The Changing Face of World Cities: Young Adult Children of Immigrants in Europe and the United States

Chapter 5. Entering the Labor Market

97 Chapter 5 Entering the Labor Market Liza Reisel, Laurence Lessard-Phillips, and Philip Kasinitz Finding a good foothold in the labor market is a crucial test for the second generation in western Europe and the United States. In recent years, as large numbers of the children of immigrants have come of age and embarked on their careers, we can begin to see what place they will occupy as adults. Knowing whether they are finding satisfactory employment in the economic mainstream is a significant first indicator of whether their working lives will be on par with those of their majority peers or whether they will remain a group apart from the broader society. This question surfaces regularly in media and public debates. In Europe, commentators have expressed growing alarm that an alleged lack of integration of children of immigrants is fueling anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly toward Muslim communities. In the United States, scholars have expressed concern over the potential for “downward assimilation” (Haller, Portes, and Lynch 2011; Alba, Kasinitz, and Waters 2011). Worry about second-generation entry into an underclass has largely focused on the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. On both sides of the Atlantic , we see increased anxiety over whether the children of immigrants are becoming more isolated from the mainstream and are having more difficulty entering the labor market. Popular discourse often links this worry to criminal behavior and welfare dependence, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding (Bean and Stevens 2003). Yet, though similar concerns over immigrant integration are raised on both sides of the Atlantic, they take quite different approaches to addressing these issues, reflecting the different ways in which national and local contexts shape second-generation transitions. The overwhelming majority of first-generation immigrant parents are legally authorized to live in western European countries and have access to many of the same welfare state provisions as natives. These countries also usually have explicit integration policies for immigrants and their children. Other policies, such as apprenticeship programs, facilitate the transition into the labor force for all young people, including the children of immigrants. In the United States, by contrast, a sizable minority of immigrants are in the country without legal authorization and have few social rights—though, paradoxically, those in the country legally can easily naturalize and the U.S. Constitution affords full citizenship rights to their U.S.-born children. Because federal legislation bars first-generation immigrants from access to most welfare benefits for five years and requires them to show that they will not be a burden on the state to become naturalized, first-generation immigrants must generally enter the labor force merely to survive. Furthermore, the poor—including the worst-off immigrants and their children—face a sharper degree of material deprivation than in western Europe. Without much of a welfare state cushion, remaining outside the labor force is simply not an option for most first-generation immigrants, and their children rarely grow up in households where such assistance is a major source of income. As difficult and uncomfortable as living with a weak safety net is, it could have the effect of integrating immigrants in the United States. Because the immigrant parents generally have extensive work experience, albeit often in low-wage jobs, they can provide their children with connections to and knowledge about local labor markets. In western Europe, by contrast, because first-generation labor market participation is far lower and social welfare benefits compensate for being outside the labor force, the children of immigrants often grow up in communities where the parents have relatively little knowledge about how to find jobs. Ironically, the claim that immigrants and their children rely too heavily on welfare is a common theme in anti-immigrant rhetoric even in the United States, despite its higher immigrant labor force participation rate and less extensive welfare state. 98    The Changing Face of World Cities Becoming a Grown-Up: Going to Work The transition from education to the labor force is, of course, a crucial step toward becoming an adult. Its timing and the way it lines up with other coming-of-age milestones varies markedly by class, ethnicity, region, and gender within any one society as well as over time (Furstenberg 2008; Mouw 2003; Kogan and Müller 2003; Shavit and Müller 1998; Staff and Mortimer 2008). Comparing the European data from the TIES project with the IIMMLA and ISGMNY data from the United States...