ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how social science findings can influence the immigration policy debate. It takes a broad view of social science findings, defining them to include deductive and inductive conclusions and conclusions that combine both deductive and inductive reasoning. The chapter examines the relationship between social science findings and value judgments. It examines the figures for people of Mexican descent born in the United States in various years and tallied in the 1970 census and compared each of these with the numbers in the same birth cohort in the 1980 census. In contrast, consider an assumption that would reduce the estimated number of undocumented Mexicans counted in the 1980 census. Robert Warren and Jeffrey Passel assumed that everyone of Mexican descent who was born in the United States never left the United States. Warren and Passel's estimate of undocumented immigrants in the United States depended not only on empirical data but on deductive assumptions.
