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CHAPTER 1 WORLDS OF THE SECOND GENERATION Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters Immigration has reshaped America since the mid-1960s. Today immigrants make up one-tenth of the U.S. population. Their U.S.-born children constitute nearly another tenth. In the nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, more than half of the population is now of immigrant stock. The number of immigrants in the country now rivals the number at any point in American history, and the diversity of contemporary immigration is unprecedented. This dramatic demographic change has produced intense debate. Analysts, journalists, and politicians argue over whether immigration is having a positive or negative impact on the U.S. economy, the quality of neighborhood life, the labor market prospects of the native poor, intergroup relations, the cost of government services, the integrity of our civic culture, and even our national security. Yet ultimately these questions will be answered not by the immigrants themselves but by their ambivalently American children. This “second generation,” now coming of age, is negotiating new and different ways of “being American.” In so doing, they are reshaping American culture, economics, politics, and racial and ethnic relations—indeed, the character of American society. This book is a collection of qualitative case studies about second- and “1.5”-generation immigrants in New York City–that is, people whose parents were immigrants but who themselves were born or substantially raised in the United States. The people in these studies come from a wide variety of backgrounds and now find themselves in a variety of circumstances. Yet they are all now young adults making their way in a complex and often very tough city. Most see themselves as very different from their immigrant parents. By and large they work in different types of jobs and have had different educa1 tional opportunities. They tend to think about race and ethnicity differently from their parents, and they often have very different ideas about love and marriage, relations with kin, and how to raise children. At the same time few of these young people truly see themselves as “mainstream” Americans. In their daily lives they balance notions of foreign-ness and native-born entitlement , of “insider” and “outsider” status—a tension that, as they often point out, makes them very much “New Yorkers.” And indeed, within their age group, their experience is, to a considerable degree, the quintessential New York experience. Together, the second and 1.5 generations make up over 29 percent of eighteen- to thirty-two-year-old New Yorkers—in contrast to only 14 percent of New Yorkers over thirty-two (many of whom are the now elderly children of pre-1924 immigrants). Another almost 29 percent of New Yorkers age eighteen to thirty-two are immigrants who arrived after age twelve. Of the city’s native-stock population in this age group, 13.1 percent are African American and 6.6 percent Puerto Rican . So in the age group with which today’s second generation generally goes to school, competes for jobs, recreates, and looks for love, only one New Yorker in five is a native white of native parentage. This is, however, only a preview of things to come: among New Yorkers under age eighteen, 62.4 percent are second- or 1.5-generation immigrants! Of course, it would be wrong to glibly suggest that New York’s future is America’s future. In some ways the studies presented here are very much New York stories, reflecting the unique role that immigration and secondgeneration incorporation have historically played in the shaping of the city’s institutions and political culture. In other respects the situations here may closely echo those of other “gateway cities” with similar numbers of immigrants . Although the ethnic particularities may be different, there is much here that is clearly comparable to Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco , and other major American cities. Twenty years ago these immigrantreceiving gateway cities seemed quite distinct from the rest of the country, but the out-migration of immigrants—and perhaps of natives fleeing immigrants—has now left few places in the country unaffected. If the incorporation of the second generation looks increasingly like the story of the coming decades in New York, it is also one of the most important stories to be told about early-twenty-first-century America. This book is part of the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York Study, a larger study of...

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