"Zombie Ideas" on US Immigration: A Conversation with Professor Rubén Rumbaut

Professor Alex Aleinikoff is Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School in New York City, and he has recently launched a new podcast called "Tempest Tossed." His latest interview is with Rubén Rumbaut, who is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UC, Irvine, and is someone whose name shows up regularly in my blog postings. The focus of the discussion is on "zombie ideas" regarding immigration which Professor Rumbaut describes as ideas that should be dead. They are false ideas and stereotypes that endure despite the lack of any evidence to support them. These include ideas such as immigrants are criminals and rapists, hurt the economy, and damage society.

This is a must-listen podcast:

Is China's Birth Rate Even Lower Than We Thought?

A few days ago I noted that the fertility rate in South Korea may have dropped to less than one child per woman. A paper just out by Stuart Gietel-Basten and associates has results from China's 2015 1% mini-census that suggests similarly very low levels of fertility--although probably not any lower than in South Korea.

In this paper, we produced a simple analysis of the 2015 mini-census of China without any statistical manipulation. Given the recent decision by the National Bureau of Statistics to cease publishing age-specific fertility rates, this data source represents one of the few means to calculate national and disaggregated measures of fertility in contemporary China. Our exercise found a national TFR of just above one, and very low TFRs in both urban and rural areas, and especially among migrant women. Our analysis of the contribution of changing trends in marriage lends credence to the idea that the postponement effect is being strongly felt in China.

The authors are careful to note that these results are tentative. The intercensal mini-census covered about 14 million people, so the sample is very large numerically, but census data are not necessarily as precise as information from vital statistics registration systems. Nonetheless, the results are consistent with various other sources, as the authors note. Although the results come from a date just prior to the government's lifting of the one-child policy, it seems pretty clear that China's road back to replacement-level fertility will probably be a long one.

Tanzania's President Urges Women to STOP Using Birth Control!

CNN has just reported that the President of Tanzania, John Magufuli, has called on women in his country to stop using birth control because the country needs more people. 

"Those going for family planning are lazy ... they are afraid they will not be able to feed their children. They do not want to work hard to feed a large family and that is why they opt for birth controls and end up with one or two children only," he said at a public rally on Sunday. He was quoted in a local newspaper, The Citizen, as saying that those advocating for birth control were foreign and had sinister motives.

Magufuli urged citizens to keep reproducing as the government was investing in maternal health and opening new district hospitals.

Now, for the record, the latest PRB World Population Data Sheet show that the average woman in Tanzania is having 5.2 children. To be sure, this is down from 6 children 20 years ago, but it still means that Tanzania is one of the top 8 countries in the world in terms of population growth over the next several decades. They are projected to increase from the current 59 million to 84 million by 2030 and 138 million by 2050--more than a doubling in scarcely more than three decades! And these projections assume that fertility will drop to about 3.5 children by the middle of this century.

So, the need for women to stop using birth control is obviously bogus. Magufuli argued that:

"You have cattle. You are big farmers. You can feed your children. Why then resort to birth control?" he asked. "This is my opinion, I see no reason to control births in Tanzania," Magufuli, who has two children, said.

The CNN reporter, Stephanie Busari, hints at the real issue--sexism. Males seem to be feeling threatened by increasing control of women over their own bodies and lives. In the meantime, the future of Tanzania almost certainly depends upon women using more birth control, not less.

Are Baby Boomer Women Redefining Retirement?

As each new generation comes along, there is a tendency to focus on the group at its younger ages (e.g., the publicity now being given to iGen aka Generation Z). But keep in mind that each successively older generation is changing the world that younger generations will move into. For example, a new paper in the journal Sociology Compass addresses the issue of how Baby Boomer women are redefining retirement. The authors, Anne-Maree Sawyer and Sara James, are both Australian sociologists, but their paper covers things going on in the U.S. and the U.K, as well as in Australia. These are general principles, not just country-specific.

As a consequence of the large‐scale entry of women into the labour force from the 1960s (Toossi, 2002), the baby boomers1 are the first generation of women to encounter retirement since its institutionalisation as an expected (male) life course transition in the early‐mid 20th century (Kohli, 2007).

You can see three important issues here: (1) the concept of retirement was built around men retiring from full-time work outside the home; (2) there has been a tremendous increase in the proportion of women who work outside the home; and (3) this gender shift is affecting Baby Boomers in a way no previous generation was affected.

Many baby boomer women entered the labour force as “pioneers,” moving far beyond the domestic worlds of their mothers. Now, facing retirement in the early decades of the 21st century, they inhabit a social landscape in which “the old ideology and the new are tangled together” (Onyx & Benton, 1996, p. 20). In an era of delayed and intensive parenting, public policy emphases on home‐based care for older people, and the rise of the “sandwich generation” (Brody, 1990), social science scholars claim that women are more engaged in intergenerational family care‐giving than previously (Moen & Lam, 2015, p. 595; Vreugdenhil, 2014).

Compared with men's employment histories, women's more heterogeneous patterns of employment—characterised by career interruptions and fragmentation, higher rates of part‐time and casual employment, unpaid work and family care‐giving—are generating gendered inequalities in retirement incomes (Foster, 2012; Shuey & O'Rand, 2004; Slevin & Wingrove, 1995). It is estimated that only 20 percent of boomer women will be “comfortable” in their retirement (Dailey, 2000; Ray Karpen, 2017), despite prevailing popular images of baby boomer retirees as intrepid adventurers spending their children's inheritance (Arlington, 2017; Brown, 2012; Edmunds, 2017).

Given improvements in life expectancy over time, and hoped-for improvements in health--not just life--at the older ages, and given the fact that women tend to live longer than men, it seems reasonable to assume that Baby Boomer women will delay full retirement, at least partly because they won't be able to afford to not keep working. The experiences of this first generation of women moving so much more completely into their own retirement than previous generations will offer important guidance for how younger generations should think about their own aging process.

Census Bureau Links Income Data to Recent College Grads

Yesterday I blogged about the continued importance of parents in their children's success. There is a very high correlation in every modern society between education and income, so getting the highest level of education you can continues to be an important element of success, no matter who you parents are. There are a lot of reasons to become educated, but obviously higher income is one of them. That is why it is very interesting to see a new project from the U.S. Census Bureau aimed at showing income levels among college graduates a year after they graduate.

The Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) project tabulates earnings by institution, degree level and degree field. PSEO does this by linking university transcript data to the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) records, which list unemployment-insurance covered quarterly earnings.

Data from PSEO offer an important assessment tool to plan postsecondary education and address a major gap in education statistics by providing a much clearer picture of what happens when a graduate gets a job out of state.

“Up until now, individual states could only measure earnings and employment outcomes for persons who worked in the same state where they were educated,” said John Abowd, chief scientist and associate director for research and methodology at the Census Bureau. “Thanks to this pilot, states, universities and prospective students have the opportunity to see employment outcomes by program of study by region and industry.”

So far the University of Texas system is the only university to have provided the requisite transcript data to the Census Bureau and, as you can see in the graph below, just a year out from graduation, the typical person is making nearly $50,000 per year. Economics majors do the best among the four shown in the graph (and you can see data for other majors by downloading spreadsheets from the PSEO website). There are some obvious limitations to the data, as the Census Bureau clearly points out, but this seems like a very innovative use of data. They promise more results down the road--stay tuned.