The Unknown Immigration: How state policy shapes the characteristics of inter-country adoptions to the United States Fernando Antonio Lozano fernando.lozano@pomona.edu Department of Economics, Pomona College and Ford School of Public Policy, The University of Michigan 735 S. State Street The University of Michigan Ann Arbor Michigan USA, 48109 734-647-8837 Sherrie A. Kossoudji (contact author) kossoudj@umich.edu Associate Professor The Department of Economics, the School of Social Work 1280 S. University Ave. The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, 48109 734.763.6320 This draft: May 8, 2009 Preliminary—please do not quote Keywords: immigrant children, adoptions JEL codes: J1, J12 Abstract Children adopted from abroad are an immigrant group about which little is known. What are the characteristics of children who are adopted from abroad and what incentives drive families to adopt them? 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, and with more than twenty thousand new adopted orphans from abroad entering the country each year. The families of these adopted orphans are mostly white, wealthy, and well educated (see Kossoudji, 2008), yet we know very little about them. In this paper we use the 2000 census to examine to what extent policy changes have shaped the landscape of international adoption. How does policy in other countries and in the United States change the demographic characteristics of the children adopted from abroad and the families that adopt them? Although the paper is preliminary, it appears that U.S. born parents respond to changes in adoption policy abroad and foreign-born parents respond to changes in immigration policy in the United States.