Douglas Massey

• Princeton University

Both homophily and heterophily are observed in humans. Homophily reinforces homogeneous social networks, and heterophily creates new experiences and collaborations. However, at the extremes, high levels of homophily can cultivate prejudice toward out-groups, whereas high levels of heterophily can weaken in-group support. Using data from 24,726 adul...

At the end of the 20th century nearly all developed nations have become countries of immigration, absorbing growing numbers of immigrants not only from developed regions, byt increasingly from developing nations of the Third World. Although international migration has come to play a central role in the social, economic, and demographic dynamics of...

Mexicans have been migrating to the United States in large numbers since the early 20th century and over time the share classified as irregular has varied sharply depending on the social, economic, and political circumstances prevailing north of the Mexico-U.S. border. Here we unmask the reality that irregular migration is more of a socio-political...

The authors of this timely book, Who Gets What?, harness the expertise from across the social sciences to show how skyrocketing inequality and social dislocation are fracturing the stable political identities and alliances of the postwar era across advanced democracies. Drawing on extensive evidence from the United States and Europe, with a focus e...

Modern societies are facing unprecedented changes in their ethnic composition. Increasing ethnic diversity poses critical new challenges as people interact with new cultures, norms, and values, or avoid such encounters. Heated academic and political debates focus on whether and how changes in ethnic composition affect societies and local communitie...

Es de todos conocido la gravedad de la situación que vive Venezuela desde hace años, así como los niveles de deterioro a los que ha llegado la sociedad en general, con indicadores de pobreza y desnutrición expandida y dificultad de sobrevivencia cada vez mayores. En este capítulo se le da prioridad a entender y contextualizar la salida de venezola...

High levels of black residential segregation emerged over the course of the twentieth century as the black population urbanized. Segregation was achieved by means of different mechanisms at different times and places, beginning with targeted violence directed at African Americans followed later by discrimination in real estate and banking using dev...

A series of policy decisions beginning in 1965 produced an exclusionist climate in the United States. Lyndon Johnson sought to eliminate prejudice from the nation’s immigration system but inadvertently curtailed opportunities for legal entry from Mexico that created a large undocumented population. In waging the Cold War, Ronald Reagan launched an...

Linking municipal-level homicide rates from 1990 through 2018 with data from the Mexican Migration Project, we estimate a series of multinomial discrete-time event history models to assess the effect that exposure to lethal violence has on the likelihood of migration within Mexico and to the U.S. without documents. Statistical estimates indicate th...

Conectando tasas de homicidio municipales desde 1990 a 2018 con datos del Proyecto Mexicano de Migración, estimamos una serie de modelos multinomiales de tiempo discreto para evaluar el efecto de la violencia homicida sobre la probabilidad de migrar dentro de México o hacia Estados Unidos sin documentos. Las estimaciones indican que la tasa de homi...

This chapter describes in great detail the Mount Laurel court case and the controversy it generated. It takes a closer look at the emotion and controversy surrounding Mount Laurel's opposition to the Ethel Lawrence Homes as a prelude to the systematic study on the effects of neighbors, the community, and tenants. In 1967 Ethel Lawrence joined with...

This chapter considers whether the move to the Ethel Lawrence Homes (EHL)—and the improved neighborhood conditions it enabled—were sufficient to change the trajectory of people's lives. Systematic comparisons between project residents and members of the nonresident control group indicated significant improvements in mental health, economic independ...

Under the New Jersey State Constitution as interpreted by the State Supreme Court in 1975 and 1983, municipalities are required to use their zoning authority to create realistic opportunities for a fair share of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households. Mount Laurel was the town at the center of the court decisions. As a result, M...

This chapter outlines the study's design and research methodology, describing the specific data sources consulted to determine the effects of the project on the community and the multiple surveys and in-depth interviews conducted to gather information on how the opening of the homes affected residents, neighbors, and the community in general. In th...

This chapter talks about the importance of location in human affairs. Naturally the quality of a dwelling has direct implications for the health, comfort, security, and well-being of the people who inhabit it, and matching the attributes of housing with the needs and resources of families has long been a principal reason for residential mobility in...

This chapter reviews the foregoing results and traces out their implications for public policy and for social theory. It argues that neighborhood circumstances do indeed have profound consequences for individual and family well-being and that housing mobility programs constitute an efficacious way both to reduce poverty and to lower levels of racia...

This chapter focuses on a special survey conducted of the residents of Ethel Lawrence Homes (EHL) and nonresidents to assess how moving into the project affected the residential environment people experienced on a day-to-day basis. The design of the survey compares neighbourhood conditions experienced by EHL residents both before and after they mov...

This chapter describes the construction, organization, and physical appearance of Ethel Lawrence Homes (EHL) and assesses the aesthetics relative to other housing in the area. Bringing affordable housing to her hometown of Mount Laurel was very much Ethel Lawrence's dream. She never gave up the fight for affordable housing in Mount Laurel and the e...

This chapter considers the effects of Ethel Lawrence Homes (EHL) on the ethos of suburban life. It draws on a representative survey and selected interviews with neighbors living in surrounding residential areas, which show that despite all the agitation and emotion before the fact, once the project opened, the reaction of neighbors was surprisingly...

This chapter evaluates the outcomes that were of such grave concern to local residents and township officials prior to the project's construction, using publicly available data to determine the effects it had on crime rates, tax burdens, and property values. It reveals that white suburban residents generally oppose the location of affordable housin...

Since 1987, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has compiled extensive data on the characteristics and behavior of documented and undocumented migrants to the United States, and made them publicly available to users to test theories of international migration and evaluate U.S. immigration and border policies. Findings based on these data have been...

Since 1987, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has collected and disseminated representative survey data on documented and undocumented migration to the United States. The MMP currently includes surveys of 161 communities, which together contain data on 27,113 households and 169,945 individuals, 26,446 of whom have U.S. migratory experience. These...

Significance Changes in social diversity constitute a key factor shaping today’s world, yet scholarly work about the consequences of diversity has been marked by a critical lack of consensus. To address this concern, we propose a multidisciplinary approach where psychological, sociological, and evolutionary perspectives are integrated to provide an...

This article provides a detailed review of the ethnosurvey, a research methodology that has been widely applied to the study of migration for almost four decades. We focus on the application of ethnosurvey methods in Mexico and Poland, drawing on studies done in the former country since the early 1980s and in the latter since the early 1990s (inclu...

Within the scientific community, much attention has focused on improving communications between scientists, policy makers, and the public. To date, efforts have centered on improving the content, accessibility, and delivery of scientific communications. Here we argue that in the current political and media environment faulty communication is no lon...

“In the course of the Great Recession, already fragile black and Hispanic middle-class households lost huge amounts of wealth, which had often been painstakingly accumulated over many decades.” Third in a series on social mobility around the world.

Cambridge Core - US Law - Debating Immigration - edited by Carol M. Swain

Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, we evaluate the effects of documented and undocumented migration on the health of Mexican adults. Results suggest that documented and undocumented migrants are positively selected with respect to health in migrating to the United States and health status does not strongly predict selection into return...

This article underscores the importance of adding a question on parental birthplace to the American Community Survey (ACS). This question was removed from the long form of the U.S. Census after 1970 and replaced by a question on ancestry. While the former provides accurate information about a demographic fact that is critical to the identification...

Telomeres are repetitive nucleotide sequences located at the ends of chromosomes that protect genetic material. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to analyze the relationship between exposure to spatially concentrated disadvantage and telomere length for white and black mothers. We find that neighborhood disadvantage is...

Throughout the world, groups that are socially disadvantaged have poorer health compared to groups that are more advantaged. This book examines the role that stigma and discrimination play in creating and sustaining these group health disparities. Stigma is a social construction in which people who are distinguished by a “mark” are viewed as devian...

In the decade leading up to the US housing crisis, black and Latino borrowers disproportionately received high-cost, high-risk mortgages—a lending disparity well documented by prior quantitative studies. We analyse qualitative data from actors in the lending industry to identify the social structure though which this mortgage discrimination took pl...

Analysis of trends in the suburbanization of whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics reveal that all groups are becoming more suburbanized, though the gap between whites and minorities remains large. Although central cities have made the transition to a majority-minority configuration, suburbs are still overwhelmingly white. Levels of minority-white...

A systematic analysis of residential segregation and spatial interaction by income reveals that as income rises, minority access to integrated neighborhoods, higher levels of interaction with whites, and more affluent neighbors also increase. However, the income payoffs are much lower for African Americans than other groups, especially Asians. Alth...

From 1988 to 2008, the United States’ undocumented population grew from 2 million to 12 million persons. It has since stabilized at around 11 million, a majority of whom are Mexican. As of this writing, some 60 percent of all Mexican immigrants in the United States are in the country illegally. This article analyzes the effect of being undocumented...

A majority of Mexican and Central Americans living in the United States today are undocumented or living in a marginal, temporary legal status. This article is a comparative analysis of how Mexican and non-Mexican Latino immigrants fare in the U.S. labor market. We show that despite higher levels of human capital and a higher class background among...

Also labeled undocumented, irregular, and unauthorized migration, illegal migration places immigrants in tenuous legal circumstances with limited rights and protections. We argue that illegal migration emerged as a structural feature of the second era of capitalist globalization, which emerged in the late twentieth century and was characterized by...

Recent studies have used statistical methods to show that minorities were more likely than equally qualified whites to receive high-cost, high-risk loans during the U.S. housing boom, evidence taken to suggest widespread discrimination in the mortgage lending industry. The evidence, however, was indirect, being inferred from racial differentials th...

Although humanitarian crises, such as the ongoing mass exodus from Syria toward Europe, tend to focus global attention on migration, each year millions of people migrate to and from affected countries throughout the world. Progress has been made in understanding drivers of migration, and we have relatively good data on immigrant populations, but we...

Residential segregation has been called the “structural linchpin” of racial stratification in the United States. Recent work has documented the central role it plays in the geographic concentration of poverty among African-Americans as well as the close connection between exposure to concentrated deprivation and limited life chances. Here we review...

In this article the authors undertake a systematic analysis of why border enforcement backfired as a strategy of immigration control in the United States. They argue theoretically that border enforcement emerged as a policy response to a moral panic about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to the United States propounded by self-interested...

The motivations for human migration are diverse, but can generally be classified under five basic rubrics: material improvement, risk management, symbolic gratification, social connection, and threat evasion. Most theoretical work in recent decades has focused on motivations connected with material improvement, risk management, and social connectio...

Although humans have existed for around 200 000 years, for most of their time on earth their societies were not characterized by much inequality. Despite some differentiation on the basis of age, gender, and kinship, people enjoyed relatively equal access to resources. Inequality begins to rise with the emergence of cities around 10 000 years ago,...

Over the course of history, Latin America has been very strongly shaped by migration. The aboriginal peoples arrived around 11 000 years ago, and by 1492 had expanded to around 54 million people. The modern history of the region begins in 1492 with the arrival of the Spanish followed closely by the Portuguese, whose germs decimated the indigenous p...

From the mid-1950s through the mid1980s, migration between Mexico and the United States constituted a stable system whose contours were shaped by social and economic conditions well-theorized by prevailing models of migration. It evolved as a mostly circular movement of male workers going to a handful of U.S. states in response to changing conditio...

Using data from the Mexican Migration Project we compute probabilities of departure and return for first and later trips to the USA in both documented and undocumented status. We then estimate statistical models to analyze the determinants of departure and return according to legal status. Prior to 1986, Mexico-US migration was characterized by gre...

Civil rights activists in 1968 hoped that the passage of the Fair Housing Act would lead to the residential desegregation of American society. In this article, I assess the degree to which this hope has been fulfilled. I begin by reviewing how the black ghetto came to be a universal feature of American cities during the twentieth century and the me...

In this article, we describe how residential segregation and individual racial disparities generate racialized patterns of subprime lending and lead to financial loss among black borrowers in segregated cities. We conceptualize race as a cumulative disadvantage because of its direct and indirect effects on socioeconomic status at the individual and...

In this note, we use a consistently defined set of metropolitan areas to study patterns and trends in black hypersegregation from 1970 to 2010. Over this 40-year period, 52 metropolitan areas were characterized by hypersegregation at one point or another, although not all at the same time. Over the period, the number of hypersegregated metropolitan...

In this chapter, we document levels and trends in residential segregation for Latin Americans and compare these with those from the African group (the second largest non-European immigrant group in Spain) following a decade of unprecedented growth through international migration. Segregation is measured using two traditional segregation indexes (th...

This chapter shows that measures such as the militarization of the border are not only ineffective in limiting the number of irregular migrants, they also lead to increasing death rates among unauthorized border crossers, rising costs of crossing the border, and longer stays for migrants working in the United States in order to pay off the crossing...

Research on intergenerational economic mobility often ignores the geographic context of childhood, including neighborhood quality and local purchasing power. We hypothesize that individual variation in intergenerational mobility is partly attributable to regional and neighborhood conditions—most notably access to high-quality schools. Using restric...

Using data from the Mexican Migration Project and the Latin American Migration Project, we find that undocumented migration from Mexico reflects U.S. labor demand and access to migrant networks and is little affected by border enforcement, which instead sharply reduces the odds of return movement. Undocumented migration from Central America follows...

Introduction In the last quarter of the twentieth century, virtually all developed nations became countries of immigration. International migration is inextricably bound to the globalization of the economy. As international trade and investment expand and markets penetrate more deeply into regions and sectors that were formerly outside or on the ma...

The black-white divide has long haunted the United States as a driving force behind social inequality. Yet, the civil rights movement, the increase in immigration, and the restructuring of the economy in favor of the rich over the last several decades have begun to alter the contours of inequality. Spheres of Influence, co-authored by noted social...

The preceding article by Lamont, Beljean and Clair (LBC) entitled 'What is Missing? Cultural Processes and Causal Pathways to Inequality' invites us to extend our socio-economic imagination regarding inequality. While much economic and social inequality is structural in nature, LBC discuss how the human experience of inequalities is strongly ground...

Gelişmiş ülkeler bugün, uluslararası göçün etkisiyle çeşitli ve çok kavimli bir yapıya ulaştılar. Uluslararası göçü açıklayan tek ve kapsamlı kuramsal açıklama henüz mevcut değil. Bu tartışmanın amacı çeşitli modellerin temel varsayımlarını ve hipotezlerini netleştirmek ve bütüncül bir biçimde sunabilmekti. Kuramlar göçün başlangıcı ve daha sonra u...

Although Colombia is a major country of emigration, little is known about its citizens' motivations for migration. Social and economic conditions have been studied as determinants of migration, but violence has received less attention. We examine how social networks and violence function to promote emigration from Colombia by linking event-history...

We develop and test a conceptual model of English language acquisition and the strength of the latter in predicting social and cultural assimilation. We present evidence that the path to English proficiency begins with exposure to English in the home country and on prior U.S. trips. English proficiency, then, has direct links to the intermediate mi...

We hypothesize that the manner in which stereotype threat affects college grade achievement is mediated by institutional context as well as individual characteristics. Drawing on a sample of black students from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen we find weak and inconsistent evidence that institutional characteristics influence the operat...

Prior work has documented the remarkable decline in the real wages of Mexican immigrant workers in the U.S. over the past several decades. Although some of this trend might be attributable to the changing characteristics of the migrants themselves, we argue that a more important change was the circumstances under within Mexican immigrants competed...

Las llamadas migraciones “económicas”, cuya causa genérica es el intento de conseguir el acceso a un mejor nivel de vida, tienen múltiples consecuencias en las áreas jurídica, laboral, educativa, social y cultural que colocan a las poblaciones que emigran en una situación de desventaja con respecto a los nacionales de los países de destino. En este...

In this paper we adjudicate between competing claims of persisting segregation and rapid integration by analyzing trends in residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians living in 287 consistently defined metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010. On average, Black segregation and isolation have fallen stea...

Under the New Jersey State Constitution as interpreted by the State Supreme Court in 1975 and 1983, municipalities are required to use their zoning authority to create realistic opportunities for a fair share of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households. Mount Laurel was the town at the center of the court decisions. As a result, M...

While the United States historically has been a polyglot nation characterized by great linguistic diversity, it has also been a zone of language extinction in which immigrant tongues fade and are replaced by monolingual English within a few generations. In 1910, 10 million people reported a mother tongue other than English, notably German, Italian,...

Few studies have examined migrant saving and remittance behavior cross-nationally. In this analysis, we use data from the Mexican Migration Project and Latin American Migration Project to study the remitting and use of migradollars in eight Latin American nations. We observe some variability in the propensity to remit and greater variability in the...

In this essay I discuss how and why U.S. policies intended to stop Latin American immigration to the United States not only failed, but proved counterproductive by ultimately accelerating the rate of both documented and undocumented migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. As a result, the Latino population grew much faster t...

This paper offers a mixed-method analysis of the municipal-level consequences of an affordable housing development built in suburban New Jersey. Opponents of affordable housing development often suggest that creating affordable housing will harm surrounding communities. Feared consequences include increases in crime, declining property values, and...

A finales de la decada de 1950, Estados Unidos permitia la entrada de aproximadamente medio millon de inmigrantes mexicanos al ano, de los cuales 450.000 llegaban con visados de trabajo temporal y 50.000 lo hacian con visados de residentes permanentes. A mediados de la decada de 1960, los cambios en la politica migratoria de Estados Unidos realizad...

At the end of the 1950s, the United States permitted the entry of a half million Mexican migrants per year, of which 450,000 entered with temporary work visas and 50,000 as permanent residents. By the mid-1970s, however, changes in U.S. migration policy undertaken in the name of civil rights had eliminated temporary work visas and limited legal res...

A finales de la década de 1950, Estados Unidos permitía la entrada de aproximadamente medio millón de inmigrantes mexicanos al año, de los cuales 450,000 llegaban con visados de trabajo temporal y 50,000 lo hacían con visados de residentes permanentes. A mediados de la década de 1960, los cambios de la política migratoria de Estados Unidos realizad...

Surveys undergird government statistical systems and social scientific research throughout the world. Rates of nonresponse are rising in cross-sectional surveys (those conducted during a fixed period of time and not repeated). Although this trend worries those concerned with the validity of survey data, there is no necessary relationship between th...

Surveys are the principal source of data not only for social science, but for consumer research, political polling, and federal statistics. In response to social and technological trends, rates of survey nonresponse have risen markedly in recent years, prompting observers to worry about the continued validity of surveys as a tool for data gathering...

We analyzed qualitative data gathered at a selective urban university with a large black student body. We found that black students from integrated backgrounds welcomed the chance to establish friendships with same-race peers even though they were at ease in white settings, whereas students from segregated backgrounds saw same-race peers as a sourc...