scholarly journals Refugee Admissions and Public Safety: Are Refugee Settlement Areas More Prone to Crime?

2020 ◽  
pp. 019791832092019
Author(s):  
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes ◽  
Cynthia Bansak ◽  
Susan Pozo

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of refugees worldwide rose to 25.9 million in 2018. Despite the increased need for refugee resettlements, resistance to the welcoming of refugees appears to have grown. The perception that refugees may engage in criminal behavior has served as fuel for closing the door to refugees in the United States and Europe. Is there any basis for this fear? We exploit variation in the geographic and temporal distribution of refugee resettlements across counties to ascertain if their presence can be linked to greater local violence in the case of the United States. We fail to find any statistically significant evidence of refugee resettlements raising local arrest or offense rates. Institutions that help refugees assimilate into the US labor market may contribute to these favorable outcomes. Overall, these findings widen our understanding of refugee resettlement in the United States and suggest that the adoption of humanitarian efforts to support these international flows need not be discouraged.

Author(s):  
Holly M. Mikkelson

This chapter traces the development of the medical interpreting profession in the United States as a case study. It begins with the conception of interpreters as volunteer helpers or dual-role medical professionals who happened to have some knowledge of languages other than English. Then it examines the emergence of training programs for medical interpreters, incipient efforts to impose standards by means of certification tests, the role of government in providing language access in health care, and the beginning of a labor market for paid medical interpreters. The chapter concludes with a description of the current situation of professional medical interpreting in the United States, in terms of training, certification and the labor market, and makes recommendations for further development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 109 ◽  
pp. 192-198
Author(s):  
Heriberto Gonzalez-Lozano ◽  
Sandra Orozco-Aleman

We study how drug violence in Mexico and internal immigration enforcement in the United States affect the selectivity of Mexican immigrants. We find that violence is associated with an increase in English proficiency among immigrants. Furthermore, the deterrence effect of interior enforcement varies: it is associated with increases in the probability of observing undocumented immigrants with prior migration experience, who are English proficient and have higher unobservable abilities. Those factors are associated with a higher probability of finding a job, and higher productivity and earnings in the US labor market.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Close Subtirelu

AbstractMultilingualism is often framed as human capital that increases individuals’ labor market value. Such assertions overlook the role of ideology in assigning value to languages and their speakers based on factors other than communicative utility. This article explores the value assigned to Spanish-English bilingualism on the United States labor market through a mixed methods analysis of online job advertisements. Findings suggest that Spanish-English bilingualism is frequently preferred or required for employment in the US, but that such employment opportunities are less lucrative. The results suggest a penalty associated with Spanish-English bilingualism in which positions listing such language requirements advertise lower wages than observationally similar positions. Quantitative disparities and qualitative differences in the specification of language requirements across income levels suggest that bilingual labor is assigned value through a racial lens that leads to linguistic work undertaken by and for US Latinxs being assigned less value. (Multilingualism, labor market, Spanish in the United States, economics of language, raciolinguistics, human capital)*


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enghin Atalay ◽  
Phai Phongthiengtham ◽  
Sebastian Sotelo ◽  
Daniel Tannenbaum

Using the text from job ads, we introduce a new dataset to describe the evolution of work from 1950 to 2000. We show that the transformation of the US labor market away from routine cognitive and manual tasks and toward nonroutine interactive and analytic tasks has been larger than prior research has found, with a substantial fraction of total changes occurring within narrowly defined job titles. We provide narrative and systematic evidence on changes in task content within job titles and on the emergence and disappearance of individual job titles. (JEL E24, J21, J24, J31, N32)


Author(s):  
Aaron B. Wagner ◽  
Elaine L. Hill ◽  
Sean E. Ryan ◽  
Ziteng Sun ◽  
Grace Deng ◽  
...  

AbstractSocial distancing measures, with varying degrees of restriction, have been imposed around the world in order to stem the spread of COVID-19. In this work we analyze the effect of current social distancing measures in the United States. We quantify the reduction in doubling rate, by state, that is associated with social distancing. We find that social distancing is associated with a statistically-significant reduction in the doubling rate for all but three states. At the same time, we do not find significant evidence that social distancing has resulted in a reduction in the number of daily confirmed cases. Instead, social distancing has merely stabilized the spread of the disease. We provide an illustration of our findings for each state, including point estimates of the effective reproduction number, R, both with and without social distancing. We also discuss the policy implications of our findings.


Author(s):  
Mark E. Schweitzer ◽  
Emily Dohrman

The pandemic brought unusually large and novel changes to the US labor market. Some sectors lost half or nearly half of their employment; others moved their workforces to home settings. Some workers lost their jobs, some left their jobs temporarily, and some left the workforce altogether. These changes have affected different demographic groups differently. We investigate how the pandemic affected workers of different ages, racial or ethnic backgrounds, and gender and the degree to which these effects have persisted after a year of recovery.


2020 ◽  
pp. 016001762094608
Author(s):  
Nikhil Kaza ◽  
Katherine Nesse

Categorizing places based on their network connections to other places in the region reveals not only population concentration but also economic dynamics that are missed in other typologies. The US Office of Management and Budget categorization of counties into metropolitan/micropolitan and central/outlying is widely seen as insufficient for many analytic purposes. In this article, we use a coreness index from network analysis to identify labor market centrality of a county. We use county-to-county commute flows, including internal commuting, to identify regional hierarchies. Indicators broken down by this typology reveal counterintuitive results in many cases. Not all strong core counties have large populations or high levels of urbanization. Employment in these strong core counties grew faster in the postrecession (2008–2015) than in other types of counties. This economic dimension is missed by other typologies, suggesting that our categorization may be useful for regional analysis and policy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-205
Author(s):  
Ellen Percy Kraly ◽  
Holly E. Reed ◽  
Malay K. Majmundar ◽  
Susan McGrath ◽  
Pia Orrenius ◽  
...  

This paper summarizes the presentations and discussions of a virtual stakeholder meeting on Refugee Resettlement in the United States which built on the foundation of the May 2019 workshop represented in this special issue. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and hosted by the Committee on Population (CPOP) of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Dec 1–2, 2020, 1 the meeting convened migration researchers, representatives of US voluntary resettlement agencies, and other practitioners to consider the role of migration research in informing programs serving refugees and migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing an emphasis on bringing global learning to those on the ground working with refugees. The goal of CPOP's work in this area has always been to build bridges between communities of research and practice and to create a dialogue for a shared agenda. We present the goals and framework for the 2020 meeting, followed by a summary of each of the four sessions and themes that emerged from these discussions. The paper ends by considering effective ways of amplifying the role of research in refugee policy and programs of refugee resettlement in the United States and how demographers and population researchers might contribute to this goal.


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