Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality

Chapter 6. Intergenerational Mobility

/ 169 Chapter 6 Intergenerational mobility Renee Reichl luthra and Roger waldinger I mmigration has long been a major source of economic and demographic growth in the United States. It has also long been a source of inequality. The last great wave of migration, at the turn of the previous century, brought large numbers of relatively lower skilled immigrants to the United States, diversifying the labor market, increasing rates of poverty, and creating an ethnically defined stratification system that endured for several generations (Lieberson and Waters 1988). The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated nationalitybased quotas, has once again opened the United States to a new wave of immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Bringing increased diversity in formal schooling and ethnic origin, a central source of concern is the impact of this immigration on inequality in the United States. On one hand, the United States has offered most of these new arrivals a chance to improve their earnings (Clemens, Montenegro, and Pritchett 2008) and better their material conditions relative to their sending countries. On the other hand, the foreign born in the United States are more likely to be poorly educated and poorly paid relative to the receiving country, and to have higher poverty rates than the native population. In the long run, however, the fate of immigrants may not be the central issue when assessing the impact of migration on inequality. Rather, it is the direction and degree of intergenerational mobility—the links between immigrant parents and their children—that will define the impact of immigration on the future of ethnic stratification in the United States. The question of intergenerational mobility has placed the children of immigrants , also known as the second generation, in the research spotlight. Two central questions guide much of this research. The first is a matter of direction: Which children of immigrants will improve upon, reproduce, or “decline” from the socioeconomic status of their immigrant parents? Second, what can explain the variation in mobility patterns observed between the children of immigrants of different origins and the children of native-born Americans? In this chapter, we address these questions by examining the transmission of Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality 170 / poverty and educational and labor market outcomes from immigrants to their children. Drawing on recent debates surrounding immigrant assimilation in the United States, we formulate a series of competing hypotheses about the direction of intergenerational mobility as well as the degree of transmission by origin group. We then test these hypotheses, first comparing nationally representative ageadjusted poverty rates, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes of immigrants and their descendants to the children of native-born whites, blacks, and Hispanics. We examine these trends more closely with metropolitan level data from the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA). This data allows the measurement of intergenerational educational and occupational mobility by including individual level measures of parental outcomes during the adult respondent’s childhood. We frame these findings within the assimilation debate on the U.S. second generation that has burgeoned in the past two decades. ThEoRETICal PERSPECTIvES In this section, we review current perspectives on immigrant intergenerational mobility. assimilation Reformulated Two competing reformulations of traditional assimilation theory frame the majority of current research on the second generation. Neo-assimilation theory modifies and updates the traditional assimilation perspective, arguing that in their desire to improve their material conditions, immigrants and their descendants will adopt the linguistic, educational, and residential characteristics that make them more like the native born (Alba and Nee 2003). In so doing, the educational and occupational distributions of the native-born descendants of immigrants should come to resemble those of the native population. Although not all immigrants will advance at the same rate, the decline in individual and institutional discrimination, combined with an increase in opportunity as the baby-boomer generation retires, should provide ample opportunity for intergenerational mobility into an increasingly multi-ethnic “mainstream” (Alba 2008). In contrast, segmented assimilation theory predicts variation within the second generation, both in the direction of intergenerational mobility and its degree. Its central contribution is the identification of three discrete paths for the children of immigrants: the traditional straight line assimilation pattern of parallel acculturation and socioeconomic mobility toward the middle class; “ethnic mobility” of delayed acculturation combined with socioeconomic mobility; and the more novel prediction, “downward mobility” as the fate of the more disadvantaged immigrant groups (Portes and Zhou 1993; Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Only the children [3.149.250.1] Project...