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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)

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]

Inheriting the City presents the results of a major research project on the children of immigrants in New York City, focusing on eight groups, five of which are immigrant groups: Dominicans; South Americans from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru; English-speaking West Indians; the Chinese; and Russian Jews. The three comparison groups are native whites, native blacks, and Puerto Ricans. The symposium allowed three critics who have followed this project from its earliest phases to assess the results and the authors to respond to the issues raised by their commentaries., Sociology