Essays
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Assimilation and Its Discontents - Zhou, Min
This essay offers a review of the scholarly literature on immigrant assimilation, looking at how classical assimilation theories explain the processes and outcomes of assimilation among contemporary immigrants and their offspring and how alternative theories are developed to address assimilation's discontents. The essay first revisits the commonly held assumptions underlying classical theories of assimilation and investigates why even normative pathways can lead to divergent assimilation outcomes. It then discusses new theoretical development in this area, highlighting the central ideas and conceptualization of the segmented assimilation theory and the neoclassical assimilation theory. The author emphasizes how multilevel determinants interact to produce unconventional pathways that have profound implication for success or failure of assimilation. She also suggests that researchers problematize the notions of “success” or “failure,” paying special attention to how immigrants and their offspring, rather than social scientists themselves, imagine and frame these notions because subjective conceptualization can influence strategies that result in vastly different pathways and outcomes. The essay concludes with a discussion on issues for future research. -
Ethnic Enclaves - Gold, Steven J.
Ethnic enclaves are geographically delimited regions wherein a community of immigrants characterized by common national or ethnic origins as well as class diversity owns a significant fraction of local businesses. By pooling business skill and investment capital within an environment of shared solidarity and coethnic employment, group members are able to successfully compete in the host society's economy such that both owners and workers are protected from the economic disadvantages (in the form of low returns on their investments in human capital) that recent immigrants generally encounter when seeking jobs in a host society's labor market. Through reliance on the ethnic enclave, immigrant populations are able to acquire wealth and provide their children with education sufficient to enter the middle class of the host society. -
Immigrant Adolescents: Opportunities and Challenges - Titzmann, Peter F.
Immigration is a critical issue for adolescent development as migration around the world continues at an increased pace. This essay provides insights into the opportunities and challenges in this area of research, but also spotlights important work that can serve as the foundation for future investigations. Our focus is on adolescent immigrants, as a substantial share of international migrants is under the age of 20. We first address specific issues across the crucial life domains of family, peers, and school, highlighting the need for developing outcome‐ and domain‐specific models in immigration research instead of focusing on “The Integration” of adolescent immigrants in general. We will then discuss more general challenges and future avenues in research with immigrant adolescents: the interplay of development and acculturation, discrimination, and the increasing heterogeneity of modern societies. -
Immigrant Children and the Transition to Adulthood - Gonzales, Roberto G.
The children of immigrants represent a large and growing segment of the US population. The children of immigrants are not progressing steadily as a group at the same rate or following a standard pathway to adulthood. Rather, there is wide variation across ethnic groups and immigrant generations, and immigrant children are not necessarily following the patterned sequence of the nonimmigrant majority. -
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging - Mahler, Sarah J.
For over 150 years and motivated by mass rural‐to‐urban migrations precipitated by industrialization, social scientists have been studying the experiences of newcomers into established sociocultural contexts. They rightly hypothesized that people's identifications with their social groups, their feelings of belonging in particular, might be altered in societies where the scope and scale of social life rapidly expanded well beyond the face‐to‐face relations characteristic of smaller‐scale societies. In addition, new forms of social solidarities and polarizations were swiftly emerging and taking hold. Early theorists faced the daunting task of not only chronicling these changes but also of theorizing in an age of newly forged and not yet sharpened social science analytical tools. Today the opposite is true; multiple models and almost innumerable publications compete to shed just a little more light on this complex social reality. Yet there is still room for innovation. Toward that goal I identify an approach meriting twenty‐first century focus: bridging heretofore separate approaches to understanding the experiences of immigrant versus native newcomers, that is, acculturation versus enculturation. Scholars of immigration have studied acculturation intensively—the processes of adapting to new cultural contexts by people who come to these contexts firmly established culturally from their homelands. Meanwhile, the same scholars almost completely ignore enculturation—the processes involved in learning culture and belonging that occupy infants and young children. Drawing upon advances in understanding the brain‐culture nexus, this essay argues that knowing more about enculturation can inform and improve understanding of acculturation. These concepts should form an analytical continuum examining how people come to identify and belong socially and how and why these shift in the course of life—particularly with migration. -
Immigration and the Changing Status of Asian Americans - Lee, Jennifer
Mass immigration over the past four decades has changed the racial and ethnic composition of United States by ushering in millions of Asians and Latinos whose arrival has not only challenged the traditional black‐white color line, but has also changed perceptions about race. Focusing on Asian Americans, I show how contemporary immigration has changed the racial status of this group; once considered “unassimilable” and “undesirable immigrants,” Asian Americans now exhibit the highest rates of intermarriage, the lowest rates of residential segregation, and the highest median household incomes of all US racial groups. By highlighting the changing selectivity of Asian immigration after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, I illustrate how their hyper‐selectivity has not only affected their patterns of incorporation, but also produced positive stereotypes of contemporary Asian Americans. This, in turn, has resulted in a social psychological process that I refer to as stereotype promise—the promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby enhancing performance and outcomes. By introducing research in social psychology to the fields of immigration and race, I provide a better understanding of the ways in which immigration is changing the meaning of race for Asian Americans in twenty‐first century America. -
Language Proficiency and the Integration of Immigrant Students in the Education System - Stanat, Petra
The integration of immigrant students in the education system is an important concern in most countries around the world. Several lines of research on this issue focus on the role of language, often distinguishing between students' family language, typically referred to as first language (L1), and the school language, typically referred to as second language (L2). Past research has clearly shown that immigrant students' level of proficiency in L2 affects their school success, yet the role of L1 proficiency is less clear. In addition, the question whether bilingual or monolingual instruction is more effective in supporting immigrant students is largely unresolved. Current investigations aim at overcoming limitations of prior research by employing longitudinal designs, by controlling relevant third variables, and by conducting randomized field trials. Promising avenues for future research include developing more clear‐cut conceptual and operational definitions of core constructs, analyzing potentially important moderators of effects, determining the role quality of language input and instruction play for proficiency development and school success, and analyzing the associations between proficiency development in L1 and L2 with various aspects of integration. -
Latinos and the Color Line - Rodríguez, Clara E.
This essay reviews the issues and current literature on how “race,” skin color, and/or phenotype operate as stratifying agents among Latinos in the United States. We review the trends and emerging issues in this area with regard to health, housing and segregation, and socioeconomic status (SES), including education and criminal justice. We do so in the context of the Census Bureau's release of its 2010 Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) study. This 5‐year study focuses on how to best ask the race question. One of the key findings of the study was that including “Hispanic/Latinos” as a race in the combined questionnaire format did not reduce the number of people identifying as Hispanic/Latino; however, it did reduce the number of Hispanics/Latinos reporting detailed information on specific national origin. The AQE also recommended further testing of the combined question format. The only time that a Hispanic origin group was included in the Census as a racial category was in 1930 when “Mexican” was included as a race. If the Census recommends the inclusion of Hispanic as a race, it would mark a significant departure from the 1997 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines and the Census' current policy of thinking of Latinos as an ethnic group, composed of many races, to a racial group similar to Whites, Blacks, or Asians in the United States. We also examine works that assess the importance of collecting data on race and ethnicity as analytically distinct concepts. -
Migrant Networks - Garip, Filiz
Migrant networks—webs of social ties between individuals in origin and migrants in destination—are a key determinant of the magnitude and direction of migration flows, as well as migrants' adaptation outcomes. The increasing emphasis on migrant networks represents a new approach to migration research, which, until the late 1980s, had been dominated by economic or political explanations of migration. This entry summarizes findings on migrant networks from relevant areas of research in anthropology, sociology, demography, and economics; identifies the promising lines of inquiry recently undertaken; and points to key issues for future research, such as understanding how migrant networks impact migration behavior and migrants' experiences. Such research into the specific mechanisms of social transmission will need to engage with the ongoing discussions on network effects and their identification in the social science literature at large, which will require the interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers. -
Politics of Immigration Policy - Money, Jeannette
In this essay, I first describe the foundational research that focuses on host or receiving states and the policies that determine states' openness to immigration and to immigrant integration. This research privileges domestic actors and institutions in the choice of immigration policy. In the following section, I outline the research that disaggregates both dimensions of immigration policy into component parts. For immigration control, these include skilled migration, unskilled migration, undocumented migration, and border control. For immigrant integration, this includes labor market integration, family reunification, and access to citizenship, among other policies. The focus on receiving states remains strong but is now complemented by research on sending states' policies toward emigrants. I also outline significant efforts by scholars to construct datasets that would allow researchers to evaluate the hypotheses generated by case studies. In the final section, I argue that, despite advances in the research agenda, there is a continuing paucity of quantitative data that would allow researchers to adjudicate among plausible hypotheses. Moreover, even where data are available, the data are generated by wealthy Western democracies about Western democracies. We have little systematic, cross‐national time series data on the rest of the world. I offer a generic concept, “politicians' incentives,” that provides one way of bridging the gap between our understanding of the politics of immigration policy in wealthy Western democracies and other states in the international system that are implicated in global migration patterns and policies. -
Skill Production Regimes and Immigrant Labor Market Integration - Kogan, Irena
In recent years, Western countries have been experiencing a significant increase in both humanitarian and economic immigration. With the number of migrants, the challenges of integration have also surged. In consequence, host countries have invested a considerable amount of resources in comprehensive and effective immigrant integration policies. Various integration measures, such as foreign credential recognition or education and (re‐)training, have been implemented to help immigrants with their transition into the host country's labor market. The success of such policies, we argue, depends not only on their extent and coverage but also on whether they are compatible with other institutional characteristics of the host countries. This contribution hence asks to what extent host countries' immigrant integration policies aligned with these countries' skill production regimes channel immigrants into the labor market and consequently are responsible for the cross‐national differences in immigrants' economic integration. We expect that immigrants, particularly those with a less marketable status (e.g., refugees or asylum seekers), should have higher incentives to acquire host‐country‐specific education or to have their source country education recognized in countries that lay a stronger emphasis on highly specific vocational skills. They also should have higher labor market returns on their investments in countries with more vocationally oriented education systems (such as in Germany and Austria) as opposed to countries with more generally oriented education systems (such as Ireland and the United Kingdom).