Socioeconomic Diversity Among African Immigrants in the United States: An Intra-African Immigrant Comparison

Recent studies on Black immigrants in the USA report higher than average socioeconomic and educational attainment for African immigrants. Based on an intra-African immigrant comparison, we examine the generalizability of this finding to African groups of differing countries and regions using data from the 1990 and 2000 5 % U.S. census Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples (IPUMS). We specifically ask whether hourly earnings of African immigrants vary by region of origin. Results of our analyses reveal that sending region is an important determinant of variations in hourly earnings among African immigrants. Also, data indicate that both race and gender are significantly associated with earning outcomes; with the earnings of males and whites significantly higher than those of females and blacks. We discuss these findings in the context of the so-called “black immigrant success story.”     

Middle East and north Africa regional conference of psychology, dubai, United arab emirates

The first Middle East and North Africa Regional Conference of Psychology (MENA RCP) was held in Dubai. United Arab Emirates, December 13–18, 2003, under the auspices of the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS), the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP), and the International Association for Cross–Cultural Psychology (IACCP). It was organized by a local Conference Committee and by the Yemen Psychological Association (YPA), in collaboration with the Egyptian Association for Psychological Studies (EAPS). High attendance, with participation from 35 countries, including 17 from the neighbouring Middle East and North Africa region, was a major achievement of the conference. Conference participants, many of them leaders of their national psychology associations, who also attended the concomitant National Capacity Building Workshop organized by the IUPsyS, signed an official Declaration to create a Regional Council of Arab Psychological Associations during the coming year and to follow this first MENA Conference with a second conference to be held in Amman. Jordan, in 2005.     

Ethnoracial Origins, Social Capital, and Earnings

The purpose of this article is to analyse ethnoracial differences in income attainment, as well as differences in earnings that can be attributed to social capital. The data set is the Ethnic Diversity Survey, a large survey of Canadians conducted by Statistics Canada in 2002. Bivariate and multivariate analyses show that ethnoracial minorities are disadvantaged when compared with the British or whites in general. This disparity remains even after controlling for a host of theoretically relevant variables. The brunt of this disadvantage is experienced by male visible-minority immigrants. Although social capital is shown to exert an independent effect on earnings, its benefit varies by social origins, types of social capital, birth, and gender. Trust is important for females’ earnings but not for males’. Family contact and religious participation benefits British males’ earnings more than those of visible-minority males. Religious participation also benefits those born in Canada more than those who immigrated to Canada. In contrast, female immigrants benefit from their associational participation more than females born in Canada.     

Gender-Role Attitudes and Earnings: A Multinational Study of Married Women and Men

This paper examines the impact of gender-role attitudes on earnings for married individuals. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and nationally representative data, we tested our hypotheses on 4,785 males and 4,368 females from 28 countries located in North and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia and the South Pacific. We found that compared to individuals in their own countries, women with egalitarian attitudes had significantly higher earnings then women with traditional attitudes. In addition, for both women and men, we found an interaction between gender-role attitudes and hours worked. Egalitarianism had a stronger positive effect on earnings among individuals who worked more hours.     

The goal to be accepted by friends as underlying function of overt aggressive behaviour in immigrant adolescents

This study investigated (1) to what extent the goal to be accepted by friends is an underlying function of overt aggressive behavior in adolescents, and (2) whether this function is more predictive than reactive aggression for overt aggressive behavior in first and second generation immigrants compared with natives. The sample comprised 339 native Austrians (51.6% girls), 126 first generation immigrants (48.4% girls), and 175 second generation immigrants (54.3% girls) aged 14 to 19 (M = 15.61). Data were collected via self-assessments. Multiple group latent means and covariance structures (MACS) models revealed that the goal to be accepted by friends was a stronger predictor than reactive aggression for overt aggressive behavior in first generation immigrants compared with second generation immigrants and natives. Furthermore, gender moderated these associations. The goal to be accepted by friends was a very strong predictor of overt aggressive behavior in first generation immigrant boys, but not in first generation immigrant girls. Results are discussed regarding the process of acculturation in first generation immigrant youth.     

Protestant images of Islam: Disparaging stereotypes reconfirmed

The paper explores the impact of two largely overlooked factors which sustained and reconfirmed the disparaging images American Protestants harboured towards Islam, particularly those which prefigured and informed the perceptions New England missionaries carried over with them in their efforts to evangelize the Orient and the Levant. First, America's encounter with the Barbary States of North Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century, are considered. Second, the life and thought of Henry H. Jessup, a leading missionary in the Levant, is examined as illustrative evidence of the reports and impressions relayed back by the missionaries themselves.     

Differences between Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Israeli college students in attitudes toward date selection and sex relations: A research note

Jewish and Arab–Moslem students attending an Israeli college were compared for their date selection criteria and their attitudes toward sexual relations. Questionnaires were completed by 214 Jews and 162 Arabs. Seventy percent of the respondents in both groups were women. Jews (more than Arabs) and males (more than females) showed a greater tendency to mention physical appearance as a selection criterion. In both ethnic groups, women thought that a longer dating period is needed before having sex. However, Jewish females did not differ from Jewish males in their vision of the appropriate age to start having sex, whereas Arab men and women did differ. The findings indicate that Israeli–Arab college students are considerably more traditional than Jewish students in their attitudes toward sex and dating and that the gender differences among Arabs are larger. The results are controlled for religiosity, family status, and financial status.     

A Comparison of Wages by Gender and Region of Origin for Newly Arrived Refugees in the USA

The resettlement model supported by the US government aims to help recently arrived refugees achieve economic self-reliance within the first 90 to 180 days of arrival. In addition to the challenges they face in adapting to their new locations, however, refugees enter a US labor market characterized by preexisting wage disparities based on race and gender. Meanwhile, recent changes in US refugee and immigration policies have infused debates over nationalism, Islamophobia, and the economics of resettlement. In this context, it is critical to assess whether refugees face wage discrimination that may affect their ability to become economically self-reliant. Drawing on the International Rescue Committee’s administrative data on refugee resettlement, we examine the extent to which starting wages for newly arrived refugees differ by region of origin and gender. The study found consistent gender pay gaps among the majority of new arrivals. The study also identified lower wages for refugees arriving from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean compared to other regions. These trends suggest a need for more consistent agency monitoring of employment placement, and the development of strategies to ensure more equitable employment outcomes for refugees.     

Bias at the intersection of race and gender: Evidence from preschool‐aged children

There is ample evidence of racial and gender bias in young children, but thus far this evidence comes almost exclusively from children's responses to a single social category (either race or gender). Yet we are each simultaneously members of many social categories (including our race and gender). Among adults, racial and gender biases intersect: negative racial biases are expressed more strongly against males than females. Here, we consider the developmental origin of bias at the intersection of race and gender. Relying on both implicit and explicit measures, we assessed 4‐year‐old children's responses to target images of children who varied systematically in both race (Black and White) and gender (male and female). Children revealed a strong and consistent pro‐White bias. This racial bias was expressed more strongly for males than females: children's responses to Black boys were less positive than to Black girls, White boys or White girls. This outcome, which constitutes the earliest evidence of bias at the intersection of race and gender, underscores the importance of addressing bias in the first years of life.     

GENDER AND CULTURE INTERACTION EFFECTS ON SCHOLASTIC APTITUDE TEST PERFORMANCE: SOME ISRAELI FINDINGS

The major aim of this study was to assess the degree of interaction between gender and cultural group background in determining scholastic aptitude test attainment among college student candidates. The analyses were based on the college entrance aptitude test scores of 1778 Jewish and 1017 Arab student candidates applying for admission to a major Israeli university. A Manova of the subtest scores revealed significant main effects for both culture and gender and a significant gender × culture interaction effect. Separate Anovas for each of the individual subtests show significant gender × culture interaction effects for both the Mathematical and Figural Reasoning subtests, with a larger gender group differential - in favor of the males - among Jews than among Arabs. The interaction effect was attributed, in part, to two complementary culture-specific factors, namely: (a) the positive self-selection of Arab female college candidates of relatively high scholastic ability, thus serving to narrow the gender gap in the Arab group; (b) the varied opportunities for advanced technical training, enrichment and experience available mainly to Jewish males during their period of compulsorly military service, serving to enhance the gender gap in the Jewish group. In sum, the data suggest that culture may serve as an important moderator variable in determining the size of gender group differences in scholastic aptitude test attainment.     

Ronald F. Levant: Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research

Presents Ronald F. Levant as the 2011 winner of the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research. "Ronald F. Levant is one of the world's leading authorities on the psychology of men and masculinity. Through his pioneering research, he helped define gender role strain theory, fostered a multicultural understanding of fathering and masculinity issues, and developed and evaluated the Male Role Norms Inventory and the Normative Male Alexithymia Scale. He also established the empirical foundation for the normative male alexithymia hypothesis, which proposes that male socialization inhibits emotional expression in males, and he developed alexithymia reduction treatment, which is designed to prepare men to engage more fully in psychotherapy and to experience greater benefit from it." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).     

Sustaining a Strong Cultural and National Identity: The Acculturation of Immigrants and Second-generation Canadians of Asian and African Descent

Immigrants often internalize a new national identity when they move to another country (psychological acculturation), although doing so means identifying with a culture that has values and traditions different from those of their culture of origin. A total of 403 immigrants, mostly from Asia (54.4%) and Africa (34.9%), and 78 Canadians whose parents had emigrated mostly from Asia (84.4%) completed a questionnaire on their integration into Canadian society and the discriminatory barriers that they faced. In support of Social Identity Theory (SIT), the strength with which respondents identified with Canada was associated with less cultural group bias, whereas the strength with which they identified with their cultural group was associated with more cultural group bias (Hypothesis 1). That is, a strong national identity moderated the tendency of immigrants (Study 1) and Canadians who are the children of immigrants (Study 2) to favour their cultural group over others. In addition, these opposing identity-differentiation relationships were stronger for those who believed that their heritage culture was incompatible with Canadian culture (Hypothesis 2). Unexpectedly, support for Hypothesis 2 was much stronger for the small sample of Canadians in Study 2, and their identification with and participation in mainstream Canadian society were negatively related to perceived discrimination. These and other results support the value of balanced multiculturalism policies designed to combat racism and encourage immigrants and their native-born children to identify strongly with their host nation while maintaining their heritage culture.     

Work and immigrants: An analysis of employment activity in the first ten years of establishment in the Montreal area

The Quebec labour market of the last two decades has undergone profound changes due to progress in information technology and market globalization. This new context has generated new forms of work which have been termed” non-standard work”. Since the early eighties, the number of such positions has been growing significantly. Often associated with precarious employment activity, the phenomenon of non-standard work has raised a fundamental question: are these positions stable? This is the main question that we wish to investigate from the perspective of new immigrants: do new immigrants achieve stability in the labour market upon arrival in Quebec? In a society that has, quite often for demographic and economic reasons, welcomed an average of 35,000 newcomers every year since the early 90s, the success (or failure) of economic integration rests in part on immigrants’ capacity to participate in the labour market and remain employed. Our analysis is based on a longitudinal survey that describes the biographical trajectories of the Settlement of New Immigrants (SNI). This survey describes the main attempts of 1,000 immigrants’ to establish themselves over a period of 10 years in the greater Montreal area. This research mainly shows that continuous sequences of employment are growing overtime, thus ensuring new immigrants greater stability in the labour market. On the other hand, results suggest that racial discrimination modulates labour market participation, in particular for natives of North Africa and the Middle East.     

Human Capital and the Economic Assimilation of Recent Immigrants in Hong Kong

Using data from the 1996, 2001, and 2006 years of the Hong Kong Population Census, this paper reported the nativity earnings gap among a synthetic cohort of immigrant and native male Chinese employees in Hong Kong. Consistent with previous research, we found earnings divergence for all workers. However, this earnings divergence masked a reverse trend for low-skilled workers. Over time, low-skilled immigrant workers gained earnings assimilation with low-skilled native workers, but high-skilled immigrant workers did not gain assimilation with high-skilled native workers. A decomposition analysis suggested that the relative skill prices cannot explain the overtime change in the relative mean-earnings gaps by nativity. Further separating pre- and postmigration education of immigrants did not improve the explanatory power of the relative skill prices. Our results for Hong Kong are consistent with the findings from recent research on the economic assimilation of low-skilled immigrants in other countries.     

Divisions of Labor in Mexican Origin and Anglo Families: Structure and Culture

Using OLS regression we model predictors of housework hours for 393 Mexican origin and Anglo families from California and Arizona. Contradicting cultural theories, Mexican origin mothers performed less housework when they were employed more hours, had higher relative earnings, and when husbands had more education. Mexican origin fathers performed more housework when family income was lower, wives contributed a larger share of earnings, and fathers had more egalitarian gender ideals. Fathers’ employment hours, wives’ gender attitudes, and familism were not significantly associated with housework hours in Mexican origin families, but were significant in Anglo families. Unique features of the study include analysis of generational status, gatekeeping, and familism. Theoretical reasons for attitudes and socioeconomic status predicting housework are discussed.     

Religious Affiliation and Attendance Among Immigrants in Eight Western Countries: Individual and Contextual Effects

This study examines the religious affiliation and participation of immigrants from a large-scale, comparative perspective. I propose a "specific migration" framework, in which immigrants' religiosity is an outcome of both individual characteristics and contextual properties related to immigrants' country of origin, country of destination, and combinations of origin and destination (i.e., communities). I use notions discussed in the religion and migration literature that fit into this scheme. To test these ideas, I collected and standardized 20 existing surveys on immigrants in eight Western countries, yielding about 38,000 immigrants. Applying multilevel models, I found, among other things, that: (1) immigrants from countries with higher levels of modernization express lower levels of religious commitment; (2) immigrants in religious countries are more religious themselves; and (3) the well-documented higher levels of religious commitment among women is not generalizable to immigrants.     

Immigrant Enclave Thesis Reconsidered: Case of Chinese Immigrants in the Enclave and Mainstream Economy in Canada

Since the development of the immigrant enclave thesis, there has been a disagreement regarding whether the immigrant enclave hurts or benefits individual immigrants’ earnings. The controversy mainly arises from the imprecise way by which enclave participation is measured and from the difference in performance between entrepreneurs and workers. This study uses data from the 2006 Census of Canada to examine how Chinese immigrants who participate in the mainstream economy and enclave economy differ in earnings. Using “the language used most often at work” to determine enclave participation, the study finds that actual and net earnings of Chinese immigrants in the enclave are lower than those of their counterparts in the mainstream economy. However, when the interaction between human capital and enclave participation is considered, human capital brings a net negative return to enclave participants, but at the same time, a positive effect associated with enclave participation. The positive effect may be understood as coming from unmeasured ethnic and cultural features of the enclave that provide a cushion to lessen the magnitude of income disadvantages in the enclave. The study suggests that there is evidence to support both sides of the debate: enclave participants have lower net returns, but the enclave provides a cushioning effect in reducing earnings disparities. The study suggests that integration policy towards immigrants may consider immigrant enclaves as providing some support to immigrants to soften some disadvantages, but enclaves do not offer the same opportunities as the mainstream economy.     

A basis for bias in geographical judgments

To determine why North Americans tend to locate European cities south of North American cities at similar latitudes (Tversky, 1981), we had observers provide bearing estimates between cities in the U.S. and Europe. Earlier research using latitude estimates of these cities has indicated that each continent has several subjective regions (Friedman & Brown, 2000a). Participants judged cities from two subjectively northern regions (Milwaukee-Munich), two subjectively southern regions (Memphis-Lisbon), and the two "crossed" regions (Albuquerque-Geneva; Minneapolis-Rome). Estimates were biased only when cities from the subjectively northern regions of North America were paired with cities from the subjectively southern region of Europe. In contrast to the view that biases are derived from distorted or aligned map-like representations, the data provide evidence that the subjective representation of global geography is principally categorical. Biases in numerical location estimates of individual cities and in bearing estimates between city pairs are derived from plausible reasoning processes operating on the same categorical representations.     

Adolescents' orientation toward the future: Sex role differentiation in a sociocultural context

The present study examines sociocultural variations of gender differences reflected in the future orientation of Israeli Jews and Arabs as cases of modernity vs. transition to modernity, respectively. One hundred and twelve Jewish adolescents (61 males and 51 females) and 116 Arab adolescents (67 males and 49 females), all high school seniors in a college-bound program, responded to an open-ended future orientation questionnaire and listed their hopes and fears for the future. These responses were categorized into eight life domains (school and matriculation, military service, higher education, work and career, marriage and family, self, others, collective issues) and each domain was analyzed in terms of salience (i.e., importance and interest, assessed by number of pertinent statements) and specificity (i.e., extent of detail and concreteness, rated on a 1–3 scale). Results supported the hopothesized instrumental-expressive division between Jewish males and females and the primacy of higher education for Arab females. Analysis employing U. Bronfenbrenner's (The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) ecological model of development suggests that these gender differences are sustained by the developmental settings of Jewish and Arab adolescents.     

Why don't they stay at home? Prejudices against ethnic minorities in Italy

This study was conducted in Bologna, Italy, to analyse attitudes concerning ethnic minorities and emotions experienced in intergroup relations. Stereotypes of North African immigrants were investigated as a function of 'geographical' proximity with black people (living in the neighbourhood of black immigrants versus living in districts without immigrants) and origin (natives of Bologna versus residents who moved from Southern Italy to Bologna). It was predicted that the most positive stereotypes would be found among natives of Bologna living in the same neighbourhoods as North Africans, while the most negative prejudices would occur among the South Italians who do not live in the same districts as black people. Results indicate that neighbourhood has a central importance but effects of respondents' origins are more mixed.