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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.

Examines the incorporation of second generation immigrants in New York City, asserting that their experiences are shaped by the history of immigration among Whites, predominance of minorities in the city's population and institutions today, and interactions among immigrants and native minority groups. Discusses school and work, intergroup contact and conflict, reassessing segmentation and assimilation, the positive impact of institutions on minority mobility, and the creation of hybrid minority cultures. (SM)

Explores racial and ethnic identities adopted by a sample of 83 adolescent second-generation West Indian and Haitian Americans in New York City. Subjective understandings of their ethnic identities are described and contrasted with the identities and reactions of first-generation immigrants from the same countries. (GR)

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]

This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Latino immigrants age sixty and older from Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Based on 178 interviews with immigrants in Florida and Massachusetts, this study identifies the financial and health hardships they endured, the kinds of government and nonprofit aid they accessed, the factors keeping many from accessing aid, and the coping strategies they adopted. Respondents faced unemployment, hunger, and loss of income. Unauthorized immigrants and people in mixed-status families were deliberately excluded from federal aid. Many other immigrants who qualified were reluctant or refused it. Immigrants without legal status and those who had more recently arrived were the most severely affected. Individuals and families responded to these challenges by doubling up, going without food and medicine, and working while sick. Greater outreach and more humane public policies could have prevented much of this suffering. [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]

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]

We examine how recent immigration to the United States has affected African Americans. We first review the research on the growing diversity within the black population, driven largely by the presence of black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. As their children and grandchildren come of age, relations between immigrants and African Americans are complicated by the fact that a growing portion of the African American community has origins in both groups. We then review literature on both new destinations and established gateway cities to illustrate the patterns of cooperation, competition, and avoidance between immigrants of diverse races and African Americans in neighborhoods, the labor market, and politics. We explore the implications of the population's increasing racial diversity owing to immigration for policies that aim to promote racial equality but that are framed in terms of diversity. We conclude with suggestions for new areas of research. [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]

Using New York City as an example, this essay examines how American cities that have a long and continuous history of absorbing immigrants develop welcoming institutions and policies for current immigrants and their children. Cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and New York have been gateway cities for many previous waves of immigrants and continue to absorb new immigrants today. The ethnic conflicts and accommodations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continue to shape the context of reception of today's immigrants. In contrast to "new destinations, " which in recent years have often been centers of anti-immigrant sentiment and nativist local social policies, New York has generally adopted policies designed to include and accommodate new immigrants, as well as repurposing institutions that served earlier European immigrants and native-born African Americans and Puerto Ricans. The continuing significance of race in the city is counterbalanced in the lives of immigrants by a relative lack of nativism and an openness to incorporating immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the article "Dreams Fulfilled, Dreams Shattered: Determinants of Segmented Assimilation in the Second Generation" by William Haller, Alejandro Portes, and Scott M. Lynch, published in the March 2011 issue of the journal "Social Forces."

Many observers have noted that immigrants to the United States are highly concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas of a relatively few states. Though immigrants diffused into many places that had previously seen relatively few immigrants during the 1990s, as of the 2000 census, 77 percent of the nation's 31.1 million foreign born residents still lived in six states -- California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. According to the 2000 census, the two largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and New York, accounted for one third of all immigrants (http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2002/demoprofiles. html). While immigrants moved into many new areas during the 1990s, making the challenge of incorporating their children a national issue, their concentration in our largest cities remained pronounced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the types of racial and ethnic identities adopted by a sample of 83 adolescent second-generation West Indian and Haitian Americans in New York City. The subjective understandings these youngsters have of being American, of being black American, and of their ethnic identities are described and contrasted with the identities and reactions of first-generation immigrants from the same countries. Three types of identities are evident among the second generation -- a black American identity, an ethnic or hyphenated national origin identity, and an immigrant identity. These different identities are related to different perceptions and understandings of race relations and of opportunities in the United States. Those youngsters who identify as black Americans tend to see more racial discrimination and limits to opportunities for blacks in the United States. Those who identify as ethnic West Indians tend to see more opportunities and rewards for individual effort and initiative. I suggest that assimilation to America for the second-generation black immigrant is complicated by race and class and their interaction, with upwardly mobile second-generation youngsters maintaining ethnic ties to their parents' national origins and with poor inner city youngsters assimilating to the black American peer culture that surrounds them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 analyzes recent literature assessing the impact of three factors including economic restructuring, racial discrimination, and immigration on the current patterns of racial inequality in the U.S. Because of the enormous impact of immigration on the composition of America's nonwhite populations, researchers stress the importance of combining analyses of the economy and of racial and ethnic discrimination. The research literature on ethnic inequality shows that progress in narrowing the gap between minorities and whites and among white ethnics was made when the economy was expanding through the mid-1970s. After that, for many groups, the progress slowed, stopped, or reversed. The restructuring of the American economy in the last few decades has hit many unskilled minority workers hard. In addition, the evidence indicates that direct discrimination is still an important factor for all minority subgroups except very highly educated Asians. The large numbers of immigrants entering the U.S. in recent decades have had mixed success, but there are some intriguing ways in which immigrants seem to have achieved mobility in spite of hard economic times and nonwhite status.

This paper examines the influence of surname on how descendants of white European immigrants to the United States, who are of mixed ethnic ancestry, determine their ethnic identification. It is based on 60 in-depth interviews about ethnic identity and family history, conducted with Catholic, suburban later-generation residents of Santa Clara County California and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (suburbs of San Jose and Philadelphia, respectively). These respondents describe how other people identilS' them using their surname as an indicator of ethnic background as well as how they use surnames to identify others. They continue to use surnames for their own and others' ethnic identifications despite the fact that they are also continually made aware of the ways in which surname is a faulty, and often inaccurate, indicator of ethnic origin. Factors such as intermarriage, name changes and insufficient knowledge of types of surnames undermine the predictive value of surnames for determining ethnic origin. This examination of the day-to-day use of surnames to determine ethnic ancestry shows the discrepancy between the widespread belief that ethnicity is the naming of a fixed, personal, biological trait that is inherited from one's ancestors and the day-to-day evidence that ethnicity is a processual social phenomenon involving change, choice, and movement across ethnic boundaries for the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As whites become increasingly distant in generations and time from their immigrant ancestors, the tendency to distort, or remember selectively, one's ethnic origins increases. Distortions and inconsistencies in ethnic reporting are shown to vary with age, educational attainment, and marital status and even to exist within families when parents report the ethnic ancestry of their children. These examples of inconsistency, simplification, and systematic distortion all demonstrate the flux of the ethnic categories among white Americans. It is concluded that ethnic categories are social phenomena that over the long run are constantly being redefined and reformulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘progressive's dilemma’ questions the ability of public social services to facilitate the integration of immigrants into modern welfare states. The rationale is that majority groups react negatively towards minorities when they perceive their prerogatives threatened, which creates a backlash against immigrants' integration. In this article, we argue that universal social services, as opposed to means-tested programmes, can help to overcome the ‘progressive's dilemma’ by facilitating the interaction of immigrants and members of the receiving community. To illustrate our argument, we describe a structural coexistence initiative of universal service delivery designed to facilitate the integration of Moroccan immigrants into a rural municipality of Spain. The discussion examines the coexistence initiative from an anti-oppressive perspective of social work with immigrant minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]