The source of new immigrants to the United States shifted radically after 1965, when U.S. immigration law abolished the national origins quota system and enabled migration for reuniting families and to fill the need for scarce occupational skills. “The new preference system allowed highly skilled professionals, primarily doctors, nurses, and engineers from Asian countries, to immigrate and eventually to sponsor their families. About the same time, and largely independently of the 1965 Immigration Act, immigration from Latin America began to rise.” Asian immigration now accounts for about a third of new immigration, and a steadily growing flow from the Americas—more than half of the total. Unlike their early twentieth-century counterparts, these newcomers are also entering a vastly changed economic landscape. Urban labor markets in major metropolitan areas where immigrants concentrate have experienced profound structural economic changes, such as deindustrialization, declining wages for low-skilled workers, and the expansion of “dead end” service sector jobs. The Immigrant and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) survey focused on assimilation patterns among six Latino and Asian groups in metropolitan Los Angeles to determine how well today’s immigrants are adjusting to these new realities. IIMMLA findings raise important considerations for future immigration policy and upend concerns that today’s immigrants are not integrating into mainstream U.S. society.
With funding of over $1.7 million provided by Russell Sage, the IIMMLA study was conducted from 2004–2008 under the direction of Rubén G. Rumbaut, Frank D. Bean, Leo Chávez, Jennifer Lee, Susan K. Brown and Louis DeSipio of the University of California, Irvine, and Min Zhou of the University of California, Los Angeles. The survey expanded the scope of two previous major studies of immigrants funded by Russell Sage, The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) and the Immigrant Second Generation in New York Study which assessed how well the young adult offspring of recent immigrants were faring as they moved through American schools and into the labor market. A multi-stage, multi-method survey, IIMMLA examined immigrant incorporation and mobility among their young adult children (ages 20-39) in metropolitan Los Angeles. In the case of the sizeable Mexican-origin population in the Los Angeles area, the survey also looked at mobility among young adult members of the third or later generation. More than 5 million persons of Mexican origin live in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and, nationally, Mexicans comprise more than 30 percent of immigrants to the United States. Their mobility paths and outcomes represent a critical case study for both immigration theory and public policy and were therefore a major focus of IIMMLA’s analyses.
About 62 percent of Los Angeles residents in 2000 were of foreign birth or parentage—the majority of them Mexican. IIMMLA focused on the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area (Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties), which contains the largest first-, second- and third-and-beyond generations of persons of Mexican origin in the United States as well as the largest concentrations of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Filipinos, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Koreans—all among the principal nationality groups arriving in the United States since 1965. In total, IIMMLA surveyed nearly 5,000 immigrants representing more than three generations about their social, cultural, and economic experiences in the United States. The two phases of the study (detailed below) comprised short telephone surveys with the complete sample of immigrants and in-depth, personal interviews with smaller subsamples.
The survey compared six foreign-born (the so-called 1.5 generation) and second-generation immigrant groups (Mexicans, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, and Central Americans from Guatemala and El Salvador) with three native-born groups (third- or later-generation Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites and blacks). The targeted groups illustrate the many methods newcomers use to incorporate and their range of occupational backgrounds and immigrant status—from professionals and entrepreneurs to laborers, refugees and unauthorized migrants. From April–October 2004, the Field Research Corporation (using a sample design and questionnaire developed by IIMMLA investigators) conducted 35-minute structured telephone interviews with 4,780 randomly drawn respondents, including first-generation immigrants who arrived before age 14; and second- and third-plus-generation adults, age 20-39.
Interviewers asked respondents for basic demographic information and their socio-cultural orientation and mobility (e.g., language use, ethnic identity, attitudes towards intermarriage, and experiences of discrimination); economic mobility (e.g., parents’ background as well as the respondent’s education, first and current job, wealth and income, and any encounters with the law); geographic mobility (childhood and present neighborhood of residence), and civic engagement and politics (political attitudes, voting behavior, as well as naturalization and transnational ties).
Data gathering for a companion qualitative study conducted from 2006-2008 involved 162 face-to-face, open-ended, in-depth interviews with 1.5- and second-generation Mexicans, Chinese, and Vietnamese, as well as native-born whites and blacks from the original survey. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou invited the respondents to talk at length about how these groups define success, how they aim to achieve it, and how they choose to identify in the unique context of Los Angeles’ racial/ethnic and immigrant diversity.
Lee and Zhou identify some key mechanisms that affect the choices the 1.5 and second generation make in their pursuit of success and explain how these choices were pivotal in determining particular mobility outcomes. But rather than adopting normative assumptions about “success,” they advance a “subject-centered approach” that places the respondents’ definitions of success and perceptions of progress at the center of analysis (Zhou and Lee 2007; Zhou, Lee, Vallejo, Tafoya-Estrada, Xiong 2008). This is critical because previous research has failed to raise the empirical question of whether second-generation outcomes are perceived and defined differently by the scholars who study immigrant incorporation and the people they study. By lifting the frame that scholars have imposed on their research subjects, the qualitative study attempts to achieve a better understanding of the choices and mechanisms that lead to divergent pathways to social mobility.
For example, some 1.5- and second-generation Mexican respondents in the sample have only graduated from high school yet successfully operate gardening, roofing, moving, or other small service businesses—occupational niches shunned by most native-born Americans, as well as their 1.5- and second-generation Asian counterparts. Their entrepreneurial success had allowed them to accumulate wealth, purchase homes in middle-class suburbs, and establish stable family households. Using the subject-centered approach, Lee and Zhou found that 1.5- and second-generation Mexicans feel that they have achieved an extraordinary level of success, especially because they compare their achievements to those of their immigrant parents, many of whom still toil away in low-wage service jobs. However, if they were to measure their successes through only conventional socioeconomic indicators such as educational and occupational scales, these 1.5- and second-generation Mexicans may fall into the unsuccessful category (Zhou and Lee 2007).
By contrast, 1.5- and second-generation Asians tend to take normative routes to mobility, achieving levels of educational attainment that exceed those of non-Hispanic whites and often landing prestigious, high-salaried, white-collar occupations. Although they have successfully navigated the rules of the mobility game and achieved “success” according to the normative definition, most of the high-achieving second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese respondents do not feel successful. Many are dissatisfied with their own achievements and feel unsuccessful regardless of how much education they have attained or how much they earn in their current positions because they are more likely to compare their own success to that of even higher-achieving Asians—including their siblings and coethnics—rather than to non-Hispanic whites or other Americans. Regardless of what they have achieved, they (or their parents) know someone who has achieved more, and therefore, they measure their achievements against an exceptionally high bar. Zhou and Lee’s preliminary findings from the qualitative study indicate that while second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese may be more successful by normative measures than second-generation Mexicans, they feel far less successful than do their Mexican counterparts. Moreover, none of these groups use native-born whites as the reference group by which they measure their mobility or success (Zhou and Lee 2007).
A brief overview of IIMMLA survey results follows. The data can be downloaded by member institutions at www.icpsr.org/IIMMLA
Results: What does IIMMLA tell us about the social mobility of today’s immigrants?
Immigrants and their offspring continue to face challenges on all socioeconomic fronts but findings demonstrate that they are making steady intergenerational progress in several key areas, including educational attainment, residential assimilation, and economic integration. The qualitative results play a crucial role in the study’s findings. “By adopting [a] subject-centered approach, we are able to understand both the obvious and subtle reasons members of the second generation make certain choices and pursue particular pathways” (Zhou et al 2008). All told, IIMMLA illuminates differences among immigrant groups in legal status, education and economic capital upon arrival, family structure, cultural networks, and context of reception—all of which have a significant effect on patterns of intergenerational mobility.
The promise of upward mobility that, by-and-large, proved true for European immigrants of the early twentieth century is not a given for today’s new arrivals. Some groups advance steadily from one generation to the next, while others—primarily Mexicans—decline across generations in key socioeconomic areas. In addition to national and racial diversity, immigrants in the twenty-first century have widely divergent social class origins, reflected in the fact that the most educated and least educated groups in the United States are first-generation immigrants—Indians and Mexicans, respectively (Rumbaut 2010). IIMMLA shows that these factors, as well as migrants’ legal status upon entry, all have a profound influence on their educational trajectory and life course. “Education, and particularly the attainment of a college degree, increasingly determines the occupational and economic opportunities and payoffs available to young adults in the U.S., and hence their prospects for upward (or downward) mobility in relation both to their peers and to their parents” (Rumbaut 2008b).
All groups are making educational progress between the first and second generations—some well beyond their native-born comparison groups. Taken as a whole, more first- and second-generation immigrants have college degrees than their native-born peers. They also maintain a slightly higher share of graduate degrees than the native-born average. Chinese and Korean immigrants, for example, are far more likely to be college graduates upon arrival (Rumbaut 2008b). These groups also show higher rates of English-language proficiency when compared to their Vietnamese and Mexican immigrant counterparts, “illustrating drastic differences in parental human capital and financial resources in the three groups” (Zhou et al 2008). The Chinese and Korean second generation shows an extremely high college graduation rate when compared to their high school dropout rate: college graduates outnumber high school dropouts 33 to 1. Second generation Filipinos, whose parents are also more likely to have attended college, do not achieve as highly, but still surpass native whites: for every one Filipino high-school dropout, eighteen graduate from college.
Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Vietnamese—the majority of whom tend to be laborers or, in the case of the Vietnamese, refugees—are likely to have less than a high school education upon arrival in the United States (Rumbaut 2008b). “Nearly three decades after they migrated to the United States to stay, the Mexican parents have mostly not finished high school (averaging only a little more than eight-and-a-half years of schooling)” (Bean, Leach, Brown, Bachmeier, Hipp 2010). The second generation of all four groups, however, has attained more education than their parents. Nearly 45 percent of the Vietnamese graduate from college. Among Salvadorans and Guatemalans, 17 percent graduate from college, but 16 percent drop out of high school. Nearly 12 percent of second-generation Mexicans have a college degree, and high school drop outs fall off by almost 15 percent. But by the third generation, Mexican American educational attainment hits a plateau, and the fourth-plus generation shows lower education than the third (Rumbaut 2008b). However, it is far from clear that this cross-sectional finding represents any kind of downward mobility or stagnation (Bean, Brown and Bachmeier 2010).
IIMMLA findings underscore how educational attainment both influences and is influenced by other indicators of mobility, including legal status, income, and incarceration rates. The adult children of immigrants who have legal status or who are naturalized citizens make more educational and economic progress than those whose parents remain undocumented. The offspring of immigrants who marry natives (including native co-ethnics) also substantially increase their educational attainment (Bean, Brown, Leach, and Bachmeier 2007).
IIMMLA also demonstrates that the pervasive fear of criminality among uneducated or unauthorized immigrants simply does not hold up. Among Latin American immigrants, for example, the lowest arrest and incarceration rates are seen within the least educated groups—first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Mexicans—who also account for the majority of the undocumented. Native-born Americans have higher arrest and imprisonment rates than these immigrant groups, making education a less reliable predictor of incarceration than nation of origin (Rumbaut 2009b).
Upon arriving in the United States, early twentieth-century immigrants settled into ethnic enclaves, and experts have variously interpreted this behavior as either a catalyst for group economic advancement or a hindrance to full social integration with the American mainstream. Nevertheless, today’s immigrants continue this trend and the question remains: will the adult children of immigrants eventually move into wealthier and more integrated neighborhoods?
IIMMLA finds that among the Mexican-origin population, spatial integration occurs at a slow but steady pace. By the third generation Mexicans live in neighborhoods with a higher median income ($46,000) than the second generation ($41,000) (Bean et al 2007). But although some Mexican Americans do move to wealthier neighborhoods as their income rises, the trend toward more integrated neighborhoods doesn’t begin until the third generation. IIMMLA co-investigator Susan Brown explains that “a new pattern may involve the 1.5 and 2nd generations improving their household income levels somewhat but still not being in the position to live in neighborhoods that are commensurately higher-income or [whiter].This could occur because so much Mexican migration consists of low-skilled and unauthorized labor migrants that adult children…often bear extra expenses of caring for parents and other relatives, either in the United States or Mexico.” For Mexicans, this “delayed spatial assimilation” does not follow traditional assimilation patterns, which flow from poorer ethnic enclaves to middle-class neighborhoods. Nor does it resemble the alternative pattern, seen among some Asian groups, of concentrating in middle-class ethnic enclaves in order to preserve cultural and educational traditions. Nevertheless, when each successive Mexican generation moves, they tend to choose neighborhoods that are more integrated and more educated than the neighborhoods in which they grew up. (Brown 2007)
Immigration policy debates are invariably attended by fears of whether immigrants will make economic progress, and the recession that began in December 2007 only magnified these concerns. Opponents of immigration fear, on one hand, that the U.S. labor market cannot successfully absorb increasing numbers of newcomers, resulting in fewer jobs for natives and lower wages for all. They also fear that today’s immigrants—Latino and Asian arrivals who account for 21 percent of all low-wage workers—will never be able to catch up to Americans and never fully integrate economically or culturally.
Counter to these fears, IIMMLA shows that more first- and second-generation Chinese (18 percent) and Vietnamese (14 percent) hold professional occupations when compared to their native-born black (4.6 percent) and white (9.6 percent) counterparts. Notably, mobility patterns among the Vietnamese resemble those for the Chinese—upward—despite the second generation Vietnamese having parents who, as a group, arrived in the United States with far less education (see Educational Attainment). And the Chinese second-generation home ownership rate is virtually the same as that for Mexicans, at 27.6 and 27.4 percent, respectively. IIMMLA findings indicate, however, that 1.5- and second-generation Chinese outpace every other immigrant group surveyed in several socioeconomic domains, including educational attainment, labor market status, earnings, and incarceration rates, pointing to “an intergenerational transmission of advantage…exhibiting higher levels of education, occupational status, and earnings compared to their Vietnamese and Mexican counterparts” (Zhou et al 2008).
IIMMLA results show that Mexican socioeconomic status rises for the first three generations. Median household income, for example, rises from $27,748 in the first generation to $53,719 in the second and $62,930 in the third. Parental home ownership for the Mexican-origin population also increases in successive generations from 35.2 percent (who are raised in owned homes) in the 1.5 generation to 62.3 percent in the second generation to 71.8 percent in the third-plus generations. These figures indicate a growth in both financial and residential stability, even as they compare negatively to Chinese (85 percent), Korean (77.2 percent), and Filipino (81.6 percent) immigrants (Rumbaut 2008a).
Despite this intergenerational progress, IIMMLA finds a socioeconomic plateau or decline among Mexican Americans beyond the third generation, including an increase in arrest and incarceration rates between the 1.5 and third generations—17.3 and 14.7 percentage points, respectively. These rates are comparable to those of native-born black men. “Rather than a story of upward mobility often mentioned in the ‘straight-line’ assimilation literature, the data…suggest instead a story of segmented assimilation to the criminal norms of the native-born” (Rumbaut 2009b).
It’s worth noting that Mexican immigrants, as compared to their Chinese counterparts, generally arrive in the United States with fewer financial resources, less educational attainment, and a lower level of English-language proficiency. And, as the group with the largest share of undocumented immigrants, they arrive to a negative context of reception. (Zhou et al 2008). IIMMLA co-investigator Susan Brown writes that, “even though the IIMMLA data show several indicators of mobility peaking in the third generation, the fourth or later generations of Mexican-origin persons still display substantial socioeconomic gains in comparison to the 1.5 and [second] generations” (Brown 2007).
IIMMLA reveals a picture of immigrants and their twenty-first century adult children who are, by and large, successfully assimilating into American society. The survey’s findings also underscore how different routes to social mobility influence immigrant life chances. This is especially evident in the area of education where most immigrants—although they arrive with various educational backgrounds—have adult children who not only surpass the achievements of their native-born comparison groups but also, in the case of Chinese and Korean immigrants, native-born whites. Findings in other dimensions of incorporation, such as median family income and residential assimilation, indicate a largely positive, if tenuous, intergenerational progression into the economic and social mainstream.
Even Mexican Americans are not an exception to this pattern, at least up through the third generation. IIMMLA studies show the group steadily acculturating to the American mainstream (e.g. speaking English, smaller families), with the third generation displaying increasing education and income (Bean et al 2010). Nevertheless, these are averages, and not everyone succeeds. “Intergenerational progress should not overshadow, however, the signs of downward mobility—including high school abandonment, unemployment or underemployment, poverty, premature childbearing, and incarceration—that are noticeable in all immigrant groups but are disproportionately present in some” (Zhou et al 2008). One of the key considerations for future study and for new directions in immigration policy will be why certain immigrants do not experience the upward mobility many of their peers do. An important issue might not be how immigrants are changing the alchemy of U.S. society but, rather, how U.S. society is changing immigrants.
Bean, Frank D., Susan K. Brown, and Rubén Rumbaut. 2006. “Mexican Immigrant Political and Economic Incorporation.” Perspectives on Politics 4: 309-313.
Bean, Frank D., Susan K. Brown, Mark A. Leach, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 2006. “Naturalización de los Inmigrantes Mexicanos y Escolaridad en la Segunda Generación.” Pp. 113-122 in Herrera, Elena Zúñiga, Jesús Arroyo Alejandre, Agustín Escobar Latapí, and Gustavo Verduzco Igartúa (eds.), Migración México – Estados Unidos: Implicaciones y Retos Para Ambos Países. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional de Población, U. de Guadalajara, CIESAS, Casa Juan Pablos, El Colegio de México.
Bean, Frank D., Susan K. Brown, Mark Leach, Jim Bachmeier, Leo R. Chávez, Louis DeSipio, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Jennifer Lee, Min Zhou. “How pathways to legal status and citizenship relate to economic attainment among the children of Mexican immigrants.” Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. Research Report to the Pew Center, September 2006.
Brown, Susan K. and Frank D. Bean. 2006. “Assimilation Models, Old and New: Explaining a Long-Term Process” Migration Information Source. October. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Portes, Alejandro and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 2006. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chapters 7 and 9 in new third edition updated to include IIMMLA findings.
Rumbaut, Rubén G., Douglas S. Massey, and Frank D. Bean. 2006. “Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California.” Population and Development Review 32(3): 447-460.
Brown, Susan K. 2007. “Delayed Spatial Assimilation: Multi-Generational Incorporation of the Mexican-Origin Population in Los Angeles.” City & Community 6(3):193-209.
Rubén G. Rumbaut and Louis DeSipio. “From Generation to Generation: Immigration and Ethnic Mobility in Los Angeles.” Research Report to the Pew Hispanic Center, June 2007.
Rumbaut, Rubén G. 2007. “On the Evolution of Language Competencies, Preferences and Use among Immigrants and Their Children in the United States Today”; and “On the Evaluation of Immigration and Assimilation.” Statement prepared for the “Hearing on Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Becoming Americans—U.S. Immigrant Integration,” before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, 110th Congress, First Session, May 16, 2007. Serial No. 110-27, pp. 21-49, 94-107. Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Printing Office.
Zhou, Min and Jennifer Lee. 2007. “Becoming Ethnic or Becoming American? Reflecting on the Divergent Pathways to Social Mobility and Assimilation among the New Second Generation.” Du Bois Review. 4 (1): 189-205.
Rumbaut, Rubén G. 2009a. “A Language Graveyard? The Evolution of Language Competencies, Preferences and Use among Young Adult Children of Immigrants.” Pp. 35-71 in Terrence G. Wiley, Jin Sook Lee, and Russell Rumberger, eds. The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Bean, Frank D., Susan K. Brown, and James Bachmeier. 2010. “Comparative Integration
Contexts and Mexican Immigrant-Group Incorporation in the United States.” Pp. 253-275 in Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia and Simon Reich, eds. Managing Ethnic Diversity After 9/11: Integration, Security, and Civil Liberties in Transatlantic Perspective. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Forthcoming / In Progress:
Bean, Frank D. and Susan K. Brown. Hidden Mobilities: Mexican Immigrant Group Incorporation in the United States. Based on research using IIMMLA, U.S. Census, CPS, SIPP, and Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD) data, this is a book about the multiple dimensions, strategies, and pathways involved in sociocultural, spatial, political and economic incorporation among Mexican immigrants and their descendants in the United States. (in progress)
Bean, Frank D., Mark A. Leach, Susan K. Brown, James Bachmeier, and John Hipp. “Axes of Early Political Incorporation: Parental Legalization and Naturalization Pathways and Their Influence on Children’s Educational Attainment.” Working Paper, Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine. (Submitted for publication.)
Bean, Frank D., Susan K. Brown, James Bachmeier, and Mark A. Leach. 2010. “How Legalization and Citizenship among Mexican Immigrant Parents Relate to their Children’s Economic Wellbeing.” In Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton, eds. The Success of Immigrants. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. (forthcoming)
Brown, Susan K., Frank D. Bean, Mark A. Leach and Rubén G. Rumbaut. “Legalization and Naturalization Trajectories Among Mexican Immigrants and Their Implications for the Second Generation.” In Richard Alba and Mary Waters, eds. The New Dimensions of Diversity: The Children of Immigrants in North American and Western Europe. New York: New York University Press. (forthcoming)
Chavez, Leo R. and Louis DeSipio. Intergenerational Analysis of Immigrant Cultural and Political Incorporation. (book manuscript in progress)
Lee, Jennifer and Min Zhou. Becoming “Ethnic,” Becoming “Angelino,” and/or Becoming “American”: The Multi-Faceted Experiences of Immigrant Children and Children of Immigrants in Los Angeles.” (book manuscript in progress)
Future of Children 20(1). (forthcoming)
Rumbaut , Rubén G., Paradise Shift: Immigration, Mobility and Inequality in Southern California. [Working title of book in progress.]