Abstract

Immigration has re-emerged as a dominant forces shaping American society. The forces shaping this migration and its impacts reflect both aspects of earlier eras and new dynamics linked to the globalization era. This project attempts to provide both broadly accessible knowledge about immigration dynamics and to investigate specific processes in depth.

Issue

Immigration is clearly a cutting-edge issue that is growing in perceived importance at the federal, state and local levels of society. It is also a cross-cutting issue that defies usual political spectrum categories. Among the core demographic processes that strongly shape and constrain major soceital processes (including fertility and mortality), migration is the most difficult to examine because of both its politically sensitive nature and major deficiencies in data.

Response

We published a monograph in 2004 entitled Immigration and a Changing America. The monograph was funded by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation in collaboration with the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). The monograph was targetted at policy makers as well as undergraduate students. It is being distributed by the PRB as part of its The American People: Census 2000 series. This sponsorship assures a broad readership including a wide range of policy makers. We have also, with support from a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NICHD), produced a series of scientific papers exploring the impacts of recent upsurges of immigration on the migratory responses of native-born Americans.

Impact

There is probably no area in the social sciences where it is more difficult to assess impact and progress than the area of migration. The broad dissemination of the Immigration and a Changing America monograph will assure that our perspective will be a part of the discourse among policy makers as well as academics. Our published research papers have established us as key scholars in the area of the internal migration responses of natives to recent immigration. We have been invited to participate in a NIH funded workshop on this topic that will be held in the Spring of 2006 at the University of Washington.

Funding Sources

• Other Federal non-USDA (e.g., NSF, NIH, DOA, DOD)
• Private (e.g., commodity groups, foundations, companies)
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Topic Description

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Collaborators

• 0

Key Personnel

• Mary M. Kritz, Development Sociology, Cornell University