Public perceptions of immigrants and crime This essay originally appeared as a special report for the Immigration Policy Center, a division of the American Immigration Law Foundation. It is printed here with the permission of the IPC and the AILF. Myths and stereotypes about immigrants and crime often provide the underpinnings for public policies and […]

Influential voices in the media and in public policy circles have sustained the impression and perhaps heightened the concern that high levels of immigration harm resident Americans by reducing their wages.  This perception of “labour market flooding” – sometimes billed as “common sense” (Brimelow, 1995) – is bolstered by the logic of introductory-level microeconomic theory.  […]

On July 2, 2000, Vicente Fox became Mexico’s first democratically-elected opposition president, and almost made good on a campaign promise to re-examine US-Mexican migration relations by proposing that the countries of North America begin eliminating controls on regional labor flows. The idea of a common market fell on deaf ears within the United States, but […]

Over the last three decades the U.S. has experienced a second great surge in immigration, comparable in many respects to the massive increase in foreign born workers in the Age of Mass Migration – the decades around the start of the last century. Between 1970 and 2005 the foreign-born share of the U.S. labor force […]

Summary How have heightened border controls affected the decision-making of unauthorized Mexican migrants to the United States? My research findings, based on highly detailed, face-to-face interviews with 1,327 migrants and their relatives in Mexico during the last 18 months, support earlier research showing that tightened border enforcement since 1993 has not stopped nor even discouraged […]

United States tolerance and the Mexican omission In practice, the phenomenon of labor migration works as a system of complementary components. What for one country is a process for immigrant arrivals, for the other is a process of emigration and people in transit. In order for the system to work, the logic of how these […]