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487 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1986)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0487 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE After a dormancy of more than fifty years, proposed legislation and other policy-related matters concerning immigration-and the demographic and behav- ioral characteristics of recent immigrants, their gain to or drain on the economy, and their social desirability and acculturation-have become major topics for research and debate in the public arena. Prior to the 1970s, the great period of immigration to the United States and studies about immigrants and their depiction in the arts and the media occurred in the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries. During the 1930s, more people emigrated from, than entered, the United States. Following World War II, the United States maintained most of its prewar restrictions on immigrants, opening its doors primarily to refugees from Communist countries in the 1950s, and then more widely in the 1960s and 1970s. Illegal migration mainly from Mexico and other Western Hemisphere countries also contributed to the growing number of newcomers to U.S. shores. Beginning in the 1970s, immigration as a topic for public debate and research came into its own. The Congress for the past four years has debated various immigration bills that have focused mainly on controlling illegal migration by introducing employers' sanctions, national identity cards, and the granting of permanent and temporary resident status to persons already in the country. Such bills have also contained caps on legal immigration, usually around the 350,000 mark. As of January 1986, none of the proposed measures has been enacted, or even passed, by the two houses of the Congress. The public debate in the media and the political arenas has focused primarily on the impact that immigrants have on the nation's economy. Job displacement, lowered wage scales, and high welfare payments have been among the major concerns, along with problems of language acquisition, loss of control of our borders, and a concern about maintaining a national identity. Researchers, in the main, have been followers, rather than determiners, of the immigration agenda. Their work has in large measure been influenced by public policy issues. In the 1970s, for example, the Select Commission on Immigration Policy solicited research and think pieces from hundreds of scholars in many different fields as it prepared its recommendations to the president. In this special issue of The Annals, the articles provide data and report research findings that should contribute to the public debate and to the making of informed decisions about immigration policy. There are also some articles that have a less practical and less applied nature and consider more abstract and theoretical matters. Thus there are articles that assess the economic and social impact on the United States of recent immigrants from different parts of the world, the adjustments that they have made to American society, the jobs they hold, the education they have attained, and the money they earn. There are also articles on bilingualism and separatism, on public attitudes toward immigrants, and on the changing behavior of white ethnic early-immigrant communities. 9

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