Philip Kasinitz

Segmented assimilation revisited: types of acculturation and socioeconomic mobility in young adulthood

Abstract This article examines the debate between key theories of immigrant assimilation by exploring the effect of acculturation types – dissonant, consonant and selective – on socioeconomic outcomes in young adulthood. Drawing on survey data from the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York, we show that, while all three types occur, dissonant acculturation is the exception, not the norm, among second-generation young adults. Our results also suggest that neither the type of acculturation nor the level of ethnic embeddedness can account for the variation in mobility patterns both across and within second-generation groups. These findings lead us to question assumptions about the protective effect of selective acculturation and the negative effect of dissonant acculturation.

Becoming American/Becoming New Yorkers: Immigrant Incorporation in a Majority Minority City

Many observers have noted that immigrants to the United States are highly concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas of a relatively few states. Though immigrants diffused into many places that had previously seen relatively few immigrants during the 1990s, as of the 2000 census, 77 percent of the nations 31.1 million foreign born residents still lived in six states – California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. According to the 2000 census, the two largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and New York, accounted for one third of all immigrants (http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2002/demoprofiles.html). While immigrants moved into many new areas during the 1990s, making the challenge of incorporating their children a national issue, their concentration in our largest cities remained pronounced.

The gentrification of “Boerum Hill”: Neighborhood change and conflicts over definitions

The article presents a case history of a gentrifying neighborhood, with special reference to the interplay between cultural artifacts and the forces of the political economy. In Boerum Hill, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, newly arriving middle-class homeowners used various political and cultural methods, including changes in nomen-clature, house tours, manipulation of boundaries and an attempt to secure historic landmark status, in order to enforce their definition of what the neighborhood should be. A countermovement then emerged on the part of older residents, who, using a different set of cultural referents (based on the notion of ethnic pride), sought to enforce a different definition. The author proposes that while the “neighborhood” is a socially constructed entity, the resources with which this construction takes place are unequally distributed. Moreover, as the notion of neighborhood has become increasingly politically salient in recent years, the author suggests that cultural conflicts over the definition of neighborhoods have become a feature of urban politics.

Becoming American, Becoming Minority, Getting Ahead: The Role of Racial and Ethnic Status in the Upward Mobility of the Children of Immigrants

Given the long history of racism in the United States, observers have been concerned that labeling the children of immigrants as “nonwhite” could lead to their downward assimilation. The success of at least some members of the contemporary second generation points to another possibility. The institutions and strategies developed by previous waves of immigrants, the struggles for equality by long-standing minorities, and changing attitudes about race have become a source of opportunity and constraint for immigrant children. Drawing from the New York Second Generation Study, the author of this article argues that programs originally intended to address the needs of earlier immigrant waves and those of native minorities, particularly African Americans, have become increasingly multicultural in focus. These programs have broadened their definition of what minority means and have, however unintentionally, come to serve as an aid to incorporation for members of todays second generation.

The Kids Are (Mostly) Alright: Second-Generation Assimilation: Comments on Haller, Portes and Lynch

The overall well-being and integration of second-generation immigrant youth constitute an important topic for researchers and policy makers, one that has generated a great deal of empirical research. While the article by Haller, Portes and Lynch organizes that research into two competing camps – segmented assimilation vs. other theories of assimilation – we think that these theories are better seen as complementary rather than antagonistic. We also believe that empirical findings on the second generation from various studies are not far apart, but in our view they do not show that “downward” assimilation is as widespread as Portes and his colleagues assert. Researchers using different theoretical lenses reach quite similar conclusions about today’s children of immigrants. In general, the second generation is doing much better than its parents in educational attainment and is less concentrated in immigrant jobs (Kasinitz et al. 2008; Park and Myers 2010; Smith 2003; Telles and Ortiz 2008). The overwhelming majority of the second generation is completely fluent in English and integrated in many ways in American society (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Bean and Stevens 2003). Yet most of its members have not reached parity with native whites, and many experience racial discrimination. A minority of the second generation does not make a successful transition to adulthood, dropping out of high school and/or failing to find employment, and some members of the second generation become involved in criminal activity including gangs and drugs (Rumbaut 2005). This was also, we must point out, the experience of an earlier second generation of European origins, during the first half of the 20th century (Foner 2000).

Black Canadians and black Americans: racial income inequality in comparative perspective

Abstract Using census data, we compare the economic status of blacks and whites in two neighbouring countries – the USA and Canada – examining the effects of international migration of people of colour upon systems of racial hierarchy. At first impression, the racial income gap is markedly smaller in Canada than in the USA. However, this is largely due to the relative sizes of first-, second- and third-plus-generation immigrants in each country. Once this is taken into account, we find that racial income and wage gaps are quite similar in the two countries, raising the puzzle of why nations with such divergent institutional histories produce similar levels of racial inequality.

Immigrants in New York City: Reaping the Benefits of Continuous Immigration

Using New York City as an example, this essay examines how American cities that have a long and continuous history of absorbing immigrants develop welcoming institutions and policies for current immigrants and their children. Cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and New York have been gateway cities for many previous waves of immigrants and continue to absorb new immigrants today. The ethnic conflicts and accommodations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continue to shape the context of reception of todays immigrants. In contrast to “new destinations,” which in recent years have often been centers of anti-immigrant sentiment and nativist local social policies, New York has generally adopted policies designed to include and accommodate new immigrants, as well as repurposing institutions that served earlier European immigrants and native-born African Americans and Puerto Ricans. The continuing significance of race in the city is counterbalanced in the lives of immigrants by a relative lack of nativism and an openness to incorporating immigrants.

The School to Work Transition of Second Generation Immigrants in Metropolitan New York: Some Preliminary Findings

We believe the time has come to undertake a detailed study of the school experience, labor market outcomes, and social incorporation of the leading edge of the second generation as it enters adulthood. Specifically, we are now in the early stages of study which will include a) a large scale telephone survey, b) in-depth, open-ended, in-person follow-up interview with a subsample of survey respondents, and c) strategically positioned ethnographies.

Beyond the Melting Pot: The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic?.

Still, Beyond the Melting Pot continues to be a landmark book and this is so, in my view, for three reasons: first, because of its historical significance as the first compelling challenge to the “canonical” assimilation story; second, because of the wealth of information it provided and which set a new standard for expert knowledge in this field; third, because of its contemporary relevance as we seek to make sense of the fragmentation of immigrant adaptation into multiple paths. In our present study of the immigrant second generation, Rub& Rumbaut and I discovered that from early to late adolescence, children of immigrants cease to see themselves as plain Americans and define themselves increasingly under various ethnic labels. Assimilation, it seems, is proceeding backwards. “Something” must have happened to these youths in the intervening years to teach them what American society is really like and their actual place is in its ethnic hierarchy. Glazer and Moynihan gave us a better framework to understand these and similar findings than earlier theories by their refusal to sell a normative story and by their hard look at what ethnicity in America really implies.

Bringing the neighborhood back in: The new urban ethnography

Urban ethnography is among the founding traditions of American sociology. From the days of Robert Park and his students until the early 1960s, qualitative studies of urban communities contributed in important ways to the conceptual vocabulary of sociologists. Such studies continue to play a central role in undergraduate curricula and remain among the most widely read works in American social science. Yet from the mid-1960s to the mid1980s they occupied a rather marginal position within the sociological profession. Fine work continued to be done, and several leading practitioners of the ethnographic craft came to be much honored as elder statesmen. Yet few aspiring sociologists were urged to follow in their footsteps. The last few years, however, have seen a minor resurgence of this tradition. Paradoxically, the increased influence of literary and cultural studies within anthropology, while often framed as a critique of ethnography, has served to revitalize interest in the ethnographic approach. Within sociology this ambivalent reconsideration of qualitative methods is evident in Paul Williss influential Marxian study of British working-class youth,