Woodrow-Lafield, Karen A., Xiaohe Xu, Bunnak Poch, and Thomas Kersen. 2001. “The Hazards of Naturalizing in America: Mexican and Chinese Immigrants.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, April 5-8, 2001.



These analyses explore influences on duration until naturalization for Mexican and Chinese immigrants admitted in 1978, 1985, and 1990 based on linked administrative records for naturalization. Event history models are specified with socio-demographic characteristics at admission and visa class of admission, but other likely influences are unobserved. The major focus is selection of the more appropriate hazard models in continuous-time formulation by allowing the underlying hazard or survival function over duration to follow several forms (exponential, Weibull, Gompertz, log-normal, log-logistic and generalized gamma distribution) and on investigating the value of correction for unobserved heterogeneity. From estimated Cox and other parametric proportional hazard models and, given absence of time-dependent covariates and multiple states, accelerated failure time models, the results show different hazard function forms by origin, taking the Gompertz shape for Mexicans and the log-logistic shape for Chinese. Models with correction for unobserved heterogeneity are preferable to those without the correction. Those immigrants admitted through employment-sponsorship, either as a principal or derivative beneficiary, have greater propensity of naturalization. Immigrants from China showed high propensity in naturalization regardless of whether admitted through family-sponsorship or employment-sponsorship. For Mexicans, but not for Chinese, women naturalized more than men.