Research

Publications

Journal Articles

Thomas, Jacob Richard. “Disenchanted With the Immigrant Dream: The Sociological Formation of Ex-Immigrant Subjectivity”, European Journal of Sociology (conditional acceptance, forthcoming)

Thomas, Jacob Richard. "Bureaucratic and Organizational Amenability to Racial Diversification: How Points Systems Replaced White-Only Immigration Policies." International Journal of Sociology 53, no. 2 (2023): 103-131.)

Thomas, Jacob. "From local control to remote control: an excavation of international mobility constraints." Theory and Society 50, no. 1 (2021): 33-64.

Thomas, Jacob. "When Political Freedom Does Not Offer Travel Freedom: The Varying Determinants of Visa‐Free Travel Opportunities." International Migration 58, no. 2 (2020): 80-97.

Thomas, Jacob. "Reflecting upon the Impact of the United States' 2016 Election and Travel Ban: Why Might Fewer Foreign Businesspeople, Tourists, Students, and Relatives Be Visiting the United States?." S. Cal. Interdisc. LJ 29 (2019): 619.

Book Chapters and Op-Eds

Thomas, Jacob and Min Zhou, “Ethnic Entrepreneurship and Its Transnational Linkages,” in Brenda Yeo and Francis Collins, Handbook On Transnationalism. Routledge, 2022

Jacob Thomas, Lemeng Liang, Shigeto Sonoda, and Yu Xie, 2022, "Shingata Korona wuirusu wa sekaino taichu/taibei ninsiki wo ikani kaetaka? (How did COVID-19 change Global Views of China and US?)" in Shigeto Sonoda and Yu Xie eds., Sekai no Taichu Ninshiki: Deta de saguru sono tokucho to henka (Global Views of China: Empirical analysis of their trends), University of Tokyo

Press (2022)

Thomas, Jacob. “Is There Anything Positive Coming Out of the COVID-19 Pandemic”, Op-Ed in Special issue of Contexts on covid-19 and the future of society, 2020

Thomas, Jacob and Kjerstin Gruys, 2014, Entry on “Class.” Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumer Studies. 

Strands of My Research

Research About Might-Have-Been-Immigrants or Potential Immigrants

Book manuscript

Thomas, Jacob. Denial, Deterrence, and Disenchantment: Why Many Never Immigrate. Book manuscript revised and resubmitted in Cambridge University Press and under review at Oxford University Press and Stanford University Press.  

Diagram of my book

Articles

Thomas, Jacob. “What Ties Individuals to a Society?: How Immobility-Mobility Capital Stratifies Legal Movement from China to the United States.” Revised and resubmitted to American Journal of Sociology. 

Thomas, Jacob. “How Families Prevent Migration.” Under review in International Migration Review. 

Thomas, Jacob. Forthcoming. “Disenchanted With the Immigrant Dream: The Sociological Formation of Ex-Immigrant Subjectivity.” European Journal of Sociology.  

Comparative Research On the Impact of Migration Policies On International Migration and Mobility

Thomas, Jacob. 2021. “From local control to remote control: an excavation of international mobility constraints.” Theory and Society 50(1): 33-64. 

Thomas, Jacob. 2023. “Bureaucratic and Organizational Amenability to Racial Diversification: How Points Systems Replaced White-Only Immigration Policies.” International Journal of Sociology 53(2): 103-131. 

Thomas, Jacob. 2020. “When Political Freedom Does Not Offer Travel Freedom: The Varying Determinants of Visa‐Free Travel Opportunities.” International Migration 58(2): 80-97. 

Thomas, Jacob. 2019. “Reflecting upon the Impact of the United States' 2016 Election and Travel Ban: Why Might Fewer Foreign Businesspeople, Tourists, Students, and Relatives Be Visiting the United States?” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 29: 619-636. 

Thomas, Jacob. “Why a Targeted Travel Ban Mostly Reduced Visitors from Non-Targeted Countries: Heterogeneity in Unintended Consequences Across Visitor Origin and Stage of Policy Formation.” Under review in Policy Studies Journal. 

Thomas, Jacob. “What Types of Famous Political Dissidents Succeed in Emigrating From Autocratic States?: An Individual-Level Analysis of Emigration Control in the People’s Republic of China.” Under review in European Political Science Review. 

Thomas, Jacob. “Mathematically Modeling How Bureaucrat-Civilian Interactions In Decision-making of Visa Application and Approval.” Under review in Journal of Mathematical Sociology. 

Thomas, Jacob and Peng Huang. “Affinity and Inequality in the Global Structure of the Visa-Free Mobility Network.” Manuscript in preparation to be submitted to American Sociological Review 

On-going General Research Fund Project ($78,600 USD): "What Distinguishes Emigrants From Hong Kong and Those in Hong Kong That Merely 'Want' to Migrate"

Communication and Media Representations of Migrants

Thomas, Jacob. “Visual Art as a Channel and Embodiment of Symbolic Interaction Between Migrants and the Native-born.” Revised and resubmitted to Symbolic Interaction.  

Thomas, Jacob. “From ‘Illegal’ to ‘Undocumented’—Anti-Immigrant Reactance toward a Ban of a Term Among Media Producers and Consumers.” Under review in Political Psychology. 

Methodology

Thomas, Jacob and Peng Huang. “The Strengths and Challenges of Cross-cultural Collaborative Field Research.” Manuscript in preparation to be submitted to Qualitative Inquiry 

Critical Normative Theories about Migration

Thomas Jacob. “Incorporating the Concerns of Both Migrant-Sending and Migrant-Receiving Countries In International Migration Policymaking.” Under review in European Journal of International Relations.  

Thomas, Jacob. “How Assimilation(ism) Can Perpetuate the Problems of Migrant-Destination Societies: A Critically Reflexive Theory about What Societies Expect Their Immigrants to Become.” Under review in Theory and Society.  

Public Opinion Research About International Relations and Contentious Issues

Thomas, Jacob, Lemeng Liang, Shigeto Sonoda, and Yu Xie. “The Soft Power Cost of COVID-19: A Lose-Lose Outcome for China and the United States.” Under review in Chinese Journal of International Politics. 

Thomas, Jacob,  “Does the Race of Rapists and Rape Victims Matter for Abortion Opinions? Anti-Abortion Universalism Vs. Latent Racial Eugenicist Bias in American Attitudes Toward Abortion.” Manuscript in preparation to be submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Thomas, Jacob, “Does What We Can See Matter for American Opinion About Gun Regulation? Experimental Impact of Images of a Bleeding Dead Child and a “Good Guy With a Gun.” Manuscript in preparation to be submitted to Sociological Science.  

Dissertation Research and Book Project in Progress

 Part 1: Denial focuses on the process by which a migrant-receiving government denies visas and how they are different from those that receive visas in terms of demographic traits and attitudes toward mobility and migration.

Chapter 1, “What Ties Individuals To A Society In Eyes of a Consular Officer?” compares those whom the government denies visas to those it grants visas.  This chapter aims offer us more refined answers to the migrant selectivity question than previous studies by examining the how strongly associated the odds of obtaining a visa are with various specific indicators of demographic traits, socioeconomic status, social ties and interview-related factors. I find that officers are more likely to deny visas to those that would not immigrate if they had the opportunity to do so whereas they are more likely to grant those visas who would immigrate if they had an opportunity—quite contrary to what US immigration mandates them to do. Officers seem to also be more likely to grant visas to those that possess indicators of what I define as “immobility-mobility capital.” I find such immobility-mobility capital” consists of high levels of formal education, extensive travel experience, and the number of years at their current job. These indicators signal to the officer that the applicant is so well established in their country of residence that they are unlikely to remain in the US even if they are not correlated with immigrant intent.  I further show holds both for applicants of all visa types and only for rarely converted tourist visas, and both in the culturally and socio-economically distinct locales of Beijing and Chengdu. I show how my findings about the denial of US visas to denials of visas are generalizable to other migrant-receiving countries by drawing on social media narratives of those who applied for visas to go to other countries.

In Chapter 2, “How the ‘Dual Intent Doctrine’ Undermines the Immigrant Versus Non-Immigrant Binary,” I examine how US tourist visa applicants’ presentation of self to surveyors and officers differs from those that are applying for other types of visas—like degree-seeking student visas, cultural exchange visas, and skilled worker visas—which are more frequently converted to immigrant visas. I hypothesize that this is due to a provision in the immigration law statute that encourages US visa officers to evaluate immigrant intent more strictly with the former than the latter by not denying non-immigrant visas to such latter applicants based on the likelihood that they will change their mind about immigrating after they arrive in the US. I show how those that applying for non-immigrant visas (NIVs) more likely to be converted into immigrant visas (high-conversion visas) answer these questions differently than those applying for NIVs less likely to be converted (low-conversion visas). I also reveal discrepancies in how they present their motivations to consular officers and our surveyors. I conclude that immobility-mobility capital is not as important to possess for those applying for such high-conversion visas as those with low-conversion visas due to the dual intent doctrine.

In Part 2: Deterrence, I consider how immigration policies, social pressures, and personal preferences together interact to deter many from even applying for a visa.

In Chapter 3: How Family Engenders Limits Upon International Migration, I build upon a finding from my survey of non-immigrant visa applicants that the main reason non-immigrant visa holders say they would not immigrate is family. Here I discuss how prospective migrants do not even apply for a visa because they also confront social forces from the community to the family that deter them from leaving, and women tend to face this opposition more than men. In a region of China that has historically one of the highest levels of out-migration, I show how many young adults become deterred from migrating not merely from visa requirements, but also due to opposition and pressure from the family which reinforces the visa requirements. Despite a kinship system and culture that more strongly sanctions men from marrying outside their bloodline, Chinese parents are much more likely to oppose women going abroad than men, even if this opposition decreases as they age. Since Chinese parents in many cases control family finances, they both intentionally and inadvertently deter their adult child to go abroad. Aside from overt opposition children may face, many women specifically are discouraged from migrating abroad or even traveling abroad due to concerns about their daughter’s physical safety, socioeconomic dependence on their parents, and societal peer pressure. This concern is particularly strong in the context of China as it is mediated by a traditional filial duty amongst the one-child-only generation toward their parents and the intense influence that parents exercise over the educational, career, and marital choices of their adult children—both of which have a stronger deterrent effect on daughters than sons.

Chapter 4: Struggling to Become Established Enough To Be Mobile highlights how deterrence also operates through a belief among young adults that they need time to build sufficient socio-economic status and social ties in their country of origin with which they can prove to foreign governments, family, and others in the country of origin they will return to their country when applying for an NIV and therefore enhance the opportunities they have to travel abroad. The process of prioritizing the accumulation of such SES and social ties deters potential immigrants from going abroad as they need to defer it to a later time that often never seems to arrive. Such societal pressures that deter projects to migrate and going abroad include expectations from the family and society in general that adult children complete a college education, obtain a “respectable” and stable job, purchase a home with a mortgage, marry an opposite sex partner, birth and raise children, and later take care of their parents—all of which effectively tie up and therefore ground many individuals from going abroad. Due to this tension many such deterred adults indefinitely defer their dream of going abroad. However, many of those deterred later often become especially eager to intentionally provide their children with pre-immigration support to go abroad as what I term second-generation emigrants.

In Part 3: Disenchantment, I examine the processes by which many of those who earnestly aspired to immigrate eventually gave up doing so and decided they would have a better life as an ex-immigrant in their country of origin.

Chapter 5: “Disenchanted With the Immigration Dream” draws upon data from 121 oral history interviews with Chinese ex-immigrants who gave up on immigrating to 16 distinct migrant-receiving countries. They describe how although they had an opportunity to migrate abroad, they nonetheless become disenchanted with the future life they envisioned they would have in countries of immigration. Synthesizing their narratives illuminates how a common sequence of processes—at first disappointment and boredom with a host society being unlike what they had envisioned, and then increasing frustrations with the language barrier. Even after they become fluent, ex-immigrants continued to feel culturally alienated due to their unfamiliarity with cultural references, customs, and norms. Then even after they culturally assimilate, aspiring immigrants encounter both racial discrimination that they perceive as hostile and local gender norms that make it difficult to find a stable relationship. After working for several years, they gradually become aware of how they are unable to advance their career within their job as an immigrant. Throughout their gradual disenchantment with their immigration project, restrictive immigration policies and greater opportunities in their country of origin can lead aspiring immigrants to cut their losses from their immigration project out of the belief they will have a happier life as an ex-immigrant in their homeland than “just an immigrant.” 

Chapter Six, The Sudden Shocks That End Immigration, examines at three levels whether and how sudden, and unexpected shocks trigger disenchantment by depriving ex-immigrants of feeling sufficiently ontologically grounded, secure, and stable in their pursuit of mobility. I first examine the impact of micro-level shocks that only pertain to a specific potential immigrant. This often includes relationship break-ups or a friend or family member suddenly becoming seriously ill or dying and often do lead to immigrants giving up. I contrast this to a macro-shock that induce suffering across the entire population and therefore substantially reduces an immigrants’ networks of social support that could help them cope with a loss of ontological security. I focus on the case of how the US government mismanaged the covid-19 pandemic by the US government resulting in a far higher percentage of its population dying than most other countries. I argue that those affected were less able to draw upon social support to recover a lost sense of ontological security that they can more rapidly recover by returning to the country of origin. Finally, in sharp contrast to the above two cases I show how a meso-level shock designed to drive away migrants—the spike of violent physical and verbal hate crimes against immigrants of East Asian origin in Western socities since 2020 that demanded that they go back to their country of origin—paradoxically led them to acculturate into American society more rapidly and therefore immigrate. 

The Conclusion of the books draw together the findings about these three types of processes that discourage immigration to discuss their implications for future research programs about migrant selectivity, state capability to control international migration and travel, and inequality both within and between migrant-receiving and migrant-sending societies. I propose ways we can quantitatively scale up the data I have collected about these three mechanisms that reduce the numbers who immigrate and then analyze it with the already abundant data we have about immigrants to develop more empirically compelling findings for such research questions than prior studies that have relied on lumping together diverse types of potential immigrant and those with no interest in immigrating as “non-migrants” as demographers have done in the past. I propose ways that in harmonizing and merging data from surveys about immigrants with data from potential immigrants who have confronted these three mechanisms, future research can discover more empirical robust findings about how migration flows are altering inequality both within and between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving societies, how effective states are controlling migrants, and how immigrants and the different types of potential immigrants are different from each other.  On a more theoretical level, across all these cases I emphasize how each of these mechanisms is driven by a tension between the desire of individuals to cross international borders and exercise autonomous choice over whether they live and the mutually reinforcing expectations by both governments and forces in society that individuals establish stable ties to a single society that make them more ambivalent about migrating. I conclude by encouraging scholars to incorporate empirical results and theories about these mechanisms into analyses about potential immigrants in the future. In this way, we can develop an even more profound ontological and epistemological appreciation of how important international migration and mobility are by offering detailed empirical knowledge and theory about various reasons that many might-have-been-immigrants never immigrated.

 Working Papers and Manuscripts-in-Preparation

I have several other up-and-coming projects and manuscripts-in-preparation about law, international migration/mobility/traveler control, and social inequality that incorporate a range of theories and methods. Stay tuned for:

1)     Critique of how normative political philosophers fail to account both the interest of migrant-sending and migrant-receiving societies in conceptualizing what a just immigration policy would be,

3)      A social network analysis of how social forces and cultural, economic and political traits of countries have relationally structured visa-free mobility of nationalities through the 20th and 21st centuries,

4)     Analysis of Chinese artwork with various interpretivist methods to demonstrate how visual artwork expresses phenomenological dimensions of migrants’ experiences not captured by social science research,

5)     Exploiting the widely unexpected 2016 US election outcome, the 2017 travel ban executive order and the Supreme upholding the ban as "natural experiments" with several hundred million observations of unavailable US government I-94 records and tweets to show how and why untargeted nationalities have since visited the US less than those targeted,

6)     Demographic and contextual correlates of China’s government forbidding and permitting its political dissidents from exiting its territory,

7)     A content analysis and M-Turk survey experiment showing how banning US journalists from using the word “illegal immigrant” did not lead to its decrease and how “undocumented immigrant” leads to more anti-immigrant sentiment in the US,

8)     A theoretical critique of how the hegemony of assimilationist ideology in how immigration societies think about immigrants harmed native-born society more than immigrants and has perpetuated many social and political problems,

9) A methodological article assessing the strengths and challenges of conducting collaborative field research between two researchers from two distinct cultures (coauthored with UCI colleague Peng Huang)

General Research Fund Project ($612,000 HKD~$78,461 USD):

Who Realizes Their Online Intentions To Emigrate? What Distinguishes Emigrants from Potential Emigrants in the Context of Rapid and Sudden Social Change

Website: www.hkemigrationproject.space 

Summary:

Research has shown that even if individuals say they will emigrate because they dislike changes in their society, most never do (Wong Siu-lun 2001, Van Dalen & Henkens 2013). Such potential emigrants may aspire to migrate but lack the ability to do so (Carling and Schewel 2018), strategically diversify risk for their family by staying at home to look after property and immobile relatives while others go abroad (FitzGerald and Arar 2018), or reasonably anticipate that their cultural, educational, and social resources might be less valuable abroad (Lancee and Bol 2017). The question remains: how do the traits, motivations, and events associated with emigration differ for emigrants and potential emigrants (those who think of emigrating but never do so)? This proposed study will contribute to our knowledge of why many people never migrate between countries and ultimately what ties individuals to society. The study does so by assessing how strongly associated emigration or thoughts of emigration are with events, migratory motivations, and migrant traits in Hong Kong, a society that has experienced rapid social changes that have driven some to migrate but not others.

Collecting such data soon is important since people will forget the details about why they migrated, researchers will find it harder to follow up with emigrants later, and the timing is now optimal: A survey by the Hong Kong Institute of Asia Pacific Studies (HKIAPS) found in September 2019, 2020, and 2021 that 42% to 43% of Hong Kongers“ wanted to emigrate”, and 15% to 16% had“ prepared to emigrate”. But government data indicates that Hong Kong’s population had declined by only 1.6% in the twelve months before August 2022 and by 1.2% in the twelve months before August 2021. Although these decreases in population were the largest on record, many potential emigrants have still not realized their aspirations (~40%) or plans (~13%) to emigrate. A focused comparison between emigrants and those who only think of emigrating will help to explain how the two groups differ in traits, motivations, and experiences. The Hong Kong case complements existing research about this phenomenon in migrant-sending societies during more settled periods with data from a context of sudden, rapid changes that many emigrants and potential emigrants have disliked.

I will create samples of these two groups of Hong Kongers—emigrants and potential emigrants—by collecting mentions of emigration on social media rather than simply relying on retrospective self-reports. Using an anonymous online survey, I will collect data about which 1) general factors and 2) specific historical events motivated participants to migrate, 3) whether and 4) when they emigrated, and 5) individual traits (e.g. various indicators of socioeconomic status and social ties) often associated with the likelihood of emigrating. After coding the factors and events, I will apply event-history models to this data to estimate how strongly and significantly the likelihood of 1) emigrating and 2) having thoughts about emigrating are associated with both different motives and society-wide events in Hong Kong, controlling for individual-level traits. My analysis will reveal how emigrants and potential emigrants on social media differ in the factors and events that motivate them to emigrate and their individual traits and reveal how these variables interact with each other.

To more deeply understand how the two groups understand emigration differently, I will interview willing participants online to explore how and why they decided to emigrate or not. Narrative data will enable me to more deeply probe about changes of how participants reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of emigrating, the extent of their ambivalence, and social pressures from key individuals and groups regarding their decision. To assess how those who post online about emigration differ from the entire online and offline population, I will also obtain demographic data from Hong Kong’s 1) general population (Census data), 2) general online population (random sample from social media), 3) those who have considered emigrating or emigrated but who are not on social media. This study will contribute to prior research about selectivity that has focused mainly only on individual-level traits from the perspective of migrant-receiving countries in which the migrant-sending society was not undergoing such rapid, sudden changes as Hong Kong recently has.