The Unknown Immigration: Incentives and Family Composition in Inter-Country Adoptions to the United States

Fernando Lozano () and Sherrie Kossoudji ()
Additional contact information
Sherrie Kossoudji: University of Michigan

No 4547, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Children adopted from abroad are an immigrant group about which little is known. According to the U.S. Census more than one and a half million children living in the U.S. are adopted, with fifteen percent of them born abroad. In fact more than twenty thousand adopted orphans from abroad enter the country each year. The families who adopt these orphans are mostly white, wealthy, and well educated (Kossoudji, 2008). What are the characteristics of children who are adopted from abroad and what incentives drive families to adopt them? In this paper we use the 2000 census to illuminate the landscape of international adoption. We address three issues: 1) How do the demographic characteristics of the children adopted from abroad change as other countries open and shut the door to inter-country adoptions, changing the supply of available children? 2) U.S. born parents and foreign-born parents may have different incentives to adopt. How are these incentives reflected in the characteristics of the children they adopt? 3) What explains differences in the estimates of foreign-born adopted children in the Census and the number of visas granted by the State Department?

Keywords: international adoption; immigrant children (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4547.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4547

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().