Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality, edited by DavidCard and StevenRaphael. 2013. Series: National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 469 + xiv. ISBN: 978‐0‐87154‐498‐8, $55.
本书汇集了经济学家、社会学家等多学科研究者对移民如何影响美国本土工人、移民贫困的地理分布、代际流动以及公共政策效果的严谨分析，适合关注移民与贫困问题的学者和政策制定者。
The contributors to Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality could hardly be pleased with the current tone accorded these topics in the looming presidential election. Editors David Card and Steven Raphael (as well as many of their contributors) have long produced critically informed research on how and why immigrants impact U.S.-born workers, the significance of demographic and economic shifts, and the socioeconomic trajectories of immigrants over time and across generations. Much of this compilation is more of the same, modeling a rigorously objective, question-led approach to a contentious field, while demonstrating the abundance of ways issues are framed and debated. In addition, the volume provides a timely focus on varying and changing state policies on immigration and welfare, and relatedly on the lives of young immigrants and members of the second generation. Attention to these authors’ concerted efforts to answer urgent questions with innovative thoughtful approaches would significantly improve public discourse. Card and Raphael's substantial introduction has numerous detailed summary tables illuminating questions from policy and academic circles as well as the data and measurements used to answer them. It is useful on its own merits to any reader seeking a comprehensive introduction to these issues. The book is then divided into four parts, with chapters coming from a well-assembled team of economists, sociologists, geographers, and education and public policy researchers. The authors’ understanding of each other's contributions both within and outside of this volume yields analytical dividends beyond disciplinary divides. The first part focuses on immigrants in the labor force and the geography of immigrant poverty. Giovanni Peri and Ethan Lewis employ counterfactual simulations to formalize and test arguments of immigrant–native worker substitutability. Peri finds that new low-skilled immigrants diminish the wages of older less-skilled immigrants and Lewis finds similar effects operating through English language skills—but crucially neither finds negative effects for native-born workers. In a volume where geography provides analytical grounding in terms of comparing and disaggregating composition and policy effects across scales, the next two chapters are the most explicit about places. After finding that places with high levels of racial (black/white) segregation are also places of high immigrant segregation with native-born whites, Michael Stoll's intervening variable approach suggests a causal relationship between segregation and English language ability. Mark Ellis, Richard Wright, and Matthew Townley's chapter enquires about the changing relationships between immigrant poverty and changing locations. Their decomposition analysis shows immigrant poverty increased as the most disadvantaged immigrants sorted into lower waged cities pressed into higher poverty by the Great Recession. These authors are all able to test causal hypotheses through experimental models that formally specify relationships and disaggregate groups, places, and time periods. The second part of the book concentrates on the socioeconomic progress of immigrants and their children, both across generations and over time. These three studies all focus on Los Angeles, with the first two utilizing the very relevant Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) data. Renee Reichl Luthra and Roger Waldinger analyze group-variant intercepts and slopes of parent–child education and occupation as the interplay of origin country selection of parents and second-generation outcomes. In contrast to conventional upward or downward assimilation accounts, they emphasize significant intergenerational mobility of the second-generation overall, but also posit alternatives such as the “working class incorporation” (p. 201) of children of less educated Mexicans. The other chapters provide in-depth ethnographic investigation of different second-generation outcomes. Lee and Zhou explore the “frames of achievement” (p. 215) that condition 1.5/second-generation Asian success but are largely absent for 1.5/second-generation Mexicans. In a frame that affects some of Lee and Zhou's participants, Gonzales’ study of young Mexican-origin adults illuminates the obstacles of undocumented status and how they unfold over a critical period for intergenerational mobility and adult outcomes. These authors stress the significance of parental resources and social and educational context for the large cohort of young adult and nearly adult children of immigrants. The third part of the volume focuses on how public policy—from immigration enforcement to employment and welfare restrictions—affects immigrant poverty. Douglas Massey's comprehensive historical analysis catalogues modern immigration policy and its racialized stigmatizing practice toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans. This provides an excellent set text for those unfamiliar with how Mexicans became so different from other immigrant groups but also sets the stage for analysis of contemporary policy shifts. Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes similarly conduct a thorough analysis of how the status quo of relatively poorer immigrant households and children emerged from two decades’ worth of increasing limitations on immigrants’ access to social welfare. Sara Bohn and Magnus Lofstrum's synthetic comparison examines the probable effects of Arizona's recent Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), finding that it drove undocumented workers toward informal employment or out of Arizona, but failed to benefit legal immigrants or native-born workers. Cybelle Fox, Irene Bloemraad, and Christel Kesler test immigrant explanations (disenfranchisement, perceived group threat, and diversity) for reduced state welfare provision, but find only that states with larger black (and to a lesser extent, larger Asian and Hispanic) populations have less redistribution. With rapidly shifting state and federal policies, the context within which immigrants and others experience poverty or social mobility, these authors investigate the origins of the current system and its ongoing emergence. The final section is a single chapter in which Christian Dustmann and Tommaso Frattini critically detail the European experience with immigration and its differences from the U.S. experience in terms of history, source countries, migrant stocks, and education and labor market outcomes. It is useful in that much theory in this field has been framed from North America with overwhelming reference to its post-1965 shift in source countries. In standing alone this chapter begs for another European chapter or two on immigration and inequality, and is a reminder of the rarity of comparative work in this field (despite increasingly ever-present political contestation of immigration and austerity on both sides of the Atlantic). Some of the chapters could be better edited so that intensive data analysis does not threaten to subsume key findings. But this is a minor quibble for, overall, the tables excellently demonstrate the numerous relationships that condition hypotheses and their testing in this enormous and seismic field. The second-generation accounts could come from somewhere else as well as Los Angeles (even Europe), but they serve to illustrate theoretical differences in expectations, as well as the very different experiences by origin group. This 469-page volume is already a massive contribution. Challenging model approaches and findings are detailed in footnotes for specialists or skeptics, but explained in more comprehensible language for a wider public in the text. The multidisciplinary array of researchers is carefully modest, often asserting the limitations of their own approach while detailing it so carefully as to encourage scrutiny, critical attention to questions, concepts, and data, and further research. The writing is often exceptional, and the significance of the issues both theoretical and political made clear. Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality should be of interest to any researcher working in the area. It deserves careful reading from any of us evaluating these issues, whether at work or at the ballot box.