Rubén G. Rumbaut

The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation Among Children of Immigrants

Focusing on the formation of ethnic self-identities during adolescence, this article examines the psychosocial adaptation of children of immigrants from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The data are drawn from a survey carried out in the San Diego and Miami metropolitan areas of over 5,000 children of immigrants attending the eighth and ninth grades in local schools. The sample is evenly split by gender and nativity (half are U.S. born, half foreign born). The results show major differences in their patterns of ethnic self-identification, both between and within groups from diverse national origins. Instead of a uniform assimilative path, we found segmented paths to identity formation. Detailed social portraits are sketched for each ethnic identity type. Multivariate analyses then explore the determinants of assimilative and dissimilative ethnic self-identities and of other aspects of psychosocial adaptation such as self-esteem, depressive affect, and parent-child conflict, controlling for gender, socioeconomic status, and national origin. The theoretical and practical implications of these results –especially the effects of acculturation, discrimination, location and ethnic density of schools, parental socialization and family context, upon the psychosocial adaptation of children of recent immigrants to the United States – are discussed.

Assimilation and its discontents: between rhetoric and reality.

The process of immigrant assimilation is typically and uncritically conceived as one of linear progress – becoming similar to the dominant group in the place of destination is presumed to be a good thing. But a compelling body of evidence on the adaptation of immigrants and their children points to a deterioration of outcomes over time and generation in the United States, as well as to nonlinear processes of change. While linguistic assimilation among children of immigrants does proceed rapidly and inexorably as a linear function, other outcomes – in such diverse areas as infant and adolescent health, diet and divorce, delinquency and risk behaviors, educational achievement and aspirations, an ethos of hard work, and the development of an ethnic identity – contradict conventional expectations, expose underlying ethnocentric pretensions, and point instead to assimilations discontents. By examining such paradoxes of immigrant adaptation that emerge in the conceptual interstices between rhetoric and reality, fruitful reformulations of a seminal sociological concept may be stimulated and advanced.

Growing Up is Harder to do

In the past several decades, a new life stage has emerged: early adulthood. No longer adolescents, but not yet ready to assume the full responsibilities of an adult, many young people are caught between needing to learn advanced job skills and depending on their family to support them during the transition.

Gendered Paths: Educational and Occupational Expectations and Outcomes Among Adult Children of Immigrants

Abstract This article examines young adults’ educational and occupational trajectories over a ten-year period using panel data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study in California. While many of the young men and women in the study are on straightforward paths to socio-economic success, others are falling well short of their goals and imagined futures. Males begin with lower educational and occupational expectations than females in junior high school, and are also less likely to translate high expectations into realities in early adulthood. While some occupational choices remain traditionally gendered, females are more likely than males to aspire to and to attain the highest status occupations, even those that are male-dominated. Early educational expectations are important predictors of subsequent success for both males and females. But determinants of outcomes differ significantly for men and women, showing how paths are segmented not only by class and ethnicity, but also by gender.

Introduction: The Second Generation and the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study

Abstract This Special Issue presents original results from the third wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study [CILS], a decade-old panel that followed a large sample of second-generation youths from early adolescence to early adulthood. The issue contains results of the third survey, conducted in 2001–2003 as members of the panel had reached an average age of 24. This introduction provides evidence of the importance of the topic, describes the methodology of the study, and summarizes the contents of the issue. The following articles examine different aspects of the second-generation adaptation process in early adulthood and tests alternative hypotheses on the forms of the process and its determinants.

Turning points in the transition to adulthood: Determinants of educational attainment, incarceration, and early childbearing among children of immigrants

Abstract This article first sketches a contemporary portrait of the immigrant first and second generations of the United States, examining national-level census data to specify differences by ethnicity, gender and generation in three variables shaping socio-economic trajectories in early adulthood: educational attainment, incarceration, and childbearing. An analysis of the latest results from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study [CILS] in California is then presented, focusing on patterns and predictors of those same three variables among a sample of young adults in their mid twenties whose parents emigrated from Mexico, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and other countries of origin. As post-secondary educational attainment has become critical to social mobility for young adults, incarceration (for men) and early childbearing (for women) have emerged as turning points that can derail life course trajectories by disrupting educational and occupational opportunities to develop human capital and move into the economic mainstream, setting in motion processes of cumulating disadvantage.

Paradoxes (and Orthodoxies) of Assimilation

The concept of assimilation, whether as outcome or process, conflates elements that are both empirical and ideological, ethnographic and ethnocentric. Conventional wisdom on the adaptation of immigrants in America has conceived of “assimilation” prescriptively and not only descriptively, as a linear process of progressive adjustment to American life. This conception is guided by an implicit deficit model: to get ahead immigrants need to learn how to “become American” and overcome their deficits with respect to the new language and culture, the new economy and society. As they shed the old and acquire the new over time, they surmount those obstacles and make their way more successfully—a homogenizing process more or less completed by the second or third generation. Recent research findings, however, especially in the areas of immigrant health, mental health, ethnic self-identity and education, debunk such ethnocentric assumptions, often running precisely in the opposite direction of what is expected from traditional perspectives. Some empirical examples are highlighted, focusing on paradoxes—on evidence that contradicts orthodox expectations—in order to identify areas that need conceptual, analytical, and theoretical refinement, including the need to spell out precisely and systematically what it is that is being “assimilated,” by whom, under what circumstances, and in reference to what sector of American society. The diversity of contemporary immigrants to the United States, in terms of class, culture, color, and the contexts within which they are received, and their segmented modes of incorporation, raise new questions about assimilation from what? to what? and for what?

Reaping What You Sow: Immigration, Youth, and Reactive Ethnicity

The immigrant-stock population of the United States, the largest ever, is a youthful one - and today’s U.S.-born second generation, with a median age of 12, is poised to explode into adulthood in the coming 10 to 20 years. They are “coming of age” in an aging society undergoing profound social and economic transformations, all of which will have, inevitably, political ramifications. A great deal of how tomorrow’s social contract between natives and newcomers is worked out, and how the commitment to democratic values of equity and inclusion is met, will hinge on the mode of political incorporation and civic engagement of newcomer youth today. In widely varying contexts of social inequality, the way young newcomers come to define themselves is significant, revealing much about their social attachments (and detachments) as well as how and where they perceive themselves to “fit” in the society of which they are its newest members. Self-identities and ethnic loyalties can often influence long-term patterns of behavior and outlook as well as intergroup relations, with potential long-term political implications. And the decisive turning point for change in ethnic and national self-identities can be expected to take place in the second, not in the first generation. As they react to their contexts of reception and learn how they are viewed and treated within them, newcomer youths form and inform not only their own identities but also their attitudes toward the society that receives them. If there is a moral to this story of reception and belonging, it echoes an ancient admonition: that societies, too, reap what they sow.

Origins and Destinies: Immigration to the United States Since World War II

Contemporary immigration to the United States and the formation of new ethnic groups are the complex and unintended social consequences of the expansion of the nation to its post-World War II position of global hegemony. Immigrant communities in the United States today are related to a history of American military, political, economic, and cultural involvement and intervention in the sending countries, especially in Asia and the Caribbean Basin, and to the linkages that are formed in the process that open a variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. The 19.8 million foreign-born persons counted in the 1990 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, though in relative terms, only 7.9% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a lower proportion than earlier in this century. Todays immigrants are extraordinarily diverse, a reflection of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical and structural contexts. Also, unlike the expanding economy that absorbed earlier flows from Europe, since the 1970s new immigrants have entered an “hourglass” economy with reduced opportunities for social mobility, particularly among the less educated, and new waves of refugees have entered a welfare state with expanded opportunities for public assistance. This paper seeks to make sense of the new diversity. A typology of contemporary immigrants is presented, and their patterns of settlement, their distinctive social and economic characteristics compared to major native-born racial-ethnic groups, and their different modes of incorporation in—and consequences for—American society are considered.

Immigration and Adult Transitions

Almost 30 percent of the more than 68 million young adults aged eighteen to thirty-four in the United States today are either foreign born or of foreign parentage. As these newcomers make their transitions to adulthood, say Rubén Rumbaut and Golnaz Komaie, they differ significantly not only from one another but also from their native-parentage counterparts, including blacks and whites. The authors document the demographic changes in the United States over the past forty years and describe the ways in which generation and national origin shape the experiences of these newcomers as they become adults.Rumbaut and Komaie point out that immigrant groups experience gaps in social, economic, and legal status that are even greater than the gaps between native whites and blacks. By far the most-educated (Indians) and the least-educated (Mexicans) groups in the United States today are first-generation immigrants, as are the groups with the lowest poverty rate (Filipinos) and the highest poverty rate (Dominicans). These social and economic divides reflect three very different ways immigrants enter the country: through regular immigration channels, without legal authorization, or as state-sponsored refugees. For many ethnic groups, significant progress takes place from the first to the second generation. But, say the authors, for millions of young immigrants, a lack of legal permanent residency status blocks their prospects for social mobility. Having an undocumented status has become all the more consequential with the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive federal immigration reforms.In the coming two decades, as the U.S. native-parentage labor force continues to shrink, immigrants and their children are expected to account for most of the growth of the nations labor force, with the fastest-growing occupations requiring college degrees. Rumbaut and Komaie stress that one key to the nations future will be how it incorporates young adults of immigrant origin in its economy, polity, and society, especially how it enables these young adults to have access to, and to attain, postsecondary education and its manifold payoffs.