Stimulus Control Procedure for Reducing Vocal Stereotypies in an Autistic Child

Stereotyped vocal behavior exhibited by a seven-year-old child diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and maintained by automatic reinforcement was placed under stimulus control through discrimination training. The training consisted of matching a green card (SD) with free access to vocal stereotypy and a red card (SD-absent) with interruption of stereotypy and vocal redirection. At the same time, appropriate behaviors were reinforced. After discrimination training, the child rarely engaged in vocal stereotypy in the red card condition and, to a greater extent, in the green card condition, demonstrating the ability to discriminate between the two different situations. After the training, the intervention began. Once they reached the latency criterion in the red stimulus condition, the child could have free access to vocal stereotypy (green card condition). The latency criterion for engaging in stereotypy was gradually increased during the red card condition and progressively decreased during the green card condition. The intervention follows a changing criterion design. This study indicates that stimulus discrimination training is a useful intervention to reduce vocal stereotypy in an autistic child.

Inclusive Storytelling: Community Reaction to Immigrant Youth Experiences in Atlanta

From 2016 to 2018, an interdisciplinary community-engaged project incorporating community-based participatory research methodology, explored how the role of storytelling is integral for the transference of knowledge, history, and sense of purpose. The outcomes help us understand how the views of receiving communities change over time with respect to migrants through their own stories, thus impacting the work of immigrant-serving organizations, such as Georgia-based Welcoming America, a nonprofit committed to implementing a variety of initiatives to cultivate welcoming cities and welcoming regions. Our project gauges the impact of the 2018 publication, Green Card Youth Voices: Immigration Stories from an Atlanta High School.

Nativity Penalty, Legal Status Paradox: The Effects of Nativity and Legal Status Signals in the U.S. Labor Market

Combining field experimental, survey, and interview data, this article examines whether and why employers screen higher-educated Latino men based on nativity and legal status. The field experiment, a correspondence audit study of 1,364 real jobs in eight cities, shows that employers are twice as likely to call back native-born as foreign-born Latinos. Paradoxically, however, employers do not differentially screen foreign-born Latinos based on legal status: employers called back documented green card holders with full work rights at almost the same rates as undocumented Latinos without the right to work. A national survey experiment of 468 HR representatives, and interviews with 23 HR representatives and immigration lawyers, reveal that individual and organizational mechanisms explain why employers are reluctant to hire Latino immigrants, regardless of their legal standing. Individually, employers hold nativist views about Latino immigrants’ English language ability, which they perceive could threaten workplace culture. And organizationally, employers associate Latino immigrants with immigration enforcement and deportation, which they perceive could threaten workplace stability. Ultimately, the results point to the power of individual perceptions and immigration laws for hampering the employment of even documented college-educated Latinos.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words? The Untapped Potential of V4 Parliaments in EU Affairs

This article offers the first ever comparative analysis of the involvement of V4 parliaments in the sphere of European Union (EU) affairs. Its underlying research objective is to determine what conditions V4’s parliamentary participation in various EU-oriented activities such as domestic scrutiny of the government’s EU policy, the political dialogue with the Commission, the Early Warning System for subsidiarity control, and the green card initiative. Based on the actual scrutiny output, parliamentary minutes, and data from questionnaires, we address the questions: (1) To what extent domestic legislatures act as autonomous as opposed to government-supporting actors in these arenas? (2) Do they mostly act as EU veto players, or try to contribute constructively to the EU policy-making process by bringing alternative policy ideas? (3) What are their motivations for engaging in direct dialogue with EU institutions in addition to domestic scrutiny? and (4) How MPs envisage their own EU-oriented roles? While the article reveals that V4 parliaments mostly act as gatekeepers in the sphere of EU affairs, it also casts a new light on the previous literature findings related to the EU-oriented performance of the Czech and Polish lower chambers. We conclude that, generally, V4 parliaments refrain from fully exploiting their relatively strong formal prerogatives in EU affairs—a fact that can be partly explained by the composition of their ruling majorities.

The Global White Snake as Digital Activist Project

There is a long oral tradition and written record for the legend of the White Snake. As a woman, her “original sin” is being a snake. She is a snake who has cultivated herself for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to attain the form of a beautiful woman. Living as a resident “alien” (yilei) in the “Human Realm” (renjian), the White Snake has always been treated with suspicion, fear, exclusion, and violent suppression/exorcism. The White Snake is an immigrant to the human world, whose serpentine identity made her a “resident alien,” the legal category given to immigrants in the United States before they receive their “Green Card” and become a “permanent resident.” The implication of being a snake woman in the human world took on new meanings when the COVID-19 pandemic worsened the existing xenophobia, fear, and suspicion toward minority populations in the contemporary United States and throughout the world. Inspired by the Chinese White Snake legend, the three Anglophone opera, film, and stage projects from Cerise Lim Jacobs, Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri, and Mary Zimmerman, energetically engage with issues relevant to minority activism in the United States and more broadly, through digital media and digital platforms.

Comparing the Effectiveness of Assignment Strategies for Estimating Likely Undocumented Status in Secondary Data Sources for Latino and Asian Immigrants

Researchers are increasingly interested in the role of undocumented status in immigrant economic, social, and health outcomes. A major obstacle to this work is that detailed immigration status is not widely collected in representative data sources. Some secondary data sources collect enough information to identify immigrants without a green card (non-LPRs), and researchers take different approaches to assign undocumented status to immigrants within this population. These approaches have not been compared to one another, nor do we know if they work equally well for Latino and Asian immigrants. In this research note, we test the validity of several assignment strategies using the 2001, 2004, and 2008 panels of the restricted version of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to measure differences in health-related outcomes (e.g., health insurance coverage and self-rated health) by immigration status. We compare results when immigration status is directly measured using the detailed information in the SIPP to several strategies to assign undocumented status among non-LPRs. The probabilistic approach produced the smallest biases, but Asian immigrants had larger biases compared to Latinos across all strategies.

Skilled Labor Mobility and Firm Value: Evidence from Green Card Allocations

This paper studies how the labor market frictions of skilled workers affect corporate valuation. The analysis features immigrant workers’ mobility constraints imposed by the U.S. green card application process and exploits exogenous variations caused by imperfections in the current immigration system. The study finds that relaxing mobility constraints negatively influences firm value. This effect is stronger for firms with higher labor adjustment costs. Reductions in investments and increases in labor costs are channels through which labor mobility adversely affects firm value. The findings suggest that monopoly rent over skilled workers is an important economic determinant of corporate valuation.

Inadequate Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Varicella Immunity Among Employees

Objectives: The purpose of this cohort study was to evaluate measles, mumps, rubella (MMR), and varicella immunity among a population of adult employees receiving primary care in an employer-sponsored health center. Methods: Participants were eligible for MMR and varicella immunity screening if they were an employee receiving primary care in an employer-sponsored health center between January 1, 2019 and November 1, 2020 who could not provide proof of immunization and 1) had it recommended by their provider, 2) specifically requested immunity testing (often because they had heard of measles outbreaks in their country of origin), or 3) were seen for an immigration physical for their Green Card application. Results: Overall, 3494 patients were screened for their MMR immunity. Of these, 3057 were also screened for varicella immunity. Among these patients, 13.9% lacked measles immunity, 0.83% lacked immunity to all 3 components of MMR, and 13.2% lacked varicella immunity. Among the 262 patients who presented specifically for immunity screening, the rates of lacking immunity were higher for all conditions: 22.7% lacked measles immunity and 9.2% lacked varicella immunity. Conclusion: Given declines in immunizations during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is reason to be concerned that measles and varicella-associated morbidity and mortality may rise. Employers, especially those with large foreign-born populations or who require international travel may want to educate their populations about common contagious illnesses and offer immunity validation or vaccinations at no or low cost.

Household disability costs and living standards in Turkey: evidence from a health reform

PurposeIn this study, we attempt to estimate the disability costs of households employing the Standard of Livings (SoL) approach and evaluate the impact of the Universal health system reform implemented in Turkey in 2008.Design/methodology/approachWe apply a Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), which simultaneously estimates the disability and living standard equations, including unobserved latent variables. Moreover, we apply a difference-in-differences (DiD) framework to investigate the impact of the universal health insurance (UHI) system and the Green Card programme on living standards. The empirical analysis relies on data derived from the cross-sectional Household Budget Surveys (HBS) during the period 2002–2013.FindingsOur findings suggest a negative and significant impact of disability on SoL, where disability costs reach the 23% of the household income, which is equivalent almost to $2,600 (USD). Furthermore, the disability costs are reduced from $4,450 to $2,260 due to the UHI and the Green Card programme.Research limitations/implicationsA major limitation of the study is the data structure, which is based on repeated cross-sectional surveys. By using panel data, it is possible to follow the same individual across time and to implement panel data models to control for unobserved heterogeneity and omitted-variable bias.Social implicationsDisability has adverse effects on living standards. The estimation of the disability-related costs may provide a useful guide on policy planning and the design of social benefits.Originality/valueThe contribution of this paper is that it is the first study estimating the disability-related costs in Turkey. Furthermore, the contribution lies in the investigation of the 2008 health reform and the Green Card programme and its impact on disability costs.