Thomas Soehl

Making the connection: Latino Immigrants and their Cross-border Ties

Abstract This paper uses the Pew Hispanic Centers 2006 National Survey of Latinos to study the everyday, routine cross-border activities of travel, remittance sending and telephone communication among Latin American immigrants in the United States. We ask how migrants vary in the intensity of their cross-border connections, distinguishing among the transmigrants, those captured by the host-country national social field, and those who maintain some ongoing home-country tie. We then examine the characteristics associated both with variations in the intensity of connectedness and with each specific type of connection. We show that most migrants maintain some degree of home-country connectedness, with a minority severing ties and a still smaller minority maintaining ties at a high degree of intensity. Connectivity is highly responsive to the location of key social ties, acculturation, and citizenship status, as well as the costs associated with the different types of cross-border activity.

Inheriting the Homeland? Intergenerational Transmission of Cross-Border Ties in Migrant Families

Theories of migrant transnationalism emphasize the enduring imprint of the premigration connections that the newcomers bring with them. But how do the children of migrants raised in the parents’ adopted country develop ties to the parental home country? Using a structural equation model and data from a recent survey of adult immigrant offspring in Los Angeles, this article shows that second-generation cross-border activities are strongly affected by earlier experiences of and exposure to home country influences. Socialization in the parental household is powerful, transmitting distinct home country competencies, loyalties, and ties, but not a coherent package of transnationalism. Our analysis of five measures of cross-border activities and loyalties among the grown children of migrants shows that transmission is specific to the social logic underlying the connection: activities rooted in family relationships such as remitting are transmitted differently than emotional attachments to the parents’ home country.

From Parent to Child? Transmission of Educational Attainment Within Immigrant Families: Methodological Considerations

One in five U.S. residents under the age of 18 has at least one foreign-born parent. Given the large proportion of immigrants with very low levels of schooling, the strength of the intergenerational transmission of education between immigrant parent and child has important repercussions for the future of social stratification in the United States. We find that the educational transmission process between parent and child is much weaker in immigrant families than in native families and, among immigrants, differs significantly across national origins. We demonstrate how this variation causes a substantial overestimation of the importance of parental education in immigrant families in studies that use aggregate data. We also show that the common practice of “controlling” for family human capital using parental years of schooling is problematic when comparing families from different origin countries and especially when comparing native and immigrant families. We link these findings to analytical and empirical distinctions between group- and individual-level processes in intergenerational transmission.

Blocked acculturation: cultural heterodoxy among Europe's immigrants.

Which immigrant groups differ most from the cultural values held by mainstream society and why? The authors explore this question using data from the European Social Survey on the values held by almost 100,000 individuals associated with 305 immigrant groups and the native majorities of 23 countries. They test whether distant linguistic or religious origins (including in Islam), value differences that immigrants “import” from their home countries, the maintenance of transnational ties and thus diasporic cultures, or legal and social disadvantage in the country of settlement shape acculturation processes. They find that only legally or socially disadvantaged groups differ from mainstream values in significant ways. For first generation immigrants, this is because the values of their countries of origin diverge more from those of natives. Among children of disadvantaged immigrants, however, value heterodoxy emerges because acculturation processes are blocked and the values of the parent generation partially maintained. From the second generation onward, therefore, cultural values are endogenous to the formation and dissolution of social boundaries, rather than shaping these as an exogenous force.

Emigrants and the Body Politic Left Behind: Results from the Latino National Survey

There is a duality at the heart of the migration phenomenon, as the very same people who are immigrants are also emigrants, making a living and possibly setting down roots in the receiving society, but still connected to and oriented toward the home society where their significant others often reside. While research has shown that home-country political conditions and experiences affect immigrant political behaviour in the receiving society, scholarship has yet to ask how those same factors affect the ways in which emigrants relate to the body politic left behind. This paper seeks to fill that lacuna. We find that pre-migration political experiences impart a lasting post-migration interest in home-country politics and that such effects are substantial compared with the impacts associated with other cross-border connections, such as remittance sending or return travel.

But do they speak it? The intergenerational transmission of home-country language in migrant families in France

ABSTRACT To what extent can immigrant parents transmit their home-country language to their children? Drawing on a recent national sample of children of immigrants in France, this paper examines the effects of parental language socialisation and exposure to the parental home country on language ability and language practices of their adult children. The data show that parental efforts at transmitting the language are necessary, but ultimately insufficient especially when it comes to language practices. Almost none of those who grew up without or with only minimal exposure to the parental home-country language use it. But even among those who had extensive exposure only a minority end up using it in their daily lives. The only domain where the second-generation uses the parental home-country language to a non-trivial degree is in the family context. In addition parental resources can have contradictory effects. While successful transmission of home-country language in the immigrant context requires significant resources, those parents who have these resources are less likely to try to pass on their language.

Reconceptualizing Context: A Multilevel Model of the Context of Reception and Second-Generation Educational Attainment

This paper seeks to return scholarly attention to a core intellectual divide between segmented and conventional (or neo‐)assimilation approaches, doing so through a theoretical and empirical reconsideration of contextual effects on second‐generation outcomes. We evaluate multiple approaches to measuring receiving country contextual effects and measuring their impact on the educational attainment of the children of immigrants. We demonstrate that our proposed measures better predict second‐generation educational attainment than prevailing approaches, enabling a multilevel modeling strategy that accounts for the structure of immigrant families nested within different receiving contexts.

Social Reproduction of Religiosity in the Immigrant Context: The Role of Family Transmission and Family Formation — Evidence from France†

This paper compares two aspects of the social reproduction of religion: parent-to-child transmission, and religious homogamy. Analysis of a survey of immigrants in France shows that for parent-to-child transmission, immigrant status/generation is not the central variable — rather, variation is across religions with Muslim families showing high continuity. Immigrant status/generation does directly matter for partner choice. In Christian and Muslim families alike, religious in-partnering significantly declines in the second generation. In turn, the offspring of religiously non-homogamous families is less religious. For Muslim immigrants this points to the possibility of a non-trivial decline in religiosity in the third generation.

The ambiguities of political opportunity: political claims-making of Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York City

Abstract How, and as what, are immigrant minorities incorporated into the political process? A set of prominent approaches focus on the political opportunity structure that immigrants encounter. Although promising in many aspects, these approaches fail to consider the internal heterogeneity of both immigrant populations and opportunity structures. This is partly a result of taking ethnic groups rather than political entrepreneurs as the unit of analysis and of not disaggregating the political context properly. I show how Russian-Jewish immigrant political entrepreneurs in New York City used very different strategies of ethnic mobilization, each emphasizing a different ethnic cleavage: one making claims in the name of Russians, the other downplaying Russianness and highlighting the Jewish identity dimension. Both strategies had good chances at success thus illustrating that political opportunity structures may encourage different claims-making strategies at the same time. Ethno-political entrepreneurs navigate complex political landscapes that are ex-ante only partially transparent.

From origins to destinations: acculturation trajectories in migrants’ attitudes towards homosexuality

ABSTRACT Many immigrants in Western countries hail from countries where attitudes towards gender relations and sexual norms are considerably more conservative than in the host countries where they eventually settle. This paper assesses whether immigrants and their children acculturate in this dimension, and how migrants’ cultural practices and economic integration influence this process. Presenting a conceptual and methodological innovation, this paper treats acculturation as a process by which immigrants (and their children) shift from the attitude distribution in the origin country to the one of the host country. Using a cross-classified hierarchical regression model and data on attitudes towards homosexuality in 83 countries of origin and 23 destination countries, I model the relative influence of origin and destination contexts on the attitudes of 15,000 immigrants and children of immigrants in Europe. In line with previous work, I find considerable evidence for acculturation across and within generations, but also important variation: respondents who use the home-country language, who are religious, or who are economically marginalised, show less acculturation in attitudes, though these effects vary between immigrants and the second generation.