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As undocumented Latino immigrants transition into adulthood, they also transition into illegality. They move from a somewhat protected status under which they had access to education and other social benefits, to the more vulnerable category of undocumented adults without access to social rights. How undocumented immigrants’ interactions with social services contribute to the formation of their ethnic identity and feelings of belonging to the United States is the focus of this research. Drawing on qualitative interview data from undocumented adults who grew up in the United States, this article shows that as undocumented children transition into adulthood, they face a new system that forces them to learn how to become an immigrant if they want to remain part of American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the pattern of reporting of ethnic ancestry in the U.S. by Whites through the 1980 census. The ethnic question introduced in the 1980 decennial census of the U.S. has generated surprising results. There is simplification, inconsistency, and instability in the ethnic origins reported. Simplification often occurs, for example, when we compare the origins of parents with the origins they. report for their children. Moreover, it is not uncommon for the ethnicity reported for one child in a family to be inconsistent with what is said about a sibling. Likewise, there is evidence of instability within a life span, particularly at the time of marriage and when leaving home. It is tempting to interpret these responses as merely reflecting enumeration errors; the new question that generates these results is not entirely clear in its verbal construction, its instructions to respondents, and its goals. This article has three main goals. First, after reviewing both the question and the surprising results reported thus far, we evaluate the competing interpretations for the inconsistent results obtained from the 1980 ethnic origins question.

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]

The article focuses on the role of lineage in identity formation among Black Americans. If all of those defined racially as black in the United States have only one ancestry that is a meaningful part of their identity and that ancestry is African-American then for all intents and purposes race and ancestry are equivalent in terms of defining this population. The idea that race and ancestry are equivalent for blacks in the U.S. is made possible because the ancestral diversity among blacks has been consistently ignored in the United States in favor of a racial definition of the population, which defines individuals only in terms of their racial identities. The "one drop rule" of racial classification in the United States has operated historically to make the distinction between race and ethnicity for those defined as blacks unimportant. Thus the people defined as blacks for the most part have also been defined as only having African-American ancestries, regardless of the degree of variation in the ancestries of the individuals involved.