At a time when the fiscal, social, and political impacts of immigration on states have grown increasingly controversial, New Jersey is managing a successful transition for its newest arrivals. The book offers one of the first comprehensive examinations of the implications of national immigration policy at the state and county levels and suggests ways to refine immigration and other policies to improve the reception that U.S. immigrants receive nationwide. Contributing authors include leading demographers, sociologists, and economists, among them senior Urban Institute researchers Rebecca L. Clark, Genevieve M. Kenney, and Wendy N. Zimmermann. They examine the demographic context for immigration, the impacts of immigrants on New Jersey's native population and its institutions, and the processes by which immigrants adapt to a new society. The authors describe these effects in economic and noneconomic contexts, pointing out similarities and dissimilarities elsewhere in the country.
New Jersey is fertile ground for examining state and local implications of U.S. immigration policy.
Its racial and ethnic composition, moreover, matches more closely than any other state that of the United States as a whole. There are important similarities and differences between the New Jersey immigrant experience and the rest of the nation. The authors offer persuasive evidence of the demographic and other factors that appear to be driving these differences and facilitating a smooth transition into American society for New Jersey's immigrants. The education gap is particularly striking for the Asian population. Though concentrated in the northeastern part of the state, the foreign-born also spread to the western and southern regions of New Jersey during the 1980s.