Abstract
Immigration and inequality are inextricably intertwined. Inequality is an important determinant of immigration, and immigration in turn generates powerful inequalities. The study of immigration and inequality is not usually considered “social psychological.” Yet social psychology provides general conceptual tools which can illuminate not only the inner workings of immigration and inequality but also their deep connections and affinities with phenomena and processes in farflung domains. Accordingly, this chapter explores the social psychology of immigration and inequality. We adopt the strategy of starting both from basic theory and from inductive exploration of immigration and inequality. As will be seen, the two approaches touch, suggesting that someday, with the growth of knowledge, they will converge. Basic theory yields a wealth of testable predictions for the relations between natives and immigrants and between different types of immigrants, including predictions for emigration, social distance, discrimination, segregation, profiling, and assimilation. Inductive exploration yields a wealth of testable propositions, including propositions about types of migrants, the effects of U.S. immigration law on sibship inequality, and the black immigrants and native U.S. citizens who may help eradicate racial and color inequality. Both approaches increase knowledge, not least by pointing to theoretical and empirical lacunae as well as data deficiencies. Each approach nurtures and spurs the other—basic theory by challenging empiricalists to test the theoretical predictions, inductive exploration by challenging theorists to incorporate new terms (such as rights) and to derive new predictions.
Everything that rises must converge. Teilhard de Chardin, 1950
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Notes
- 1.
The gold standard is the Newtonian hypothetico-deductive theory, whose assumptions are “genuine guesses about the structure of the world” (Popper 1963, p. 245), whose predictions display the “marvellous deductive unfolding” of the theory (Popper 1963, p. 221), and whose fruitfulness is evident in the “derivations far afield from its original domain,” which “permit an increasingly broad and diversified basis for testing the theory” (Danto 1967, pp. 299–300)—exactly in the spirit of Merton’s words above.
- 2.
What we are here calling two approaches are sometimes regarded as sequential stages in the development of a scientific discipline—in the classic formulation by Koopmans (1947), the “Kepler stage” of discovering “empirical regularities” and the “Newton stage” of discovering “fundamental laws.” Knowledge gained with the guiding hand of theory is more robust and reliable than knowledge obtained from “measurement without theory” (Koopmans 1947) or “inference without theory” (Wolpin 2013).
- 3.
The Gini and the two Theil measures are among the set of classical measures of overall inequality. Others include the Atkinson measures and Pearson’s coefficient of variation. For brief introduction to these measures and their formulas, see Jasso and Kotz (2008, pp. 37–41).
- 4.
The term “comparison” is used to denote outcomes generated by comparing an actual amount of X to a just or expected amount of X (the X* version). The outcome depends on both X and X*. This comparison operation is sometimes confused with the operation of locating self or other within a hierarchy, which may require noticing other people’s amounts of X to discern the focal individual’s relative rank. But this latter operation yields only one variable—the relative rank—and this one variable generates the sociobehavioral outcome. The key to avoiding confusion is to ask how many independent variables are in the function generating the outcome. As noted, justice and the other comparison processes are generated by two variables, X and X*, but status and power are generated by only a single variable, X.
- 5.
The expressiveness part of the signature constant θ plays an important part in empirical work but can be safely ignored in much theoretical work. The framing part of the signature constant is always important, but can safely be set as positive, given that results for bads are readily established from results on goods. Accordingly, in the rest of this chapter, the signature constant is fixed at + 1.
- 6.
“The terms “Personal Identity,” “Subgroup Identity,” and “Group Identity” provide a convenient shorthand for “individual’s PSO score,” “subgroup average PSO score,” and “group average PSO score” (Jasso 2008). Because there are many social science terms that include “identity” in them, this chapter follows the convention of capitalizing the three terms used here, to indicate the special meaning attached to them.
- 7.
Mathematically, this is an application of the classic Newtonian idea that mass accumulates at a point.
- 8.
Note that when the subgroup PSO inequality (Section on “Inequality in the Elements of Basic Theory”) is represented by the absolute difference between the average PSO in the two subgroups, it equals the social distance.
- 9.
- 10.
Jasso and Kotz (2008) establish that as personal X inequality increases, subgroup X inequality increases. The social distance results summarized here further establish that as personal X inequality increases, subgroup PSO inequality also increases, but only if people care about material goods and the dominant PSO is justice or power. For example, if X is wealth and the PSO is self-esteem, as personal wealth inequality increases, so do both subgroup wealth inequality and subgroup self-esteem inequality. However, if status is the PSO, as personal wealth inequality increases, so does subgroup wealth inequality but not subgroup status inequality.
- 11.
As further analyses accumulate, exact numerical predictions will become available for justice and power societies. Jasso (2008, pp. 427–430) provides an initial glimpse, suggesting that a justice-materialistic society in which the valued good is Pareto-distributed will resemble a status society, that a justice-nonmaterialistic society and a justice-materialistic society in which the valued good is power-function-distributed will be identical and the mirror image of a status society, and that a justice-materialistic society in which the valued good is lognormally-distributed will have equal numbers of Selfistas and Subgroupistas. These symmetries and asymmetries are rooted in fundamental features of the probability distributions of the valued goods.
- 12.
The reverse is also increasingly the case. It could be said that it is impossible to study social stratification without studying migration (Jasso 2011).
- 13.
This is a major data deficiency which immigration researchers are striving to address. The New Immigrant Survey provides the requisite information for selected annual cohorts of new legal permanent residents (including their entire visa history, which may include spells with temporary visas or in an unauthorized status). But there is currently no similarly detailed information for a representative sample of the population of resident foreign-born. For further information on the New Immigrant Survey and to download public-use data and associated documentation, please see http://nis.princeton.edu.
- 14.
The numerical discrepancy across the estimates developed by the Census Bureau and the Office of Immigration Statistics—a feature of estimates for all years for which the underlying data are available (viz., 2007–2011)—merits further analysis, but such analysis lies outside the scope of the present chapter. One may speculate whether one or more of the Census figures is an underestimate and whether one or more of the DHS figures is an overestimate. Note that it is not unusual for estimates to differ across estimating agency; for example, estimates of the world’s total population prepared by the Census Bureau differ from estimates prepared by the United Nations (Roberts 2011).
- 15.
See Desravines (2013) for a personal account of some of these processes.
- 16.
The United States has a historic commitment of over half a century to eradicate discrimination on racial grounds. It is over 50 years since President John F. Kennedy issued the groundbreaking Executive Order 10925 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin” (6 March 1961) and soon thereafter signed the Equal Pay Act (10 June 1963), extending to gender the protection against discrimination. The new spirit quickly reached the field of immigration, and Congress passed Public Law 87–301 (enacted 26 September 1961), which eliminated the requirement that visa applicants provide their race.
- 17.
The New Immigrant Survey measured respondent skin color using a scale designed by Douglas S. Massey and Jennifer A. Martin, based on an idea originally developed by Massey et al. (2003). The scale is an 11-point scale, ranging from zero to 10, with zero representing albinism (the total absence of color) and 10 representing the darkest possible skin. The ten shades of skin color corresponding to the points 1–10 on the NIS Skin Color Scale are depicted in a chart, with each point represented by a hand, of identical form, but differing in color. The NIS Skin Color Scale is for use by interviewers, who “memorize” the scale, so that respondents never see the chart. [A copy of the Scale appears in the appendix.]
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Appendix. Scale of Skin Color Darkness
Appendix. Scale of Skin Color Darkness
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Jasso, G. (2014). The Social Psychology of Immigration and Inequality. In: McLeod, J., Lawler, E., Schwalbe, M. (eds) Handbook of the Social Psychology of Inequality. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9002-4_23
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