Working Paper No. 335 Young Mexican Americans, Blacks, and Whites in Recent Years: Schooling and Teen Motherhood as Indicators of Strengths and Risks

A dominant concern regarding the contemporary immigration to the United States involves the children, and later descendants, of the immigrants: will they manage to improve upon the conditions of their parents, and repeat the pattern of earlier waves of immigration, namely a slow but steady ascent over several generations. Discussion of the past most usefully concerns the last great wave of immigration, roughly 1890-1920 during which southern, central and eastern Europeans from ethnic stocks that had been little known in the United States before that time, immigrated to a modern, industrial, society in great number. Today there is little difference in socioeconomic position between the descendants of that immigration and the descendants of much earlier arrivals to the United States (Lieberson and Waters). Concern about the offspring of today's immigrants has been expressed most influentially in the theory of segmented assimilation suggested by A. Portes and his colleagues (Portes and Zhou, Portes and Rumbaut). They expect that the offspring of middle-class immigrants will probably assimilate fairly easily, but they warn of the possibility that the children of immigrants entering American society at the bottom will have more trouble than did the children of immigrants who entered at the bottom in past eras. Today's offspring will have more trouble because i) they are non-white and American society is a long way from ignoring such differences; ii) the nature of the economy has changed so that industrial-economy jobs requiring minimal skill (but still an improvement over the parents' jobs) do not exist in great number as they did in the past; iii) extended education (necessary for today's better jobs) is out of the reach of immigrant families that enter at the bottom; and finally iv) an alienated, inner-city, non-white, youth culture will appeal to these new lower-class second-generation youth who encounter blocked mobility.