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

Chapter 1. The Second Generation

3 Chapter 1 The Second Generation Maurice Crul and John Mollenkopf The children of immigrants are central to the future of the large cities of western Europe and the United States and of the countries surrounding these cities.1 Not only do young people from immigrant backgrounds make up a large and growing share of their populations, they will also steadily replace the native-born baby boom generation as it ages out of the workplace and positions of influence. It is critical, then, that these young people are prepared—and enabled—to realize their full potential. Their success in school; finding good jobs; forming solid families ; identifying strongly, if not uncritically, with their countries of birth; and participating fully in civic and political life augur well for the future. If many drop out of school, lack work, rely on welfare, or form an alienated new urban poor, the chances that western European and American societies can live up to the values they profess will drop sharply. The large size of the second generation guarantees that these individuals will have a profound impact on the cultural and ethnic differences within their societies. In many places, members of the white majority of native descent feel deep anxieties about this shift. They see people speaking other languages filling their neighborhood schools and shopping places, they encounter minority group members in public spaces, and they 4    The Changing Face of World Cities may even have new kinds of neighbors. All these make them worry that their way of life is at risk of being displaced. These experiences and reactions make them—especially those in precarious positions—available for anti-immigrant mobilization not only under the right-wing banners of patriotism, protecting a leitkultur, or obeying the law, but also under the left-wing banners of the emancipation of women, tolerance for homosexuality , and secularism. With an extra push from the current economic and fiscal crisis, the tenor of public debate has already shifted dramatically against immigrants and their children. In the United States, this debate focuses particularly on undocumented immigrants and their children. Some 12 million U.S. residents, or one in twenty-five, are estimated to be undocumented, with far larger shares in immigrant destinations. Many undocumented adults have U.S.-born children, creating a difficult mix in which the children have rights but the parents do not. The great majority of these 12 million are from Mexico. Some see them as highly problematic—using costly social services, committing crimes, taking jobs away from American citizens, lowering wage standards, and being exploited without contributing much. To be sure, their severely disadvantaged position creates major barriers for their children. An important academic strain of thought warns that these children may be subject to segmented assimilation, in which those with disadvantaged and discriminated-against immigrant parents join an alienated and angry native minority underclass. In Europe, one populist party after another has put the threat of Islam on the political agenda. In Denmark and the Netherlands, success led to minority governments that must rely on votes from legislators from antiimmigrant parties outside of government, giving them a veto power that enables them to highjack the topic of migration and integration and normalize an anti-immigrant discourse that links unemployment, crime, and Islamist extremism with immigrants and their children. Although the murder of sixty-seven Norwegian young people at a Social Democratic party camp by a right-wing zealot in July 2011 is undoubtedly an extreme—and hopefully rare—expression of this tendency, it nonetheless bears witness to the depth of anti-immigrant anxiety. This trend is pronounced even in the most strongly assimilationist country of Europe, France. The anti-immigrant voice of Marie Le Pen, the popular new leader of the Front National, has gained prominence in the center of the French political arena. Similarly, the relatively moderate leaders of Germany and the United Kingdom, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister David Cameron, both recently declared multiculturalism to have failed. Thilo Sarrazin, a former member of the The Second Generation    5 German Central Bank board from the Social Democratic Party, amplified Merkel’s theme in a controversial book arguing that Muslim immigrants did not want to integrate and were happy to rely on criminality and welfare instead. This debate echoes worries about the emergence of a Parallelgesellschaft in which 2 million people of Turkish descent live in a life-world supposedly detached from...