Native-born Americans Research Articles

Too Cold to Venture There? January Temperature and Immigrant Self-Employment Across the United States

Immigrants in the United States have higher self-employment rates than native-born Americans. However, immigrant self-employment rates vary considerably across areas of the country. The authors examine the percentage of immigrant workers in local areas who are self-employed (i.e., the self-employment rate for the foreign born). Areas with colder winter temperatures have especially low self-employment rates among their immigrant populations compared to warmer areas. The relationship between winter temperature and immigrant self-employment persists after controlling for numerous individual and local area characteristics. The relationship holds for numerous subsamples of immigrants but is strongest for immigrants arriving to the United States as adults. Child immigrants and native-born Americans exhibit a weaker relationship, possibly because of previous exposure and attachment to particular locations chosen by their parents that constrain the migration responses of potential entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial immigrants arriving to the country as adults appear especially footloose and particularly responsive to January temperatures in their location decisions.

The impact of transnationally mobile migrants on immigrants’ educational perception and practice: the case of Koreans and Korean Americans

ABSTRACT New waves of Asian migration to the US are comprised of not only new first-generation immigrants but also transnationally mobile migrants – temporary migrants that move between the home and host countries, spending significant pre-planned periods of time in the host country for specific purposes such as education and employment. Focusing on Korean and Korean American perception and usage of private supplementary education, I examine how the contemporary homeland norms and practices transnationally mobile Koreans transmit impact immigrant Koreans’ education. Drawing on 51 in-depth interviews with Korean American and transnationally mobile Korean students and parents, I find that transnationally mobile Koreans have become a significant reference group for Korean Americans in assessing their education. While education of Asian Americans is often measured against that of white Americans, or native-born Americans as a whole, transnationally mobile migrants from Asian Americans’ ethnic homelands provide a different reference group for Asian American education. In response to the educational norms and practices transnational Koreans transmit, Korean Americans reevaluate their education and formulate educational strategies accordingly. These findings consider how transnational replenishment impacts immigrant experiences in the host society and illuminates the significance of accounting for interactions among different transnational migrants in transnational social spaces.

The within occupation and industry component of the immigrant-native gap in U.S. self-employment rates

ABSTRACT This paper examines whether the higher self-employment rates among U.S. immigrants, relative to native-born Americans, can be accounted for by immigrants being over-represented in occupations and industries that are commonly pursued through self-employment. After accounting for detailed occupations and industries, approximately 58% of the immigrant-native gap in self-employment rates remains. This finding suggests that the higher self-employment rate among immigrants is driven by factors that influence the likelihood of pursuing self-employment in and of itself, rather than factors that act indirectly by driving immigrants towards occupations and industries that are commonly associated with self-employment.

Unpacking the liberalizing potential of higher education: an analysis of academic majors, anti-Black prejudice, and opposition to immigration

ABSTRACT In this article, we challenge the prevailing assumption about the impact of higher education on attitudes toward racial and ethnic minorities by examining whether educational effects are monolithic or manifold instead. Using data from the General Social Survey (1972–2021), we use a variety of measures of education (years, levels, sectors, and majors) to unpack the relationship between higher education and intergroup attitudes, specifically anti-immigration attitudes among native-born Americans and anti-Black attitudes among non-African Americans. Results show that some higher education graduates hold out-group attitudes that are not much different from those without any higher education. Narrowing our focus to respondents only with higher education, we find significant variation in out-group attitudes across educational sectors and academic majors. These results have implications for how we understand previous scholarship on prejudice and higher education, which may have overestimated the impact higher education has, in general, on prejudice.

"If they send him off, I think I shall not long be safe myself": Contesting Early American Citizenship in the Longchamps Affair, 1784–1786

Abstract: Through the little known Longchamps Affair, this article explores the interaction between state and national, and popular and legal, conceptions of American citizenship during the founding era. In 1784, French migrant Charles Julien de Longchamps attacked a French diplomat on the streets of Philadelphia, sparking a national debate on what it meant to be an American citizen. While the French government demanded his expatriation, in an unexpected turn of events, Longchamps alleged that he had been naturalised as a citizen of Pennsylvania the day before the attack, and consequently had the right to stand trial in the United States. The affair became a national referendum on the nature of American citizenship. Officials employed a state-centric, legal vision of membership inherited from the colonial period to argue that Longchamps was not an American citizen and advocate for his removal. These claims were disputed in newspaper coverage across the United States, which instead contended that Longchamps' commitment to revolutionary values proved his citizenship, invoking a broader national community. The public perceived Longchamps' fate as inherently tied to their own, demonstrating that a shared sense of belonging across the United States was equally as important as state membership in shaping how citizenship was understood in real terms. The Longchamps Affair provides a window into the ambiguous and contested nature of membership during the founding decades, both in determining what constituted American citizenship, and how the rights conferred by citizenship differed for native-born Americans and naturalized migrants.

What Makes a Citizen? Contemporary Immigration and the Boundaries of Citizenry

Abstract How do native-born Americans evaluate citizenship claims made by immigrant groups? Prior research identifies three broad patterns: respondents (1) make judgments based on immigrants’ willingness to adhere to national norms and civic values, (2) rely on ethnoracial cues, and (3) rely on economic cues. Using a conjoint survey experiment, this is the first study to examine how these patterns hold across two distinct dimensions of citizenship—legal membership (being considered a citizen of the state) and cultural membership (being perceived as a fellow American). The results reveal that legal status and age of arrival are powerful determinants for attitudes toward legal membership. By contrast, ethnoracial boundaries have a more significant impact on cultural membership, even after accounting for key predictors, such as legal status and English proficiency. Moreover, we show that evaluations of citizenship claims differ for White and non-White Americans in meaningful ways. Compared to White respondents, Black and Latino respondents express higher levels of ingroup preference for legal membership, and Latinos are significantly more likely to use an inclusive definition of cultural membership. In tandem, these results highlight the importance of measuring citizenship as a multidimensional concept and the limitations of focusing on the dominant group to understand immigration attitudes in contemporary diverse societies.

Understanding refugee and immigrant health literacy and beliefs toward antimicrobial resistance

Background: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global health threat, particularly in refugee populations, due to challenges posed by migration. Little guidance has been provided by public health agencies regarding antimicrobial stewardship specific to this demographic. Studies have primarily focused on encampment areas abroad. We sought to better understand health literacy and beliefs regarding AMR in local refugee and immigrant populations in southeastern Michigan. Methods: From November 1, 2022 to March 10, 2023, we distributed an anonymous questionnaire to adult patients at four primary care clinics in Southeastern Michigan and made it available online. The questionnaire collected demographic information and used 5-point Likert scale responses regarding antibiotic use in children with symptoms of respiratory infection. We binarized the questions and responses to determine whether respondents provided the preferred response and added these to create an overall health literacy score, then used simple linear and multivariable linear regression modeling to identify demographic variables independently associated with the health literacy score. Chi-squared and Mann-Whitney tests were also performed where appropriate. Results: Immigrants and refugees/asylum-seekers from low or middle-income countries (group A, n = 109) were compared to native-born Americans and immigrants from high-income countries (group B, n = 171) with participants from 40 countries (Figure 1). Age distribution did not differ between groups, while group B had generally longer duration of living in the United States (Figure 2). Differences were found in other demographic categories except female gender, with group B reporting higher income, educational levels, and English ability (Figure 3). Simple linear regression revealed that all demographic variables except age significantly correlated with responses (Figure 4). Multivariable linear regression showed that female gender, educational level, and age correlated with greater health literacy, while being in group A trended towards significance with respect to correlating with lesser health literacy (Figure 5). Conclusions: Immigrants and refugees/asylum-seekers from LMICs demonstrated beliefs suggesting deficits in knowledge of AMR compared to native-born Americans and those from high-income countries, independent of other potentially confounding demographic characteristics. Female gender, educational level, and age independently correlated with greater health literacy. These results could inform future patient-centered antimicrobial stewardship educational interventions in certain target populations such as immigrants and refugees/asylum-seekers in the United States.Disclosures: None

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz

Reviewed by: A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz Kara M. French (bio) William Walcutt, Art, Early American art, Nativism A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art. By Wendy Jean Katz. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022, Pp. 226.) Questions of who gets to call themselves a "real" American and whose histories should be centered have saturated the political arena in recent years. In the atmosphere of these heated debates, Wendy Jean Katz's analysis of nativism's ties to nineteenth-century art and artists appears very relevant. Examining the career of popular nineteenth-century artist William Walcutt—a man Katz accurately describes as "nativist adjacent" if not a card-carrying Know-Nothing—and his circle allows for a deeper understanding of how pervasive nativist ideals and symbols were in the illustrations, engravings, banners, and sculptures in the visual vernacular of the 1840s and 50s (xii). A True American goes beyond the more familiar and obvious tropes of nativist ideology—exaggerated caricatures of Irish and German immigrants or scheming Jesuits locking women in convents—to show how even seemingly innocuous displays of the eagle or Thanksgiving celebrations were part of a larger nativist symbology. Katz argues that "the most patriotic art of the nineteenth century, the art that spoke most strongly about American democracy, was often the art most colored by exclusionary ideas about citizenship" (xiii). It was an art that centered the heroism of white Anglo–Saxon Protestant men while relegating women, the enslaved, and people of color to supporting roles, often ushering them out of the frame entirely. William Walcutt and his fellow working artists are likely not as familiar to scholars of the early republic as their fine art contemporaries in the Hudson River School or notable historical painters like John Trumbull or Daniel Huntington. Katz, however, makes a strong case that these men (and they were almost entirely men) represent a kind of "norm" in antebellum art, a norm that was increasingly becoming suffused with nativist ideas of "true Americanism" (xiii). Though Walcutt did gain some fame as a sculptor and illustrator in his own time, he and his circle were more aligned [End Page 187] with what today would be described as commercial art. To be clear, A True American is not a strict biography of Walcutt per se, but a larger study of a circle of artists whose sympathies were more aligned to those of their fellow working-class artisans than fine artists supported by elite patrons. Walcutt was born in Ohio, the descendant of frontiersmen and Revolutionary-era veterans. After working in the Midwest alongside his two brothers who were also artists, Walcutt arrived in New York City in 1847, an environment flush with artistic patronage as well as one in flux from both immigration and the disruptions of the market revolution. One of the most notable contributions of A True American is Katz's detailed analysis of the overlapping circles of working artists like Walcutt, fraternal orders, and nativist organizations. While the rise of fraternal organizations as well as the new cultural industries of the early republic have been well documented, Katz's work allows us to re-envision artistic societies like Walcutt's New York Sketch Club as fraternal organizations rather than just as gatherings of creatives. In doing so, the first two chapters of A True American help expand notions of who counts as a working-class artisan—beyond the usual shoemakers and tailors displaced by industrialization, one must include artists themselves. Not only did this circle of artists often contribute illustrations to nativist publications like America's Own and paint banners for Odd Fellows' lodges, they also provided mutual aid and shared a sense of their own artistic "brotherhood" standing against both capitalist and foreign tyranny. This was particularly acute for American-born artists like Walcutt who believed that American art should be native-grown and commissions reserved for native-born Americans, rather than more well-known European artists who had trained in academies abroad. Walcutt's circle was opposed to the creation of academies of fine arts within the United States, believing them to be hierarchical and anti...

Mortality from Sexually Transmitted Diseases: Immigration and Socioeconomic Factors

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to investigate associations between immigration status and mortality from sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the United States. It was hypothesized that there are no mortality differentials between native-born and foreign-born Americans once controls are made for socioeconomic factors. Methods: Data were obtained from the United States National Longitudinal Mortality Study. Cox Proportional hazards regression models were fit to the data, with the entire sample of male and female respondents. Analysis was then stratified to do separate models for each sex group. Results: Immigrants were much less likely to die of sexual diseases than their native-born counterparts. Results held even after controlling for a place of residence, marital status, educational attainment and household income. The sample was disaggregated by sex. In the male sample, immigration was negatively associated with mortality from Sexually transmitted diseases. Among women, negative associations were also observed association between immigration and sexually transmitted diseases. The ever married and the never married were much more likely to die of sexually transmitted disease. Men experienced mortality risk that was over 3 times that of women. Conclusion: Debates continue in the United States about the possible effects of immigration on health. Findings from this study show that using a relatively large sample of over 1 million individuals, immigrants were much less likely to die from STDs than native-born Americans. It was concluded that foreign-born are not contributing positively to US STD mortality.

Understanding refugee and immigrant health literacy and beliefs toward antimicrobial resistance.

Refugee and migrant populations have increased vulnerability to antimicrobial resistance, yet stewardship guidance is lacking. We addressed this gap through a cross-sectional survey, finding that these populations and immigrants from low and middle-income countries had lower health literacy on the issue compared to native-born Americans and those from high-income countries.

Becoming Italian

Becoming Italian

Children of Immigrants and Nonmarital Fertility in the United States

There is vast research on the patterns and consequences of nonmarital fertility; but relatively little is known about how the patterns of nonmarital fertility vary according to the immigrant generational status of young adult Americans. This paper examines differences in the risk of experiencing a nonmarital first birth between children of immigrants and children of native-born Americans. Results from the longitudinal data and event history models show that children of immigrants are less likely to have a nonmarital first birth compared to children of native-born Americans. A range of demographic and mitigating factors drive these nonmarital fertility patterns but do not fully account for the differences. I provide possible explanations for children of immigrants’ lower risks of experiencing a nonmarital first birth. This study provides new insights into differentials into the family context faced by the next generation of Americans.

“In sober dignity”: the Irish Brigade, ethnicity, and the Irish Catholic temperance movement in the Civil War era

ABSTRACT This study shows how Irish Catholic temperance groups challenged nativist stereotypes towards Irish immigrants. Irish Americans used abstinence to achieve a respectable reputation among native-born Americans in the Civil War era. By linking Civil War service with the temperance efforts of Irishmen who fought for the Union Army, prominent members of the ethnic group demonstrated that Irish Americans were respectable and virtuous citizens of the United States throughout the Civil War era.

The Effect of Ethnicity on Identification of Korean American Speech

Research on ethnic varieties of American English has found that listeners can identify speaker ethnicity from voice alone at above-chance rates. This study aims to extend this research by focusing on the perception of race and ethnicity in the voices of ethnically Korean speakers of English. Bilingual Korean Americans in California provided samples of English speech that were rated by 105 listeners. Listeners rated the speakers on their likelihood of being a certain race or ethnicity (including Asian and White). Listeners who were Korean themselves rated the speakers as more likely to be Asian and Korean, whereas non-Asian listeners rated the speakers as more likely to be White. Non-Asian listeners also demonstrated a negative correlation between rating a voice as Asian and rating a voice as belonging to a native-born American, while Asian listeners did not. Finally, a positive correlation between pitch and perceived Asianness was found for female speakers, corresponding to listeners’ metalinguistic commentary about the hallmarks and stereotypes of Asian or Asian American speech. The findings implicate the listener’s own ethnic identity and familiarity with a speech variety as an important factor in sociolinguistic perception.

When I Was Growing Up: The Lasting Impact of Immigrant Presence on Native-Born American Attitudes towards Immigrants and Immigration

AbstractScholarship, including seminal research on prejudice, identifies adolescence as a critical period for the development of attitudes. Yet most sociological research on prejudice, especially in the form of anti-immigrant sentiment, focuses on the relationship between contemporaneous social conditions and attitudes towards out-groups while neglecting the demographic context during one’s impressionable years. Therefore, we design research to investigate the relationship among temporally distal and temporally proximal sub-national contexts and native-born attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. To do this, we merge geocoded data from the General Social Survey (1994–2016) with a unique US state-level dataset (1900–2015). Results from multilevel models reveal that immigrant presence during adolescence is a more consistent predictor of attitudes towards immigration and immigrants in adulthood. Thus, while the majority of sociological research on anti-immigrant sentiment asks if societal conditions matter, our results suggest that a more important question is when the context matters.

Race, Religion, and Immigration: Experimental Evidence from the Labor Market

In this project, we examine employers’ response to Black immigrants compared to native-born Black Americans. Between July 2017 and December 2018, we applied to publicly advertised positions using fictitious resumes that are manipulated on perceived race and ethnicity (Somali American, African American, and white American). We examine the proportion of resumes that are contacted by employers. We find that male African American applicants are 5 percentage points less likely to be contacted than equivalent white American applicants. Somali American applicants are 11 percentage points less likely to be contacted by employers than equivalent white American applicants and 6 percentage points less likely to be contacted than equivalent African American applicants. For female applicants, the effects followed a similar pattern, but were muted. Signals of language ability, education, and religiosity showed little impact on the proportion contacted by an employer.

Multiple Mainstreams

Multiple Mainstreams Carla Murphy (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 24] I suppose I'm meant to care how "the left" talks about race and class. I fit the profile; I'm a black female journalist. My stories since the early 2000s have featured men and women made invisible or marginalized by society, sometimes by their own communities, and certainly by newsrooms. But as a news gatherer, I've always tinkered on the borderlands of mainstream and progressive journalism, the left's gathering space. I never fully committed. That's because early in my career I settled on an important distinction: it's not how you talk about class and race that matters; it's to and for whom. Audience determines how. Left conversations about race and class rarely center my folks as their audience: the precarious middle-class, working-class, and workingpoor residents of my Brooklyn street; recent immigrants; and native-born Americans like them. Left conversations seem unaware of the value of redistributing news media power such that non-whites and working people construct their own left conversations about race and class. This, to me, is the problem—not how the left's well-educated upper-middle class, unharmed and unbothered by journalism's poverty wages, talks about race and class. As a journalist I always conceived of my role as working for folks who are not in the room. I don't view the progressive or liberal journalist's pursuit of news about marginalized people as progress. From my view in the borderlands, the progressive mission should be to expand the production of news (about race, class, and gender) for these audiences. It should be to create multiple mainstreams strong enough to compete with the mainstream. Producing news about low-wealth people for a better-off, highly educated audience carries a high civic and socioeconomic cost for folks on the losing side of economic inequality and those of us driven to expand democratic participation. It never made sense to me to believe that a shooting in a New York City outer borough has gotten sunlight because a white guy in Greenwich, Connecticut, read about it in an issue of the New York Times. What [End Page 25] does informing him have to do with journalism fulfilling its public service for the people living in that outer borough? Where is their trusted mainstream for surfacing debate, sifting truth from misinformation, and building consensus? I come from city blocks that at one point seemed to be losing one member of every five households to Rikers and to prisons upstate. No mainstream outlet has ever covered that phenomenon commensurate to its effect on generations of families in the sending and receiving zip codes. The affected persons—black, brown, and white—aren't whom those outlets produce news for. Otherwise, we would see newsroom beats like "community health and safety," "justice," or "the prison economy"—instead of "crime." The way that mainstream news media covers healthcare, housing, and higher education, for example, is also shaped by the audience it values. These outlets don't consistently answer the practical, mundane, or even existential questions of people and communities that are low wealth, of color, or immigrant. They answer the white guy in Greenwich's questions. However those outlets talk about race and class, it's for him. They explain the world to him. They center him. They seek to expand his world. They seek to persuade and convince him. They engage and value him. They believe his civic participation matters more than that of the audiences I value. Meanwhile, the nation is browner in real life, and even browner on Gen Z's TV shows and social media. Right now, to paraphrase Ian Haney López, white people are trying to figure out what it means to be white in the United States. For low-wealth families the cost of upward mobility is prohibitive. Is our news system designed for now? It makes sense to me that the journalism industry should serve pluralities, or multiple mainstreams—not only the imagined white, suburban one penning in the black and brown inner-city. That's a throwback to when white...

Social Welfare Attitudes and Immigrants as a Target Population: Experimental Evidence

What makes some Americans assume that social welfare programs will benefit immigrants rather than native-born Americans? How do these assumptions shape their attitudes about policy? Recent observational research has shown that immigration attitudes and social welfare attitudes are strongly correlated, but we lack evidence of exactly how this relationship works. In this pre-registered survey experiment, I study respondents’ assumptions about beneficiaries of a generic social welfare policy, and test the effects of different “threat” primes on the assumption that the policy benefits immigrants rather than native-born Americans. I find that a prime constructing immigrants as a fiscal threat increases the likelihood that a respondent will make this assumption, while a prime emphasizing cultural or demographic threat has no significant effect. These effects vary by geographic context, but not by relevant attitudes. Attitudes about immigration become an important predictor of policy approval when this assumption is triggered.

Regional differences in the impact of diabetes on population health in the USA

BackgroundTo evaluate regional disparities in the influence of diabetes on population health, we examine life expectancies at age 50 between population with diabetes and healthy population and life quality among...