Bringing Down the House to Add a (Nice) Room

摘要

Ivan Light's Deflecting Immigration makes a valuable contribution, one that illuminates various trends either overlooked or left unaddressed in the standard scholarship about immigration in the United States. Where much of that scholarship sees a lineal progression, Light (a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles) identifies a discontinuous process, which he renders as a two-stage model: demand-driven immigration becomes supply-driven. He incorporates into his model variables, such as local policy, that are usually considered exogenous to the immigration process. In so doing, Light makes a second contribution: he shows that once immigration enters the supply-driven stage, it gets redirected to other, secondary destinations.