Incorporating Diversity

Rethinking Assimilation in a Multicultural Age

Peter Kivisto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317257639
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration

As the best single-source collection of classic and contemporary readings on the subject, this anthology will be a valuable reference to scholars of immigration, race and ethnicity, national identity, and the history of ideas, and indispensable for courses in history and the social sciences dealing with these topics.' Ruben G. Rumbaut, co-author of Immigrant America: A Portrait and Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation Societies today are increasingly characterized by their ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. One key question raised by the global migration of people is how they do or do not come to be incorporated into their new social environments. For over a century, assimilation has been the concept used in explaining the processes of immigrant incorporation into a new society. It has also been applied to indigenous peoples, to refugees, and to involuntary migrants caught up in the slave trade. Assimilation has confronted many scholarly challenges which were often intermeshed with particular political agendas. This book allows readers to obtain a clearer sense of the canonical formulation of assimilation theory and an understanding of the key themes and issues contained in current efforts to rethink and revise the classical perspective for today's changing world.

Part 4

New Directions

13

The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants

Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou

My name is Herb

and I’m not poor,

I’m the Herbie that you’re looking for,

like Pepsi,

a new generation

of Haitian determination—

I’m the Herbie that you’re looking for.

A beat tapped with bare hands, a few dance steps, and the Haitian kid was rapping. His song, titled “Straight Out of Haiti,” was being performed at Edison High, a school that sits astride Little Haiti and Liberty City, the largest black area of Miami. The lyrics captured well the distinct outlook of his immigrant community. The panorama of Little Haiti contrasts sharply with the bleak inner city. In Miami’s Little Haiti, the storefronts leap out at the passersby. Bright blues, reds, and oranges vibrate to Haitian merengue blaring from sidewalk speakers.¹ Yet, behind the gay Caribbean exteriors, a struggle goes on that will define the future of this community As we will see later on, it involves the second generation—children like Herbie—subject to conflicting pressure from parents and peers and to pervasive outside discrimination.

Growing up in an immigrant family has always been difficult, as individuals are torn by conflicting social and cultural demands while they face the challenge of entry into an unfamiliar and frequently hostile world. And yet the difficulties are not always the same. The process of growing up American oscillates between smooth acceptance and traumatic confrontation depending on the characteristics that immigrants and their children bring along and the social context that receives them. In this article, we explore some of these factors and their bearing on the process of social adaptation of the immigrant second generation. We propose a conceptual framework for understanding this process and illustrate it with selected ethnographic material and survey data from a recent survey of children of immigrants.

Research on the new immigration—that which arose after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act—has been focused almost exclusively on the first generation, that is, on adult men and women coming to the United States in search of work or to escape political persecution. Little noticed until recently is the fact that the foreign-born inflow has been rapidly evolving from single adult individuals to entire family groups, including infant children and those born to immigrants in the United States. By 1980, 10 percent of dependent children in households counted by the census were second-generation immigrants.² In the late 1980s, another study put the number of students in kindergarten through twelfth grade in American schools who spoke a language other than English at home at 3 to 5 million.³

The great deal of research and theorizing on post-1965 immigration offers only tentative guidance on the prospects and paths of adaptation of the second generation because the outlook of this group can be very different from that of their immigrant parents. For example, it is generally accepted among immigration theorists that entry-level menial jobs are performed without hesitation by newly arrived immigrants but are commonly shunned by their U.S.-reared offspring. This disjuncture gives rise to a race between the social and economic progress of first-generation immigrants and the material conditions and career prospects that their American children grow to expect.⁴

Nor does the existing literature on second-generation adaptation, based as it is on the experience of descendants of pre-World War I immigrants, offer much guidance for the understanding of contemporary events. The last sociological study of children of immigrants was Irving Child’s Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict, published fifty years ago.⁵ Conditions at the time were quite different from those confronting settled immigrant groups today. Two such differences deserve special mention. First, descendants of European immigrants who confronted the dilemmas of conflicting cultures were uniformly white. Even if of a somewhat darker hue than the natives, their skin color reduced a major barrier to entry into the American mainstream. For this reason, the process of assimilation depended largely on individual decisions to leave the immigrant culture behind and embrace American ways. Such an advantage obviously does not exist for the black, Asian, and mestizo children of today’s immigrants.

Second, the structure of economic opportunities has also changed. Fifty years ago, the United States was the premier industrial power in the world, and its diversified industrial labor requirements offered to the second generation the opportunity to move up gradually through better-paid occupations while remaining part of the working class. Such opportunities have increasingly disappeared in recent years following a rapid process of national deindustrialization and global industrial restructuring. This process has left entrants to the American labor force confronting a widening gap between the minimally paid menial jobs that immigrants commonly accept and the high-tech and professional occupations requiring college degrees: that native elites occupy.⁶ The gradual disappearance of intermediate opportunities also bears directly on the race between first-generation economic progress and second-generation expectations, noted previously.

THE NEW AMERICANS AT A GLANCE

Before examining this process in detail, it is important to learn a little more about today’s second generation. In 1990, the foreign-born population of the United States reached an estimated 21.2 million. In absolute terms, this is the highest number in the history of the nation, although relative to the native-born population, the figure is lower than that at the turn of the century. A century ago, in 1890, immigrants represented 14.8 percent of the total population, almost double today’s figure of 8.6 percent. The foreign-stock population, composed of immigrants and their descendants, is, however, much higher. In 1990, roughly 46 million, or 18.5 percent of the total U.S. population, were estimated to be of foreign stock. This yields a net second-generation total of 24.8 million, or 10.9 percent of the American population.⁷

As an estimate of the new second generation, this figure is inflated by the presence of offspring of older immigrants. A team of demographers at the Urban Institute have estimated the contribution of post-1960 immigration, including immigrants and their children, to the total 1990 U.S. population. According to their estimate, if immigration had been cut off in 1960, the total population in 1990 would have been 223.4 million and not the 248.7 actually counted. Hence post-1960 immigration contributed approximately 25.3 million. Subtracting estimates of net immigration for 1960–90 provided by the same researchers, the new second generation, formed by children of post-1960 immigrants, represents 7.7 million, or 3.4 percent of the native-born population. This is a lower-bound estimate based on a demographic model and not on an actual count. It excludes children born to mixed foreign-native couples who are also normally counted as part of the second generation.⁸

More important, however, is the prospect for growth in future years. Given the record increase of immigration since 1960, the second generation as a whole is expected to grow rapidly, surpassing its former peak of roughly 28 million in 1940 sometime during this decade. As noted previously, however, the racial and ethnic composition of the component of the second generation attributable to post-1960 immigration is quite different from that which peaked just before World War II. Over 85 percent of children of immigrants in 1940 were born to Europeans, or, in current terminology, non-Hispanic whites. By contrast, approximately 77 percent of post-1960 immigrants are non-Europeans. Of the post-1960 immigrants, 22.4 percent are classified as Asians, 7.6 as blacks, and 47 percent as Hispanics. The latter group, which originates in Mexico and other Latin American countries, poses a problem in terms of phenotypical classification since Hispanics can be of any race.⁹

According to the 1990 census, 51.7 percent of the 22.3 million Hispanics counted were white, 3.4 percent black, and 42.7 percent of another race. The latter figure, possibly corresponding to the category of mixed race, or mestizos, was slightly larger among Mexicans, who constitute 60.4 percent of the total Hispanic population. Applying these figures with some adjustments to the post-1960 immigrant flow, it is reasonable to assume that approximately half of Hispanic immigrants would be classified as nonwhite. This phenotypical category would hence comprise a majority, roughly 54 percent, of the total inflow.¹⁰

Individual data from the 1990 census have not been released as of this writing. In an effort to learn more about the new second generation, Leif Jensen conducted an analysis of the one-in-a-thousand version of the Public Use Microdata Sample A (PUMS) from the 1980 census. He identified 3,425 children living in households with at least one foreign-born parent and who themselves were either native-born or had immigrated to the United States at a young age.¹¹ The number represented 5.1 percent of native-born native-parentage children identified in the sample, a figure that is close to the estimated contribution of post-1960 immigration to the 1980 U.S. population, 5.8 percent.

The ethnic classification of Jensen’s sample of new second-generation children in 1980 also corresponds closely with that of post-1965 immigrants reported previously. In Jensen’s sample, 17.9 percent were classified as Asians, 6.8 percent as blacks, and 45.5 percent as Hispanics. The data do not provide a racial breakdown of Hispanics, but they do contain information on their national origin. Sixty-five percent of the 1,564 post-1965 Hispanic children were of Mexican origin; 7.5 percent of Cuban origin; and the remaining 27.5 percent were from all other Latin American nationalities. Table 13.1 presents selected sociodemographic characteristics of this sample and compares them with those of native-born children of native parentage.

Not surprisingly, second-generation youths are far more likely to be bilingual than their native-parentage counterparts. Less than half of the children of immigrants speak English only, and two-thirds speak a language other than English at home in contrast with the overwhelming English exclusivity among native-parentage youth. However, linguistic assimilation is evident in the fact that only 12 percent of the second generation reports speaking English poorly. Households with immigrant parents are far more likely to be urban and to be found in central cities. Their geographic distribution by state also differs significantly from native-headed households. Just six states account for 71 percent of immigrant households while the same states contain only 33 percent of the natives. Not surprisingly, immigrant parents tend to have more modest socioeconomic characteristics, as indicated by their lower family income, higher poverty rates, and lower education of the family head. However, they are about twice less likely to head single-parent households than are natives. Greater family cohesiveness may have something to do with second-generation educational outcomes. Figures in Table 13.1 indicate that children of immigrants are as likely to attend private schools, as unlikely to be dropouts, and as likely to graduate from high school as native-parentage youth.¹²

These comparisons are, of course, based on averages that conceal great diversity within each universe. Among second-generation youths in particular, preliminary field research indicates wide differences in educational, linguistic, and social psychological outcomes. None is more important than the forms that an inexorable process of cultural assimilation takes among different immigrant nationalities and its effects on their youths. We explore these differences and provide a theoretical explanation of their causes in the next sections.

ASSIMILATION AS A PROBLEM

The Haitian immigrant community of Miami is composed of some 75,000 legal and clandestine immigrants, many of whom sold everything they owned in order to buy passage to America. First-generation Haitians are strongly oriented toward preserving a strong national identity, which they associate both with community solidarity and with social networks promoting individual success.¹³ In trying to instill national pride and an achievement orientation in their children, they clash, however, with the youngsters’ everyday experiences in school. Little Haiti is adjacent to Liberty City, the main black inner-city area of Miami, and Haitian adolescents attend predominantly inner-city schools. Native-born youths stereotype Haitians as too docile and too subservient to whites and they make fun of French and Creole and of the Haitians’ accent. As a result, second-generation Haitian children find themselves torn between conflicting ideas and values: to remain Haitian they would have to face social ostracism and continuing attacks in school; to become American—black American in this case—they would have to forgo their parents’ dreams of making it in America on the basis of ethnic solidarity and preservation of traditional values.¹⁴

Table 13.1 Selected Characteristics of Post-1965 Second-Generation Youths and Native Youths of Native Parentage, 1980 (Percentage unless noted)

Children’s Characteristics	Post-1965 Immigrant (N = 3,425)	Parent Native-born Parents (N = 67,193)
Female	46.8	47.4
Mean age	7.5 years	11.9 years
Race or ethnicity
White	27.4	78.9
Black	6.8	14.4
Hispanic	45.7	5.4
Mexican	29.7	3.3
Cuban	3.5	0.0
Other	12.5	2.1
Asian	19.5	0.5
Chinese	4.3	0.1
Filipino	5.1	0.1
Korean	2.6	0.0
Vietnamese	1.4	0.0
Other	6.1	0.3
English ability
Speaks English only	74.7	59.5
Very well	26.5	2.7
Well	13.8	1.3
Not well or not at all	12.0	0.5
Language spoken at home
English	33.6	49.9
Other	66.4	5.1
Household type
Couple	89.7	79.0
Single male head	1.5	2.7
Single female head	8.8	18.3
Area of residence
Central city	93.6	17.4
Non-central-city metropolitan area	48.4	49.8
Mixed	6.5	11.7
Nonmetropolitan	5.5	21.1
State of residence*
California	23.4	8.1
New York	12.8	7.2
Texas	9.9	6.1
Illinois	5.7	5.2
Florida	5.0	3.5
New Jersey	4.9	3.1
Mean family income	$19,502	$23,414
Poverty rate	20.8	13.8
Mean education of family head	10.9 years	12.2 years
Mean education, self†	11.5 years	12.0 years
High school dropout†	22.8	22.9
School typ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I. Introduction
• II. The Classical Formulation
• III. Assimilation Revisited
• IV. New Directions
• Index
• About the Editor