The complexities and confusions of segmented assimilation

Abstract

The concept of segmented assimilation is both the most important and most controversial idea to have emerged over the past twenty years from the literature on the children of immigrants in the US. This article traces the origins of the concept, attempts to unravel the controversy surrounding it and to show how the concept has evolved. We consider the major findings from the largest and most widely cited research studies about the children of immigrants in the US. We find that segmented assimilation has been used both simply to describe the diversity of educational and economic outcomes among the children of immigrants and as a typology to explain those outcomes. The typology has been the more controversial use and has undergone several alterations since its introduction. We conclude that the emphasis on national origins in both description and explanation should be replaced with a focus on social contexts and processes.

Keywords:

• segmented assimilation
• second generation
• United States
• educational outcomes
• national origins
• integration

Acknowledgements

This article emanates from a year in Europe on a sabbatical leave granted by Florida International University and with support from a Fulbright Fellowship and the European Institute of Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin. We would like to thank Jens Schneider, Maurice Crul, Roger Waldinger and Tekla Nicholas along with the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on an early draft of this article.

Notes

1. European scholars tend to prefer the terms incorporation or integration which avoid the implication that immigrants end up being indistinguishable from native members of the host society. The contemporary use of assimilation avoids this implication also and it is explicit in the concept of segmented assimilation. As currently used by most researchers assimilation, incorporation and integration are synonymous.

2. Segmented assimilation could also apply to later descendants of immigrants, i.e. the third, fourth and later generations. Presently, with the exception of Mexicans, there are too few of these from the current wave in the US to provide empirical data.

3. The incomes of second-generation Mexican men lag behind native whites, although they earn more than first-generation Mexicans (Valdez 2006; Waldinger and Reichl 2006; Waldinger and Lim 2008). In San Diego and South Florida over 20 per cent of the young adult children of immigrants had average household incomes greater than $75,000, while 16 per cent had less than $20,000 yearly family incomes (Portes, Fernández-Kelly and Haller 2005, p. 1018). In New York, native whites earn the most on average and native Puerto Ricans the least. In-between are the immigrants who are differentiated by national origin, with Russian Jews and Chinese having the highest earnings and Dominicans earning closer to the native minorities (Kasinitz et al. 2008, p. 177).

4. For an academic review of the popular discourse and politics surrounding US immigration, see Chavez (2008).

5. The one exception was West Indian females who earned more than West Indian males in the New York study (Kasinitz et al. 2008).

6. Everyone born in the US is ipso facto a US citizen. For the 1.5 generation who were born outside the US, legal status does not affect their early education. The US Supreme Court (‘Plyer v. Doe’ 1982) ruled that all children in the US, regardless of their immigration status, have a right to a free public education through to the end of high school, i.e. the twelfth grade. The court, however, did not give immigrants without legal status (including the 1.5 generation) the right to attend colleges and universities at the same cost as citizens or legal permanent residents.

7. Portes, Fernández-Kelly and Haller (2005) do point out that these negative outcomes result also indirectly from low parental human capital, especially among Haitians.

8. The somewhat parallel path that curtails education for females is early childbearing.