Ethnic and Transnational Views on Education and Mobility Among Second Generation Chinese and Dominicans.

A key theme in the literature on migration is transnationalism, the concept of having a foot in both worlds ? the homeland that immigrants have left behind and the country that they have entered. This paper contributes to the emergent research on how transnationalism and ethnicity play out in the lives of the second generation, e.g., the American-born children of immigrants, and foreign-born children who arrived in the United States by the age of 12, with a particular focus on the Chinese and Dominicans and their views on and experience with higher education and mobility. Surveys and interviews with respondents of both groups show that they come from families embedded in strong transnational fields. The second generation Chinese, however, were only weakly transnational themselves, unlike the Dominicans, for whom the homeland figured strongly. Contrary to what we might expect, given that the Chinese have higher levels of educational attainment on average than many other immigrant groups, including Dominicans, the Chinese express more pessimism about the opportunity structure in the United States and their prospects for mobility. This is because the Chinese tended to use only ethnic/panethnic lenses to understand their educational and mobility trajectories in the United States and thus believed they should be doing better. By using both ethnic and transnational lenses, Dominicans compared themselves positively with their peers in the Dominican Republic and their co-ethnics in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]