Most Americans and Europeans in opinion polls say that governments are doing a poor job of selecting wanted newcomers, preventing the entry and stay of unwanted foreigners, and integrating settled immigrants and their children. This seminar reviewed the evidence, asking about the economic and socio-political integration of low-skilled immigrants and their children.

The context for links between immigration and integration is that most European nations have shrinking populations and extensive welfare states that provide support to the elderly and poor from the contributions of currently employed workers. If immigrants and their children add to employment, they can achieve the higher wages and more opportunities most sought inEuropeand help to preserve generous welfare states. However, if immigrants and their children are mostly jobless or out of the labor force, they may add burdens to welfare states.

In 2005, 3 percent of the world’s residents left their country of birth or citizenship for a year or more. These migrants include persons in all legal statuses whose reason for being abroad range from study to work to settlement. Most industrial countries have organizations that advocate no borders at one extreme and no immigrants at the other. These extremes have hardened, and each faction seems to prefer the status quo to a compromise that can be enacted into law, which may explain the persistence of the status quo.

The U.S. had 37 million foreign-born residents in 2007, totaling 12.3 percent of the U.S. population and almost 20 percent of the world’s international migrants. The Senate in May–June 2007 debated and failed to approve the “comprehensive immigration reform” favored by President Bush and most Democrats, which aimed to reduce the influx of unauthorized foreigners and provide a path to legal status for many of them. The failure of immigration reform has led to a range of consequences including the no-match enforcement strategy, the failure of the DREAM and AgJOBS bills, and the thorny status of immigration in the 2008 presidential election.

This monograph reviews Germany’s evolution from a country of emigration to a reluctant land of immigration between the 1960s and 1980s, as guest workers settled and asylum seekers arrived. During the 1990s, Germany became a magnet for diverse foreigners, including the families of settled guest workers, newly mobile Eastern Europeans and ethnic Germans, and asylum seekers from throughout the world. Germany, with a relatively structured and rigid labor market and economy, finds it easier to integrate especially unskilled newcomers into generous social welfare programs than into the labor market. Since immigration means change as immigrants and Germans adjust to each other, an aging German populace may resist the changes in the economy and labor market that could facilitate immigrant integration as well as the changes in culture and society that invariably accompany immigrants.

Employment in California agriculture has increased over the past 30 years and has become less seasonal. There were an average of 404,000 farm jobs in California in 2020, 10% more than average employment of 367,000 in 1990. Meanwhile, seasonality, as measured by peak month employment divided by trough month employment, fell 22% over three decades, from 1.8 in 1990 to 1.4 in 2020. Most farmworkers have one farm employer a year, although that employer may be a labor contractor who moves workers from one farm to another. Most new workers in the California farm workforce are H-2A guest workers, the young and flexible Mexican workers who are legally authorized to work in the United States and who are often brought to farms by labor contractors. In the future, rising employment and declining seasonality, combined with an aging and settled farm workforce, may reduce farmworker migration and flexibility.

The wine industry in California and the world is entering a new era, marked by consolidation and globalization. People are drinking less but better wine. Will producers of lower-priced grapes raise quality to attract more upscale wine drinkers, putting downward pressure on all grape and wine prices, or will the wine-grape industry fragment into distinct quality and price segments? In 2001 and 2002, an increased grape supply and the recession led to declining prices for wine grapes in all areas of California except the North Coast. Predictions of a severe wine-grape glut obscure the possibility that a fragmented wine industry is developing in which some segments prosper while others languish.