foreign born is currently 13 per cent of the total population. While this figure is high relative to the period from 1950 to 1970, it is slightly below the proportion of foreign born for much of American history.

The ‘Post-1965 Immigration Wave,’ was named for the 1965 immigration law that repealed the ‘national origins quotas’ enacted in the 1920s. These quotas were considered discriminatory by the children and grandchildren of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, and the 1965 immigration legislation was part of the reforms of the Civil Rights era. The advocates of reform in the 1960s were not pushing for a major new wave of immigration; they expected a small increase in the number of arrivals from Italy, Greece, and a few other European countries, as families that were divided by the immigration restrictions of the 1920s were allowed to be reunited ( Reimrs 1985 : Chap. 3).

Family reunification and scarce occupational skills were the primary criteria for admission under the 1965 Act ( Keely 1979 ). The new preference system allowed highly skilled professionals, primarily doctors, nurses, and engineers from Asian countries, to immigrate and eventually to sponsor their families. About the same time, and largely independently of the 1965 Act, immigration from Latin America began to rise. Legal and undocumented migration from Mexico surged after a temporary farm worker programme, known as the Bracero Programme, ended in 1964 ( Massey, Durand and Malone 2002 ). There have also been major waves of immigration to the United States with the fall of regimes supported by American political and military interventions abroad, including Cuba, Vietnam, and Central America. Each of these streams of immigrant and refugee inflows has spawned secondary waves of immigration as family members have followed.

3. Characteristics of the Post-1965 Wave of Immigrants

Most of the immigrants who arrived from 1880 to 1920 during the Age of Mass Migration were from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia. Many of these ‘new’ immigrants in the early 20 th century were considered to be distinctly different from the older stock of white Americans in terms of language, religion, and in their potential for assimilation into American society. Popular opposition to immigration in the early 20 th century led to the laws of the 1920s that sharply restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. There were much smaller waves of immigration from China and Japan, but even stronger opposition ended Asian immigration in the late 19 th and early 20 th century.

When the doors to immigration were opened again in the years after 1965, only small numbers of Europeans arrived. The major regions of origin in the Post-1965 Wave of Immigration are Latin America and Asia. More than 11 million—about 30 per cent of all immigrants (foreign born)—are from Mexico, one of the nearest neighbours of the United States. Another 20 per cent of immigrants are from other countries in Latin America, with the largest numbers from Central America and the Caribbean. Migrants from Puerto Rico are domestic migrants, not immigrants, since Puerto Rico is an American territory and all Puerto Ricans are American citizens at birth.

About one quarter of the foreign-born are from Asia, and the relative share of Asian immigrants has risen in recent years. One of the hallmarks of contemporary Asian immigration is its diversity—almost every country in Asia is represented in the American immigrant population. The largest Asian immigrant communities in the U. S. are from China, India, and the Philippines, but there are also considerable numbers from Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.

In the 1970s and 1980s, most ‘new immigrants’ settled in the West and East coast states, and a few other selected states, including Texas, Florida, and Illinois. About 40 per cent of all immigrants lived in California and New York. In the 1990s and 2000s, immigrants increasingly began settling in new destinations including smaller towns in the Midwest and Southeast. The majority of immigrants still live in California, New York, and other traditional destinations, but industries are attracting immigrant labour to many other regions. In addition to the high tech sectors and universities that attract highly skilled immigrants, less skilled immigrants are drawn to agriculture, food processing, and manufacturing industries that are often shunned by native born workers.

The distribution of education among recent immigrants to the United States is bimodal. The largest group of immigrants, particularly those from Mexico and Central America, has less education, on average, than the native-born American population. Less education, however, is not equivalent to unskilled labour. Many immigrants without a high school degree are able to work in the skilled construction industry, nursing homes caring for the elderly, and in the service sectors in restaurants, hotels, and gardening.

At the other end of the educational continuum are the highly educated immigrant streams from Taiwan, India, Iran, and many African countries. Almost half of Asian immigrants have a university degree compared to only a third of native born Americans. Many of these highly skilled immigrants fill key niches in the high tech sector, higher education, and many professional fields.

4. Popular Fears of Too Much Immigration

Existing alongside the pride of having immigrant grandparents (or great-grandparents) in the ‘nation of immigrants,’ many Americans fear that the United States has more immigrants than the country can absorb and assimilate. There are widespread popular beliefs that immigrants take jobs that would otherwise go to native born Americans and that the wages of native born workers are depressed by the presence of immigrant workers. Beyond the economic argument, many Americans also think that the presence of immigrants, especially large numbers of immigrants from ‘third world’ countries, are a threat to American values, culture, and institutions ( Bouvier 1992 ; Brimelow 1995 ; Huntington 2004 ). These sentiments have given rise to an anti-immigrant lobby that includes political leaders, TV and radio talk-show pundits, social movement organisations, including public interest organisations that publish reports and policy briefs, as well as unauthorised militia groups that patrol the U.S. Mexican border, such as the ‘Minutemen’.

Neither the presence of large numbers of immigrants nor the exaggerated claims about the negative impact of immigration are new phenomena. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin complained about the Germans in Pennsylvania and their reluctance to learn English ( Archdeacon 1983 : 20; Jones 1992 : 39–40). Based on a campaign of fear about the political dangers of unchecked immigration, primarily Irish Catholics, the ‘Know-Nothing’Party elected six governors, dominated several state legislatures, and sent a bloc of representatives to Congress in 1855. During World War I, Americans who wanted to retain their German-American identity were forced to be ‘100 percent Americans’ and to give up their language and culture ( Higham 1988 : Chap. 8).

In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, Chinese and Japanese migrants who worked as railroad and agricultural labourers were targeted by nativist groups who feared that Asian immigrants would harm the economic status of native workers and contaminate the ‘racial purity’ of the nation ( Hing 1993 : 22). The passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major step toward a closed society. After the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, Japanese migrants became a new source of cheap labour on the West coast and Hawaii. Japanese immigration was targeted by the same groups that opposed Chinese immigrants.

Southern and Eastern European groups also faced an increasingly hostile context of reception as their numbers swelled at the turn of the twentieth century. A number of formal organisations sprang up among old line New England elites to campaign against the continued immigration of ‘undesirables’ from Europe ( Higham 1988 ; Jones 1992 : Chap. 9). After a long political struggle, Congress passed restrictive laws in the early 1920s that stopped almost all immigration except from Northwestern Europe.

5. Do Immigrants Assimilate into American Society?

In spite of the fears that immigrants are resistant to learning English and refuse to join the American mainstream, there is a large body of social science and historical research which concludes that immigrants have, by and large, assimilated to American society ( Alba 1990 , Alba and Nee 2003 ; Duncan and Duncan 1968 ; Lieberson 1980 ). This does not mean that assimilation was painless, automatic, or immediate. For the first generation of immigrants who arrived as adults, the processes of linguistic, cultural, and social change were painful and usually incomplete. Immigrants tend to settle in ethnic enclaves, prefer to speak their mother tongue, and gravitate to places of worship and social events that provide cultural continuity with their origins ( Handlin 1973 ; Portes and Rumbaut 2006 ). Many immigrants do learn English and find employment in the general economy, but few feel completely part of their new society. In the early decades of the 20 th century, evidence pointed to the slow and incomplete assimilation of the then ‘new’ immigrants ( Pagnini and Morgan 1990 ).

With the passage of time, and especially following the emergence of the second generation, there was unmistakable evidence of assimilation among the descendants of early 20 th century European immigrants. Acculturated through their attendance at American schools, the children of immigrants did not share the ambivalence of their immigrant parents. The second generation spoke fluent English and was eager to join the American mainstream. By all measures, including socio-economic status, residential mobility, and intermarriage, they left behind the ethnic world of their immigrant parents ( Alba and Nee 2003 ; Lieberson 1980 ). By the 1950s, patterns of suburbanisation broke down ethnic neighborhoods and intermarriage became more common ( Alba and Nee 2003 ; Lieberson and Waters 1988 ).

Although it is widely assumed that immigrants in the Post-1965 Immigration Wave are less likely to assimilate than those who arrived in the early 20 th century, there is growing evidence that the new immigrants, especially their children, are doing remarkably well ( Alba and Nee 2003 ; Kasinitz et al. 2008 ). On average, second generation immigrants are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to attend college than the average native born American ( Hirschman 2001 ; White and Glick 2009 ). Intermarriage is also common: recent research estimates that one-third to one-half of second generation Hispanics and Asians marry outside of their community ( Duncan and Trejo 2007 ; Min and Kim 2009 ). The children of contemporary immigrants are on track for assimilation and upward mobility at about the same pace as the descendants of earlier waves of immigration from Europe.

6. The Impact of Immigration on America

There are widespread popular beliefs, including many influential voices within public policy circles, which argue that immigration is harmful to the economic welfare of the country, especially to native born Americans ( Borjas 1994 ; Bouvier 1992 ; Briggs 1984 ; Brimelow 1995 ). The central claim is that immigrants, because they are willing to work for lower wages, take jobs from native born American workers. Competition from immigrant workers is expected to depress wages, especially in the low-skilled labour market ( Borjas 1989 ). Finally, immigrants are thought to be an economic burden because they disproportionately receive public benefits, such as health care, schooling, and welfare without paying their fair share of taxes. These claims, however, are not supported by empirical evidence.

The definitive statement on the economic consequences of immigration was the 1997 report of the National Research Council (NRC) panel on the demographic and economic impacts of immigration, which drew on the theoretical and empirical research conducted by leading specialists in labour economics and public finance ( Smith and Edmonston 1997 ; 1998 , also see Card 1990 ; 2005 ). The major conclusion of the NRC report was that the net effects of immigration on the American economy were very modest. Immigration does expand labour supply and may increase competition for jobs and lower wages for native workers who are substitutes for immigrants, but immigration also expands total production (national income) and increases the incomes that accrue to native born workers who are complements to immigrants ( Smith and Edmondson 1997 : Chap. 4). Although some native born workers may compete for the same jobs as immigrants, many more may be complements to immigrants. This means that the arrival of unskilled immigrant labour may ‘push up’, rather than ‘push out’, many native born workers ( Haines 2000 : 202; Lieberson 1980 : Chap. 10). Moreover, many native born workers have direct or indirect income from capital through their savings, ownership of property, and as recipients of pension programmes.

The most likely reason for a lack of empirical support for the presumed negative impact of immigration is the questionable assumption that the only impact of additional workers (immigrants) on the labour market is through wage competition. The presence of immigrants has broader effects on economic growth, both locally and nationally, that leads to rising wage levels for native born workers. Among the potential mechanisms are increased national savings, entrepreneurship and small business development, a faster rate of inventive activity and technological innovation, and increasing economies of scale, both in the production and consumer markets ( Carter and Sutch 1999 ). There is a long-standing hypothesis in economic history that high levels of immigration stimulates economic growth by increasing demand for housing, urban development, and other amenities ( Easterlin 1968 ). A recent study found that immigration provided the necessary labour supply for the rapid growth of manufacturing during the American Industrial Revolution from 1880 to 1920 ( Hirschman and Mogford 2009 ).

Another major economic issue addressed by the 1997 NRC report was the impact of immigration on the governmental fiscal system—the balance between taxes paid and the value of government services received ( Clune 1998 ; Garvey and Espendshade 1998 ; Lee and Miller 1998 ; Smith and Edmonston 1997 : Chaps. 6 & 7). The NRC researchers report that the average native born household in New Jersey and California pays more in state and local taxes as a result of the presence of immigrants ( Smith and Edmonston 1997 : Chap. 6). These results are largely determined by the lower wages of immigrants and the demographic composition of immigrant households, which tend to be younger and have more children than the native born population. The largest component of local and state government budgets is schooling, and immigrant households, with more children per household than native born households, are disproportionately beneficiaries of state support for schooling.

Despite potential imbalances in the net transfer of revenues at the local and state level, an accounting of the federal fiscal system shows that immigrants (and their descendants) contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits ( Smith and Edmonston 1997 : Chap. 7). Just as the age structure of immigrant households makes them disproportionately the beneficiaries of public education, the relative youth of immigrants also means they are less likely be beneficiaries of Social Security and Medicare (and Medicaid for many of the institutionalised elderly). Immigrants also help to relieve the per-capita fiscal burden of native born for the national debt, national security, and public goods, which are major federal expenditures that are only loosely tied to population size. An intergenerational accounting that counts the future taxes paid by the children of immigrants concludes that immigration helps, rather than hurts, the nation’s fiscal balance ( Lee and Miller 1998 ; Smith and Edmonston 1997 ; Chap. 7).

6.1 The Role of Immigration on the Advancement of Science, Technology and Higher Education

Scientific progress is a major source of modern economic growth, increasing longevity and other features of modern development that enhance the quality of life in the United States. It is frequently claimed that American economic development has been fostered by government investments in scientific and technological innovation in the industrial sector, as well as in universities and research institutes. How might immigration also affect scientific progress? Perhaps the most direct link is the migration of scientists from other countries and the high educational attainment of immigrants and their children.

Albert Einstein, perhaps the most eminent American scientist of the 20 th century, was a refugee from Nazi Germany. There are many other examples of distinguished scientists, researchers, academics, and entrepreneurs who arrived in the United States as students who pursued their talents in American universities and/or industry, including Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe, the fathers of the atomic age, Elias Zerhouni, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Andrew Grove, Jerry Yang, and Sergey Brin, the engineering entrepreneurs who led the American transition to the digital age. From 1990 to 2004, over one-third of US scientists who had received Nobel Prizes were foreign born ( Wulf 2006 ; also see Smith and Edmonston 1977 : 384–385).

The impact of immigration on the development of science in the United States is more than the story of a relatively open door for immigrants who are exceptionally talented scientists and engineers. Over the last four decades, American universities have played an important role in training immigrants and the children of immigrants to become scientists. Foreign students have become increasingly central to American higher education, particularly in graduate education in engineering and the sciences. After graduating with advanced degrees from American universities, many foreign students return to their home countries, but a significant share is attracted to employment opportunities in American universities, laboratories, and industries. Many of the foreign students who have become permanent residents or US citizens go on to make important contributions to the development of American science and engineering.

Several recent studies have found that foreign-born scientists and engineers are playing a critical role in in American universities, laboratories, and scientific industries ( Stephan and Levin 2007 ; Sana 2010 ). Foreign-born scientists and engineers are also over-represented among members of elected honorific societies such as the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences, and among the authors of highly cited academic papers ( Stephan and Levin 2007 ). During the last decades of the twentieth century, immigrant entrepreneurs formed a significant contingent of all founders of US high-technology start-ups, particularly in Silicon Valley ( Saxenian 2001 ). One recent study estimates that one in four technology firms started in the United States between 1995 and 2005 was founded by at least one foreign-born entrepreneur ( Wadwha et al. 2007 ).

6.2 The Impact of Immigrants on the Evolution of American Institutions

All other things being equal, most societies, communities, organisations and cultures tend to resist change, especially from outside sources. The truism that ‘people prefer that which is familiar’ is reinforced by persons with authority, power, and status, who generally shape cultural expectations to revere conformity more than innovation. This pattern, an ‘ideal type’ to be sure, is especially common in traditional rural areas, among multi-generational families, and in religious and cultural organisations.

There are, of course, many exceptions to this pattern, especially during eras of rapid technological and social change, wartime, and other times of catastrophe. The simple proposition of cultural continuity helps to explain the generally conservative nature of intergenerational socialisation and the ubiquity of ethnocentrism—beliefs that value insiders and traditional culture more than outsiders. In traditional (and in many modern) societies, immigrants are feared because they might potentially challenge the existing social arrangements as well as familiar cultural patterns.

All things have not been equal during much of American history. The United States has received about 75 million immigrants since record-keeping began in 1820. This relatively open door was due to a confluence of interests, both external and internal. As modernisation spread throughout the Old World during the 18 th and 19 th centuries, the (relatively) open frontier beckoned the landless and others seeking economic betterment. These patterns culminated in the early 20 th century, when more than one million immigrants arrived annually—a level that is only being rivaled by contemporary levels of immigration. American economic and political institutions also gained from immigration. Immigrant settlement helped to secure the frontier as well as to provide labour for nation-building projects, including transportation networks of roads, canals, and railroads. During the era of industrialisation, immigrant labour provided a disproportionate share of workers for the dirty and dangerous jobs in mining and manufacturing ( Hirschman and Mogford 2009 ).

In spite of the national tradition of mass immigration, new arrivals have rarely received a welcome reception. The conservative backlash against immigrants has been a perennial theme of American history. During the Age of Mass Migration, the negative reaction against immigrants was not simply a response from the parochial masses, but also a project led by conservative intellectuals. Long before immigration restrictions were implemented in the 1920s, there was a particularly virulent campaign against the ‘new’ immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Most of these immigrants were Catholics and Jews—religious and cultural traditions that were thought to be in conflict with the traditional ascendancy of white Protestants of English ancestry.

As most Northeastern and Midwestern cities became dominated by immigrants (both first and second generations) in the late 19 th century, many elite old-stock American families and communities created barriers to protect their ‘aristocratic’ status and privileges against newcomers ( Higham 1988 ). Residential areas became ‘restricted,’ college fraternities and sororities limited their membership, and many social clubs and societies only allowed those with the right pedigrees and connections to be admitted ( Baltzell 1964 ). Barriers to employment for minorities, especially Jews, were part of the culture of corporate law firms and elite professions ( Auerbach 1975 : Chap. 2). In the early 20 th century, many elite private universities were notorious for their quotas for Jewish students and their refusal to hire Jews and other minorities ( Baltzell 1964 : 336; Karabel 2006 ). In some cases, these quotas persisted until the 1960s.

Given this history, how were immigrants and their children able to make such impressive achievements to American science, arts, and culture? Part of the solution to this puzzle is that immigrants, and especially their children, were pulled into self-employment and new sectors of the economy where there was less discrimination. As noted above, prestigious organisations that celebrated tradition tended to be closed to outsiders. The early 20 th century was an era of rapid demographic, economic, and technological change. Rapid social change creates more flexibility and openness for outsiders to be absorbed into mainstream institutions.

The market for cultural and artistic performances was greatly expanded with the growth of cities in the early 20 th century. A significant share of the urban population, the potential consumers of art and culture, were of immigrant stock. The most important development of this era was the motion picture industry—a new form of the performing arts. In the 1920s, immigrant risk-takers, primarily Eastern European Jewish immigrants, transformed the fledgling motion picture industry with the development of large Hollywood studios. Although the new Hollywood moguls sought to create movies that appealed to mass audiences and ignored any hint of ethnicity or religion, their presence may have minimised traditional prejudices and discrimination among those who worked in Hollywood. Irving Howe characterised the openness of the performing arts (and sports) to talented outsiders:

… “the (entertainment industry) brushed aside claims of rank and looked only for the immediate promise of talent. Just as blacks would later turn to baseball and basketball knowing that here at least their skin color counted for less than their skills, so in the early 1900s, young Jews broke into vaudeville because here too, people asked not, who are you? but, what can you do?”

This openness is reinforced in fields and professions where talent and accomplishment are clearly recognised and visible, including professional sports and universities. Prior to World War II, competition was restricted in many institutions with barriers to admission and hiring. Professional baseball was closed to African Americans and elite universities restricted the admission of Jews and other minorities. In spite of these tendencies, many American institutions have become more open and meritocratic over the 20 th century. Baseball and other professional sports were integrated before most other institutions, including public school education. In recent decades, American professional sports have become more global, with a growing participation of talented international players. This trend is driven, in large part, by competition. Sports fans want winning teams, and large audiences increase revenues. The owners and management of sports teams respond to market pressures by recruitment of talented players from other countries. Similar processes are at work in universities and scientific organisations. More talented researchers generate more grants, more patents, and more commercial applications of scientific discoveries. The global search for talented graduate students and researchers by elite American universities and research organisations is driven by competitive pressures that have accelerated in recent decades. Other fields where merit is relatively easy to measure, such as in classical musical performance, have also become part of a global employment market.

There are similar competitive pressures in many American corporations and business for talented employees, but there are certainly wide variations depending on the pace of technological change, international market competition, and the ability to measure merit. Traditional manufacturing sectors of the economy, automobiles for example, may focus more on continuity, advertising, and efficiency than technological innovation. Other sectors, such as the electronic and computing industry are more at the forefront of technological innovation and international competition. It seems likely that these more competitive sectors, perhaps exemplified by Silicon Valley, would be the most meritocratic and willing to hire outsiders—immigrants and foreign students who have the necessary skills.

The same processes of competition certainly affected the development of Hollywood, Broadway, and many other American performing and cultural arts. Audience preferences may have tended toward familiar cultural content, but there was undoubtedly strong market pressure for ‘quality’, however defined. There was also considerable room for innovation in artistic and cultural performance in a pluralistic society with relatively few cultural touchstones. Immigrants and their children played important roles in the development of culture and art in 20 th century America, just as they have in science and academic institutions.

My contention is that the presence of immigrants and their offspring has helped to ‘push’ American institutions in the direction of increasing openness and meritocracy. This has not always been a smooth or conflict-free process. When Jewish students appeared in large numbers in leading American universities in the early 20 th century, they were deemed rate-busters who upset the traditional college student culture, which de-emphasised too much study or serious scholarly interests.

The growing number of talented Jewish students, mostly second generation immigrants, certainly raised the standards at universities that did not discriminate. As universities began to compete for faculty and graduate students during the post-World War II era, the quota restrictions eventually disappeared ( Karabel 2006 ). Elite colleges and universities still retain legacies of non-merit based admission systems, including programmes to privilege children of alumni. There is also evidence that Asian American students have not been admitted in numbers proportional to their test scores ( Espenshade and Chung 2005 ), but these current practices are only a shadow of those of earlier times. The point is not that universities are completely meritocratic, but that they have become more meritocratic with increasing competition and acceptance of talented ‘outsiders.’

Greater openness to hiring and promotion on the basis of merit has become an integral part of many American institutions in recent years. The reputation of the United States as a land of opportunity for those with ambition and ability—a theme in many Hollywood movies—made the country a beacon for prospective immigrants. In addition to raising the international stature of the United States, the participation of talented immigrants and their children has likely made American scientific and cultural institutions more successful.

7. Conclusions

Contemporary immigration to the United States, upwards of one million new arrivals per year, is not exceptional. In fact, the relative share of immigrants—about 13 per cent—is a bit lower than the 14 to 15 per cent that characterised much of American history prior to the 1920s. Absorbing large numbers of newcomers has costs as well as benefits. The costs are immediately apparent, but some of the benefits take longer to appear. Schools, hospitals, and social service agencies may have to arrange for translation services and other special programmes for immigrants. But most of the costs of these adjustments are paid by immigrants and their families. Immigrants have given up the familiarity of home in their quest for more rewarding careers and greater opportunities for their children. Immigrants must also contend with a receiving society that is ambivalent, and sometimes hostile, to their presence.

Contemporary immigrants do adapt and assimilate to American society—probably as fast as earlier waves of immigrants. Assimilation is not instantaneous, and, for adult immigrants, the process is never complete. But for their native born children, and for those who arrive in the United States as young children, assimilation is a natural process that reflects immersion in American schools and culture.

Immigrants and their children, however, are not the same as native born Americans. In addition to the many obvious characteristics, such as language, religion, and cuisine, they generally differ on social and educational characteristics. For the contemporary period, immigrants are over-represented both among college graduates and those with less than 12 years of schooling relative to native born Americans ( Portes and Rumbaut 2006 : Chap. 4). Immigrants are also not representative of the society from which they come ( Feliciano 2005a ; 2005b ; Model 2008 ). In contrast to popular images, immigrants are not drawn from the least successful ranks of their home societies, but are generally well above average in terms of their education and other skills.

Perhaps the most important contribution of immigrants is their children. Many immigrants have made enormous sacrifices for their children’s welfare, including the decision to settle in the United States. Immigrant parents often have to work in menial jobs, multiple jobs, and in occupations well below the status they would have earned if they had remained at home. These sacrifices have meaning because immigrant parents believe that their children will have better educational and occupational opportunities in the United States than in their homelands. Immigrant parents push their children to excel by reminding them of their own sacrifices.

These high expectations for the children of immigrants generally lead to high motivations for academic and worldly success ( Hao and Bonstead-Burns 1998 ). A large body of research shows that the children of immigrants do remarkably well in American schools. Holding constant their socio-economic status, the second generation obtains higher grades in school and above average results on standardised tests, is less likely to drop out of high school, and is more likely to go to college than the children of native born Americans ( Fuligni and Witknow 2004 ; Perreira, Harris and Lee 2006 ).

In addition to measures of socio-economic assimilation, immigrants and their children are over-represented in a broad range of rare achievements, including Nobel Prize winners, top scientists, American performing artists, and other contributors to the American creative arts. They have broadened our cultural outlook and sometimes, have even defined American culture through literature, music and art.

Compared with other societies, the United States is generally regarded as unusually competitive and places a high premium on progress and innovation. This dynamic characteristic may well arise from the presence of immigrants and on the evolution of American institutions and identity. The size and selectivity of the immigrant community means that immigrants (and/or their children) are competing for entry into colleges, jobs, and access to prestigious positions and institutions. Not all institutions have been open to outsiders on an equal footing with insiders. In particular, high status organisations often give preference to persons with the right connections and social pedigree. But institutions that opened their doors to talented outsiders—immigrants and their children—probably gained a competitive advantage. Over time, greater openness and meritocratic processes may have become a force that shaped the evolution of American institutions in the arts, sports, science, and some sectors of business. In turn, the participation of outsiders may have reinforced a distinctive American character and culture that values not ‘who are you?’ but, ‘what can you do?’

Because immigrants have to constantly work at learning the system, they are intensely curious about American culture. For the most talented, this leads to a level of creativity beyond the normal boundaries that has left its imprint on American music, theater, dance, film, and many other realms of artistic endeavour. Finally, American institutions – schools, universities, businesses, sports teams, and even symphony orchestras, are meritocratic and seek talent wherever they can find it. The United States is a competitive society that values progress and success. This dynamic characteristic has partly been created through the presence of immigrants, which has pushed the country to value skills and ability over social pedigree.

The fear of cultural conservatives is that immigrants will change American character and identity. Yet, the definition of American identity is elusive. Unlike many other societies, the United States does not have an identity tied to an ancient lineage. Given the two wars against the British in early American history (in 1776 and 1812), the founders of the new American republic did not make English origins the defining trait of American identity; rather it was acceptance of the Enlightenment ideas expressed in the founding documents of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights ( Gleason 1980 ; Vecoli 1966). Even though these ideals were belied by the continuing stain of slavery, a civic identity rather than ancestry has been the distinctive feature of American ‘ peoplehood ’ from the very start. This trait combined with jus soli (birthright citizenship) 2 has slowed, if not stopped, efforts to define Americans solely on the basis of ancestral origins. Another reason for the broad definition of American identity is that the overwhelming majority of the American population, including white Americans, is descended from 19 th and 20 th century immigrants. Demographic estimates suggest that less than one-third of the American population in the late 20 th century were descended from the 18 th century American population ( Edmonston and Passel 1994 : 61, Gibson 1992 ).

Yet, there have been recurrent struggles to redefine American identity in terms of ancestry. The first naturalisation law passed by Congress in 1790 limited citizenship to whites. The broadening of American citizenship to include African Americans, American Indians, and Asian immigrants were epic battles. The short-lived, but remarkably successful ‘Know-Nothing’ political movement called itself the American Party to highlight the ancestral origins of its adherents. In the late 19 th century, as new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were pouring in, some old stock Americans founded organisations such as the Sons of the American Revolution, Daughters of the American Revolution, and similar groups to celebrate their ancestral pedigrees and to distance themselves from recent immigrants. The national origin quotas of the 1920s were a clear victory for those who feared dilution of the white English Protestant composition of the American population. The current anti-immigrant sentiment also expresses a fear that American identity will be lost, yet it is unclear that a universal contemporary American identity exists. Although the English language is considered to be central, English Protestant ancestry is not emphasised. There is too much diversity, even within the white population, to focus on specific ancestral origins.

In an often quoted remark, Oscar Handlin, the famous historian, observed that after searching for the place of immigrants in American history, that immigrants are American history. The American experiment in nation building is, in large part, the story of how immigrants have been absorbed into American society and how immigrants have enlarged and transformed America. Immigrants settled the frontier; they participated in constructing canals, roads and railroads, and contributed significant manpower in many American wars. Immigrants provided much of the manufacturing labour for the American industrial revolution as well as a disproportionate share of the contemporary highly skilled scientists and engineers that are central to the modern electronic and biomedical economy. Most interestingly, immigrants and the children of immigrants have been among the most important creative artists who have shaped the development of the cultural arts, including movies, theatre, dance, and music.

Immigration is, perhaps, the most distinctive feature of American identity. Immigration has had a disproportionate effect on the demographic size, ethnic diversity, culture, and character of American society. Immigrants and their children have assimilated to America, but they have also shaped American institutions in ways that have allowed strangers to participate on a relatively open playing field.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the Malaysian Population and Family Development Board for the invitation to participate in the conference, the Malaysian American Commission for Educational Exchange for a Fulbright Fellowship to Malaysia, the Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya for hosting me as a Visiting Fulbright Professor, and Associate Professor Tey Nai Peng for his advice on my conference paper.

+ An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Migration, Urbanisation and Development at the University of Malaya, 8 July 2013.

1 The foreign-born refers to all persons who are born outside the United States or a United States territory. The Census Bureau defines the native born (the complement of the foreign born) as persons who are American citizens at birth. The terms foreign born and immigrants are used interchangeably here, but this is not technically true because many of the foreign born are in the United States as temporary workers or students.

2 The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution (adopted in 1868) defines citizenship as consisting of: “All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Subsequent Supreme Court rulings have interpreted the citizenship clause to include the native born children of foreign nationals.

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LITERATURE REVIEW OF MIGRATION, RELIGION AND INTEGRATION AMONG IMMIGRANTS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

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A Comparison of Migrant Integration Policies via Mixture of Matrix-Normals

• Original Research
• Open access
• Published: 23 October 2022
• Volume 165 , pages 473–494, ( 2023 )

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• Leonardo Salvatore Alaimo 1 ,
• Francesco Amato 2 ,
• Filomena Maggino 4 ,
• Alfonso Piscitelli 3 &
• Emiliano Seri   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2450-6703 4  

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In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in comparative studies about migrant integration, assimilation and the evaluation of policies implemented for these purposes. Over the years, the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) has become a reference on these topics. This index measures and evaluates the policies of migrants’ integration in 52 countries over time. However, the comparison of very different countries can be difficult and, if not well conducted, can lead to misleading interpretations and evaluations of the results. The aim of this paper is to improve this comparison and facilitate the reading of the considered phenomenon, by applying a Mixture of Matrix-Normals classification model for longitudinal data. Focusing on data for 7 MIPEX dimensions from 2014 to 2019, our analysis identify 5 clusters of countries, facilitating the evaluation and the comparison of the countries within each cluster and between different clusters.

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1 Introduction

Immigration regulation and immigrants assimilation have been salient political issues in all industrialised countries for many decades, mainly because of their cultural and economic effects (Alesina & Tabellini, 2022 ). The growing interest in the study of immigration, starting from citizenship and moving more recently to integration, has led to a variety of attempts to quantify immigration policies. Policy indices have become mandatory in the study of immigrant-related policies implemented by different countries. However, the study of these phenomena from a quantitative point of view is rather recent, due to the previous lack or difficulties to access of data (Bjerre et al., 2015 ). Moreover, quantifying migrant integration is a difficult challenge, linked to its complex nature and lack of uniformity in migration policies of many countries, which are based on multiple criteria.

In this work, we focus on the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) (Niessen et al., 2007 ; Solano & Huddleston, 2020 ), a complex system of 167 policy indicators across 8 domains of citizenship and integration, combined into a single composite indicator in order to evaluate the migrant integration policies of each considered country over the years. MIPEX has quickly become a solid and useful tool for evaluating and comparing what governments are doing to promote the migrants’ integration in a cross-country setting. Indeed, it informs and engages key policy actors about how to use indicators to improve integration governance and policy effectiveness, with the aim to measure policies that promote integration in both socio-economic and civic terms. Although not without its critics, this index has become a reference for comparative studies on migrant integration over the last decade and its data has been widely used in literature (Hadjar & Backes, 2013 ; Ruedin, 2015 ; Rayp et al., 2017 ; Ingleby et al., 2019 ). This paper aims to deeply look at how similar, or dissimilar, countries really are and to add new reading perspectives on the MIPEX data, by discovering structures and patterns in the behaviour of the considered countries. The underlying idea is that, given the complex and multidimensional nature of the phenomenon and the differences in socio-economic and civic terms between the examined countries, it can be misleading to compare all of the units with each others. Therefore, the present work aims at improving the analysis, by grouping countries in order to facilitate the comparison and interpretation of the phenomenon. Thus, the research question to which we try to answer:

In order to improve the comparison between the countries regarding their migrant integration policies, is it possible to identify homogeneous groups over time among them, i.e. groups of countries which behave similarly across and within time?

To answer this research question, a Finite Mixture of Matrix-Normals model has been applied to cluster the units, taking into account the longitudinal dimension along 6 years, on the 52 available countries for 7 of the 8 dimensional indicators of the MIPEX. We relied on an unsupervised parametric clustering approach to minimize the risk of arbitrariness Footnote 1 in the choices made and to be able to better evaluate the results.

The paper is structured as follows. Section  2 describes the immigrants integration framework and some works related to migration indicators. Section  3 presents the description of the analysed data and the structure of the MIPEX theoretical framework. In Sect.  4 we present the methodology implemented. Section  5 reports data analysis and the results and Sect.  6 concludes.

2 Theoretical Framework and Related works

2.1 immigrants integration framework.

Immigration can be generally defined as the set of policies that determine who can enter or exit a country under what conditions, as well as how immigrants are considered once they are settled in a country. Many factors contribute to the migratory flows and stocks (forced or voluntary) to destination countries, which have been extensively addressed in the literature (Dustmann & Preston, 2007 ; Pedersen et al., 2008 ; Simpson, 2017 ). We distinguish short-term migrants (seasonal agricultural workers, students, tourists, or temporary residents) and long-term migrants that include permanent residents, the first step on a path towards the creation of members, namely the citizenship (Goodman, 2019 ; Solano & Huddleston, 2021 ). Migration and migrant integration dynamics influence the number and characteristics of migrants entering a country, as well as the integration outcomes (Helbling & Leblang, 2019 ; Garcés-Mascare nas & Penninx, 2016 ; Czaika & De Haas, 2013 ; Massey et al, 1998 ) At the same time, the receiving society defines all the laws and policies that relate to the selection, admission, integration, settlement, and full membership of migrants in a country (Solano & Huddleston, 2021 ; Bjerre et al., 2015 ; Hammar, 1990 ). Citizenship, migration, and integration policy, albeit in different ways, are distinct policy domains and creates the conditions that support or hinder migrants’ inclusion in the destination society. More attention has been paid to integration policies in recent years, so much so that, in modern countries, they have evolved into very complex legal constructs (Zincone et al., 2011 ), whereas previously the focus was more on immigrant or assimilation policies. Moreover, as reported in Ramakrishnan ( 2013 ), in several countries terms like assimilation , adaptation , incorporation and integration , often refer to the same concept and some efforts were needed to provide more conceptual clarity, especially in finding unambiguous definitions of fundamental concepts on the matter. Castles and Davidson ( 2000 ) highlight that countries have three main policy options with respect to managing social diversity. The first option is exclusion . Although this model is not considered legitimate by humanitarian standards and formally not accepted, it should be noted that it is still predominant in large areas of the world. The second option is assimilation . According to this policy model, immigrants should be granted full citizenship: the immigrants’ distinct culture is seen as in transition and it is expected that they fully adopt the national culture and generally accepted social norms. The third option is integration , with respect which policy makers are aware that immigrants do not abandon their distinct culture immediately and, therefore, their cultural identity can be considered an opportunity. Legal integration, intended as an immigrant’s legal status, residence rights, citizenship, and equal access to rights, goods, services, and resources, receives wide expert acceptance as the first step in promoting societal integration. It is considered a key determinant (Penninx & Martiniello, 2004 ) and can hardly be overestimated as either “a firm base” for societal integration or a “clear signal” committing public authorities to an inclusive agenda (Groenendijk et al., 1998 ). These differences are strictly linked to the complex nature of immigration policies, which involve different political, social and economical spheres that are interconnected with each other. As explained in Niessen and Huddleston ( 2009 ), integration is developed by policymakers in conjunction with their policies on social inclusion/cohesion, employment, demography, competitiveness. It follows that immigrant integration is only one part of the broader good governance framework. In recent years, various studies have tried to develop this framework and quantitative indices of immigration policies have been proposed. These indices play a central role in the study of immigrant-related policies, starting with citizenship and moving to immigration and integration (Goodman, 2019 , 2015 ; Helbling, 2013 ). The next sub-section, although not exhaustively, present some of the most used immigrant-related policy indexes, highlighting how over time they assume greater specificity in relation to integration policies.

2.2 Immigration Policies Indexes: A Literature Review

The policy indices reflect the tendency in social sciences to reduce the complexity of socio-economic phenomena, allowing comparisons across countries and times (Rainer & Marc, 2011 ; Skaaning, 2010 ). A sample of immigrant-related policy indexes will be presented below, providing information on index content, type, scope, and source. All of the indices reported in this paper make important and innovative contributions to the field of comparative immigration policy research. It is not our goal to discuss whether and which indexes are better than others. Each index has different methodological and conceptual assumptions and answers specific research questions. In the migratory field, the first index was proposed by Waldrauch and Hofinger ( 1997 ) in a study on citizenship, examining the Legal Obstacles to Integration (LOI). But indexing did not stop at citizenship. Several studies have documented the expansion of indexing from citizenship to integration, assuming more specificity for immigration policies (Goodman, 2019 , 2015 ; Helbling, 2013 ). The first immigrant-related policy indexes proposed, do not differentiate between immigration and integration policy domains. An exception is represented by the index proposed by Boushey and Luedtke ( 2011 ), who first consider the distinction between immigration control and immigrant integration measures. This index provides “conceptual clarification to indexing by distinguishing immigration as control policies [that] deal with keeping out “unwanted immigrants” and integration policy as dictat[ing] the transition and settlement of resident immigrants” (Goodman, 2019 , p. 579). Recently, an interdisciplinary community of scholars has developed multi-dimensional indices capable of differentiating across types of policies, target groups, and instruments (Goodman, 2019 , 2010 ; Koopmans et al., 2012 ). We briefly present some of the main ones:

First released by Banting et al. ( 2006 ), the Multiculturalism Policy Index (MCP) is a scholarly research project that monitors the evolution of multiculturalism policies in 21 Western democracies. The MCP is designed to provide information about multiculturalism policies in a standardized format that aids comparative research and contributes to the understanding of State-minorities relations. The project provides an index at 3 points in time: 1980, 2000, 2010, and for 3 types of minorities: one index relating to immigrant groups; one relating to historic national minorities; one index relating to indigenous peoples.

The Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) (Niessen et al., 2007 ; Solano & Huddleston, 2020 ) is a complex system of 167 policy indicators across 8 domains of citizenship and integration combined into a single composite indicator, in order to evaluate the migrant integration policies of each considered country (for details, see Sect. 3 ).

Based on the selection of data for 9 countries, between 1999 and 2008, and with the aim of measuring and comparing immigration, asylum, and naturalization policies across countries, the International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) database collects comparable data on immigration law and policy across 6 major areas of migration legislation: economic migration, family reunification, humanitarian migration, irregular migration, student migration, and the acquisition and loss of citizenship for migrants resident (Gest et al., 2014 ; Beine et al., 2016 ).

Helbling et al. ( 2017 ) presented the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project, which proposes a data set that allows to measure immigration regulations.

The Canadian Index for Measuring Integration (CIMI), is an interactive tool that allows for measuring the outcomes of immigrants in Canadian regions. It is a data-driven index that examines 4 dimensions of immigrants’ integration in Canada to assess the gaps between immigrants and the Canadian-born population. The CIMI identifies factors that underline successful immigrants’ integration, assesses changes and trends over time (currently from 1991 to 2020), enables detailed examination of 4 dimensions of integration and provides rankings based on empirical evidence for Canadian geographies.

The Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) (Harder et al., 2018 ) is a survey-based measure of immigrant integration, to provide scholars with a short instrument that can be implemented across survey modes, with the aim to strike a pragmatic compromise to help generate cumulative knowledge on immigrant integration. The IPL captures 6 dimensions of integration: psychological, economical, political, social, linguistical, and navigational.

With the proliferation of such policy indices, scholars have more refined tools than ever for classifying and comparing policy plans and practices. Immigration and integration policies vary across dimensions, and limiting them to a single dimension reduces the ability to observe variations that could be significant. For this reason, we focused our analysis on MIPEX dimensions instead of the final composite indicator.

Analyzing a complex phenomenon (Alaimo, 2021b ) is often connected to the measuring of some non-directly measurable latent variables (Maggino et al., 2021 ; Maggino & Alaimo, 2021 , 2022 ). The measurement process in social sciences is associated with the construction of system of indicators. The indicators within a system are interconnected and new properties typical of the system emerge from these interconnections. As it can be easily understood, these kinds of systems are complex systems (Alaimo, 2021a ). Therefore, a system of indicators allows the measurement of a complex concept that would not otherwise be measurable by taking into account the indicators individually (Alaimo & Maggino, 2020 ).

The MIPEX is a system of 167 policy indicators Footnote 2 and it includes 52 countries and collects data from 2007 to 2019, in order to provide a view of integration policies across a broad range of differing environments. The values of each indicator are chosen by experts from each country, by means of a questionnaire. The MIPEX synthetic indicator is constructed by means of an aggregative-compensative approach (Nardo et al., 2005 ; OECD, 2008 ; Alaimo & Maggino, 2020 ). The 167 basic indicators are first aggregated in 58 indicators (for more information, please consult Solano and Huddleston ( 2020 )), which cover the 8 policy areas designed to benchmark current laws and policies against the highest standards through consultations with top scholars and institutions, Footnote 3 . The policy areas of integration covered are the following:

Labour Market Mobility (X1)

Family Reunion (X2)

Education (X3)

Political Participation (X4)

Long-term Residence (X5)

Access to Nationality (X6)

Anti-discrimination (X7)

Health Footnote 4

For each area, a synthetic measure (dimensional) is calculated as the arithmetic mean of the elementary indicators Footnote 5 , i.e. those selected for measuring each policy area. Each dimensional synthetic indicator is bounded between [0, 100]: the higher the value, the better the situation in that policy area.

The method and the approach adopted for the construction of the synthetic index have not been without criticism. Even if it is the most widespread among the aggregation methods for composite indicators construction, the arithmetic mean it has been highly criticized. The main advantage of this method is that it is simple, largely known and gives easy-to-understand results. The main drawback is that it is a full compensative method; consequently, low values in some indicators can be compensated by high values in other ones (OECD, 2008 ). This assumption is very strong and has a great impact on the results obtained, leading in many cases to an extreme flattening of the differences between the units (Alaimo & Seri, 2021 ). Despite its success, the aggregative-compensative approach has been deeply criticized as inappropriate and often inconsistent, from both conceptual and methodological point of view (Freudenber, 2003 ; Maggino, 2017 ; Fattore, 2017 ). To address and try to overcome the limitations of this approach, in recent years alternative procedures to synthesis have been developed in the literature (for instance, see: Kerber & Brüggemann, 2015 ; Kerber, 2017 ; Alaimo et al, 2021 , 2022 ). However, the purpose of this paper is to improve the analysis of the dimensions of MIPEX in its present form, albeit we suggest a critical read of it. The analysis carried out in the present work uses the listed above dimensions (excluding health), of which we are going to give a brief description in the following sub-sections Footnote 6 .

3.1 Labour Market Mobility

Integration of immigrants into the labor market is a process that happens over time and depends on general policies, context, immigrants’ skills and the reason for migration. Labour market mobility policies qualify as only halfway favourable for promoting equal quality employment over the long-term. In most countries, family members and permanent residents can access the labour market and job training, as well as social security and assistance. However, according to Solano and Huddleston ( 2020 ), full equality of rights and opportunity in the labour market is still far from being achieved, especially in the public sector.

3.2 Family Reunion

Family reunification policies determine if and when separated families can reunite and settle in their new home. According to Solano and Huddleston ( 2020 ), policies are more favourable in traditional destination countries, Northern European countries and new countries of labour migration (e.g. Italy, Portugal and Spain). On the other hand, for family reunification some countries require a high fee to pay and little support (e.g. Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, UK). Increasingly, countries make exceptions for the highly-skilled and the wealthy, but rarely for the most vulnerable (minors and beneficiaries of international protection).

3.3 Education

Despite being an increasing priority for integration, education is the greatest weakness in the integration policies of many countries. Most immigrant pupils receive little support in finding the right school or class, or in ‘catching up’ with their peers. As described in Solano and Huddleston ( 2020 ), Australia, Canada and New Zealand have developed strong targeted education policies through multiculturalism, while the US focuses additional support on vulnerable racial and social groups. In contrast, the education systems of Austria, France, Germany and Luxembourg are less responsive to the needs of their relatively large number of immigrant pupils. New destination countries with small immigrant communities offer inconsistent targeted support (e.g. Japan and Central Europe).

3.4 Political Participation

In most countries, foreign citizens are not enfranchised or regularly informed, consulted or involved in local civil society and public life. Political participation is one of the weakest areas of integration (Solano & Huddleston, 2020 ). Foreign citizens’ political opportunities differ enormously from one country to another. For instance, in Australia, New Zealand and Western Europe, they enjoy greater voting rights, stronger consultative bodies, more funding for immigrant organisations and greater support from mainstream organisations. With the exception of Korea, immigrants in Asian countries enjoy almost none of these rights unless they (can) naturalise. Despite European norms and promising regional practices, political participation is still almost absent from integration strategies in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia.

3.5 Long-term Residence

The security of permanent residence may be a fundamental step on the path to full citizenship and better integration outcomes. Permanent residence is a normal part of the integration process in top-scoring countries in the MIPEX composite indicator, such as Canada, most Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile and Mexico), Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden), and few other European countries (Hungary, Iceland, Slovenia, Ukraine). In contrast, many newcomers are ineligible for permanent residence in China, Denmark, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and Turkey. Countries rarely reform their legal routes to permanent residence. The limited major reforms of recent years have been driven by the politicisation of immigration. Brazil, Estonia, Macedonia, Russia, and Turkey have removed previous restrictions, while Austria, Denmark, Korea, Norway, Poland, Ukraine and the US have imposed new ones.

3.6 Access to Nationality

Facilitating access to nationality can significantly increase naturalisation rates and boost integration outcomes. Nationality policies are a major area of weakness in most European and non-European countries (Solano & Huddleston, 2020 ), especially Austria, Bulgaria, the Baltics, Eastern Europe, and India. By contrast, immigrants have favourable opportunities to become citizens in many countries, e.g., Sweden and the traditional destination countries (Canada, New Zealand and US). Since 2014, nationality policies have become more restrictive in Argentina, Denmark, Greece and Italy, while immigrants’ access to nationality has improved significantly in Brazil and Luxembourg and, to lesser extent, in China, Greece, Latvia, Moldova, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey.

3.7 Anti-discrimination

Anti-discrimination laws are becoming increasingly widespread. Victims of discrimination are often too poorly informed or supported to take the first step in the long path to justice, so most do not report their experience to the authorities. Victims are best informed and supported to seek justice in traditional destination countries (Canada, New Zealand and the US) and some EU Member States (Finland, Portugal and Sweden). Since the adoption of EU law in 2000, anti- discrimination has been the greatest and most consistent area of improvement in integration policy across Europe. Over the past 5 years, 7 countries have made positive reforms to discrimination policy (Croatia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxemburg, Slovenia and Turkey) and more than half of the MIPEX countries now protect against ethnic, racial, religious and nationality discrimination in all areas of public life (Solano & Huddleston, 2020 ). China, India, Japan, Russia and Switzerland are critically behind schedule on these international trends.

4 Methodology

The basic finite mixture model assumes that data are drawn from a density modelled as a convex combination of components each of specified parametric form (Green, 2019 ). The usage of finite mixture models as clustering procedures comes clear when supposing that the population from which we are sampling is heterogeneous and so there are multiple groups. Model-based clustering refers to the use of statistical models to cluster data, where the (multivariate) observations are assumed to have been generated from a finite mixture of component distributions, each regarded as a cluster, whose specific probability distribution has generated the units belonging to it (Titterington et al., 1985 ; Hennig et al., 2015 ). Model-based clustering offers the advantage of clearly stating the assumptions behind the clustering algorithm, and allows the analysis benefit from the inferential framework of statistics to address some of the practical questions arising when performing clustering: determine the number of clusters, detecting and treating outliers, assessing uncertainty (Bouveyron et al., 2019 ). In our case, we deal with longitudinal data; model-based clustering of such data is far from simple. Indeed, longitudinal data, sometimes referred to as panel data, track the same sample taking measurements at different time occasions. They are very different from time series: in the longitudinal case we observe short sequences of data in correspondence to a large number of individuals or statistical units, whereas in the time series case we observe long sequences of data referred to one or few statistical units (Bartolucci et al., 2012 ). The ideal way to model these data would be to take into account the temporal evolution and models all the responses at the same time. Thus, the analysis will exhibit typical temporal evolution behaviours, which are the objects that researchers in human and social sciences wish to study.

In this paper, we adopt a clustering approach to longitudinal data that consists of arranging the data in a three-way format and modelling them through a matrix-variate mixture model. This approach offers the advantage of accounting for the overall time-behavior, grouping together the units that have a similar pattern across and within time. While not being new (Basford & McLachlan, 1985 ), matrix-variate distributions have recently gained attention, and Mixtures of Matrix-Normals (MMN) have been developed and applied both in a frequentist framework (Viroli, 2011a ) and within a Bayesian one (Viroli, 2011b ). From a frequentist point of view, these models represent a natural extension of the multivariate normal mixtures to account for temporal (or even spatial) dependencies, and have the advantage of being also relatively easy to estimate by means of EM algorithm (a nice short description of the EM application to MMN is provided in Wang and Melnykov ( 2020 )). Very recently, Tomarchio et al. ( 2022 ) applied MMN to cluster longitudinal students’ career indicators for Italian universities.

4.1 Mixture of Matrix-Normals

MMN, as introduced in Viroli ( 2011a ), can be a useful tool to cluster time-dependent data. Suppose we observe N independent and identically distributed random matrices \(Y_1,\dots , Y_N\) of dimension \(J \times T \) , with J -variate vector observations measured repeatedly over T time points (i.e. \(Y \in {\mathbb {R}}^{J\times T}\) ), as in a longitudinal study case. Assume that Y follows a matrix-normal distribution, \(Y \sim \mathcal{MN}\mathcal{}_{(J\times T)}(M,\Phi ,\Omega )\) , where \(M \in {\mathbb {R}}^{J\times T}\) is the matrix of means, \(\Phi \in {\mathbb {R}}^{T \times T}\) is a covariance matrix containing the variances and covariances between the T occasions or times and \(\Omega \in {\mathbb {R}}^{J \times J}\) is the covariance matrix containing the variance and covariances of the J variables. The matrix-normal probability density function (pdf) is:

Being a particular specification of the multivariate normal distribution, the matrix-normal distribution shares the same various properties, like for instance, closure under marginalization, conditioning and linear transformations (Gupta & Nagar, 1999 ). The pdf of the MMN model is:

where K is the number of mixture components, \(\varvec{\pi }=\{\pi _k\}_{k=1}^{K}\) is the vector of mixing proportions, subject to constraint \(\sum _{k=1}^{K}\pi _k=1\) and \(\varvec{\Theta }=\{\Theta _k\}_{k=1}^K\) is the set of component-specific parameters with \(\Theta _k=\{M_k,\Phi _k,\Omega _k\}\) .

Matrix-variate models suffer from over-parametrization that leads to estimation issues. This issue is addressed in Sarkar et al. ( 2020 ) and Zhu et al. ( 2022 ), with the aim to explain the data with as few parameters as possible. To do so, the spectral decomposition of the covariance matrix (Banfield & Raftery, 1993 ; Celeux & Govaert, 1995 ) is used. The spectral decomposition of the general covariance matrix \(\Omega _k\) is given by \(\Omega _k=\lambda _k \Gamma _k \Delta _k \Gamma _k^{\intercal }\) , where \(\lambda _k = \mid \Omega _k \mid ^{1/J}\) , \(\Gamma _k\) is the matrix consisting of the eigenvectors of \(\Omega _k\) and \(\Delta _k\) is the diagonal matrix composed by the eigenvalues. From a geometrical interpretation point of view, \(\lambda _k\) mirrors the volume of the k -th mixture component, \(\Gamma _k\) the orientation and \(\Delta _k\) the shape. In MMN, there are two covariance matrices, one measuring covariance in time and one among variables. For identifiability issues of the model, the determinant of the time-covariance matrix must be restricted to be \(\mid \Phi _k \mid = 1\) , hence imposing K restrictions and making \(\lambda _k=1\) for the matrix \(\Phi _k\) . Moreover, two kinds of mean matrices M are considered: a general (no constraints) and an additive one. An additive matrix \(M_k\) has the structure \(M_k=\alpha _k {\mathbf {1}}_T^{\intercal } + {\mathbf {1}}_J\beta _k^{\intercal }\) , where \({\mathbf {1}}_{T}\) represents a T -dimensional vector of 1s, \(\alpha _k\) is the J -dimensional mean vector for the variables (row-wise) and \(\beta _k\) is the T -dimensional mean vector across time (column-wise). This structure gives rise to identifiability issues, which are resolved by imposing K constraints \(\beta _{k,T}=0\) . Last, as introduced in Mcnicholas and Murphy ( 2010 ), the time-covariance matrix can be further decomposed through the modified Cholesky decomposition to parameters interpretable in an Auto-Regressive (AR) fashion. Any or all among volume, shape or orientation can be constrained across mixture components. Following the conventional notation in Bouveyron et al. ( 2019 ), for the covariance matrices parameterizations E stands for equal, V denotes variable, I represents identity, configuring different types of constraints that can be imposed. Since \(\Omega _k\) can be decomposed in 3 submatrices, and \(\Phi _k\) in 2, we have 14 different possible combination for the former and 8 (including AR) for the latter, giving rise to \(14 \times 8=112\) different parametrizations. Since the mean matrix \(M_k\) can be in turn parametrized with a general or an additive structure, in total we can fit \(2 \times 112=224\) differently parametrized models.

5 Analysis and Results

Data used are freely downloadable from the Migrant Integration Policy Index website Footnote 7 . For sake of brevity, during the analysis and in all the Tables and Figures, we name the indicators using one-word labels or the codes reported in Sect.  3 .

Country trajectories of the 7 MIPEX dimensions. 52 countries; years 2014–2019

The analysis has been carried out by considering 7 MIPEX dimensions explained in Sect.  3 . In this paper, we deal with a three-way “time data array” of the type “units \(\times \) variables \(\times \) times” (D’Urso, 2000 ) that can be algebraically formalised as follows:

where the indices i , j and t stand, respectively, for the units, the quantitative variables and the times. In this paper, \(i=1,2,\dots ,52\) indicates the generic country, \(j=1,2,\dots ,7\) the generic MIPEX dimensional indicator and \(t=204,2015,\dots ,2019\) the generic year; consequently, \(y_{ijt}\) represents the determination of the j -th indicator in the i -th country at the t -th year. The first step is to give a geometrical representation of the initial data array \({\mathbf {Y}}\) to obtain information on the form of the data and the relationships between the basic indicators (Pearson, 1956 ). Figure  1 outlines that the trajectories of most of the indicators appears quite flat, which means that most of the countries does not change much the values of their indicators (and so the related policies) over time. For instance, Canada, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Romania have no improvement or worsening in any indicator during the considered period; while other countries (for instance, Albania, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Latvia) have just a small change in only one of the considered years. We can also observe that in most of the countries (for instance, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, and so on) the labour dimension is the one that rank higher; at the same time, the residence dimension rank lower. However, this is not true for most of the Asian countries, where the family and politics dimensions tend to rank higher and the labour dimension lower. The MMN will be used to model together the changes between and within time, grouping together the units which behave similarly across and within time.

The cluster analysis have been performed with the package \(\mathsf {MatTransMix}\) (Zhu et al., 2022 ) of the statistical software R. As usual when performing clustering, the main parameter to set is represented by the number of clusters K . Moreover, it is important that the clusters are interpretable (Fraley & Raftery, 1998 ; Forgy, 1965 ). Since our dataset is composed by 52 units, we carried out the MMN model for K ranging from 1 to 8 and we run the model several times in order to choose the best number of clusters by means of the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC): the lowest the BIC, the better the model. The selected number of K is 5. The best parametrization of the model, as expressed in Sect.  4.1 , is A-VEV-VV Footnote 8 , which means that the means \(M_k\) are better parsimoniously parametrized in additive way, \(\Omega _k\) with varying volume, equal shape and varying orientation (in a two components case, it would be ellipsoidal with equal shape) and \(\Phi _k\) has both varying shape and orientation.

Because of the matrices \(\Phi _k\) and \(\Omega _k\) , each MMN component models not only the conditional means, but also covariances of the response variables and the covariances among times. This, of course, is visible in the clustering as well, since MMN tends to cluster together not only the units with similar response conditional means, but with conditional covariances among times and variables as well. In this way, each cluster provides a broad profile of units belonging to it. It should be notice that a low correlation in time within cluster means that there have been changes in migration polices in the countries belonging to the cluster; on the other hand, a high correlation in time would signal that little changed. Equally, purified from temporal effect, positive variables correlations mean that the policies’ dimensional scores move homogeneously country-wise within cluster. The values of the correlation in time are reported in Fig.  2 , the values of the correlations among variables in Fig.  3 and the countries that belongs to each cluster in Fig.  4 . The values of the clusters’ means over time are reported in Table  1 .

MMN clusters’ corr-plots in time

MMN clusters’ corr-plots among indicators. X1 Labour, X2 Family, X3 Education, X4 Politics, X5 Residence, X6 Citizenship, X7 Anti-discrimination

A description and interpretation of the clustering results is as follow:

Cluster 1 Estonia and Slovenia.

Correlation in time with respect to the other clusters, Cluster 1 is the one with the lowest correlations within time.

Means this is the cluster with the lowest mean values in the Citizenship strand. With respect to the other clusters, it has low values in the Politics indicator but high values for Family, Residence and Anti-discrimination.

Correlation among indicators the Labour indicator presents negative correlations with almost all the other indicators except for Family. The correlation is particularly high between the indicators Labour and Anti-discrimination.

In Cluster 1, we observe relatively low levels of temporal correlation, and this is due to the fact that Estonia has important changes in Family indicator in 2016 and 2017 and Residence in 2017, while Slovenia has important changes in the Anti-discrimination in 2016, in Education in 2018 and Politics in 2019. Cluster 1 is characterized by lower correlations in time between the first 3 years (2014–2016) and the second ones (2017–2019). Moreover, it has negative correlation between Labour Market Mobility and the other dimensions, with the exception of Family Reunion. Countries in this cluster have the lowest score for the Access To Nationality and rank low for Political Participation as well, while ranking high for Family Reunion, Long-term Residence and Anti-discrimination legislation.

Cluster 2 Belgium, Canada, Chile, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland.

Correlation in time Cluster 2 presents high correlation values in time.

Means with respect to the other clusters, the values of the means of this group are quite low in Politics and Education and high in Family, Residence and Anti-discrimination.

Correlation among indicators almost all the indicators of this cluster are positively correlated, with particularly high values between Education and Labour, Politics and Labour, Politics and Education, Citizenship and Education and Citizenship and Politics.

During the analysed period, countries belonging to this cluster did not change much their policies, and they usually rank high in all the areas. The countries of this group tend to have good policies for Residence, Family and Anti-discrimination, but rank low for Education and Politics.

Cluster 3 Albania, Austria, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Ukraine, UK, USA.

Correlation in time Cluster 3 presents the highest correlations in time with respect to the other clusters.

Means with respect to the other clusters, this group does not present low mean values for any indicator. It presents medium values in Politics, Labour, Family, Education and Citizenship indicators and quite high values in Residence and Anti-discrimination.

Correlation among indicators almost all the correlations values among indicators are low, with exception for Residence and Family.

The characteristic of Cluster 3 is its high stability in time, that is the tendency to not make huge changes in the legislation, with some remarkable exceptions such as Iceland in Anti-discrimination in 2018 and Citizenship and Anti-discrimination in Luxembourg in 2017. To this cluster, belongs the countries that reformed less their immigration legislation during the study period. They tend to rank average in most of the policies areas, with the exception of Residence and Anti-discrimination laws, where they tend to rank higher. This group could be seen as the “average” cluster, grouping countries which could be located at the middle of the MIPEX overall rank. This does not mean that any country of this cluster do not present high or low values in any indicator, but that overall, among the indicators the tendency is towards the center. However, low correlation among variables signals that countries do not move homogeneously among the policies areas.

Cluster 4 Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Turkey.

Correlation in time it presents high values but they shades with time.

Means with respect to the other clusters, Cluster 4 have the lowest mean values for Politics and quite low values in Education, Citizenship and Labour. It has high mean values in Anti-discrimination.

Correlation among indicators it generally presents low correlations with the exception for an high positive value between Anti-discrimination and Residence.

Cluster 4 is mainly characterised by its relatively low values of Politics in every country, including France. Important positive improvements in Education across time for all the countries mostly explaining the time-correlation behaviour. Despite ranking generally high for Anti-discrimination policies, countries within this cluster tend to rank low for policies in Education, Citizenship and Labour, while scoring average for Residence legislation. Yet, low correlation among variables indicates that the countries do not move homogeneously among the dimensions, with the exception of policies regarding Residence and Anti-discrimination, that have high positive correlation. Countries belonging to this cluster have seen their score moderately changing in time, indicating that some changes in the legislation have happened.

Cluster 5 Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Moldova.

Correlation in time it presents high values but they shade faster.

Means with respect to the other clusters, the values of the means of Cluster 5 are quite low in Education and Politics, medium in Labour and high for the other indicators.

Correlation among indicators the values of the correlations are generally low.

Cluster 5 collects countries with smooth evolution, in both positive and negative directions and it generally presents low values in Education (with the exception of Australia). Changes are to be noted in Residence, where all the countries (with the exception of Argentina) see their values change in time (in both directions). Countries belonging to this cluster have high correlation values in time, but they tend to decrease faster with time, meaning that some changes in the policies have been made especially in the last years. Countries of this cluster, are characterized for generally ranking low in policies related to Educational support for foreign pupils and Politics, but high in Family, Residence, Citizenship and Anti-discrimination. However, the low correlation among the dimensions, means that the countries tend not to move homogeneously among them.

MIPEX dimensional indices: MMN clusters’ composition. 52 countries; years 2014–2019

Looking at the details of the countries assigned to each cluster, it could be noticed that in the clustering process the algorithm gave more importance to the temporal and variables’ dynamics (captured by \(\Phi \) and \(\Omega \) ) than to their overall scores (captured in M ). The clustering privileged the similarity in trajectory rather than in magnitude. This gives us an idea on how the clustering should be read and explains why countries that one could think are quite different in their policies are in the same cluster.

6 Conclusions

This paper has explored immigrant regulation and immigrant assimilation policies, analyzing 7 dimensions of the Migrant Integration Policy Index from the year 2014 to 2019. The need for the analysis carried out came from the statement that when comparing very different countries from each other on social and civil issues, the identification of homogeneous groups of units substantially improves the ease of reading and the interpretation of the results. In this paper, we addressed this issue trough the application of an unsupervised clustering approach for longitudinal data namely MMN. The exploration and visualization of the data show that for the 7 MIPEX dimensions analyzed, the considered countries tend to change little over time. This behaviour led us to rely on an approach as MMN, that accounts simultaneously for the within and between time dependency structures. The identification of groups of countries with similar behaviour over time allows the comparison of clusters with each other and the comparison of the countries within each cluster. Moreover, the correlations in time shows the general trend of each indicator over time in each cluster, and the correlations between variables purified from the time effect underline the behaviour of each indicator in relation to the others within each cluster. This analysis allowed the addition of new levels of interpretation of the migration policies and of several new information about the phenomena. Specifically, the information added helps to better understand which countries have similar legislative attitudes regarding migration policies and which are following similar trends, whether they are virtuous toward integration, static, or toward the marginalization of migrants. For instance, the evidence that Bulgaria and France are both in Cluster 4 highlights that they both have relatively low values for the Politics dimension and they both improved the Citizenship dimension over the considered years.

As future developments of this work, we expect, as the data will be available, to add to the analysis the Health dimension. This would be of particular interest especially during the last years of COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, if as we expect, there will be changes in the migration policies of many of the countries considered, and, consequently, there will be changes over time in the trajectories of the considered indicators. Moreover, it will be of particular interest to estimate the probabilities to move trough the clusters along the time, through the application of Latent Markov models.

Subjectivity is an essential element in any measurement process, but its presence does not make the process arbitrary (Alaimo, 2020 ).

A policy indicator is a question relating to a specific policy component of one of the 8 policy areas.

The highest standards are drawn from Council of Europe Conventions, European Union Directives and international conventions (for more information see: http://mipex.eu/methodology ).

This dimensions was excluded from the analysis, because it presents data only available for years 2014 and 2019.

The elementary indicators are described in (Solano & Huddleston, 2020 ).

A more extensive explanation is given in (Solano & Huddleston, 2020 ).

https://www.mipex.eu/download-pdf .

The total number of estimated parameters is given by \(K+(J-1)+KJ(J-1)/2+KT(T-1)/2-K+K(J + T-1) =251\) , to be estimated from a total of \(J \times T \times N=7 \times 6 \times 52=2184\) observations. For a non parsimoniously parametrized matrix-variate normal mixture the number of parameters would be \(K[JT + J(J + 1)/2 + T (T + 1)/2] - 1=454\) .

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Supporting Sanctuary Cities And Giving Driver’s Licenses To Illegal Migrants: Tim Walz’s Record On Immigration

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Vice President Kamala Harris’ choice for a running mate has a history of far-left positions and actions on immigration issues, a review of his record reveals.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is the Democratic vice presidential nominee for the 2024 ticket, Harris announced in an X post on Tuesday morning. The newly-minted running mate has opposed border enforcement and supported pro-illegal immigration policies while serving as governor and as a congressman, attracting the ire of immigration hawks. (RELATED: ‘Exploitable Loopholes’: Biden Admin’s Latest Plan To Deal With Immigration Surge Could Have Unintended Consequences)

Walz signed into law state legislation in March 2023 allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, opening the door for an estimated 81,000 undocumented aliens in Minnesota to apply for licenses. The Democratic governor said in a press release at the time that giving licenses to foreign nationals living in the state illegally would make “our roads safer.”

Flashback: Walz grants driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants: pic.twitter.com/KqyLsqjEUg — Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 6, 2024

During his successful 2018 gubernatorial run, Walz publicly declared his support for “sanctuary” policies in Minnesota, according to CBS News.

“Here’s what I believe: Congress has given federal agencies the authority to enforce immigration laws in Minnesota, and I support their doing so,” the then-gubernatorial candidate said in 2018. “Congress has not given local law enforcement that same authority.”

“The role of law enforcement is to enforce state and local laws, not federal immigration laws, and I strongly believe that they should not do so,” his statement continued.

The statement largely reflected what sanctuary city advocates support: Noncooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. Sanctuary jurisdictions typically decline to enforce detainer requests for criminal illegal migrants who are arrested, allowing them back into the community when they are released from local custody.

Walz additionally signed into law legislation that gives state-funded healthcare and free college tuition to illegal immigrants while governor.

Before being elected as governor, Walz served in Congress from 2007 to 2019. NumbersUSA, a group that supports stricter border enforcement, awarded his congressional career with a “D” rating on immigration issues, listing a slate of bills he co-sponsored that, according to the group, undermines border security.

Also as a representative, Walz publicly called then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to build a border wall “ ridiculous “.

“Governor Walz supports measures that promote illegal immigration, including policies that allow undocumented migrants to obtain drivers licenses,” John Fabbricatore, a retired Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office director, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“His initiatives in Minnesota magnetize illegal immigration and dismiss the foundation of immigration law,” he continued.

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Vance calls out illegal immigration during campaign stop

Watch CBS News

U.S. pauses migrant sponsorship program due to fraud concerns

By Camilo Montoya-Galvez

Updated on: August 2, 2024 / 5:51 PM EDT / CBS News

The Biden administration has paused a migrant sponsorship policy it set up to discourage illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border due to concerns about fraud among sponsors, officials said Friday.

The policy allows up to 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to fly to the U.S. legally each month if American sponsors agree to support them financially. The administration first started the program in late 2022 and expanded it in early 2023 to dissuade migrants from those crisis-stricken countries from traveling to the U.S. southern border.

The Department of Homeland Security said it stopped issuing travel documents to people applying for the program while it investigates applications filed by U.S.-based sponsors. 

"Out of an abundance of caution, DHS has temporarily paused the issuance of advanced travel authorizations for new beneficiaries while it undertakes a review of supporter applications," the department said in a statement Friday. "DHS will restart application processing as quickly as possible, with appropriate safeguards."

Fox News first reported DHS' decision to halt travel permits under the program.

DHS first stopped granting travel authorization to Venezuelans under the policy, known as CHNV, in July and then extended the pause to the other three nationalities, two people familiar with the internal steps told CBS News.

The pause, the sources added, was triggered by concerns raised by the fraud detection branch of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which noted a significant number of would-be sponsors were applying to sponsor multiple migrants.

The fraud concerns being investigated relate to the people in the U.S. applying to sponsor migrants, not the migrants themselves, the sources said. Public reports have suggested that some people have been advertising sponsorships online. Would-be sponsors need to be American citizens, residents or otherwise have a legal status in the U.S.

In its statement, DHS said it refers instances of immigration fraud to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution. It also stressed it has not "identified issues" around the vetting of migrants who are eligible for the sponsorship initiative.

Tennessee Rep. Mark Greene, the Republican chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the program's pause "vindicates" his concerns about it.

"This is exactly what happens when you create an unlawful mass-parole program in order to spare your administration the political embarrassment and bad optics of overrun borders," Greene said in a statement. "The Biden-Harris administration should terminate the CHNV program immediately."

Since its inception, the CHNV policy has allowed roughly 520,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to fly to U.S. airports after rounds of security vetting, according to government data.

While arrivals of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the U.S. southern border reached record highs in past years, they dropped dramatically after the Biden administration created policies specific to those nationalities. The administration has paired the CHNV program with a policy of returning migrants from these countries to Mexico if they enter the U.S. illegally.

Republican-led states have challenged the CHNV initiative in federal court, arguing it violates the intent of the humanitarian parole law that the Biden administration has invoked to admit migrants under the program. Earlier this year, a federal judge in Texas dismissed the red states' lawsuit, ruling that they had not been harmed by the policy. The states are appealing that decision.

Migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border soared to record levels in 2022 and 2023. But they have plunged this year, reaching the lowest level in nearly four years in July. Officials have attributed the massive drop to a crackdown on asylum by President Biden, scorching summer temperatures and efforts by Mexico to stop migrants.

Camilo Montoya-Galvez is the immigration reporter at CBS News. Based in Washington, he covers immigration policy and politics.

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Pope Francis: Literature and poetry are essential for future priests

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Every Christian, but especially seminarians, should set aside their screens regularly and spend time with a book of literature or poetry, Pope Francis said.

In a world that so often prizes efficiency and accomplishment, “we desperately need to counterbalance this inevitable temptation to a frenetic and uncritical lifestyle by stepping back, slowing down, taking time to look and listen,” the pope wrote. “This can happen when a person simply stops to read a book.”

In a letter “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” published by the Vatican Aug. 4, Pope Francis said he initially intended to write a letter on how important it is for seminarians to devote time to reading novels and poetry but decided to expand it because reading is important for “the formation of all those engaged in pastoral work, indeed of all Christians.”

The pope’s letter cited his own experience as a high school literature teacher in 1964-65 as well as essays by the writers C.S. Lewis, Marcel Proust and Jorge Luis Borges and texts by Jesuit Father Karl Rahner, St. Paul VI, St. John Paul II and the Second Vatican Council. He also referred to evidence in the Acts of the Apostles that St. Paul knew the work of the poet Epimenides, who wrote in the sixth century B.C.E., and the poet Aratus of Soli from the third century B.C.E.

Reading, the pope said, is a healthy form of relaxation, an important way to increase one’s vocabulary and an essential exercise in learning to listen to the experiences of other people and other cultures.

“Often during periods of boredom on holiday, in the heat and quiet of some deserted neighborhood, finding a good book to read can provide an oasis that keeps us from other choices that are less wholesome,” the pope said. “Likewise, in moments of weariness, anger, disappointment or failure, when prayer itself does not help us find inner serenity, a good book can help us weather the storm until we find peace of mind.”

Pope Francis insisted reading “is not something completely outdated” and is an antidote to “our present unremitting exposure to social media, mobile phones and other devices.”

“I very much appreciate the fact that at least some seminaries have reacted to the obsession with ‘screens’ and with toxic, superficial and violent fake news by devoting time and attention to literature,” he wrote. “They have done this by setting aside time for tranquil reading and for discussing books, new and old, that continue to have much to say to us.”

However, the pope said, even in those seminaries, literature is often seen merely as a form of healthy entertainment rather than as a subject that is important in their training.

A lack of literature and poetry, he said, “can lead to the serious intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of future priests, who will be deprived of that privileged access which literature grants to the very heart of human culture and, more specifically, to the heart of every individual.”

Literature, he said, is “listening to another person’s voice.”

Especially for those preparing for the priesthood, learning to listen to others, particularly those who challenge one’s point of view, is a necessary skill, the pope said. Without it, “we immediately fall into self-isolation; we enter into a kind of ‘spiritual deafness,’ which has a negative effect on our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with God, no matter how much theology or psychology we may have studied.”

Literature and poetry, like other arts, also help hone a reader’s ability to be in awe -- of others, of the world and, ultimately, of God, the pope said.

Literature, he said, “teaches us how to look and see, to discern and explore the reality of individuals and situations as a mystery charged with a surplus of meaning that can only be partially understood through categories, explanatory schemes, linear dynamics of causes and effects, means and ends.”

Learning that lesson is essential for effective evangelization, which is not first about proclaiming and explaining church doctrines but about helping people “encounter Jesus Christ made flesh, made man, made history,” the pope wrote.

“We must always take care never to lose sight of the ‘flesh’ of Jesus Christ: that flesh made of passions, emotions and feelings, words that challenge and console, hands that touch and heal, looks that liberate and encourage, flesh made of hospitality, forgiveness, indignation, courage, fearlessness; in a word, love,” Pope Francis said.

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As Republicans Attack Harris on Immigration, Here’s What Her Record Shows

Republicans blame Vice President Kamala Harris for the surge of migrants into the United States over the past several years. But a review of her involvement shows a more nuanced record.

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By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Jazmine Ulloa

Reporting from Washington

As they seek effective attack lines against Vice President Kamala Harris, Republicans are focusing on her role in the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies, seeking to blame her for the surge of migrants into the United States over the past several years.

A review of her involvement in the issue shows a more nuanced record.

President Biden did not assign her the job title of “border czar” or the responsibility of overseeing the enforcement policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, as the Trump campaign suggested on Tuesday in its first ad against her. But she did have a prominent role in trying to ensure that a record surge of global migration did not become worse.

After the number of migrants crossing the southern border hit record levels at times during the administration’s first three years, crossings have now dropped to their lowest levels since Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris took office.

Her early efforts at handling her role and the administration’s policies were widely panned, even by some Democrats, as clumsy and counterproductive, especially in displaying defensiveness over why she had not visited the border. Some of her allies felt she had been handed a no-win portfolio.

Early in the administration, Ms. Harris was given a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fund-raiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her attempt to convince companies across the world to invest in Central America and create jobs for would-be migrants had some success, according to immigration experts and current and former government officials.

But those successes only underlined the scale of the gulf in economic opportunity between the United States and Central America, and how policies to narrow that gulf could take years or even generations to show results.

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Remembering james heffernan, prolific literature scholar and champion of the humanities, posted on august 05, 2024 by arts and sciences.

The professor emeritus of English died on July 21.

James Heffernan, professor emeritus of English and longtime resident of Hanover, died on July 21 of metastatic prostate cancer. He was 85.

"James was a prolific scholar of literature, a cherished teacher, and a passionate champion for the humanities. With his expansive intellect, playful wit, and generous spirit, he touched the lives of countless students and colleagues at Dartmouth and around the world," Dean Elizabeth F. Smith said in a message to the Arts and Sciences community.

Born in 1939, and raised in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain, Heffernan earned his BA from Georgetown University in 1960 and his PhD in English from Princeton in 1964. He was an instructor of English at the University of Virginia for two years before joining Dartmouth as an assistant professor in 1965. After being promoted to associate professor in 1970 and full professor in 1976, Heffernan served as chair of the English department from 1978 to 1981 and as the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the Art of Writing from 1997 to 2004, when he retired.

The author of 10 books and dozens of scholarly articles, Heffernan began his academic career with a focus on English Romantic poetry and broadened his focus over the years to the entire Western canon and the interconnections between literature, art, and politics. He also co-authored a popular textbook, published first in 1982 by W.W. Norton, Writing: A College Handbook , that sold over 100,000 copies in its first year and continued through five editions.

Heffernan followed his first book, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry: The Transforming Imagination (1969) , with The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner (1985), which compares the nature poetry of two major Romantic poets to the work of two of England's most important landscape painters.

In 1992, Heffernan edited a collection of essays, Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography and Art, that was published after he hosted a conference on the French Revolution at Dartmouth in July of 1989. The acclaimed historian Simon Schama described the book as "the best set of essays that we have" on English responses to the French Revolution, and he called Heffernan's piece on Wordsworth's Prelude a "superlative essay, the best modern reading of the Prelude I know."

Heffernan next turned his attention to ekphrastic poetry, in which poets set out to re-create in words a work of visual art. His 1993 book, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery , was followed in 2006 by Cultivating Picturacy , a collection of essays on the relationship between literature and art. The book was praised by many eminent scholars, including Gillen D'Arcy Wood, who called it "a treasure for scholars and students interested in the history, theory, and practice of text-image relations."

In 2009, Heffernan launched Review 19 , which reviews academic studies of 19th-century British and American literature. With hundreds of reviewers, ranging from graduate students to emeriti, the site published nearly 700 articles and drew more than 200,000 unique visitors.

His next book, Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature (2014), traces the giving and taking of hospitality in Western literature, from Homer's Odyssey to Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This was followed by his 2023 book, Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II , the first comprehensive study of the impact of the outbreak of World War II on the literary work of American, English, and European. The New York Review of Books called it "an appealing enticement to read some of the most inventive works of wartime literature and to recognize their contributions to the historical record."

In addition to his scholarly writing, Heffernan wrote extensive political commentary. Between 2005 and 2017, he published nearly 70 columns in the Huffington Post, with topics ranging from abortion rights and immigration to terrorism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He also authored a number of satirical pieces, with titles such as "Should Stephen Colbert Be the Next Pope?" and "Jesus and His Wife: The Pre-Nup."

At Dartmouth, his literature courses garnered copious praise from students, especially his senior seminar on James Joyce's Ulysses . His other popular courses included Romantic Poetry and A Survey of English Literature: Dryden to Eliot.

Heffernan was also highly regarded by students around the world who watched his lectures via the Teaching Company's Great Courses : 24 lectures on Ulysses and more than 20 additional talks on authors including Jane Austen, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett. His courses attracted numerous five-star reviews, including praise of his "acting (and singing!) skills" and ability to "recite dialogue so beautifully in character." They also inspired students from as far as Iran to write Heffernan with messages of gratitude, leading in some cases to years-long correspondences.

Heffernan also took great pride in helping to host Democratic candidates on campus. In 1992, he introduced Hillary and Bill Clinton to their first Dartmouth audiences—the former on Jan. 9 and the latter on Feb. 13. In 1994, when Hillary returned to campus as first lady, Heffernan was invited to drive in her motorcade as it traveled from Lebanon Airport to the Hopkins Center and then back after her speech.

In his public lectures and writing, Heffernan advocated vocally for the study of the humanities. "Having spent trillions of dollars fighting terrorism with bullets and bombs, we need literature and the humanities now more than ever, because they strive to heal, to nurture the most priceless of all our possessions: our humanity," he wrote in a 2021 column in  The American Scholar . His final book, a memoir posted on his website , details a blueprint for the future of the humanities at Dartmouth, which includes the revival of a required year-long course for first-year students covering ancient to modern texts.

A palpable love of words permeated all of Heffernan's work, which also includes poetry he composed for family members and friends on special occasions, such as a free verse narrative about his mother on her 100th birthday. In his memoir, he reflects on the famous words of Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  "Having lived more than twice as long as Dylan Thomas, I do not rage against the dying of the light," Heffernan wrote. "On the contrary, my point of departure for this chapter is my own little twist on his angry couplet:

Do not go silent into that good night, Write, write against the dying of the light.

This sense of joyful engagement defined his approach to teaching. "Ultimately, my teaching springs from a passion to learn, which is what I strive to share with my listeners," he said. "School is just the beginning of education. If you want to stay alive to the very end of your life, never stop learning."

Heffernan is survived by his wife, Nancy Coffey Heffernan; his two children, Andrew and Virginia Heffernan; their partners, Heidi Rose Robbins and Richard Stanislaw; and his four grandchildren, Kate Robin Heffernan, Dylan Heffernan, Benjamin Samuels, and Susannah Samuels. Funeral services will be held at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover in the early fall, followed by interment of ashes in the Columbarium.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the LISTEN Center of Lebanon in Heffernan's honor. 

The Dartmouth flag will be lowered in Heffernan's honor on Aug. 7 and 8.

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The average direct, indirect and total effects of environmental concern on pro-environmental behavior.

1. Introduction

2.1. background, designing observational study as experimental, 2.2. data section, 2.3. technical point and description of the method, 2.4. sensitivity analysis.

Click here to enlarge figure

Sensitivity Analysis

4. discussion, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Hernández-Alemán, A.; Cruz-Pérez, N.; Santamarta, J.C. The Average Direct, Indirect and Total Effects of Environmental Concern on Pro-Environmental Behavior. Land 2024 , 13 , 1229. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13081229

Hernández-Alemán A, Cruz-Pérez N, Santamarta JC. The Average Direct, Indirect and Total Effects of Environmental Concern on Pro-Environmental Behavior. Land . 2024; 13(8):1229. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13081229

Hernández-Alemán, Anastasia, Noelia Cruz-Pérez, and Juan C. Santamarta. 2024. "The Average Direct, Indirect and Total Effects of Environmental Concern on Pro-Environmental Behavior" Land 13, no. 8: 1229. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13081229

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