The Immigrant Multiplier in Historical and Contemporary Contexts

I've been thinking a lot lately about the immigrant multiplier, a term used to refer to the number of other people that ultimately enter the country with, or because of, a single migrant. Many of the discussions revolve around trying to produce accurate figures for chain migration (through family reunification,) to understand not simply the number of people admitted each year for legal permanent resident status, but also the net immigration gain.

As comprehensive reform once again enters the political discourse, estimating the actual multiplier is bound to play a role. As an example of the power of the chain migration, many commentators point to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act [among other factors] as causing many of the extreme backlogs in family preference categories today, as IRCA's amnesty provisions created a large number of new residents and citizens who could then petition for their family members to enter.

So what is the actual multiplier? In his theoretical account of the immigration reforms of 1965, David Reimers has shown that one student (on nonimmigrant status,) can enter the country, and within ten years, bring over 18 others. This multiplier of 18 is certainly the high point, and more empircally based studies have found the actual number to be far less. Jasso and Rosenzweig,* for instance, estimate the multiplier at only 1.2 other people per migrant, out of a cohort of 1971 labor migrants. The most up-to-date figures come from Bin Yu, using a wider sample size, and a slightly different methodology, which combines reunfication (i.e. those coming through chain migration,) and reproduction (2nd generation, etc..) Yu's figure is still far lower than Reimers, at only 4.3.

So how does this factor into my dissertation on the development of immigration policy in the 1950s and 1960s? The evidence that I have found in the archives so far indicates that policymakers in the 1950s and early 1960s based their estimates for divising immigration reform on studies of the first postwar piece of immigration legislation, the Displaced Persons Act (DP Act,) which worked to bring in those people affected by WWII and the Holocaust. Over and again in the debates over reform, legislators and bureaucrats referred to a multiplier of 2.4 family members per immigrant (though the term immigrant multiplier had not yet been coin.) This figure of 2.4 had significant weight when it came to proposals to widen immigrant admissions, as liberals and restrictionists fought over a slew of reform proposals. It also played into the creation of immigration/refugee bureaucracy, as policymaker decided where to open consulates, refugee centers, etc.

I am still trying to figure out how exactly to fit this information into my narrative of the rise a new preference system that heavily favored family reunification over all other categories (especially labor market needs,) but it strikes me that 2.4 is a rather small figure, which could help to account for some of the "unintended consequences" of the 1965 Immigration Act. It also makes me think that legislators were actually much more concerned with net migration than scholars have acknowledged.