Abstract
In Education and Immigration, Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette provide a comprehensive review of existing research in order to provide an in-depth understanding of Asian, Hispanic, and African immigrant students’ educational experiences and outcomes and how, as racial/ethnic minorities, they are incorporated into the racial landscape of the United States. The book is very clearly written and successfully balances breadth and depth in order to not only provide an important description of the educational achievements of children of immigrants but also an assessment of prevalent explanations of racial/ethnic disparities in education. The authors effectively examine and emphasize the heterogeneity found across and within immigrant groups while simultaneously providing a comprehensive discussion of the overall themes and patterns within post-1965 immigration.
Chapter 1 sets the stage for using education as an indicator of assimilation, and discusses important terminology and theoretical perspectives within the literature of education and immigration. Providing numerous benefits to immigrants and their children, such as access to better paying and more prestigious jobs, educational outcomes are an important dimension of how immigrants are incorporated into the US social structure. To more thoroughly highlight how education is an important measure of immigrant incorporation, and how educational attainment is often dependent on contexts of incorporation, the authors spend a full chapter devoted to assimilation theories and processes in Chapter 2.
The notion of the ‘American Dream’ and the corresponding belief that all immigrants can achieve success if they choose to conform to American culture is assessed in Chapter 2. The authors question whether or not conforming to native-born Whites is beneficial for immigrants’ educational outcomes, or whether it is advantageous for immigrants to retain their ethnic identity and cultural values. While early immigrant groups assimilated into White, middle-class America by shedding their ethnic distinctions, Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette emphasize that contemporary immigrant groups experience different incorporation contexts, complicated by socioeconomic status and race, which impacts groups’ success within education. While contemporary assimilation theories emphasize that contexts of reception impact the incorporation of immigrants, the authors highlight that these theories are often unable to disentangle which factors are most significant in impacting immigrant education.
A historical account of US immigration is assessed in Chapter 3. Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette examine how educational, economic, racial/ethnic, and other demographic characteristics of immigrant populations have shifted over time as a result of immigration legislation. Their discussion of past and current immigration policies provides insight into how immigrant groups have been received and the role of race and socioeconomic status in immigrant incorporation. For example, seen as racially inferior and perceived as an economic threat, Chinese individuals were explicitly prohibited from immigrating to the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Later, the noteworthy Immigration Act of 1965 abolished existing national-origin quotas and gave preference to family-reunification and high-skilled workers. As a result, immigration from non-European countries drastically increased, with immigrants from Europe comprising less than 14 percent of total legal immigrants between 1990 and 2000. The power of legislation to shape the demographic characteristics of immigrant groups directly influences the educational outcomes of children of immigrants. For instance, post-1965 immigrants are often differentiated between high-skilled, highly educated, human capital migrants and lower skilled, under-educated, labor migrants; the socioeconomic status of immigrant parents then influences the educational resources their children are able to access. This impact of parents’ socioeconomic standing is further examined in Chapter 4.
Chapter 4 provides a thorough review of the educational and income attainments of immigrant adults. A major strength of the chapter is the authors’ emphasis on heterogeneity, not only between immigrant groups but also within immigrant groups. For example, while Asians, on average, have higher levels of educational attainment than do Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, this is certainly not the case for all Asian ethnic groups. Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians all have a smaller proportion of adults who have attained at least a high school degree compared to Whites and Blacks. Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette highlight a similarly large amount of variation with the Hispanic population. For instance, median household incomes range from a low of about US$34,000 among Dominicans to over US$60,000 among Bolivians and Chileans. Their examination of socioeconomic attainment among African immigrants is also noteworthy, as they show that African immigrants have much higher levels of education than the overall population of African Americans. This heterogeneity in the socioeconomic attainment of immigrant adults has important consequences for the education of their children.
Chapter 5 examines the educational achievements of children of immigrants. Although Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette do not pay as much attention to ethnic group heterogeneity as they do in Chapters 4 and 6, it is still the most interesting chapter of their book. The authors not only provide a detailed description of education outcomes, such as test scores, grades, aspirations, and attainment, but they also provide a thoughtful examination of prevalent explanations of racial/ethnic differences in achievement. This chapter addresses common stereotypes of racial/ethnic minority groups, and, coupled with the previous chapters about the influence of immigration policies on the selectivity of immigrant adults in the United States, it effectively challenges cultural deficit models of educational disparities. For instance, as the authors discuss, explanations for the success of Asian groups often emphasize valuing education and hard work. However, preferences for high-skilled workers led to many post-1965 Asian immigrants migrating with high amounts of human and financial capital. These high-skilled migrants could then provide their children with resources that benefitted them educationally. Another strength of this chapter is the authors’ attention to African immigrants. As they state, research on the Black–White achievement gap predominantly focuses on US-born African Americans; we have less knowledge of the educational outcomes and experiences of African immigrants. Highlighting the ways in which their educational experiences and outcomes are similar to and different from US-born African Americans underscores the consequences of race for education.
Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette demonstrate that racial/ethnic differences in education cannot be fully explained by family socioeconomic status, and that remaining differences are not a result of cultural values regarding education. Instead, groups have access to different resources that can aid in the educational achievement and attainment processes. One such resource is language, which is the focus of Chapter 6 of the book. The authors provide a thorough review of research on the rates of English language proficiency and bilingualism among children of immigrants and how they are related to educational achievement and attainment. Again, the authors demonstrate wide variation in these rates by ethnic group. For instance among Asians, Japanese have the lowest rates of speaking a language other than English at home (46%), whereas over 90 percent of Hmong and Bangladeshis speak another language at home. Among Hispanics, only 33 percent of Spaniards speak another language at home, but over 90 percent of Dominicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Ecuadoreans speak another language at home. These latter groups are also those that have among the highest proportions of individuals who speak English less than ‘very well.’ The authors show how English proficiency is a very strong predictor of educational achievement, aspirations, and attainment. However, these findings do not provide a justification for English-only policies in education. The authors highlight benefits to being proficient in a language other than English by showing that bilingualism (speaking both English and another language fluently) can provide even greater advantages for education.
In the conclusion, Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette return to the central debate of assimilation and what research on the educational outcomes of immigrant youth can contribute to our understanding of immigrant assimilation. The racial/ethnic differences they review in the previous chapters underscore the importance of race in the process of incorporation into the United States. In fact, because of its importance, readers would have benefitted from a more thorough discussion of racial formation and racialization in the United States. The section in chapter 5 on racial formation is informative; however, readers are still left with the question of how and why race influences immigration legislation, socioeconomic mobility, and educational attainment. This is beyond the scope of the book’s aims, but researchers studying the immigrant population should pay critical attention to how race shapes institutions such as the law, the labor market, and education, and vice versa.
Overall, Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette provide an excellent review of research on educational aspirations, achievement, and attainment among children of immigrants, as well as a thorough discussion of the various perspectives that have been used to explain these educational outcomes. This book is a very valuable and easily accessible resource to anyone who is interested in studying race, immigration, and/or education.