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.     

Being Well vs. Doing Well: Self‐Esteem and School Performance among Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Racial and Ethnic Groups

It has frequently been suggested that the academic achievement of minority students may be hindered by low self‐esteem in a white‐dominated society. Some researchers and theorists, however, have questioned such assumptions. The self‐esteem‐academic achievement issue is further complicated by the relatively strong performance of children of immigrants in general, and of children of Asian immigrants in particular. A substantial literature suggests that these children face insecurities and difficulties that are inconsistent with high self‐esteem. In examining data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that Asians do show the lowest levels of reported self‐esteem of the major racial/ethnic groups, but also the highest grade‐point averages. Black adolescents, on the other hand, show the highest levels of reported self‐esteem, but show relatively low grade‐point averages. In further examination, we demonstrate that despite this apparent inconsistency between school performance and reported self‐esteem, the two do have a positive relationship. Immigrant parental status, we suggest, has a complex relationship to school performance and psychological well‐being that can help to explain the apparent paradox.     

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.     

Immigrant Generation,School Procedural Justice,and Educational Attainment

There is much educational concern about the disproportionate punishment of racial/ethnic minority students within U.S. public schools. Research evidence indicates that school punishment exacerbates the already-known racial/ethnic inequalities within the educational system. What remains uncertain is if and how school punishment, justice, and fairness are moderating educational attainment for the children of immigrants. This study utilizes data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 and incorporates multilevel analysis to examine how school punishment, justice, and fairness influence the educational attainment of children of immigrants. The study draws on straight-line and segmented assimilation frameworks to evaluate variation in these effects by immigrant generation. Findings do suggest that improved school procedural justice and fairness could enhance educational attainment as well as ameliorate the detrimental impact of school punishment; however, these patterns are segmented by immigrant generation and race/ethnicity.     

Racial/Ethnic Composition and Violence: Size‐of‐Place Variations in Percent Black and Percent Latino Effects on Violence Rates

According to racial invariance positions and mainstream sociological perspectives on race and crime, race differences in structural conditions should account for most if not all of the racial composition (or percent black) effect on aggregate‐level violence rates. However, prior research (mostly conducted prior to 1990) generally provides mixed or contrary evidence for this position, showing instead that greater concentrations of blacks are linked to increased violence even after accounting for racial differences in socioeconomic conditions. The current study uses recent data and a novel unit of analysis to go beyond extant research in two ways. First, we include percent Latino in our examination of the extent to which both racial and ethnic composition effects on violent crime rates are mediated by racial/ethnic disparities in socioeconomic disadvantage. Second, we test whether racial/ethnic composition effects are conditioned by size of place, through the use of census places as a uniquely varying unit of analysis. We find that both black and Latino composition effects are partly explained by controlling for structural conditions (especially structural disadvantage), but this characterizes smaller places much more than the largest, most urbanized places.     

The Interaction between Race and Nativity on the Housing Market: Homeownership and House Value of Black Immigrants in the United States

There is extensive research investigating race and nativity disparities in the US housing market, but little focuses on the group representing the intersection of the two literatures. This study investigates whether black immigrants are disadvantaged due to racial stratification or are able to leverage human or ethnic capital into positive housing market outcomes compared to US‐born blacks. I find that racial stratification affects the housing market outcomes of black immigrants. However, high homeownership and house value relative to US‐born blacks suggest that immigrants are able to use ethnic community capital to avoid some of the disadvantage experienced by native‐born blacks.     

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.     

Race and the Religious Contexts of Violence: Linking Religion and White,Black, and Latino Violent Crime

Research has demonstrated that concentrated disadvantage and other measures are strongly associated with aggregate‐level rates of violence, including across racial and ethnic groups. Less studied is the impact of cultural factors, including religious contextual measures. The current study addresses several key gaps in prior literature by utilizing race/ethnic‐specific arrest data from California, New York, and Texas paired with religious contextual data from the Religious Congregations and Memberships Survey. Results suggest that, net of important controls, (1) religious contextual measures have significant crime‐reducing associations with violence; (2) these associations are race/ethnic specific; and (3) religious contextual measures moderate the criminogenic association between disadvantage and violence for blacks. Implications for future research are discussed.     

After ‘ethnicity’: Migration,identity and political economy

In an earlier article¹ I have argued that British ‘African Asians’ can not legitimately be described as an ‘ethnic’ community. This argument was made by means of a critique of sections from the 4th PSI Survey. I show that the attitudinal responses of British ‘African Asians’, as evidenced in the Survey, do not reveal any special emphasis upon the components of ethnicity (religion, skin colour, ‘extra‐British’ origins, ‘racial’ grouping) specified by the Survey's authors and that parental roles in marital decision‐making, thought by the Survey's authors to be important in maintaining ‘ethnic’ boundaries, and their attitudes towards ‘mixed marriages’, are now little different from the majority of Britishers. My chief objection to the ‘ethnicity’ paradigm, incorporating the notion of ‘ethnic identities’, is that, as with all analytical concepts, it inhibits those whom it embraces from inclusion within alternative conceptions: marking individuals and communities as ‘ethnically’ special robs them of parity with their ‘non‐ethnic’ neighbours.

In this article, in opposition to the current vogue for ‘ethnic’ labelling and in sympathy with Robert Miles's well‐known position, I contend that British Gujarati Hindus (who form a majority of British ‘African Asians') should be considered in the same analytical light as any other group of British citizens. The focus of the article is on those members of the Gujarati Hindu Patidar caste (commonly having the surname Patel), who settled first in East Africa and then, often not through their own choice, in Britain. I argue that their caste identity, the dynamics of their migrations and changes to their socioreligious culture are all fully explicable by non‐'ethnic’ political sociology.     

Economic Benefits of Self‐Employment for Canadian Immigrants

This paper evaluates the economic benefits of self‐employment in Canada for 12 groups of ethno‐racial immigrants. It tests whether or not their self‐employment earnings are higher or lower than similar groups in wage and salary employment, whether ethnic minorities earn more or less from self‐employment compared to White immigrants, and whether self‐employment earnings of immigrant groups vary by their industrial sectors of employment. Using the Canadian Census 2006, I show that self‐employed ethno‐racial immigrants earn less than White immigrants. I also show that the economic benefits of self‐employment depend on the ethno‐racial groups and the industrial mix of their self‐employment. Cet article évalue les avantages économiques du travail indépendant au Canada pour 12 groupes d'immigrés ethnoraciaux. Il teste si les revenus du travail indépendant sont supérieurs ou inférieurs aux groupes similaires au sujet de salaire et de travail avec le salaire annuel, si les minorités ethniques gagnent plus ou moins de travail indépendant par rapport aux immigrés blancs, et si les revenus du travail indépendant des groupes immigrés varient par leurs secteurs industriels de travail. En utilisant le Recensement du Canada de 2006, je montre que les immigrés ethnoraciaux qui sont indépendants gagnent moins que les immigrés blancs. Je montre aussi que les avantages économiques dépendent des groupes ethnoraciaux et du mélange industriel de leur travail indépendant.     

Recent developments in school social control

In the U.S., decisions regarding social control are increasingly modeled on two dominant institutions: the criminal justice and medical/healthcare systems. Sociologists and other scholars refer to this adoption of legal and/or medical terminology and technologies as criminalization and medicalization. These models of social control are particular evident in how America defines and manages child behavior. Public schools borrow from both the criminal justice and medical systems as part of the routine educational setting. In this article, I provide the first synthesis and review of the school criminalization and medicalization literatures. In doing so, I argue that criminalized school social controls provide harsh, repressive responses to student misbehavior, while medicalized school social controls provide rehabilitative and restitutive responses. Given these fundamentally different approaches to student behavior, I argue that the disproportionate use of criminalized and medicalized social control across racial/ethnic groups and children from different socioeconomic backgrounds entrenches inequalities and functions to channel racial/ethnic minorities and poor children into the school‐to‐prison pipeline while keeping socially advantaged children in school and away from the problems associated with criminalized social control.     

Immigration,trade and ‘ethnic surplus value’: a critique of Indo–Canadian transnational networks

It is often argued that countries hosting large populations of skilled immigrants might benefit from their cultural and economic competencies in the development of international trade networks. Yet, in so doing, the state can be criticized for fetishizing the ethnic immigrant in market terms in order to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. In this article, I examine these debates empirically in the case of India–Canada immigration and trade using interviews with traders, officials and immigrant entrepreneurs in British Columbia, Canada. Findings suggest that the supposedly positive relationship between trade and immigration is not obvious in the India–Canada case and there is no convincing evidence of the state managing successfully to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. Rather, what appears most compelling is evidence of what can be termed a discourse of regional disadvantage circulated by immigrant and non‐immigrant business actors alike regarding the nature of India–Canada relations. Interview respondents link this discourse of disadvantage to the regional history of Indian immigration to Canada, which has traditionally comprised Sikhs from rural Punjab, and it functions to essentialize Indian immigrant ethnicity spatially within both the Indian and Canadian contexts. I focus on the theme of the extraction of ‘ethnic surplus value’ and regional disadvantage to reveal the limitations of both arguments about the economic nature of immigrant‐led network development. In both cases, I challenge these ideas with a critical emphasis on the role of immigrant agency and offer a more nuanced and complicated reading of the role of the state. As a result, I offer a detailed reading of how socio‐spatial immigrant networks are formed and operate at the regional scale, and how this complicates more abstract theoretical formulations regarding the trade and immigration nexus.     

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.     

Ethnic Enclaves,Networks and Self‐Employment among Middle Eastern Immigrants in Sweden

The proportion of immigrants from countries in the Middle East living in Sweden has increased since the 1970s, and it is a well‐known fact that immigrants from the Middle East suffer from low earnings and high rates of unemployment on the Swedish labour market. There are often great hopes that self‐employment will enable immigrants to improve their labour market situation. Further, in Sweden as in many other countries, the question of whether the existence of ethnic enclaves are good or bad for immigrants’ earnings and employment opportunities has also been widely debated. This paper presents a study of the extent to which Middle Eastern ethnic enclaves and networks in Sweden enhance or hinder immigrants’ self‐employment. The results show that the presence of ethnic enclaves increases the propensity for self‐employment. Thus, immigrants in ethnic enclaves provide their co‐ethnics with goods and services that Swedish natives are not able to provide. The results also show that ethnic networks seem to be an obstacle to immigrant self‐employment. One explanation is that an increase in network size implies increased competition for customers among self‐employed immigrants. The question of whether ethnic enclaves are good or bad for the integration of immigrants into the labour market has been widely debated. The results of this paper provide us with information about the integration puzzle. Ethnic enclaves seem to enhance self‐employment propensities among Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden.     

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.     

Moving Up and Down the Ladder: Perceived Social Mobility and Emotional Dispositions Among South Florida's Immigrants

Migrating to a new country is often associated with difficulties such as social isolation, financial strain, language barriers, and cultural differences. Less is known about how social mobility brought about by migration may be related to the emotional dispositions of immigrants (also referred to as subjective well‐being). To examine this relationship, we utilize data from a representative sample of 1,268 first‐generation immigrants from 80 different countries living in South Florida. Changes in perceived social mobility between the homeland and the United States—moving up and down the socioeconomic ladder—are indeed associated with differences in immigrants' negative dispositions. We draw from literature on expectations, social comparisons, and subjective class status to explain these findings. We do not find a statistically significant association between changes in socioeconomic status and positive dispositions, which may suggest that losses outweigh migration‐related gains. Additionally, findings reveal that nondominant groups fare worse than Cubans (the dominant group in the region) with regard to dispositions. Social comparisons to the dominant ethnic group may explain this, as well as perceptions of relative deprivation experienced by groups not favored by immigration policies and underrepresented in social and economic institutions. We conclude by discussing implications on how negative emotional dispositions represent risk factors that could affect immigrants' mental health.     

A Preliminary Analysis of Associations Among Ethnic–Racial Socialization,Ethnic Discrimination,and Ethnic Identity Among Urban Sixth Graders

Drawing from cultural ecological models of adolescent development, the present research investigates how early adolescents received ethnic–racial socialization from parents as well as how experiences of ethnic and racial discrimination are associated with their ethnic identity (i.e., centrality, private regard, and public regard). Data for this study were drawn from a multimethod study of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse early adolescents in three mid‐ to high‐achieving schools in New York City. After accounting for the influences of race/ethnicity, social class, gender, immigrant status, and self‐esteem, parental ethnic–racial socialization was associated with higher levels of ethnic centrality (i.e., the extent to which youth identify themselves in terms of their group), more positive private regard (i.e., feelings about one's own ethnic group), and public regard (i.e., perceptions of other people's perceptions of their ethnic group). Ethnic discrimination from adults at school and from peers was associated with more negative perceptions of one's ethnic group (i.e., public regard). In addition, the association of ethnic–racial parent socialization and ethnic identity beliefs was stronger for those who reported higher levels of adult discrimination. Results highlight key ways in which ethnic identity may be shaped by the social ecologies in which adolescents are embedded.     

Racialized Labour Market Incorporation? African Immigrants and the Role of Education‐Occupation Mismatch in Earnings

U.S. immigration policy debates increasingly center on attracting highly‐skilled immigrants. African immigrants, in particular, exhibit high levels of over‐education. But questions remain about whether African immigrants’ skills are appropriately utilized in the U.S. labour market. This paper uses U.S. Census and American Community Survey data to determine whether Africans’ over‐education leads to a corresponding wage disadvantage. I also investigate whether search and match, imperfect transferability, or queuing theory describes African immigrants’ wage outcomes. I find that, while African and Asian immigrants have similarly high rates of college education and over‐education, Africans experience significantly larger wage disadvantages due to over‐education. African immigrants’ low wages are closer to that of U.S. and Caribbean‐born blacks indicating that queuing theory describes their wage disadvantage. These findings suggest the need for policy addressing racial disparities in the labour market rather than new immigration policy.     

Toward a Minority Culture of Mobility: Immigrant Integration into the African‐American Middle Class

Two important social transformations have occurred since the 1960s: the rise of the Black middle class and the influx of immigrants from Latin, America, Asia and Africa. The cultural and economic outcomes for first‐ and second‐generation Black immigrants are often linked to the Black poor/underclass. However, we understand little about the ways in which the Black middle class is a potential pathway of integration for immigrants. This paper reviews the sociological debates on the socioeconomic incorporation of immigrants and the racial and ethnic relations of new and old African‐Americans. It discusses the important contributions of minority culture of mobility hypothesis for class‐based theories of immigrant integration. We draw from the literature on social stratification, race relations and immigrant incorporation in order to chime in on the conversation about how becoming socially mobile in America may mean having similar social experience as the African‐American or minority middle class. The paper also suggests ways to better analyze the relationship between identity, integration, space and generation in minority incorporation.