ASSIMILATING THE DIASPORA OF THE AMERICAS IN AUSTRALIA: AN INTERGENERATIONAL ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT

People from the Americas are a small, largely neglected part of Australia’s immigrant population. Most came from middle-class backgrounds in the post-global economic restructuring era (post-mid-1970s), though a minority were working class. Five dimensions of their intergenerational assimilation are analyzed: educational attainment and occupational status; linguistic shift; identification as Australians; discrimination (racism); and, for Sydney, first to second generations spatial assimilation. While the first three dimensions conform to the classic assimilation model, intergenerational socioeconomic status shift and spatial dispersal do so only partially. Intergenerational patterns of educational attainment and occupations broadly correlate, but first through third generation shift among both North and Latin Americans is downwards toward national means. Second generation ancestry groups are more dispersed than the first, but only a minority into host-society districts; suggested reasons include superdiversity, age, income, and housing market factors.

Keywords::

• diaspora
• intergenerational analysis
• Australia

Notes

¹ Levitt and Waters (2002; see also Waters and Gerstein 2015; Zhou and Bankston 2016) mention two broad views of assimilation in the United States. Most experienced increasing intergenerational acculturation and subsequent integration into the white middle class. For a minority, intergenerational mobility was downwards into an underclass situation (segmented assimilation). There is no evidence of segmented assimilation in Australia.

² After Del Rio (2014, 168) “Latin American” includes everybody of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking heritage from South and Central America living in Australia.

³ The 2016 census asked: “What is the person’s ancestry? Provide up to two ancestries only.” Results appear online in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Tablebuilder facility https://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/tablebuilder. Multiple ancestries could be ascertained by cross-tabulating results of each choice (Tables ANC1P and ANC2P). However, with one exception, 60 Central Americans who recorded their ancestry as Mayan, responses nominated country of birth. With no question on race, examination of multiple ancestries would add little.

⁴ “Host” society is defined, after Poulsen and others (2001), as those claiming Australian only or Anglo-Irish ancestry.