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In this article we address some of the controversies that have arisen in the reception of Richard Alba's work on changing patterns of ethnoracial diversity and the integration of immigrants. We parse some of the debates around the term 'assimilation', arguing that it is still a useful term for understanding the trajectories of immigrants and their descendants. We argue that Alba's demographic analyses of the incorporation of post 1965 immigrants is an objective description of statistical changes in the population, but it is sometimes critiqued by scholars who point to subjective experiences of discrimination and prejudice among this population. We argue that this is best explained by the 'integration paradox' – greater integration leads to more, not less, feelings of exclusion, especially at the beginning of the process. We explore what Alba means when he discusses the expansion of the white racial category, and we review research on whiteness to bring attention to the question of whether the expansion of the mainstream and the blurring of the boundaries of whiteness are related. We stress the importance of differentiating between whiteness as a category, an identity, and an ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to reduce stark health inequalities by providing universal health insurance to all Americans and long-term authorised immigrants. Later regulations, however, gave the 50 U.S. states latitude to choose the degree of coverage for their constituencies. In this paper, we explore how interactions with these diverse systems of care contribute to the incorporation of immigrants into America, especially among the most likely to remain uninsured: the working poor. We uncovered a process in which immigrants’ access to health coverage and care was informed by the procedural justice embedded in their interactions with representatives of the health care system. These interactions signalled to immigrants their deservingness in American society, operating as a system of incorporation in the most inclusive states and as a barrier to incorporation in the most exclusive ones. Repealing the ACA may exacerbate differences across states in access to health care among eligible immigrants and end the incipient transformation of the U.S. health care system into an agent of immigrant incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two important trends may influence the identities of the later-generation descendants of European immigrants in the USA: high levels of ongoing immigration to the USA from all over the world, and the growth of genetic testing for ancestry and ethnic origins. I suggest that these trends may modify Gans's predictions of what will happen to later-generation ethnicity. Both trends might lead to the maintenance of some type of identity, even if it is very thin, or even unrelated to the European immigrants who originally came to the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the ways in which Britain and the USA classify and analyse the integration of immigrants and their descendants. While both societies recognize racial differences in their official statistics and in the academic analyses of change over time, the USA tends to classify immigrants and their descendants by immigrant generation much more than Britain does. The importance of the concept of generation in American immigration research is highlighted and it is suggested that studies built on the importance of generation can illuminate social processes of integration in Britain. The complexities of defining and measuring immigrant generation are reviewed, including new developments in the measurement of generation that take into account age at migration, and historical period and cohort effects. Racial and ethnic minority groups formed through immigration may have very different characteristics depending on the average distance of their members from immigration – including the possibility of ‘ethnic leakage’, as more assimilated, later-generation individuals no longer identify with the group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the process of ethnic identity formation among two different groups of recent immigrants to the United States: secular kibbutz-born Israelis and middle-class Haitians, While the two groups are different in a number of ways, they share an ambivalence with the identities that American society would assign to them -- as Jews and blacks respectively. By contrasting these two case studies we identify the role of the 'proximal host', the category to which the immigrants would be assigned following immigration. The determination of the ultimate definition of the ethnic identities of these immigrants is a result of the interaction of the conception of identity the immigrants bring with them from their countries of origin, the definitions and reactions of the proximal host group, and the overall ordering and definitions of American society. The ambivalence of both groups of immigrants towards their post-immigration identities is a result of both macro-forces determining the definition of categories and micro-forces of individual choice. In conclusion we show that because of the primacy of race in American society, Israelis are likely to face many more options in the determination of their identities, than are Haitians, although they both face a similar structural dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]