The future of immigrant children, and what it means for the United States - Book Review

Review of Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation and Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America by Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut

In the wake of large-scale immigration to the United States over the last 40 years, immigrants and their children today number 55 million persons, or one out of every five Americans. The incorporation of immigrants and their children has far-reaching implications for our nation. One is the creation of new ethnic groups, concentrated in several states and metropolitan areas. Another has to do with the eventual trajectories of these ethnic groups. A key determinant of these trajectories will be the outcomes of the second-generation immigrant children who were either born in the U.S. or came here at an early enough age to be largely socialized here. How will they fare in the United States? Will they climb the mobility ladder, fulfilling their parents' aspirations for them, or will they fall down the ladder, perhaps even faring worse than their immigrant parents?

This is the central question underlying Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut's exciting new book, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, and the answer, as they persuasively argue, goes beyond matters of immigration. Indeed, the authors argue that the story of the immigrant second generation, specifically, its social and economic adaptation, can lead to two dramatically different national fates, in one case a nation revitalized by the new ethnic mosaic, and in the other, a nation downtrodden by an escalation in its social problems. Ethnicities, the companion volume to Legacies, speaks to a related question that has been the subject of debate in political and public policy arenas, namely, the role of nationality or ethnicity in different immigrant and second-generation outcomes. In sum, the two volumes provide a detailed rendering of the immigrant second generation, including how ethnicity plays out in immigrant mobility, and in so doing, a possible forecast of our nation's future.

If we look to the historical record, we see in an earlier wave of immigration to the United States one possible outcome for the new second generation. It is estimated that between 1880 and 1924, 13.5 million south-central-eastern European immigrants landed on American shores. They came largely from peasant, semi-literate backgrounds, had few skills, and their reception in the United States was often virulent discrimination combined with intense xenophobia, as they were compared unfavorably to the northwestern European, Protestant migrants who had come before them. Yet successive generations came to achieve socioeconomic mobility and were eventually incorporated into the nation's social fabric, giving rise to the classic assimilation paradigm in the field of sociology, one in which mobility and integration into mainstream American culture (e.g., white, middle-class, and of European, Protestant origins) went hand in hand.

Portes and Rumbaut, however, offer a very different picture of what could happen to the immigrant second generation, one decidedly less optimistic. Some ethnic groups will indeed see their second generation follow the classic assimilation paradigm, and quickly become incorporated into the American mainstream. This trajectory is cause for optimism. Others, though, will see the second generation experience downward assimilation, experiencing the intense poverty and alienation from the mainstream that are commonly associated with the American underclass in response to the severe economic deterioration in many of our nation's cities. If this scenario were to unfold, the urban underclass would not only increase in sheer numbers but also acquire a multiethnic character. This trajectory is cause for pessimism.

In making this assessment, Portes and Rumbaut build on several rich intellectual strands. One is their earlier work, Immigrant America (1980), detailing where the new immigrants came from, the resources they brought with them, and the different contexts of reception they faced in the United States. Such contexts include how the government treats the group, its incorporation into the labor market, and whether the group joins an already existing ethnic community. Another is an influential article written by sociologist Herbert Gans, who envisioned that a significant portion of post-1965 second-generation immigrants might not follow the classic assimilation paradigm, but rather would become alienated, jobless, and decline into poverty. Building on this vision, Portes and sociologist Min Zhou argue that the children of post-1965 immigrants are assimilating into different segments of society, with divergent outlooks on schooling and socioeconomic outcomes. Two groups are able to achieve upward mobility--those children who assimilate into majority culture, and those children who are able to draw upon strong ethnic communities and develop strong ethnic attachments along with positive outlooks on schooling. A third group of children who experience discrimination and settle near native-born minority groups in straggling neighborhoods adopt negative outlooks on schooling and assimilate into urban poverty.

This previous work on immigration left us with three important questions that could be traced both to the demographic profile of recent immigrants and to the American economy that is receiving them. First is the issue of race. Most of the post-1960 immigrants have been from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean, and are nonwhite. What role will the racial hierarchy in the United States play in structuring the outcomes of their second-generation children? A second key development has been the increasing importance of educational credentials in the U.S. labor market. We know from sociologist William Julius Wilson and economist Richard J. Murnane and others that the American economy no longer provides well-paid manufacturing jobs to persons with low levels of education (as was the case during the earlier period of European immigration to the United States). Instead, the second-generation children will be joining an hour-glass economy sharply divided between well-paid employment for the highly educated and highly skilled, and conversely, low-paid jobs for unskilled workers with low levels of education, with few opportunities in between. Will the second-generation children acquire the necessary education to join the top segment of the economy? The third crucial development has been the emergence of an American urban population living in neighborhoods devastated by the dual effects of industrial restructuring and middle-class flight that have left them largely isolated and devoid of institutional support and social organization. Some immigrants have settled near or in these neighborhoods, where residents try to cope with a flayed economic fabric of scarce job opportunities and poverty, and a social fabric of drugs and violence. The residents are often the descendants of earlier black migrants from the American South, and migrants from Puerto Rico and Mexico, who came to the urban centers in search of better lives for themselves and their children. Will the new second generation find their hopes and opportunities similarly diminished?

Legacies provides a strong empirical basis for exploring these questions. The book draws from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) based in Miami and San Diego, two sites that have been gateway cities for the post-1960 immigration to the United States. In Miami, the focus was the children of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and other islands in the English-speaking West Indies, Central America, and South America. In San Diego, the focus was the children of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea).

The CILS student sample included schoolchildren from the ages of 13 to 17, with a mean age of 14, thus allowing the authors to target children who had not yet dropped out of school. The children had to have at least one foreign-born parent, and were either born in the United States or had lived in the U.S. for at least five years. Two surveys were administered, the first to a sample of 5,262 students when they were in the eighth and ninth grades, and the second when they were in their last year of high school, or had already left school. Interviews were also conducted with 120 parents in 1992, followed by a survey of 2,442 parents in 1995. The quantitative analyses provide rich explanatory power, balanced by vivid life histories of immigrants and their American-born-and-raised children.

One key finding is that regardless of nationality and socioeconomic background, immigrant parents share high levels of optimism for their children's futures in the United States. Yet despite this optimism, there is a gap between what parents hope for, and how their children are presently faring. On the one hand, parental optimism translates into an achievement drive on the part of their children. For some children, though, there emerges an eventual disjuncture between these high aspirations and actual outcomes. As Portes and Rumbaut tell it, this disjuncture comes from several sources. One is individual characteristics like the kinds of financial and educational resources that immigrant parents themselves have and bring with them, which can shape their children's paths; or whether the immigrant family can provide the stabilizing influence of two parents, as opposed to a single parent.

Portes and Rumbaut further argue that the gap derives from the immigrant group's mode of incorporation, or a set of external conditions that lay within the realm of public policy. How the government receives an immigrant group, for example, can play an important role in shaping the group's outcomes. Portes and Rumbaut point to the example of Nicaraguans in Miami, a group with relatively high levels of education that could have allowed them to climb the American mobility ladder. Unfortunately, their claims for political asylum and assistance have been routinely denied, resulting in an uncertain legal status that makes it difficult for Nicaraguans to convert their education into an economic toehold. Rather, they must settle for menial jobs that leave them unable to transmit advantages to their children. In a poignant example, a young Nicaraguan daughter, an excellent student, expresses her hopes of attending college. In this, she is supported by her mother, who worked for an insurance company in Nicaragua, and her mother's partner, who had his own farm in their native country. But waiting on tables and delivering pizzas, the jobs her mother and partner have been able to get in the United States, do not pay enough to fund a college tuition, and due to their uncertain legal status, the daughter would not qualify for any kind of financial assistance.

The American social context comes to the fore as another critical external factor. Immigrant parents maintain a dual vision of the United States: a place with abundant opportunities for their children, but also a place where youth gangs, drugs, and lax cultural norms about parenting undermine their attempts to help children take advantage of those opportunities. It is what Portes and Rumbaut term "the Janus-faced nature of American society: unmatched educational and economic opportunities coupled with constant multiple threats to family cohesion and individual survival." The challenge is particularly acute for working-class parents whose abilities to monitor their children are undercut by their lack of financial resources. They cannot move to safer neighborhoods where gangs do not beckon, enroll their children in better and safer schools, and discipline their children in ways that they are most familiar with. A Dominican father speaks of his attempts to discipline his 13-year-old son through physical punishment, as parents might do in his native land, and how his Americanized son responds--with a call to 911, reporting his father for child abuse. In this family, the solution was to send the son back to the Dominican Republic for his schooling and a dose of family discipline, a tactic the father believes saved his son from gang life.

In the minds of immigrant parents, Americanization brings with it negative connotations that can endanger their children's futures. Indeed, Portes and Rumbaut find that immigrant children who have been in the United States longer have higher reading scores (indicating their growing facility with the English language) but lower grade point averages. With the passage of time, the immigrant drive for academic achievement begins to wane as acculturation sets in.

There is also the crucial matter of race. While the educational and financial resources that immigrants bring with them matter, race plays a key role in how immigrants can capitalize on those resources in the United States, and thus, the extent to which they can pass on advantages to their children. Given that they are either born in the United States or have grown up here, second-generation immigrant children confront an additional set of issues centered on race, namely how they self-identify and how others see them. As they are inserted into the American racial hierarchy, immigrant children begin to see themselves as part of externally constructed racial groupings, and some racialize their national origins in ways that their parents could not even imagine, while others must negotiate immigrant and racial identities that can be at odds with one another.

In one telling example, the daughter of Trinidadian professionals consciously adopted the speech patterns of her African American peers in school in an attempt to fit in. Yet, outside of school, she found herself followed by store clerks and the object of curt interactions with whites on the basis of her race. In an attempt to get better treatment, she learns to telegraph her Trinidadian or West Indian identity by trying to reclaim the "island accent" of her parents' homeland.

Here, the historical record provides another interesting comparison. The earlier wave of south-central-eastern European immigrants was classified as being of different racial stock (and harshly discriminated against as a result). Looking back, we may find this difficult to envision since their descendants have long gained acceptance as whites, and in fact, lay claim to an optional ethnicity. We know from the work of sociologist Mary Waters, for example, that a third-generation Italian American largely gets to choose whether to be identified as Italian; it is not an identity imposed on that person by others. It is unclear, however, whether this new second generation of West Indians, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Vietnamese, and their children will have such flexibility, or whether they will continue to have racialized ethnic identities imposed on them by others, and occupy a lower rung in the nation's racial hierarchy.

In Ethnicities, Portes and Rumbaut move to consider another important question that has fuelled much of the immigration debate, that is, the role of nationality and ethnicity in shaping different outcomes among immigrant groups. As they point out, analyses of CILS data consistently point to nationality or ethnicity "as a strong or significant predictor of virtually every adaptation outcome." The important question is why. Political conservatives certainly have provided one answer, long touting the extraordinary success of Asian groups (as compared with Latinos, for example), and West Indians (as compared with African Americans). According to this line of thought, which finds some support in the American public, superior cultural resources are the key reason why some immigrant groups are able to fare better than others.

The scholars assembled to analyze the CILS dataset and draw upon their own expertise, however, draw a very different kind of conclusion. In fact, individual resources recede in importance, in comparison to how social structures incorporate the immigrants. The story is not of individual ambition, or even skills, but one of "constraints and opportunities" created by these social structures. Portes and Rumbaut persuasively argue that this dynamic plays out differently among the various nationalities, "forging distinct but undeniably American personalities and outlooks." Portes and Rumbaut cull from these analyses to detail three possible paths of assimilation that highlight how a group's interaction with social structures has a decisive impact on its outcomes.

In one scenario, immigrant groups arriving with high levels of education and skills meet with a neutral or favorable context of reception. As a result, they are able to parlay their advantage in the economy, join the middle class, and provide their children with the benefits that come with this status. Filipinos would be one example of this type of assimilation. In the second scenario, the key is a context of reception that allows for the development of ethnic communities with strong economic opportunities. Two groups that came to the United States as refugees, the first wave of Cuban exiles to Miami and the Vietnamese, would be examples of this pathway. The U.S. government provided crucial assistance that allowed for families and communities to be reconstituted, along with strong ethnic networks. Thus, while the immigrant groups may not have high levels of education or skills, they do have access to the opportunity to build small businesses in these ethnic enclaves and capitalize on their ethnic networks to support the education of the second generation.

In the third scenario, immigrant groups with few skills, or in some cases, even the highly skilled, meet with a negative context of reception. For these immigrant groups, there is no chance of obtaining good jobs in the mainstream economy; there is no available government policy of assistance; and there is no pre-existing ethnic community with strong support systems ready to receive them. Rather, these immigrant groups settle near or in already disenfranchised minority communities and experience persistent labor market and social discrimination. Their precarious economic and social position in the United States only heightens the stresses that underlie immigrant adaptation. Mexicans and Haitians experience this type of assimilation, along with Nicaraguans, who tend to have higher levels of professionalization, which they cannot capitalize on because of their uncertain legal status. West Indian immigrants are interesting because they face a similar kind of discrimination, but the effects are mediated, in part, by their skills and high levels of education, English language facility, and attempts to retain their immigrant culture.

These pathways to assimilation for the immigrant generation and their children prove to be a compelling argument for seeing group outcomes as embedded in structural factors at various levels. In effect, Portes and Rumbaut's two volumes present a persuasive and empirically robust argument against the idea that certain groups are culturally positioned to do better than others.

In their policy recommendations, Portes and Rumbaut focus on education and the role of language acquisition. They make the case that immigrant children should learn both English and their parents' native language in school, and in fact, become fluent in both. Such bilingualism will then lead to high academic outcomes, a better relationship with parents, and presumably, mobility. This prescription is very different from what they contend actually occurs in the public school system, where bilingual education has become synonymous with "temporary instruction in a foreign language for children unable to speak English." In the authors' view, the current attempt to quickly mainstream immigrant children plays out to deleterious effects: some children not only lose most of their foreign language facility, but they end up with limited English skills as well. Even those children who become adept at the English language still lose out in a global economy, where speaking several languages has become ever important. Their point on language is well taken, even though the Asian groups in the study appear to be an interesting exception to their theory. The Asians rapidly lose their parental language and yet do extremely well in school, while some of the Latino groups are much more likely to maintain Spanish language facility but do not fare as well in school.

With their educational policy prescriptions, Portes and Rumbaut provide an important window into how to meet the challenges facing immigrant children in the public school system. The stakes are high. As Portes and Rumbaut point out, these immigrant children have a single lifetime to match the educational credentials that the descendants of earlier European immigrants had several generations to acquire. This "fast-forwarding" of the educational trajectory is required for the new second generation to make it in the new American economy.

Immigrant status, however, may only be one layer of the compelling educational issues that demand our attention. Policies developed for immigrant children attending poor, urban schools might also need to address the challenges found among all children attending these schools, both immigrant and native-born groups, particularly minorities. There will likely be some divergence between the two groups in matters of importance, especially when it comes to language issues and socio-cultural adjustment for immigrants. But in other important respects, there is much overlap. After all, both native-born and immigrant children are attending the same urban schools beset by disinvestment, gangs, and concerns about general safety. If higher education has indeed become the ticket to American mobility, then it is our responsibility to ensure that children have some kind of equitable access to higher education. The question then becomes, how can we improve the opportunity of all children to learn in public schools? For example, we might consider if there is any way to replicate the strong optimism of immigrant children among the children of long-term minority groups. Or does the relationship go only one way, with immigrant children acculturating into a decline in achievement motivation?

And here, the dynamics of race and ethnicity that Portes and Rumbaut elaborate on so gracefully elsewhere need to be taken into account. How do race and ethnicity shape children's experiences with education, particularly in middle and high school, the time when their performance structures access to higher education? Race, as Portes and Rumbaut and other scholars have shown us, still has a powerful impact on how Americans are treated and viewed. If that is the case, what is the role of teachers' and peer group perceptions and academic expectations for different racial and ethnic groups, for both immigrant and native-born children, and what effect do these expectations have? It might also be useful to examine if and how schools as social institutions perpetuate or challenge racial, ethnic, and class stratification, with an eye towards school tracking and funding. A look at these types of issues might help us explain why some of the Asians in Legacies were faring better than some of the Latinos, despite their different language patterns.

Other researchers have been addressing these areas in ongoing projects that, along with the contributions made by Portes and Rumbaut, will deepen our understanding of this important population. One of these projects is the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study (LISA) based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In this study, Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco are examining how immigrant students and their parents engage with education over a period of five years. The students, who were first contacted when they were between the ages of 9 to 14, are in many ways the younger counterparts to the adolescents who were the core of Legacies. The LISA study further extends the line of inquiry by observing how children interact in their schools, communities, and homes, and assessing their language ability and achievement through individually administered instruments. The latter will provide a welcome check on self-reported data on the part of students or parents, as well as data released by the schools.

The Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York based at the City University of New York Graduate Center is a project that promises to shed light on second-generation adults. Two sociologists, Mary Waters and Philip Kasinitz, and a political scientist, John Mollenkopf, are investigating the second generation's educational, economic, political, and cultural lives. In a sense, then, the Second Generation project will give us an idea of where the children in Legacies may end up. Additional strengths of this study are that it includes native-born groups (e.g., whites, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans) as a comparative flame for the immigrant experience and an ethnographic component that studies the second generation in diverse social settings such as a community college, the church, and a labor union.

There is a tendency in the United States to see immigrants as occupying a separate space, both physically and symbolically. They come from places that seem far away, and in some cases, are literally so. Some arrive in mysterious ways, under the cover of night, or through smugglers preying on their hopes for a better life. Once in the United States, they negotiate a Byzantine bureaucracy for green cards, legal papers, matters that non-immigrants do not often understand too well. In the public mind, immigrants are here, but they are not of here. While their presence is embodied in the clothes we wear, the fruits and vegetables we eat, and at the other end of the spectrum, the medical care and computer chips to which we have access, they often seem to be invisible. And when they do become visible, they are often flamed as a problem that can be managed by laws restricting their entry. What we are left with in Legacies is how incomplete that picture is. The story of immigrant children has deep implications for the rest of us. On their shoulders may rest the health of some of our nation's cities, as they become, in terms of their sheer numbers, our economic and political bulwark in future years. The story of the second generation is in a sense, then, our story, and it is up to us what the ending will be.

DR. VIVIAN LOUIE IS A HARVARD FELLOW ON RACE, CULTURE, AND EDUCATION AT THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION.

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