Abstract
In the edited volume, The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective, Richard Alba and Mary C. Waters include 13 chapters that explore the integration of second generation immigrants in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The book adopts a broad definition of second generation immigrants, focusing on the children of immigrants who were either born in these regions or migrated at young ages. To frame the contributions of the chapters, Alba and Waters point to four themes that differentiate both the flows of immigration to – and the diverse societies of – these areas: the character of the immigration, citizenship regimes, institutions of the host society that directly affect the children of immigrants, and local contexts of the receiving societies. These themes situate the chapters within the larger literature on second generation immigrants as well as draw readers’ attention to their broader contributions. Curiously, Alba and Waters do not organize the chapters according to these themes. Though there is a section devoted to local contexts, the other sections include ‘starting points’, ‘major case studies’, and ‘comparative studies’. It is this final section that presumably influences the title of the book, as one chapter compares Great Britain and the United States and another compares four mainland European countries. The third chapter within this section examines how blocked job opportunities among second generation immigrants in France contributed to the November 2005 riots. Its location here is questionable as the chapter only draws comparisons with the United States in its conclusion and is more similar in its approach to the chapters within the ‘major case studies’ section.
The majority of the chapters address the theme of host society institutions that affect the second generation, focusing specifically on the educational systems and labor markets of a diverse set of countries, including the United States, Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium. Three chapters examine a range of educational outcomes in the United States, including total attainment, enrollment, and high school dropout. In Chapter 4, Joel Perlmann also analyzes other outcomes, such as teen pregnancy and single motherhood, labor market attachment, and institutionalization among second generation Mexican Americans. Alba et al. (Chapter 5) are the only authors to include multiple generations of immigrants in their analysis of the educational attainment of second, third, and fourth generation Mexican immigrants. Chapter 11 (Kasinitz et al.) is the lone chapter on the labor market in the United States. This chapter looks at employment among second generation young adults across multiple racial/ethnic groups in New York City. The remaining chapters addressing this theme explore education and labor markets within several European countries. Notably, for education, Chapter 9 (Tariq Modood) examines the overrepresentation of nonwhite ethnic minorities in higher education in Great Britain. Fibbi et al. (Chapter 6) investigate educational attainment and intergenerational educational mobility in Switzerland by country of origin. Two other chapters look at Germany and Belgium and, in particular, they narrow in on disadvantage in occupational attainment for second generation Turkish immigrants. Together, these chapters on the various European countries provide valuable insight into the immigration flows within Europe as well as how the second generation interacts with two major institutions (educational systems and labor markets) of the host countries. As a whole, the chapters that comprise this theme allow scholars an opportunity to assess how different features of the disparate European societies and the United States affect important educational and labor market outcomes for second generation immigrants.
I found Chapter 2 the most interesting. It is the only chapter to address the theme of ‘citizenship regimes’. Here, Brown et al. focus on combinations of legalization and naturalization statuses among immigrant parents and how they affect a host of outcomes (e.g. educational attainment, occupational socioeconomic prestige, annual income) for the second generation. The authors use data from the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles study and carefully craft a set of mutually exclusive migration status and naturalization trajectories. Specifically, these trajectories parse the second generation by their parents’ initial migration status and their own current naturalization status. For example, immigrants with an ‘authorized/citizen’ or ‘authorized/authorized’ categorization were both authorized at entry into the United States, but the former naturalized while the latter did not. With this detailed categorization of immigrant legal statuses, the authors find that the life chances of second generation immigrants improved when their parents’ legal status changed from unauthorized to authorized or transitioned further to naturalized. In their conclusion, the authors draw attention to the sizeable population of unauthorized immigrants in the United States and note the intergenerational ramifications of this legal status for the second generation. The attention to immigrants’ changing migration and naturalization statuses is laudable and should encourage scholars – when the data are available – to carefully consider the diverse legal statuses of immigrants both upon and after arrival to the United States.
Alongside the strengths of this book, one weakness is the relative lack of comparative research. This is particularly notable because of the title of the book and because Alba and Waters emphasize in their introduction that a comparative perspective is the best approach for developing theory and models of second generation integration. The book, however, only offers three cross-national comparisons and a fourth (Chapter 14) only takes up a comparative perspective in the conclusion. If a comparative perspective is indeed central for understanding the integration patterns of second generation immigrants, the book contributes relatively little to this research agenda. Additionally, Alba and Waters note that they do not address many issues of law and policy that affect both immigration flows and immigrant integration. If the book had been dedicated to a comparative perspective from the outset or focused solely on either the United States or Europe, there would be ample space for attention to such issues. Furthermore, this approach would allow for the development of two of Alba and Waters’s themes that received little attention: character of the immigration and citizenship regimes. Given that there is only one chapter devoted to the latter theme, this is an area that would have benefited from a more focused book. While the book may yet meet Alba and Waters’s hope that this volume will serve as a jumping off point for scholarly thinking on patterns of integration among second generation immigrants in contemporary societies, an exclusively comparative-, United States-, or European-focus would have provided a more effective opportunity to both broaden and deepen scholars’ understanding of the second generation.
This criticism aside, Alba and Waters do edit a book that meets their primary goal of exploring integration patterns among second generation immigrants. Whether they accomplish the second part of this goal – the further refinement and development of theories and models of the second generation – depends on future research taking up this charge. Certainly, these chapters provide a beginning point for scholars interested in immigrant integration in the United States or Europe or in comparative research between the two. Though the few chapters dedicated to the latter area fall short of the emphasis placed on it by Alba and Waters in their introduction, the study of immigrant integration among the second generation would clearly benefit from heightened interest in comparative research. Thus, while readers may be disappointed that the comparative content of the book does not meet the promise of its introduction, this book nevertheless provides a glimpse of the promise of this research agenda and a few examples of how it might proceed.