Abstract
We use the Immigrants Admitted to the United States (microdata) supplemented with special tabulations from the Department of Homeland Security to examine how family reunification impacts the age composition of new immigrant cohorts since 1980. We develop a family migration multiplier measure for the period 1981–2009 that improves on prior studies by including immigrants granted legal status under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and relaxing unrealistic assumptions required by synthetic cohort measures. Results show that every 100 initiating immigrants admitted between 1981 and 1985 sponsored an average of 260 family members; the comparable figure for initiating immigrants for the 1996–2000 cohort is 345 family members. Furthermore, the number of family migrants ages 50 and over rose from 44 to 74 per 100 initiating migrants. The discussion considers the health and welfare implications of late-age immigration in a climate of growing fiscal restraint and an aging native population.
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Notes
Australia and Canada consider age by assigning fewer points for seniors.
The Department of Homeland Security Yearbook of Immigration Statistics does publish the age distribution of legal permanent residents by sex, but not by visa categories or regions of origin.
The criteria for the tabulations is specified in written communications with M. Hoefer, director, Office of Immigration Statistics, USDHS, September 21, 2010, and J. Simansky, chief, Communications Division, Office of Immigration Statistics, USDHS, November 17, 2010.
Other studies use the term “principal immigrants” to refer to initiating immigrants (Yu 2008; Jasso and Rosenzweig 1986), but to avoid confusion with the USDHS use of the term Principal Alien, we use the term “initiating immigrant.” For example, a sibling of a U.S. citizen sponsored under the family 4th preference would be classified as a principal alien by USDHS (because she can sponsor accompanying family dependents), but would not be considered an initiating immigrant because an earlier migrant sponsored her.
Mexican nationals accounted for 75 percent of all IRCA amnesty recipients (Rytina 2002, p. 3).
Unlike the USDHS use of the term “family immigrants,” which reflects LPRs admitted as U.S. citizens’ immediate relatives or under family-sponsored preferences, we also include as “family immigrants” the accompanying family dependents of initiating immigrants (Monger 2010, p. 2). For example, we characterize the accompanying family members of an employer-sponsored initiating immigrant as family immigrants, whereas USDHS classifies them under employment-based preferences admissions.
Although there exist visa backlogs for second preference family members, over the period we study these range from 2 to 8 years for most countries and up to 10 years for Mexico, with more recent petitions reaching the upper end of the spectrum (Wasem 2010a).
Spouses of U.S. citizens may naturalize after three rather than five years as LPRs. The other naturalization requirements consist of age (18 years or older), English language proficiency, knowledge of U.S. government and history, and good moral character (Lee 2010, p. 1).
Eight years is the median of the total median years in LPR status during this study’s period of observation (Lee 2010, p. 4).
For an earlier period, Jasso and Rosenzweig (1990, p. 230) estimated that less than five percent of parent sponsors were U.S.-born children who used their citizenship entitlement to sponsor parents when they reached age of majority. We contacted the Department of Homeland Security for estimates of the number of U.S.-born children who sponsor their parents and were told that direct estimates are unavailable. Furthermore, the New Immigrant Survey, which is based on the 2003 LPR admission cohort, lacks information about the age of sponsors (Jasso et al. 2006).
In the interest of parsimony, we do not elaborate the welfare reforms in detail, but some cross-state differences are noteworthy. A minority of states used their own funds to extend Medicaid benefits to new immigrants during the five-year ban, and five states created substitute income-support programs for some groups of immigrants rendered ineligible for SSI by PRWORA; however, most of these benefits were less generous than the federal program or subject to more stringent conditions relative to SSI in the pre-1996 period (Zimmerman and Tumlin 1999).
Deeming practices vary across states, however, and few benefit agencies seek reimbursement from sponsors both because states do not face penalties for failure to pursue reimbursement and because the costs of seeking reimbursement from sponsors exceed the benefits (NILC 2009; Ambegaokar and Blazer 2011).
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Princeton Center for the Demography of Aging (NIH Grant P30 AG024361); institutional support was provided by a grant (#R24HD047879) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Office of Population Research. An earlier version of this research was presented at the 2012 Annual Meetings of the Population Association of America, San Francisco.
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Carr, S., Tienda, M. Family Sponsorship and Late-Age Immigration in Aging America: Revised and Expanded Estimates of Chained Migration. Popul Res Policy Rev 32, 825–849 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-013-9300-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-013-9300-y