America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity

Acknowledgments

xiii Acknowledgments T his book represents the culmination of several years of research and thinking about a number of social science research questions that have occupied center stage in the longstanding (but never more salient than now) debate in the United States over the issue of immigration reform. Whether and how U.S. admissions policies should be modified in order to try to achieve a stronger American society and economy is a subject with many facets. Thus, researching and writing this book has constituted a long project with a large number of sub-topics. As a result, many people and institutions have contributed in one way or another, in some form or fashion , to the furtherance and no doubt the betterment of the endeavor. In acknowledging these contributions, it is perhaps appropriate to start at the beginning. In this regard, special thanks are owed first to Harley Browning for encouraging and providing an opportunity when the first author was an assistant professor at the University of Texas to become involved in the field of what now might be called Latino population studies, an involvement that eventually led to the development of substantial interests in the economic sociology and demography of immigration. A particular note of thanks is also accorded Sidney Weintraub, now the William Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., whose collaboration with the first author some years ago in a project on Mexican migration and U.S. policy led to the development of a program of research, many of whose results have been included in this volume. The investigations on which the book is based have received support from several institutions. Some of the work incorporated into several of the chapters occurred when the first author was still affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin, working at the Population Research Center as a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs. A word of appreciation is in order to both the Population Research Cen- xiv Acknowledgments ter (and its then director, Myron Gutmann) and the LBJ School (and its then dean, Max Sherman) for providing in ways both large and small the kind of stimulating intellectual environment and the sort of research infrastructure that makes possible policy-relevant social science research. The University Research Institute of the University of Texas also supported some of the projects out of which this book developed , as did the Department of Sociology through its granting of a leave to the senior investigator. The University of Texas at Austin also welcomed Stevens as a visiting scholar from 1998 to 1999 when she had a sabbatical leave from the University of Illinois, a time that enabled the collaborative nature of this effort to begin to flourish. We would particularly like to acknowledge the help of a number of persons at the Texas Population Research Center for their assistance: Cecilia Dean, Diane Fisher, Jenny Frary, Eve Kleinman, and Starling Pullum. We also extend a very special note of thanks to the Department of Sociology, the School of Social Sciences, and the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at the University of California, Irvine, for contributing in important ways to the project, especially through the establishment of the Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy (codirected by the first author), which has also supported some of the book’s research. We are extremely grateful for the research or other assistance provided by Jeanne Batalova, Carolynn Bramlett, Andrea Dinesh, Charles Morgan, Christine Oh, Ping Ren, and MaryAnn Zovak, all at the University of California, Irvine. We also appreciate very much the research assistance provided by Xavier Escandell and Hiromi Ishizawa, both at the University of Illinois. We also express our deepest appreciation to several foundations and funding agencies that have generously furnished financial support for some of the research on which the book is based. These include the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation , the William P. and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, the National Institute of Aging, and the National Institute of Child Health and Development. A Guggenheim Fellowship to the first author during 2002 was particularly helpful in allowing relatively unencumbered time that could be devoted to writing, and a Visiting Scholar award at the Russell Sage Foundation to the first author during the academic year 2002 to 2003 provided an opportunity to undertake final revisions and put...