Nathan Hoffmann

This paper helps disentangle Americans’ preferences for migrants’ presumed cultural similarity from economic potential and humanitarian merit. It also sheds light on an understudied but politically salient group.

Thanks for reading! The full paper is open access: academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

We do discover a number of heterogeneous effects: Democrats, atheists, and sexual minority respondents consider lesbian and gay migrants more deserving of admission than straight ones, while Republicans, Christians, and straight respondents see them as less deserving.

However, we find no preference for admission and a negative overall effect for cultural similarity: Americans do not prefer to admit lesbian and gay migrants over straight ones, and they perceive them as less culturally similar.

We thought Americans might be more welcoming of lesbian and gay migrants and to perceive them as more culturally similar, due to homonational norms, perceptions of lesbians and gays as economically productive, and humanitarian concerns around increasing oppression.

A new paper with @kvelasco.bsky.social is now online at @poqjournal.bsky.social! Using a conjoint survey experiment with 1,650 U.S. citizens, we ask, how do Americans take sexual orientation into account when evaluating immigrants' deservingness for admission?

academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

Here are some photos from my mom's side, Eastern European Jews who migrated around 1900 to escape oppression in the Russian Empire.

I have my first lecture for my Sociology of Immigration class tomorrow, and I'm sharing my family's migration story. My dad scrounged up alien registration cards for Johann George Angerer and Kunigunda Seitz, my grandma’s grandparents, who migrated from a small German town near Nuremberg in 1854!

That's true, adding a don't know option would give this a lot more validity! Even so, family and other people I talk to in Kansas (where I grew up) have strikingly negative views of major cities.

How Americans describe New York, Los Angeles, and other major U.S. cities | YouGov Of the cities asked about, New York City is most likely to be regarded as multicultural, as having good food, and as being walkable. Los Angeles beat out other cities in the share who view it as havin...

Link to the @today.yougov.com study: today.yougov.com/politics/art...

Of course, crime in New York is at a historic low. And as a former LA resident, I'm appalled that only 34% of Americans think LA has good food! It is an incredible food city.

www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/ne...

Annoyed by long lines and throngs of tourists, a friend in New York feels like everyone in the U.S. wants to move there. I found this 2023 @today.yougov.com poll on major American cities, showing that only 9% of Americans think that New York is safe! Other aspects are not rated much better.

The two books that most blew me away were Home by Marilynne Robinson and Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte.

What if Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction? If economic and technological transformations have changed our relationship with literature before, they could do so again.

Very proud of my friend @tuhinchakr.bsky.social being featured in the New Yorker!
www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

datacatalogue.ukdataservice.ac.uk/series/serie...

British cohort studies are excellent data and are easy to access. I've worked the most with the Millennium Cohort Study.

Curious if these proportions have changed over time. As a kid I would have said the future, but now I'd definitely say the past (more of an age than a period effect I think).

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

I just wrapped up teaching an intro stats course using this book, and I think it worked really well! bsky.app/profile/nath...

I deeply thank everyone who gave advice, as well as my students, who were so engaged and pleasant to teach. If anyone wants to hear more from me about putting together a new intro stats course, I'd love to talk; please message me. I'm looking forward to teaching this again soon!

In most of the five problem sets I assigned, students replicated part of a published social science paper. Below is a link to each paper:
doi.org/10.1177/0003...
doi.org/10.1177/0003...
doi.org/10.1257/0002...
doi.org/10.1257/0002...

With topics like data cleaning, visualization, and survey design, I tried to make the course useful for students who don't want to do quantitative work, but interesting for those with some background in statistics. To keep things engaging for the latter, I included Bonus problems in the group work.

Data Analysis for Social Science An ideal textbook for complete beginners—teaches from scratch R, statistics, and the fundamentals of quantitative social science

As the main textbook, I chose "Data Analysis for Social Science" by @ellaudet.bsky.social and Kosuke Imai. I loved how this book introduced topics like causal inference and included accessible R code, with probability and statistics saved for the end.

press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

I tried to make the course practical and hands-on. Each 75-minute class session, I lectured for about 40 minutes, then gave in-class group work exercises for the students to practice concepts and do some coding in R, graded for completion. At the end of each class, we went over solutions together.

With the semester finishing, I wanted to give an update about building this intro statistics course for PhD students in sociology. Thanks to everyone who gave advice! I ended up having a blast teaching it, and students seemed to like it.

Here's the syllabus: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

A few years ago I got selected for the ACS, but that was less exciting because it was just by mail.

Today was the most exciting day of my life: An in-person enumerator from the Census Bureau stopped by to interview me for the Current Population Survey! I can't wait to tell my students that I'm contributing to the data we use for statistics exercises.

I'm facilitating a causal inference reading group next semester for Sociology PhD students. (I will also be learning!) If there are (1) pedagogical articles or (2) empirical examples in soc that you ❤️, will you share in the comments? [And please RT to help me crowd-source!]

Thanks for sharing it! It's under review...

What the data says about immigrants in the U.S. As of June 2025, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s.

A shocking 1.5-million decrease in net immigration between January and June
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Haha I have been lucky enough to avoid the PSID so far...