Douglas Massey - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Articles & Papers by Douglas Massey

American sociological review, 2010

The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market f... more The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, but it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use in mortgage-backed securities that could be sold on secondary markets. We test this argument by regressing foreclosure actions in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas on measures of black, Hispanic, and Asian segregation while controlling for a variety of housing market conditions, including average creditworthiness, the extent of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, the degree of zoning regulation, and the overall rate of subprime lending. We find that black residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation are powerful predictors of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas. To isolate subprime lending as the causal mechanism through which segregation influences foreclosures, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that confirms the causal effect of black segregation on the number and rate of foreclosures across metropolitan areas. We thus conclude that segregation was an important contributing cause of the foreclosure crisis, along with overbuilding, risky lending practices, lax regulation, and the bursting of the housing price bubble.

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 2010

Using data from Mexico's Matrícula Consular program, we analyze the geographic organization of un... more Using data from Mexico's Matrícula Consular program, we analyze the geographic organization of undocumented Mexican migration to the United States. We show that emigration has moved beyond its historical origins in west-central Mexico into the central region and, to a lesser extent, the southeast and border regions. In the United States, traditional gateways continue to dominate, but a variety of new destinations have emerged. California, in particular, has lost its overwhelming dominance. Although the geographic structure of Mexico-U.S. migration is relatively stable, it has nonetheless continued to evolve and change over time.

Papers by Douglas Massey

Social Science Research, 2011

In 1970, the foreign born percentage of the United States dropped below 5% for the first and only... more In 1970, the foreign born percentage of the United States dropped below 5% for the first and only time in American history. Since that date a remarkable revival of mass immigration has transformed the nation. From a historical nadir of 4.7% in 1970, the percentage foreign born rose to 12.2% in 2009. Another 11% of all Americans in that year were the children of immigrants, meaning that nearly a quarter of the U.S. population is presently in its first or second generation of U.S. residence. Between 2000 and 2009, international migration accounted for 35% of U.S. population growth and the children of immigrants now comprise a quarter of all births. The nation is quickly moving toward a new demography where no racial or ethnic group will comprise a clear majority. Indeed, in 2010 only half of all American births were to non-Hispanic white mothers. Given the legacy of race in the United States, this radical transformation of American immigration and its attendant effects on the nation's racial and ethnic composition necessarily carry profound implications for patterns and processes of stratification. DETERIORATING DATA Ironically, just as the immigration boom was getting underway, the capacity of social scientists to measure and study it began to falter. In 1957, the United States abandoned record-keeping on emigration, thus rendering direct computation of net international migration impossible. After 1970 the U.S. Census Bureau eliminated the question on birthplace of parents from the census long form, abruptly ending a century-long statistical series and eliminating the ability to study second generation immigrants using a large national sample. This deficiency was only partially remedied by the addition a parental birthplace question to the Current Population Survey in 1996 (Massey 2010). On top of these developments, changes in U.S. immigration law drastically curtailed the opportunities for legal migration from Mexico after 1965, causing unauthorized migration to begin its inexorable rise, thus putting a growing fraction of immigrants outside the reach of official statistics (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). The subsequent militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border not only failed to control undocumented migration; it backfired by driving down the rate of return migration while having little effect on illegal entries, thereby

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2021

Immigration is increasing around the world. Academic work suggests that increasing immigration re... more Immigration is increasing around the world. Academic work suggests that increasing immigration reduces social cohesion and subjective well-being, but these studies mainly focused on white majority populations. Using the 2002 to 2014 European Social Survey, we analyze data from 5,149 ethnic minority respondents living in twenty-four European countries. We examine the association between immigration and respondents’ well-being, mediated by two critical cognitive mechanisms: perceived discrimination and generalized trust. We find that in the short term, immigration is associated with greater perceived discrimination, which in turn is associated with lower trust and well-being. Over the longer term, though, immigration is associated with lower perceived discrimination from ethnic minorities, yielding greater generalized trust and perceived well-being.

In this study we draw on data from a quasi-experimental study to test whether moving into a subsi... more In this study we draw on data from a quasi-experimental study to test whether moving into a subsidized housing development in an affluent suburb yields educational benefits to the children of residents, compared to the educations they would have received had they not moved into the development. Results suggest that resident children experienced a significant improvement in school quality compared with a comparison group of students whose parents also had applied for residence. Parents who were residents of the development also displayed higher levels of school involvement compared with the comparison group of nonresident parents, and their children were exposed to significantly lower levels of school disorder and violence within school and spent more time reading outside of school. Living in the development did not influence GPA directly, but it did indirectly increase GPA by increasing the time residents spent reading outside of school.

This article provides a detailed review of the ethnosurvey, a research methodology that has been ... more This article provides a detailed review of the ethnosurvey, a research methodology that has been widely applied to the study of migration for almost four decades. We focus on the application of ethnosurvey methods in Mexico and Poland, drawing on studies done in the former country since the early 1980s and, in the latter, since the early 1990s (including several post-2004 examples). The second case is particularly relevant for our analysis as it refers to a number of novel migration forms that have been identified in Central and Eastern Europe in the post-1989 transition period. Drawing on these studies, we consider the advantages and disadvantages of the ethnosurvey as a research tool for studying international migration. Its advantages include its multilevel design, blend of qualitative and quantitative methods, reliance on retrospective life histories and multisited data collection strategy. These features yield a rich database that has enabled researchers to capture circular, irregular, short-term and sequential movements. Its disadvantages primarily stem from its hybrid sampling strategy, which necessarily places limits on estimation and generalisability and on the technical challenges of parallel sampling in communities of both origin and destination. Here we argue that the ethnosurvey was never proposed and should not be taken as a universal methodology applicable in all circumstances. Rather it represents a specialised tool which, when correctly applied under the right conditions, can be extremely useful in revealing the social and economic mechanisms that underlie human mobility, thus yielding a fuller understanding of international migration's complex causes and diverse consequences in both sending and receiving societies.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

This paper charts the growth and development of the Latino population of the northeastern U.S. fr... more This paper charts the growth and development of the Latino population of the northeastern U.S. from 1970 to 2015. The relatively small population dominated by Puerto Ricans and concentrated in New York and a few other cities has evolved into a large, diverse, and more geographically dispersed population. It grew from 1.9 to 7.7 million persons and rose from 3.8% to 10.5% of the regional population. It has increasingly suburbanized with roughly equal numbers of Latinos living in cities and suburbs. They are the most diverse Latino population of all regions in the U.S., they are not dominated by Mexicans, they are predominantly documented, and the large majority are citizens. JEL-Codes: J150.

Comparative Migration Studies, 2020

The world appears to be moving into a new era of international migration during which gaps betwee... more The world appears to be moving into a new era of international migration during which gaps between policies needed to manage migratory flows and those enacted in practice will widen. Whereas immigrants in the late 20th century were motivated by a desire to improve their wellbeing by accessing opportunities in richer countries, in the early 21st century they are increasingly motivated by a desire to escape threats at places of origin, yielding very different patterns of migration and selectivity. Using the United States as an example, this paper reviews how mismatches between the underlying realities of international migration and the policies adopted to manage them, in both eras have produced and continue to produce dysfunctional outcomes. Although deleterious policy outcomes might be avoided in the future by combining a well-grounded conceptual understanding of the forces producing immigration with a clear statement of the goals to be achieved through specific policy interventions,...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019

Significance Changes in social diversity constitute a key factor shaping today’s world, yet schol... more Significance Changes in social diversity constitute a key factor shaping today’s world, yet scholarly work about the consequences of diversity has been marked by a critical lack of consensus. To address this concern, we propose a multidisciplinary approach where psychological, sociological, and evolutionary perspectives are integrated to provide an account of how individuals adapt to changes in social diversity. With an analysis of 22 y of worldwide data, our results suggest that humans are initially inclined to react negatively to threats to homogeneity, but that these negative effects are compensated in the long term by the beneficial effects of intergroup contact. Our findings advance knowledge and inform political debate about one of the defining challenges of modern societies.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2018

Neighborhood Disadvantage and Telomere Length: Results from the Fragile Families Study dougl as s... more Neighborhood Disadvantage and Telomere Length: Results from the Fragile Families Study dougl as s. m assey, br a ndon Wagner, louis don nelly, sa r a mcl a na h a n, Je a n ne brooKs-gun n, irW in ga r finK el, colter mitchell, a nd da niel a. not ter m a n Telomeres are repetitive nucleotide sequences located at the ends of chromosomes that protect genetic material. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to analyze the relationship between exposure to spatially concentrated disadvantage and telomere length for white and black mothers. We find that neighborhood disadvantage is associated with shorter telomere length for mothers of both races. This finding highlights a potential mechanism through which the unique spatially concentrated disadvantage faced by African Americans contributes to racial health disparities. We conclude that equalizing the health and socioeconomic status of black and white Americans will be very difficult without reducing levels of residential segregation in the United States.

International Social Science Journal, 2019

It has been nearly two decades since Joaquín Arango (2000) published his critical

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018

Within the scientific community, much attention has focused on improving communications between s... more Within the scientific community, much attention has focused on improving communications between scientists, policy makers, and the public. To date, efforts have centered on improving the content, accessibility, and delivery of scientific communications. Here we argue that in the current political and media environment faulty communication is no longer the core of the problem. Distrust in the scientific enterprise and misperceptions of scientific knowledge increasingly stem less from problems of communication and more from the widespread dissemination of misleading and biased information. We describe the profound structural shifts in the media environment that have occurred in recent decades and their connection to public policy decisions and technological changes. We explain how these shifts have enabled unscrupulous actors with ulterior motives increasingly to circulate fake news, misinformation, and disinformation with the help of trolls, bots, and respondent-driven algorithms. We...

City & Community, 2016

Three decades of research have amply confirmed Pettigrew's (1979) prescient observation that resi... more Three decades of research have amply confirmed Pettigrew's (1979) prescient observation that residential segregation constitutes the "structural linchpin" of racial stratification in the United States. Although the centrality of segregation as a stratifying force in American society remains, however, patterns of segregation have changed substantially since the 1970s. At that time, African Americans were highly segregated almost everywhere and socioeconomic attainments had no effect on the degree of segregation experienced by African Americans. Race was very much a master status and most whites subscribed to an ideology of segregation, either de jure or de facto. In the early 1960s, for example, absolute majorities of white Americans still supported segregation as a matter of principle, agreeing on surveys that schools, transportation, occupations, and neighborhoods should be racially segregated and that intermarriage should be prohibited (Schuman et al. 1998).

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 31, 2017

In their article, Umberson et al. (1) demonstrate that African Americans are much more likely tha... more In their article, Umberson et al. (1) demonstrate that African Americans are much more likely than whites to experience deaths in their immediate family circle, and that this elevated exposure to death occurs at virtually all stages of the life cycle. Differential exposure to bereavement by race is likely to contribute to long-standing black−white differentials with respect to health and socioeconomic status more generally. As the authors note, human well-being across a range of dimensions is well known to be adversely affected by exposure to the stress of bereavement.

Socio-Economic Review, 2014

The first chapter of my book Categorically Unequal, which Lamont, Beljean, and Clair specifically... more The first chapter of my book Categorically Unequal, which Lamont, Beljean, and Clair specifically cite in their article, was entitled "How Stratification Works" and in it I sought to sketch out a simple theoretical framework to explain how inequality was produced, one that bridged the micro-and macro-levels of analysis. At the micro-level I drew heavily on the work of Susan Fiske (2003) and her stereotype content model (Fiske et al. 2002) whereas at the macro-level I drew heavily on the work of Charles Tilly (1998) and his theory of durable inequality. At the time I was writing in 2006, I was acutely aware that my synthesis elided a sizeable conceptual gap by failing to elucidate how categorical processes of stratification at the micro-level translated into categorical processes of inequality at the macro-level.

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2013

In this paper we adjudicate between competing claims of persisting segregation and rapid integrat... more In this paper we adjudicate between competing claims of persisting segregation and rapid integration by analyzing trends in residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians living in 287 consistently defined metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010. On average, Black segregation and isolation have fallen steadily but still remain very high in many areas, particularly those areas historically characterized by hypersegregation. In contrast, Hispanic segregation has increased slightly but Hispanic isolation has risen substantially owing to rapid population growth. Asian segregation has changed little and remains moderate, and although Asian isolation has increased it remains at low levels compared with other groups. Whites remain quite isolated from all three minority groups in metropolitan America, despite rising diversity and some shifts toward integration from the minority viewpoint.Multivariate analyses reveal that minority segregation and sp...

Reis, 2006

Capital social, política social y migración desde comunidades tradicionales y nuevas comunidades ... more Capital social, política social y migración desde comunidades tradicionales y nuevas comunidades de origen en México Social capital, social policy and migration from traditional communities and new communities with origins in Mexico

Social Forces, 1988

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

Social Forces, 1998

Page 1. The Elusive Quest for the Perfect Index of Concentration: Reply to Egan, Anderton, and We... more Page 1. The Elusive Quest for the Perfect Index of Concentration: Reply to Egan, Anderton, and Weber* DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, University of Pennsylvania NANCY A. DENTON, State University of New York at Albany Abstract ...

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 2010

Using data from Mexico's Matrícula Consular program, we analyze the geographic organization o... more Using data from Mexico's Matrícula Consular program, we analyze the geographic organization of undocumented Mexican migration to the United States. We show that emigration has moved beyond its historical origins in west-central Mexico into the central region and, to a lesser extent, the southeast and border regions. In the United States, traditional gateways continue to dominate, but a variety of new destinations have emerged. California, in particular, has lost its overwhelming dominance. Although the geographic structure of Mexico-U.S. migration is relatively stable, it has nonetheless continued to evolve and change over time.

American sociological review, 2010

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 2010

Social Science Research, 2011

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

Comparative Migration Studies, 2020

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2018

International Social Science Journal, 2019

It has been nearly two decades since Joaquín Arango (2000) published his critical

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018

City & Community, 2016

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 31, 2017

Socio-Economic Review, 2014

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2013

Reis, 2006

Social Forces, 1988

Social Forces, 1998

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 2010

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2013

We hypothesize that the manner in which stereotype threat affects college grade achievement is me... more We hypothesize that the manner in which stereotype threat affects college grade achievement is mediated by institutional context as well as individual characteristics. Drawing on a sample of black students from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen we find weak and inconsistent evidence that institutional characteristics influence the operation of stereotype threat. We find more consistent evidence to indicate that the effect of stereotype threat is conditioned by individual factors such as skin color, multiracial origins, and an integrated upbringing. Most of the effect on grade achievement occurs through the internalization pathway, in which the internalization of negative stereotypes leads to disinvestment manifested by a reduction in academic effort. The reduction in work effort, in turn, lowers grades. We also find evidence that immigrant origin confers protection from the negative effects of stereotype threat through both internalization and externalization mechanisms, though the ultimate effect of grade achievement is rather small.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2010

Of the three main contributors to population growth— fertility, mortality, and net migration—the ... more Of the three main contributors to population growth— fertility, mortality, and net migration—the latter is by far the most difficult to capture statistically. This article discusses the main sources of federal statistical data on immigration, each with its own characteristic set of strengths, weaknesses, possibilities, and limitations in the context of the interested social scientist. Among the key limitations, the article argues, are the elimination of parental birthplace from the census and the lack of complete data concerning the legal statuses of the U.S. population. This article concludes with suggestions on remedying such deficiencies, at relatively low marginal cost, such as the inclusion of questions on parental birthplace, instituting a regular survey of randomly selected legal immigrants, and the use of the “two-card method” in statistical data.