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

Chapter 10. Challenges and Opportunities

235 Chapter 10 Challenges and Opportunities Maurice Crul and John Mollenkopf Over the last fifty years, the major cities in western Europe and the United States have developed many ways of integrating immigrants and their children into their social, economic, and political fabric. This creates an opportunity to compare outcomes for similarly positioned groups of immigrant descent facing a variety of national and local integration policies and practices across roughly similar urban contexts. This concluding chapter focuses on Turkish second-generation youth in six large capital cities in Europe (Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Stockholm , and Vienna) compared with Dominican second-generation youngsters in New York and their Mexican second-generation peers in Los Angeles, the two largest cities in the United States. Our conclusion draws on the previous thematic chapters as well as some additional analysis of the TIES, ISGMNY, and IIMMLA surveys. This comparison examines only those whose parents entered these cities at great comparative disadvantage. Their experiences do not represent the modal or typical outcomes for the immigrant second generation, but only the outcomes achieved under the most difficult circumstances. This way, we can see how each urban and national setting has faced its toughest test: providing advancement for young people from the most 236    The Changing Face of World Cities disadvantaged immigrant ethnic group. Although their experience obviously does not represent that of the entire second generation, it is particularly meaningful because social scientists would predict it to be the most problematic. As noted, the great majority of Turkish, Dominican, and Mexican parents were labor migrants with little education. Although almost all of the first-generation Turkish fathers initially worked, a great many now do not. Turkish mothers were least likely to work all along. And though the Dominican and Mexican parents have higher and longer levels of labor force participation, they remain overwhelmingly in low-wage, low-skilled jobs. On both sides of the Atlantic, the parents’ low levels of education, income, and host language ability, together with religious differences in western Europe, make their children candidates for forming an ethnic underclass in the sense of being a marginalized, isolated, or separate group from the larger society. Whether they do in fact form such a group reveals much about the barriers and opportunities they face, the strategies that they and their parents have forged in response to them, and how various public policy environments affect their prospects. The final result is a good indication of how well the assimilation or integration process is working. Although Dominicans and Mexicans came to New York and Los Angeles as voluntary labor migrants, western European governments specifically recruited Turkish contract workers (usually males) from the most undeveloped parts of Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s to do dirty, dangerous, or difficult jobs in European factory settings. They were thus probably somewhat more negatively selected than Dominican or Mexican migrants, though they too were among the least educated or skilled in their home countries. Deindustrialization, jobs offshored to low-wage countries, the oil crises of the late 1970s, the ending of guest-worker programs, and the more general closing down of immigration into western Europe pushed many Turkish guest-worker fathers out of work and into various kinds of social support. Their wives, who arrived later through family reunification, always had low levels of labor force participation. Although the Dominican and Mexican parents also worked in low-skill, low-wage jobs, they migrated under their own steam, were not tied to specific jobs in specific places, and generally remain in the labor force today. Dominican and Mexican women tended to arrive at more or less the same time as men and were much more likely than their counterparts in Europe to work. Indeed, the Turkish second generation in Europe mainly grew up in traditional households with two legally resident parents. The Dominican Challenges and Opportunities    237 and Mexican parents often did not migrate as a family unit and some were not initially authorized to live in the United States. Their family situations were more likely to be characterized by divorce or single mother­ hood than those of Turks. Finally, in recent decades, Turkey’s economy has arguably grown more quickly than that of Mexico or the Dominican Republic, and that growth has driven business formation in the Turkish communities in western European cities. (Gross domestic product per capita is about the same in Mexico as Turkey but is significantly...