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In this IMR Methods Note, we spotlight the rise in quantitative data availability, measurements, and scholarly investigations of US immigrant and immigration policies (IIPs). To begin, we offer a detailed account of the quantitative data sources, measures, and analytical strategies that have been developed by scholars studying IIPs over the last two decades. We then highlight this scholarship's important advances toward identifying IIPs’ intended, unintended, and spillover effects on immigrant and nonimmigrant populations in the United States. To conclude, we discuss ongoing challenges and future opportunities for deepening research on US IIPs and their psychosocial, behavioral, and health implications. Our review illuminates how data on federal immigration enforcement activities, and on federal, state, and municipal immigrant laws have engendered increasingly sophisticated quantitative studies of the US IIP climate. At the same time, it highlights several dimensions in which existing work stands to be strengthened, including the need for comparisons of newly developed IIP measures and their estimated effects; greater exploration of IIPs’ potentially heterogeneous effects across distinct subpopulations; and more attention to endogeneity, or in other words, the political and demographic processes that give rise to nonrandom variation in how IIPs take shape across space and time. 

Abstract Scholarship on migrant identity increasingly shows that migrants can—and often do—construct multifaceted identities. Yet, questions around migrant identity formation remain contested in France, given a strongly assimilationist policy context that (in theory) precludes multiple identification. This paper explores intergenerational patterns of migrant identification in France using a nationally representative sample of 1st-, 1.5th-, and 2nd-generation migrants in France from five diverse sending regions in the Trajectories and Origin Survey. We conduct a latent profile analysis to identify qualitatively different unobserved (or latent) categories of migrant identification based on observed responses to questions of identification and belonging. These analyses suggest there are five distinct “identificational orientations” among migrants: assimilated, active bicultural, othered bicultural, detached bicultural, and ethnic. While the assimilated and ethnic categories provide some support for a traditional assimilation framework, biculturalism is widely prevalent and multifaceted: We identify three distinct varieties of biculturalism (active, othered, and detached). We also provide evidence of segmentation in identificational assimilation by region of origin and conduct multivariate analyses that shed insight into the experiences that correlate with different identificational orientations. Our findings question the presumed threat of strong ethnic identification to France’s national cohesion and offer starting points for future research on how complex identities are formed within strongly assimilationist receiving contexts like France. 

A considerable literature explores whether the fertility of migrants from high-fertility contexts converges with that of women in lower fertility destinations. Nonetheless, much of this research compares migrants’ reproductive outcomes to those of native-born women in destination countries. Drawing on research emphasizing the importance of transnational perspectives, we standardize and integrate data collected in France (the destination) and in six high-fertility African countries (the senders). We show that African migrants in our sample had higher children ever born (CEB) than native French women but lower CEB than women in corresponding origin countries. These findings suggest that socialization into pronatalist norms is an incomplete explanation for migrant fertility in the first generation, an insight that is overlooked when analyzing destination settings only. Next, we conduct multivariate analyses that weight migrants’ background characteristics to resemble women in both origin and destination countries. Findings indicate that observed differences between African migrants in France and women in African origin countries help explain differences in CEB between the two groups, which supports selection. We also demonstrate that African migrants in France had delayed transitions into first, second, and third births and lower completed fertility compared to women in origin countries, thus disputing the disruption hypothesis. Finally, we show that observed differences between African migrants in France and native French women explain differences in CEB between the two groups, which supports adaptation. These multifaceted findings on selection, disruption, and adaptation would be obscured by analyzing destination settings only, thus validating a multisited approach to migrant fertility. 

Do migrants adopt the contraceptive norms dominant in their destination context? To explore this question, the authors adopt a multisited analysis in which they standardize and integrate data on women’s contraceptive use from two different sources: the Trajectoires et Origines survey collected in France (the receiving country) and the Demographic and Health Survey collected in Turkey (the sending country). Descriptive analyses indicate that contraceptive use of migrant women from Turkey in France is more comparable with that of nonmigrant women in France compared with nonmigrant women in Turkey. To address migrant selectivity on observed characteristics in multivariate analyses, nonmigrant groups in France and Turkey are reweighted with entropy balancing to resemble migrants on observed characteristics. Multivariate results indicate that there are sizable differences in contraceptive use between Turkish migrants and nonmigrant Turkish women, which undermines the hypothesis of selection on observables. Yet there are no significant differences between migrants and nonmigrant French women in contraceptive methods, thus supporting an adaptation perspective. Supplementary analyses highlight several pathways that could help explain these findings. 

Abstract This research note presents a multisited analysis of migration and contraceptive use by standardizing and integrating a sample of African migrants in France from six West and Central African countries in the Trajectoires et Origines survey with a sample of women living in the same six African countries in the Demographic and Health Surveys. Descriptive analyses indicate that the contraceptive use of migrants more closely aligns with that of native French women than with that of women from origin countries. In particular, migrants report dramatically higher use of long-acting reversible contraceptives and short-acting hormonal methods and lower use of traditional methods than do women in the countries of origin. Although migrants differ from women in the countries of origin on observed characteristics, including education and family background, reweighting women in the origin countries to resemble migrants on these characteristics does little to explain differences in contraceptive use between the groups. Given that contraceptive use is an important proximate determinant of fertility, our results suggest that contraceptive use should feature more prominently in the dominant demographic paradigms of migrant fertility.