Frank Dawson Bean Jr. (born May 20, 1942) is Chancellor's Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. Bean came to Irvine in 1999, after holding positions at the University of Texas and Indiana University. He has a PhD in sociology from Duke University.
Accomplishments
Author or editor of more than 150 scholarly articles and chapters and 18 books, Bean's research focuses on international migration, unauthorized migration, U.S. immigration policy, and the demography of the U.S. Hispanic population. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and held numerous visiting scholar positions (at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Transatlantic Academy, the American Academy in Berlin, the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, and the Center for U.S./Mexico Studies at the University of California at San Diego). He has mentored dozens of students, who hold (or have held) positions at such places as Georgetown University, UCLA, the University of Illinois, the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, the University of Washington, the Migration Policy Institute, and the U.S. Bureau of the Census. A frequent recipient of foundation and federal grants, Bean has been a Principal Investigator of NICHD behavioral science grants in population in every decade since the inception of the program in 1969. In 2011, he received the Distinguished Lifetime Scholarly Career Award in International Migration at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
Intellectual Contributions
Bean's intellectual contributions span five areas. The first is racial/ethnic fertility. The American Library Association gave a Choice award for academic distinction to his book Mexican American Fertility Patterns (with Gray Swicegood, 1985). This study shows that Mexican-origin women have higher birth rates because of their lower socioeconomic standing and work opportunities, not because of their cultural orientations, and that their fertility changes as they achieve higher levels of education. A second area in which Bean is well-known is Hispanic demography, as indicated by his 1987 book The Hispanic Population of the United States (with Marta Tienda), which was commissioned by the National Committee for Research on the 1980 Census and the Russell Sage Foundation. Regarded as a canonical treatment of its subject, the work provides a comprehensive portrayal of Hispanics and shows, among other things, the crucial importance of considering Hispanic national-origin and nativity groups separately in policy-relevant research.
A third research area is unauthorized Mexican migration. He co-directed a large research program at The Urban Institute and Rand Corporation on the implementation and effectiveness of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), legislation that initiated employer penalties for hiring unauthorized workers and permitted legalization of unauthorized immigrants in the country. His research involved developing estimates of how IRCA affected unauthorized migration and what factors affected flows from Mexico. In the mid-1990s, he led a group of U.S. and Mexican scholars seeking to improve estimates of unauthorized migration for the Mexico/U.S. Binational Migration Study, mandated by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. The research provided what The New York Times called in a front-page story "the first authoritative estimate of the net annual flow of illegal Mexican workers into the United States." This work also helped to spawn adjustments for coverage error in all subsequent official and widely accepted estimates of unauthorized migration.
