State Responses to Immigration: A Database of All State Legislation
The State Responses database is a unique, searchable online tool that catalogues all 1,059 immigration-related bills introduced in state legislatures in 2007, and allows users to search legislation by state, geographic region, subject area, bill status, and legislative typology. The database includes a synopsis of each bill and is accompanied by a report, Regulating Immigration at the State Level: Highlights from the Database of 2007 State Immigration Legislation and the Methodology.

New Data Guide On Finding, Using the Most Accurate, Recent Immigration Data Resources
The Immigration: Data Matters guide shows where to locate some of the most credible, up-to-date US and global immigration-related data compiled by government and non-governmental sources. The online guide, also available in hard copy, includes clickable links to resources that offer immigrant population estimates; the size of the unauthorized immigrant population; English proficiency rates; the share of immigrants in the workforce; education, health, and income and poverty statistics relating to immigrants; and other data.
Data Guide | Press Release
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Language Portal: A Translation and Interpretation Digital Library
National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, February 2008

The Language Portal is a digital library of nearly 600 resources relating to the use of language access services in social services and public safety agencies. The Portal includes legal guidelines, service models, master contracts for service providers, hourly translation and interpretation rates for different languages, pay differentials for multilingual staff, and sample translated documents. The Portal was created to provide “one-stop shopping” for the many local government administrators, policymakers, and others who are looking for ways to provide high-quality and cost-effective translation and interpretation services.

Role of Foreign-born Voters in Elections
MPI election profiles for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, examining voter registration by nativity, providing breakdowns for foreign-born citizens as a share of total state population, and detailing their turnout in the 2004 general election, and by ethnicity.

MPI Data Hub
Click-of-a-button maps of the foreign born and the most up-to-date demographic information on immigrants in each of the 50 states.

MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy is a crossroads for elected officials, researchers, state and local agency managers, grassroots leaders and activists, local service providers, and others who seek to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities today’s high rates of immigration create in local communities.

Key services the Center provides include: policy-focused research; policy design; leadership development; technical assistance and training for government officials and community leaders; needs assessment, program planning, and evaluation services; and an electronic resource center on immigrant integration issues.

Learn more about the Center.

David Dixon, Julia Gelatt, and Afshin Zilanawala
provide an overview of characteristics of young children (under age 9) of immigrants living in 14 communities throughout the United States.

The fact sheets use 2000 Census data to track the growth of the population of young children of immigrants between 1990 and 2000, their citizenship status, parents’ places of birth, parents’ immigration status, and the shares living in mixed-status families. 

The fact sheets also document parents’ levels of education and English-language ability; parents’ occupations, wages, and labor force participation rates; shares of young children of immigrants living in poverty or low-income households; and rates of benefits use.

Read more and access the profiles.

Protection through Integration: The Mexican Government’s Efforts to Aid Migrants in the United States
By Laureen Laglagaron
Immigrant integration remains largely an afterthought in US immigration policy discussions and the country’s integration policies remain chronically underfunded and limited in scope. Local and informal actors such as families and community-based organizations have historically taken on this responsibility. However, as this report explores, new partners are emerging. Mexico’s efforts to help its migrants succeed in the United States offer a new example of an immigrant-sending country looking to improve its emigrants’ lives and connect with its diaspora. The report examines the evolution of Mexico’s approach to its migrants and details the activities of Mexico’s Institute of Mexicans Abroad (IME) in a first-ever attempt to map the expanding range of IME educational, health care, financial, and civic engagement programs.
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Immigrants and Welfare: The Impact of Welfare Reform on America’s Newcomers
This volume, edited by MPI Senior Vice President Michael Fix, rigorously assesses the 1996 welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants’ ability to integrate into American society. The book probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. It also focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants’ propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants’ use and hardship levels afterwards.
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E Pluribus Unum Prizes: Honoring Exceptional Immigrant Integration Initiatives
The E Pluribus Unum Prizes, coordinated by MPI's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, is a national awards program that provides four $50,000 prizes annually to exceptional initiatives that promote immigrant integration. The awards are intended to recognize exceptional immigrant integration initiatives that help immigrants and their children adapt, thrive, and contribute to the United States or that bring immigrants and the native born together to build stronger, more cohesive communities.
The application period has closed. Winners will be announced in May 2010.
Learn more about the E Pluribus Unum Prizes.

Tied to the Business Cycle: How Immigrants Fare in Good and Bad Economic Times
By Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny
Immigrants surpassed native-born workers in several key labor market outcomes from the mid-1990s through 2007, recording higher employment and lower jobless rates — but the trend was reversed with the onset of the current recession. The report, which analyzes employment and unemployment patterns over the past 15 years and two recessions, shows that immigrant economic outcomes began deteriorating before the current recession officially began in December 2007, tracing immigrants' declining fortunes largely to the housing bust which began in spring 2006.
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The Binational Option: Meeting the Instructional Needs of Limited English Proficient Students
By Aaron Terrazas and Michael Fix
With 1 in 10 children in US schools having limited English proficiency, school districts across the country face challenges in meeting the students' educational needs and finding enough qualified bilingual and English as a Second Language educators. This report identifies international teacher exchanges as an innovative, near-term strategy for school administrators to respond to immediate teaching needs, particularly in subject areas where knowledge of a foreign language is necessary. In conjunction with efforts to recruit local teachers, foreign teachers can help alleviate endemic shortages — particularly in districts that face rapid, unexpected, or short-term changes in the student population.
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Immigrants and Health Care Reform: What’s Really at Stake?
By Randy Capps, Marc R. Rosenblum, and Michael Fix
Health care reform proposals under consideration in Congress that would exclude many legal immigrants from core benefits and impose new verification requirements would have important spillover consequences for taxpayers and other health care consumers. In a new report, MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy offers the first-ever estimates of the size of uninsured immigrant populations in major immigrant-destination states, the number of immigrant workers covered by employer-provided plans, and the share of immigrants employed by small firms likely to be exempted from employer coverage mandates. The report, based on MPI analysis of Census Bureau data, also examines health coverage for immigrants by legal status, age, and poverty levels.
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Taking Limited English Proficient Adults into Account in the Federal Adult Education Funding Formula
By Randy Capps, Michael Fix, Margie McHugh, and Serena Yi-Ying Lin
This new report by MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy examines the funding formula used to distribute Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Title II federal funds for adult education, literacy, and English as a Second Language instruction. Though all adults with limited English proficiency (LEP) are eligible for WIA Title II programs, the authors report that the formula used to distribute $554 million to the states in fiscal 2009 excludes 11.2 million LEP adults with at least a high school education. With WIA up for reauthorization, the authors suggest there is an opportunity for policymakers to revisit the funding formula and related issues.
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Recommendations for Addressing the Needs of English Language Learners
Policymakers and state and local school administrators disbursing federal stimulus funds designed to improve children’s educational outcomes should pay targeted attention to the nation’s growing population of English language learners, a group of researchers with extensive experience regarding ELL students recommends in a new report. The ELL Working Group, of which MPI Senior Vice President Michael Fix is a member, was convened by Diane August, Kenji Hakuta, and Jennifer O’Day. The group’s recommendations were presented to senior US Department of Education officials and other senior education officers, among others.
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Uneven Progress: The Employment Pathways of Skilled Immigrants in the United States
By Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix with Peter A. Creticos
More than 1.3 million college-educated immigrants in the United States are unemployed or working in unskilled jobs because they are unable to make full use of their academic and professional credentials, MPI reports in the first assessment yet of the scope of the “brain waste” problem. The report analyzes and offers possible solutions for the credentialing and language-barrier hurdles that deprive the US economy of a rich source of human capital at a time of increasing competition globally for skilled talent.
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The Redesigned Citizenship Test: High Stakes
MPI Backgrounder No. 6, September 2008
More than a decade in the making, the redesigned citizenship test required for use after October 1, 2008 is supposed to provide a more meaningful opportunity for applicants to demonstrate knowledge about US history and civics, and allow the government more standardized test administration. This MPI Backgrounder details the redesign process, examines whether the government met its goals, and provides policy recommendations.
Fact Sheet | Press Release

Gambling on the Future: Managing the Education Challenges of Rapid Growth in Nevada
By Aaron Terrazas and Michael Fix
Nevada, the fastest growing state in the United States, is experiencing a population boom – driven in part by immigration – that has key implications for its school system and labor market. Immigrants represent one in five Nevada residents and their children account for one in three Nevadans under age 18. Yet even as schools have experienced a surge in enrollment, federal and state investments in the state's failing education system haven't kept pace.
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Hometown Associations: An Untapped Resource for Immigrant Integration?
By Will Somerville, Jamie Durana, and Aaron Matteo Terrazas
Hometown associations, the organizations that immigrants create for social, economic development, and political empowerment purposes, play an important – and underexamined – role in immigrant integration. Though policymakers focus chiefly on the associations’ development potential, this MPI Insight recommends cooperative interventions to strengthen their immigrant integration capacity.
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Los Angeles on the Leading Edge: Immigrant Integration Indicators and Their Policy Implications
By Michael Fix, Margie McHugh, Aaron Matteo Terrazas, and Laureen Laglagaron
April 2008
As Los Angeles makes the transition from being a city of immigrants to one dominated by their US-born children, it can serve as a policy laboratory for other cities facing the need to better integrate immigrants into US classrooms, workplaces, and civic life. MPI’s report details the imperative for integration policies that will benefit immigrants and the broader US society alike.
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Testing the Limits: A Framework for Assessing the Legality of State and Local Immigration Measures
By Cristina Rodríguez, Muzaffar Chishti, and Kimberly Nortman
Report, December 2007
In 2007 alone, the 50 state legislatures have considered over 1,000 pieces of legislation regulating immigrants and immigration. This paper provides a framework for assessing the legal validity of five of the most common or high-profile measures that address unauthorized immigration specifically.

MPI Report Offers First-Time National Estimates of Numbers and Costs to Provide English Instruction to Legal and Unauthorized Immigrant Adults

In order to get to a level of proficiency necessary for civic integration or to begin post-secondary education, approximately 5.8 million adult lawful permanent residents (LPRs) currently in the United States will need about 277 million hours of English language instruction a year for six years.

If only half of adult LPRs were to participate in classroom English instruction and 10 percent of instruction could be done outside the classroom, the additional cost of meeting LPRs’ English instruction needs would be about $200 million a year, for six years, over and above the approximately $1 billion currently spent annually by the federal government and states.

In order to remain in the United States under the terms of the failed Senate immigration bill or to fully participate in U.S. civic life, approximately 6.4 million unauthorized immigrants will need about 319 million hours of English instruction a year for six years. In the event of a broad legalization program for today’s unauthorized population, total projected English instruction costs would increase $2.9 billion a year for six years.

Read the full report.

Measures of Change: The Demography and Literacy of Adolescent English Learners
By Jeanne Batalova, Michael Fix, and Julie Murray
This new report provides a demographic profile of students in grades 6-12 who are English Language Learners (ELLs) and focuses on how these students are faring on standardized tests at the national level and in four states: California, Colorado, Illinois, and North Carolina. The authors find wide achievement gaps between ELL and other students at both national and state levels -- a finding with worrying implications for schools trying to meet requirements under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Press Release | Download the Report

Securing the Future: US Immigrant Integration Policy, A Reader
Edited by Michael Fix, Co-Director of MPI's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy

This volume sketches the contours of a national integration policy and includes a discussion of key integration issues raised by the current debate around immigration reform, including impact aid to state and local governments and financing health care for legalizing immigrants. 

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