Suchergebnisse

Japan's rapidly aging populace and its accompanying demographic, social, and economic problems are forcing a gradual opening to increased immigration. This paper consequently considers what factors influence public opinion toward immigration in Japan, using multilevel statistical modeling to test hypotheses regarding economic threat, cultural threat, contact, and salience of change.

ObjectivesTo test the "Trump Hypothesis": whether immigrants are responsible for higher levels of violent and drug‐related crime in the United States, as asserted by Donald Trump in his 2015 presidential campaign announcement. This is achieved using recent crime and immigration data, thus testing the common public perception linking immigrants to crime, and providing an updated assessment of the immigrant‐crime nexus.MethodsRates of violent crime and drug arrests by state are pooled for 2012–2014. These are compared against pooled statistics on foreign‐born and Mexican nationals living in the United States, as well as estimates of undocumented foreign and undocumented Mexican population by state. The data are analyzed using correlation and multivariate regressions.ResultsData uniformly show no association between immigrant population size and increased violent crime. However, there appears to be a small but significant association between undocumented immigrant populations and drug‐related arrests.ConclusionsResults largely contradict the Trump Hypothesis: no evidence links Mexican or undocumented Mexican immigrants specifically to violent or drug‐related crime. Undocumented immigrant associations with drug‐related crime are minimal, though significant. The Trump Hypothesis consequently appears to be biased toward rhetoric rather than evidence.

AbstractMost people believe that there are such things as good jobs—jobs that a worker would consider herself lucky to get. But for economists, the existence of good jobs is debatable. In this paper, I provide a definition of a good job based on various theories of the labour market: a job that involves a surplus captured partly by the worker. I use that definition to guide an empirical investigation of the existence and importance of good jobs. I conclude that good jobs do exist—that the labour market does not just function according to a Roy model with wage differentials reflecting only skill differentials, compensating differentials or bond posting—and that their impact on the overall wage structure is substantial. Finally, I discuss the implications of the existence of good jobs for policy setting and for assessments of the justice of a society.

Most recent analyses of US penality describe and explain the exceptional harshening of punishment over the previous three decades. This article challenges and qualifies these accounts by identifying 10 cultural, moral, and practical drivers of a bipartisan reconsideration of the discourses and policies responsible for mass incarceration. These penal-reform catalysts and drivers include: (1) the crime decline; (2) the Great Recession; (3) the prisoner-reentry movement and attendant changes in the moral status of prisoners; (4) apparent shifts in public attitudes about punishment; (5) 'punitive saturation' and the cyclical nature of penal thinking and policy; (6) changing dominant conceptions of the criminal offender; (7) the return of human dignity to US jurisprudence; (8) the ideational influence of Christian reformers who assail the morality of excessive punishment; (9) the conservative 'Right on Crime' initiative that promotes a range of reforms formerly associated with the Left; and (10) the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose model legislation once drove mass incarceration but now aims to curtail it. The article also invites theoretical analysis of whether ongoing shifts represent a structural reordering of the penal field akin to the punitive turn or merely a set of benevolent tendencies within the same carceral paradigm.