My final research project: The impact of state-level bills on immigration policy

The impact of state-level bills on immigration policy

With the worldwide globalization age, the world is developing into a network-based community, and therefore international emigration and immigration among developed and developing countries is becoming one of the striking phenomena reflecting today’s fast-changing worldwide socio-economic situations. In the United States, a world super-power, the immigration issue is one of the serious socio-economic problems that Americans consider. Historically, the number of immigrants has continuously increased in the United States, and their political and economic power influence American society at a certain level. The number of illegal immigrants since the 1980s has explosively increased, but they can be an issue influencing serious social illness or several criminal acts. Moreover, the serious economic downturn provides momentum to increasing conflicts between American citizens and immigrants living in the United States. Many Americans consider immigrants as plunderers of the country’s economic pie, and therefore many states have passed anti-immigration bills limiting immigrants’ legal rights and status. To American federal and state governments, immigration presents one of the very difficult problems to give relevant answers to.

Under this consideration, this research deals with the impact of immigration bills on immigration policy. That is, I assume the newly-made immigration bills place a considerable limitation on the socio-economic life of immigrants in the United States. The purpose of this research is to review with a critical mind how several immigration bills at the state and federal levels influence immigrants living in the United States in terms of their economic life.

To do so, data that I will use for my final research project are related to MPI (Migration Policy Institute) data hub and U.S. Census data. MPI data (http://www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/) includes the latest immigration-related statistics for the United States and other countries in 2007 as a base year. Moreover, it also showcases the most current national and state-level demographic, social, and economic facts about immigrants to the United States; as well as stock, flow, citizenship, net migration, and historical data for countries in Europe, North America, and Oceania. U.S. Census data, as one of the favorite data sources for social scientists, is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Of several parts of U.S. Census data, I will select The Statistical Abstract of the United States (http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/) for my research to grasp basic information about immigrants living in the United States, such as the number of immigrants by state, their income level, and so on. Especially, I will compare these data in the 2006 version of the Statistical Abstract (as a proxy data before the advent of radical immigration bills) and the 2008 version of the Statistical Abstract (as a proxy data after the advent of radical immigration bills) to understand the impact of immigration bills.

With these datasets, as I mentioned earlier, I would like to review the following research questions: (1) how several 2007 immigration bills passed by states have influenced immigrants’ economic life, (2) the number of immigration bills (total), status of immigration bills (passed, rejected, expired, and pending), types of immigration bills (regulating employment, regulating law enforcement, contracting rights), and how they are associated with changes in immigrants’ lives, mainly in terms of their economic conditions, and (3) how the immigration bills since 2007 impact states differently; that is, the differences in impact between states that traditionally have many legal and illegal immigrants, such as Arizona, Texas, California, and Florida, and others that have smaller numbers of immigrants. To do so, this research will use the state as the unit of analysis. By using some empirical methods, such as descriptive, ANOVA, and multiple regression analysis, I will deal with the relationship between independent variables (state response like introduction and implementation of immigration bills) and dependent variable (immigrant’s economic condition or life). Several conditional variables, such as some demographic, political, and contextual factors by state, can be included in the process of the research development.

Regarding my research, I need more data sources regarding immigration and immigration policy at the state and federal levels, if possible. So does anyone know the relevant data sources regarding them? Which factors relevantly reflect immigrants’ economic conditions? In my research, immigration bills can basically be considered as a strong “limitation” factor to immigrants’ socio-economic rights, although not all immigration bills have unfavorable characteristics towards legal and illegal immigrants. Under this condition, how can I deal with all immigration bills having diverse types, status, and intentions to understand the relationship of other independent variables?