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Abstract
Concern with the prospects and experience of the ‘new’ second generation now stands at the top of the immigration research agenda in the United States. In contrast to the past, many immigrant offspring appear to be rapidly heading upward, exemplified by the large number of Chinese, Korean, Indian and other Asian-origin students enrolled in the nation's leading universities, some the children of workers, others the descendants of immigrants who moved straight into the middle class. On the other hand, knowledgeable observers tell us that the offspring of today's poorly educated immigrants are likely to experience a very different fate. In their view, post-industrial America is an inhospitable place for low-skilled immigrants and their offspring, as the latter are likely not to be integrated into the mainstream but acculturated into the ways and lifestyles of their underclass neighbours. We advance an alternative perspective, not captured by these two opposing views: namely, that the children of recent immigrants will follow in the footsteps of the offspring of Italian or Polish labour migrants of the turn of the last century, gaining incorporation into working-class America. Using samples of the Current Population Survey (CPS), we evaluate these hypotheses, comparing job holding and job quality patterns among the descendants of immigrants and their native counterparts.
Acknowledgments
Grateful thanks to the Russell Sage Foundation and to the University of California, Institute of Labor and Employment, for grants supporting this research; responsibility for the results reported herein is that of the authors alone.
Notes
1. Since 1994, the Current Population Survey has often been used for studies of the second generation. We note that the CPS shares many of the shortcomings that afflict other similar sources of official data used for the study of immigration: in particular, it does not ask about legal status. However, this lacuna is likely to be of limited importance for the purposes at hand, which entail studying those children of immigrants who are born in the United States, and for whom US citizenship is a birthright status. While an unauthorised legal status may affect the foreign-born, the huge rise in legal admissions from Mexico and, more importantly, adjustments among Mexicans already residing in the United States imply that the migrants of earlier vintage found in the sample represent a largely legalised population.
2. If migrant selectivity is diminishing, as is likely to be true among Mexican immigrants (e.g. Borjas Citation1994), cross-sectional comparisons between first and second generations may yield upwardly biased indicators of inter-generational change, as the contemporary second generation are the offspring of an earlier, and possibly more selective group than the most recent cohorts. By contrast, cross-sectional comparisons between second and third generations may yield downward biases, due to differences in the ways in which these populations are identified. Whereas the second generation is identified genealogically, using information about parent's birthplace, the third-plus generation is identified psycho-socially, using information regarding ethnic identity. While current knowledge does not tell us whether retention of Mexican ethnic identity varies by social class or ethnicity of marital partner, research on other groups (e.g. Alba Citation1990) suggests that social mobility and intermarriage decrease the likelihood of continued affiliation.