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This paper presents the authors' comments on "Dreams Fulfilled, Dreams Shattered: Determinants of Segmented Assimilation in the Second Generation" by William Haller, Alejandro Portes and Scott M. Lynch. The overall well-being and integration of second-generation immigrant youth constitute an important topic for researchers and policy makers, one that has generated a great deal of empirical research. While the article by Haller, Portes and Lynch organizes that research into two competing camps--segmented assimilation vs. other theories of assimilation--the authors think that these theories are better seen as complementary rather than antagonistic. They also believe that empirical findings on the second generation from various studies are not far apart, but in the authors' view they do not show that "downward" assimilation is as widespread as Portes and his colleagues assert. They believe that segmented-assimilation and mainstream-assimilation theories are complementary in that both approaches have overlapping explanations for the varying levels of success of the second generation, but contribute insights that are distinct.

This refreshing book is an important contribution to the sociological literature on immigration, ethnicity, community studies, and refugee studies. The book reports on the author's eight-year study of the Vietnamese [...]