Rethinking the Hispanic Paradox: The Mortality Experience of Mexican Immigrants in Traditional Gateways and New Destinations

Previous research suggests that favorable health outcomes among Mexican immigrants reflect high levels of social support in enclave communities with high co‐ethnic density. This study examines the mortality outcomes of Mexican immigrants in the United States in traditional gateways versus new and minor destinations. Mexican immigrants in new and minor destinations have a significant survival advantage over those in traditional gateways, reflecting less established communities in new destinations. This finding casts doubt on the protective effects of enclaves, since non‐traditional destinations have less established immigrant communities. Future research should reevaluate the relationship between community ethnic composition, social support, and immigrant health.     

In and Out of the Ethnic Economy: A Longitudinal Analysis of Ethnic Networks and Pathways to Economic Success across Immigrant Categories1

The economic benefits to immigrants of taking jobs in ethnic workplaces, relative to the open economy, are heavily debated. We examine longitudinally differences across immigrant categories in how the choice of ethnic or non‐ethnic workplace influences the ethnic composition of social networks and how these factors impact immigrants’ economic success. Using the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, with data 6 months, 2 years, and 4 years after arrival, we find support for both sides of the ethnic economy debate when it is qualified by immigrant category. While economic immigrants benefit from non‐ethnic workplaces, family immigrants face economic penalties in the open economy and do better in ethnic workplaces. We argue that policies sorting immigrants into visa categories do much of the work of leading them into segmented paths of incorporation.     

The Effect of Immigrant Communities on Foreign‐Born Student Achievement1

This paper explores the effect of the human capital characteristics of co‐ethnic immigrant communities on foreign‐born students’ math achievement. We use data on New York City public school foreign‐born students from 39 countries merged with census data on the characteristics of the immigrant household heads in the city from each nation of origin and estimate regressions of student achievement on co‐ethnic immigrant community characteristics, controlling for student and school attributes. We find that the income and size of the co‐ethnic immigrant community has no effect on immigrant student achievement, while the percent of college graduates may have a small positive effect. In addition, children in highly English proficient immigrant communities test slightly lower than children from less proficient communities. The results suggest that there may be some protective factors associated with immigrant community members’ education levels and use of native languages.     

From Caregivers to Caretakers: The Impact of Family Roles on Ethnicity Among Children of Korean and Chinese Immigrant Families

Scholars have long examined the effects of family and community on ethnicity, but they have less to say on why some children may be more receptive to the positive influences of ethnic communities than siblings within the same family. As more immigrants struggle to adapt to the needs and demands of the new global economy, many families are turning to alternative caregiving arrangements that significantly impact the long-term ethnic identities of the second generation. The article considers how adult-age children of immigrants negotiate the emotional disconnects created by these varying contexts of care depending on their individual role within the family and how it shapes their views on ethnicity and culture in their own adult lives. The study focuses in-depth on fourteen semi-structured, in-person interviews with adult-age children of Asian immigrant families in the NY-NJ metropolitan area. Depending on their social status, children of immigrants are integrated into their families: as cultural brokers expected to mediate and care for their family members, as familial dependents who rely on their parents for traditional caregiving functions, or as autonomous caretakers who grow up detached from their parents. I argue that because of their intense engagement with family, cultural brokers describe their ethnic-centered experiences as evoking feelings of reciprocated empathy, whereas on the other end, autonomous caretakers associate their parents’ ancestral culture with ethnocentric exclusion. Depending on how they are able to negotiate the cultural divide, familial dependents generally view their parents’ culture and immigrant experiences through the hierarchical lens of emulation.     

Social Capital Investment and Immigrant Economic Trajectories: A Case Study of Punjabi American Taxi Drivers in New York City

Although the scholarship on social capital and immigrant economic incorporation has sufficiently documented how immigrants mobilize social capital in their search for employment which often leads to the formation of immigrant niches, how social capital is processed after immigrants acquire employment and its significance for the preservation of immigrant employment niches is less well explored. This paper addresses this gap in the literature with a case study of immigrant Punjabi taxi drivers in the New York metropolitan area. In particular, this study shows how a group of immigrant Punjabi taxi drivers mobilized social capital via embeddedness in co‐ethnic social networks and improved their working conditions – a process that must be considered in explanations of the Punjabi niche in the taxi industry for more than two decades. The study has implications for the relationship between social capital and the structure of the workplace or industry where immigrants are incorporated and its subsequent impact on immigrant economic trajectories. Further, this study contributes to the debate on the usefulness of ethnic communities for the adaptation of immigrant groups. Additionally, this research is relevant to the scholarship on the economic adaptation of South Asian (a subset of Asian Americans) immigrants, an understudied immigrant group in the United States.     

Digital Ethnic Enclaves: Mate Preferences and Platform Choices Among Chinese Immigrant Online Daters in Vancouver

In light of the growing racialized immigrant population in Canada and advances in dating technologies, this study examines Chinese immigrants’ partner preferences and mate selection processes through the lens of online dating. We draw on in-depth interviews with 31 Chinese immigrants who have used online dating services in Metro Vancouver to search for different-sex partners. Chinese immigrant online daters show strong preferences for dating Chinese. They emphasize permanent residency status and similarity in age at arrival when evaluating potential partners. Given their preferences, Chinese immigrants strategically choose the dating platforms they primarily use. Men exhibit higher selectivity in their preferences and choices of platforms. Notably, platforms catering to Chinese users create “digital ethnic enclaves” where Chinese immigrant daters congregate. The findings illuminate the intersection of race, gender, immigrant status, and age at arrival in shaping divergent experiences of mate selection and immigrant assimilation in the digital era.     

Changes in the Initial Destinations and Redistribution of Canada's Major Immigrant Groups: Reexamining the Role of Group Affinity1

This study examines to what extent Canada's recent immigrants have altered their geographic concentration over time, with a view of determining the role of preexisting immigrant communities in immigrants’ locational choices, looking specifically at community size. The results show a large increase in concentration levels at the initial destination among major immigrant groups throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and a much smaller increase in the following decade. However, redistribution after immigration was generally small‐scale and had inconsistent effects on changing concentration at initial destinations among immigrant groups and across arrival cohorts within an immigrant group. Finally, this study finds that the size of the preexisting immigrant community is not a significant factor in immigrant locational choice when location fixed effects are accounted for.     

From Multiracial Subjects to Multicultural Citizens: Social Stratification and Ethnic and Racial Classification among Children of Immigrants in the United Kingdom

This study examines how immigrant parents’ geographic origins correspond to their adult children's ethnic and racial self‐classification; whether discrepancies are associated with socioeconomic status; and the implications of these patterns for assessing socioeconomic inequality. Using linked British census data, we identify immigrants’ children in 1971 and examine how they ethnically/racially self‐classify in 2001. We find that fluidity in classification varies across groups, but higher educational attainment is consistently associated with less white British classification. Therefore, grouping immigrants’ children by ethnic/racial self‐classification underestimates socioeconomic disadvantage for these groups. However, grouping by parental birthplace overlooks variation in racialization and disadvantage among children of immigrants from the same country of origin.     

From Filial Piety to Religious Piety: Evangelical Christianity Reconstructing Taiwanese Immigrant Families in the United States1

While current scholarship suggests that immigrant religion reproduces ethnic traditions, this article suggests that religion can also challenge and transform ethnic traditions. Like other immigrants from Confucian cultures, Taiwanese immigrants find that their Confucian family traditions are difficult to maintain in the United States. The immigrant church is an important community institution that offers new models of parenting and family life. This article discusses how through the influence of evangelical Christianity, the immigrant church reconstructs Taiwanese immigrant families by (i) shifting the moral vocabulary of the family from one of filial duty to religious discipleship; (ii) democratizing relationships between parents and children; and (iii) consecrating the individuality and autonomy of children. These new models of family life both reproduce and alter Taiwanese traditions in the United States. Religion mediates and shapes immigrant cultural assimilation to the United States.     

Immigrant Retail Entrepreneurship and Urban Black Population Size in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

Building on the idea that immigrant merchants often operate in black consumer markets, this study tests the hypothesis that late nineteenth-century European immigrants’ highest odds of retail enterprise in the United States were in cities with the largest black populations. Regression analyses of census data show that the positive association between the odds of retail enterprise and percent black was strongest for men from European immigrant groups and especially strong for men of Polish and Russian ancestry, many of whom were Jewish immigrants. The analyses reveal that the association between the odds of retail enterprise and percent black was not significant for native white or black men. The findings accord with the proposition, derived from theories of middleman minorities and ethnic queuing, that immigrant retail entrepreneurship is most strongly associated with black population size for recently arrived immigrant groups that are often socially or spatially close to urban black communities.     

Israeli immigrants in the United States: The question of community

Despite their possession of many social advantages such as high levels of education, familiarity with Western, urban culture, Caucasian appearance, relative economic security and ties to an established, co-ethnic community, much literature on Israeli immigrants in the U.S. depicts them as plagued by social and psychological alienation to the extent that they are incapable of creating viable ethnic communities. This paper uses field work and photography collected within the Israeli immigrant population of Los Angeles to critically examine the assertion that Israeli immigrants in the U.S. are much less organized than would be predicted by recent theories on immigrant adaptation and community formation. Based on this research, we argue that while Israelis are ambivalent about their presence in the U.S., they have created a variety of communal activities involving entrepreneurship, religion, culture, politics and leisure.     

The Role of Religion in the Origins and Adaptation of Immigrant Groups in the United States1

The classical model of the role of religion in the lives of immigrants to the United States, formulated in the writings of Will Herberg and Oscar Handlin, emphasized cultural continuity and the psychological benefits of religious faith following the trauma of immigration. Although this perspective captures an important reason for the centrality of religion in most immigrant communities (but not for all immigrants), the classical model does not address the equally important socioeconomic role of churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques in American society. The creation of an immigrant church or temple often provided ethnic communities with refuge from the hostility and discrimination from the broader society as well as opportunities for economic mobility and social recognition. In turn, the successive waves of immigrants have probably shaped the character as well as the content of American religious institutions.     

The Role of Premigration Status in the Acculturation of Chinese–Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans

Drawing from fifty in‐depth interviews, this research examines the role of existing parental language knowledge on the ethnic identity negotiation of two ethnically distinct children of immigrant groups—Vietnamese and Chinese–Vietnamese—whose families have emigrated from Vietnam to the Southern California region of the United States. While previous research focused primarily on the influence of premigration status on first‐generation immigrants, this article considers how a central aspect of premigration status (intranational ethnicity) applies specifically to the children of first generation immigrants. By taking the premigration approach of comparing the experiences of different ancestral‐origin groups from a single nation (the intranational ethnicity perspective), this analysis suggests that a family's premigration ethnic status shapes the 1.5 and second‐generation's ethnic self‐identification choices through the mediation of parental language knowledge. Specifically, for the children of immigrants with twice‐minority status (Chinese–Vietnamese Americans), parental language knowledge serves as an easy ethnic identity default during these children's early self‐identification process.     

ONE UNDER GOD? RELIGIOUS ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND PIONEER LATINO IMMIGRANTS IN SOUTHERN LOUISIANA

Studies of immigrants and religion tend to focus on established communities, organized as de facto congregations. In the early days of the development of an ethnic community, however, the provision of religious needs is more likely to come from existing local congregations. Using the model of religious economies, I analyze the case of a Baptist mission ministering to Latino immigrants in a rural southern Louisiana town. The pioneer immigrants constitute a change in religious demand, an area not considered by the economic model. They constitute a market niche for local religious entrepreneurs. Given the characteristics of this new community, however, a modified version of the de facto congregation will emerge, where professional clergy is not involved. Relying on participant observation and interviews with the parties involved, I describe the challenges that pioneer immigrant present for a religious entrepreneur.     

Immigrant socioeconomic mobility in the United States: Mechanisms of inequality and the role of ethnic capital

We review recent social science research on the socioeconomic mobility of immigrants to the United States by focusing on the educational, occupational, and income attainments among immigrant adults, the first‐generation, and the educational attainment of their children, the New Second‐Generation. Existing research has identified significant inequalities in educational attainment between second‐generation Asian and Latinx immigrant groups. Researchers have also highlighted the importance of ethnic capital for mobility, but we find that they have largely proceeded with the assumption that co‐ethnic ties are easily available as a benefit for immigrants upon resettlement. We propose that future research on immigrant socioeconomic mobility should incorporate conceptual insights from economic and cultural sociology as well as use comparative ethnographic research designs to directly observe how ethnic capital operates to challenge or reinforce patterns of socioeconomic inequality.     

Intersections on the road to skills’ transferability: The role of international training,gender, and visible minority status in shaping immigrant engineers’ career attainment in Canada

This paper focuses on the engineering profession in Canada, a regulated field with a large proportion of internationally trained professionals. Using Canadian census data, this study addresses two main questions. First, I ask whether immigrant engineers who were trained abroad are at increased disadvantage in gaining access (1) to employment in general, (2) to the engineering field, and (3) to professional and managerial employment within the field. Second, I ask how immigration status and the origin of training intersect with gender and visible minority status to shape immigrant engineers’ occupational outcomes. The results reveal that immigrant engineers who were trained abroad are at increased risk of occupational mismatch and this risk is two-fold and intersectional. First, they are at a disadvantage to enter the engineering field. Second, those employed in the engineering field are more likely to occupy technical positions. These forms of disadvantage intensify and diversify for women and racial/ethnic minority immigrants. The paper concludes with a discussion of immigrants’ skills transferability in regulated fields from an intersectional perspective.     

Immigrants working with co‐ethnics: Who are they and how do they fare?

Participation in ethnic economies has been regarded as an alternative avenue of economic adaptation for immigrants and minorities in major immigrant‐receiving countries. This study examines one important dimension of ethnic economies: co‐ethnic concentration at the workplace. Using a large national representative sample from Statistics Canada’s 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey, this study addresses four questions: (1) what is the level of co‐ethnic concentration at the workplace for Canada’s minority groups? (2) How do workers who share the same ethnicity with most of their co‐workers differ from other workers in socio‐demographic characteristics? (3) Is higher level of co‐ethnic concentration at the workplace associated with lower earnings? (4) Is higher level of co‐ethnic concentration at the workplace associated with higher levels of life satisfaction? The results show that only a small proportion of immigrants and the Canadian‐born work in ethnically homogeneous settings. In Canada’s eight largest metropolitan areas about 10 per cent of non‐British/French immigrants share a same ethnic origin with the majority of their co‐workers. The level is as high as 20 per cent among Chinese immigrants and 18 per cent among Portuguese immigrants. Among Canadian‐born minority groups, the level of co‐ethnic workplace concentration is about half the level for immigrants. Immigrant workers in ethnically concentrated settings have much lower educational levels and proficiency in English/French. Immigrant men who work mostly with co‐ethnics on average earn about 33 per cent less than workers with few or none co‐ethnic coworkers. About two thirds of this gap is attributable to differences in demographic and job characteristics. Meanwhile, immigrant workers in ethnically homogenous settings are less likely to report low levels of life satisfaction than other immigrant workers. Among the Canadian‐born, co‐ethnic concentration is not consistently associated with earnings and life satisfaction.     

Ethnic Institutions Reconsidered: The Case of Flemish Workers in 19th Century France1

Abstract Traditional perspectives on ethnic institutions tend to consider mainly their role in the preservation of the cultural and social fabric of ethnic communities. Increasing evidence indicates that ethno‐institutional effects are often more varied and complex. France's first industrial‐era immigrants, massively crossing the border from Belgian Flanders during the second half of the 19^th century, are a case in point. Immigrant Flemish workers introduced a new type of institution to the French working class: socialist cooperatives. These would have a long‐term impact not only on the immigrant Flemish community itself, but also on the larger labour movement, on the region, and on the country as a whole. Three elements were important in this process of institutional cross‐fertilization: Belgian workers’ rich institutional repertoire; the coincidence of their settlement with the rise of the French labour movement; and the fact that their institutional innovation was easily transferable.     

Race/Ethnicity and Stop‐and‐Frisk: Past,Present, Future

Scholarly debates surrounding stop‐and‐frisk typically assess the effectiveness and lawfulness of stop‐and‐frisk. Notwithstanding these efforts, recent reviews have excluded some recent research that addresses its impact on racial and ethnic immigrants. Understanding how the practice of stop‐and‐frisk affects racial and ethnic immigrants is worth including in reviews of these policies, considering the recent growth of research involving crime and immigrants that largely finds that immigration does not result in higher levels of crime. This review includes recent work showing that overall enforcement – stops and arrests – is higher in immigrant communities despite their lower levels of criminal involvement and recent work exploring differences among first‐generation and second‐generation immigrants in perceptions of police stops. Finally, some suggestions for the future of stop‐and‐frisk research are considered.