Integration's challenges and opportunities in the Wealthy West

† The original version of this paper was presented as a keynote address to the 2015 JEMS-SCMR conference.

ABSTRACT

A demographic transition to greater ethno-racial diversity, the product in part of large-scale immigration over decades, will create challenges and opportunities for Western societies in coming decades. In this paper, based on our study of the USA and four Western European countries, we sift evidence from the first decade of the twenty-first century to look for clues about the possible consequences of the transition for the integration of the second generation, specifically, the children of low-status immigrants. We find unmet challenges when it comes to educational attainment and early labour-market position. That is, although on average the second generation advances beyond its parents, in each society it lags well behind its agemates from the native majority. Yet we also find, using data from the USA, that segments of the second generation are experiencing social mobility into the upper tiers of the occupational hierarchy and socially integrating with members of the majority group, arguably expanding the societal mainstream. This paradoxical picture, we argue, captures crucial dynamics that will affect the near future in the wealthy West.

KEYWORDS:

• Integration
• second generation
• demographic transition
• education
• labor market
• mixed unions

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Paul Statham and his colleagues for this opportunity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

† The original version of this paper was presented as a keynote address to the 2015 JEMS-SCMR conference.

1. By native majority, we mean, in the USA, later-generation white Americans and, in European countries, the native born of native-born parents.

2. We refer to ‘ethno-racial origin’ because key social distinctions in American society are defined as a combination of race and ethnicity, such as that between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics. Occasionally, we will refer to ‘race’ as a stand-in for the more complex term.

3. A major qualification is in order because of the limitations of census data: The census classifies all individuals of mixed race and mixed Hispanic/non-Hispanic ancestry as members of minority groups. For simplicity, we have remained consistent with this problematic usage. However, it should be noted that many of these individuals with mixed backgrounds have in fact some European ancestry.