Immigration cohorts and residential overcrowding in southern California

Abstract

To what degree do immigrants reduce their high rates of residential overcrowding with increasing length of residence in the United States? This question is addressed through the application of a "double cohort" method that nests birth cohorts within immigration cohorts. This method enables duration of immigration effects to be separated from aging effects as cohorts pass through life course phases, when family sizes may be growing or shrinking. The analysis finds that cohort trends differ sharply from the cross-sectional pattern observed at a single point in time. Cohorts' growth in income is found to contribute substantially to the decline in overcrowding over time. Cohort trends among Hispanic immigrants, however, diverge from those among others, indicating much less decrease in overcrowding and even increases over certain age spans.

Toward an improved understanding of immigrant adaptation and transnational engagement: the case of Cuban Émigrés in the United States

“…4 See Eckstein (2009), Chapter One for overview of Mannheim and Ryder theses. 5 The kinds of immigration cohort analyses carried out by Borjas (1985), Myers and Lee (1996), Myers and Cranford (1998), as well as in this article, are distinct from studies of immigrant generations based on genealogical remove from the first in a family to emigrate. Generational cohort analyses based on genealogical remove are conceptually ahistoric.…”

“…Previous scholars have used a cohort framework to analyze immigrant adaptation. For example, Borjas (1985) deployed a cohort approach to estimate the effects of immigrants' human capital on their earnings, and Myers and Lee (1996;1998), and Myers and Cranford (1998), modeled the effects of aging and length of US residence on immigrant housing attainment and occupational mobility. However, heretofore no scholar has conceptualized different immigration cohorts to capture historically grounded premigration experiences and their possible long-term cross-border impact.…”

“…Assimilation analyses typically highlighted how the longer immigrants lived in a new country, the greater their acculturation and overall integration, owing to their exposure to the ways of their new land (see Alba and Nee 2003 for a review of this perspective). Some scholars refer to this post-migration dynamic as the duration effect (Chiswick, 1978;Myers and Lee, 1996). 3 Building on the assimilation paradigm, host country adaptation has also been shown to vary with age at time of migration: the younger the age, the greater the assimilation and acculturation (Rumbaut, 2004).…”

“…Yet, it may be theoretically desirable to differentiate and include all three variables as predictors in a model. The second issue is the confounding of duration and immigration cohort (Myers and Lee, 1996). Researchers have typically used immigration cohort to represent effects owing to varying lengths of residence in the host country (Chiswick, 1978).…”

“…To address these problems, Myers and Lee (1996) proposed a double cohort method wherein observations from cross-sectional surveys at two time points are linked through dual birth and immigration year memberships to create synthetic cohorts that can be followed over time. We adopt their method, and in preliminary analysis not shown here (results available upon request), used a hierarchical backward model selection strategy to obtain the following reduced-form double cohort model:…”