Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration

  • C. Matthew Snipp
  • Tomas Jimenez
  • Linda Burton
  • Hazel Markus
  • Douglas Massey

Leaders: Linda Burton, Tomás Jiménez, Hazel Markus, Douglas Massey, C. Matthew Snipp

The CPI has an extensive research program on race, ethnicity, immigration, and poverty. The National Poverty Study, for example, is designed to rigorously compare differences across rural black, deindustrialized, reservation, and other “racialized” poverty forms. The CPI also runs a comprehensive program on Hispanic poverty that explores such topics as the “chilling effect” of anti-immigrant laws on program use, the reasons why, contrary to much speculation, the Hispanic poverty rate has not taken off, and the causes of the so-called Hispanic Health Paradox (see, for example, our Pathways Magazine special report on poverty, inequality, and mobility among Hispanics). And one of the CPI’s most distinguished affiliates, Jennifer Eberhardt (who is on the CPI directorate), is carrying out a groundbreaking big-data analysis of policing and race. We list below a sampling of other CPI projects on race, ethnicity, immigration, and poverty.

Poverty among refugees: The U.S. refugee population faces very high rates of poverty, yet we know very little about the effects of different resettlement programs and approaches. There are efforts afoot to exploit available administrative data and begin to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Arrests, race, and poverty: Why are some arrests resolved informally while others are converted into a criminal record that then has a life-long scarring effect? The process of converting an arrest into a criminal booking may play an important role in generating downstream racial disparities.

Reducing the race gap in test scores: The new Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) is a rich resource that is providing the most systematic evidence to date on the capacity of school-district policies to reduce the racial gap in test scores.

Poverty and schooling on reservations: Why are test scores and educational outcomes on Native reservations so low (relative to the national average)? In a new project by the noted ethnographer Martin Sánchez-Jankowski, we’ll be learning more about how traditional and formal education are viewed and the ways in which they might be better integrated. 

Race And Ethnicity - CPI Research

Title Author Media
The New Third Generation: Post-1965 Immigration and the Next Chapter in the Long Story of Assimilation Tomás R. Jiménez, Julie Park, Juan Pedroza

The New Third Generation: Post-1965 Immigration and the Next Chapter in the Long Story of Assimilation

Author: Tomás R. Jiménez, Julie Park, Juan Pedroza
Publisher: International Migration Review
Date: 12/2017

Now is the time for social scientists to focus an analytical lens on the new third generation to see what their experiences reveal about post-1965 assimilation. This paper is a first step. We compare the household characteristics of post-1965, second-generation Latino and Asian children in 1980 to a “new third generation” in 2010. Today's new third generation is growing up in households headed by parents who have higher socioeconomic attainment; that are more likely to be headed by intermarried parents; that are less likely to contain extended family; and that, when living with intermarried parents, are more likely to have children identified with a Hispanic or Asian label compared to second-generation children growing in 1980. We use these findings to inform a larger research agenda for studying the new third generation.

The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants Are Changing American Life Tomas Jimenez

The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants Are Changing American Life

Author: Tomas Jimenez
Publisher: University of California Press
Date: 07/2017

The immigration patterns of the last three decades have profoundly changed nearly every aspect of life in the United States. What do those changes mean for the most established Americans—those whose families have been in the country for multiple generations?
 
The Other Side of Assimilation shows that assimilation is not a one-way street. Jiménez explains how established Americans undergo their own assimilation in response to profound immigration-driven ethnic, racial, political, economic, and cultural shifts. Drawing on interviews with a race and class spectrum of established Americans in three different Silicon Valley cities, The Other Side of Assimilation illuminates how established Americans make sense of their experiences in immigrant-rich environments, in work, school, public interactions, romantic life, and leisure activities. With lucid prose, Jiménez reveals how immigration not only changes the American cityscape but also reshapes the United States by altering the outlooks and identities of its most established citizens. 

State of the Union 2017: Intergenerational Mobility Florencia Torche

State of the Union 2017: Intergenerational Mobility

Author: Florencia Torche
Publisher: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
Date: 06/2017

The persistence of affluence is stronger for whites, while the persistence of poverty is stronger for blacks. However, beginning with generations that came of age in the mid-1960s, the white-black gap in the chance of escaping poverty has closed significantly.

State of the Union 2017: Wealth Thomas Shapiro

State of the Union 2017: Wealth

Author: Thomas Shapiro
Publisher: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
Date: 06/2017

Why should we care about wealth? It serves an insurance function by protecting against economic shocks, health and personal crises, and mishaps. It brings access to quality health care, educational opportunities, better-resourced communities, and other services. It shapes family economic mobility. It provides retirement security and a springboard for future generations’ investments in human capital and resources. And finally, social and political influence, as well as personal identity, are attached to wealth. It thus matters whether opportunities to amass wealth are equally available. The simple result that will be discussed here: Access to building wealth is vastly unequal.

State of the Union 2017: Earnings Colin Peterson, C. Matthew Snipp, Sin Yi Cheung

State of the Union 2017: Earnings

Author: Colin Peterson, C. Matthew Snipp, Sin Yi Cheung
Publisher: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
Date: 06/2017

Between 1970 and 2010, the earnings gap between whites and other groups has narrowed, but most of that decline was secured in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. Except in the case of Asians, more recent trends are less favorable, with the post-1980 earnings gap either growing larger (e.g., Hispanics) or remaining roughly stable in size (e.g., black men).

race and ethnicity - CPI Affiliates

Aliya Saperstein's picture Aliya Saperstein Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University
Mary C. Waters's picture Mary C. Waters John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology
Harvard University
Michael Rosenfeld's picture Michael Rosenfeld Professor of Sociology
Stanford University
Patrick Sharkey's picture Patrick Sharkey Professor of Sociology; Chair of Sociology Department, NYU Wagner
New York University
Van C. Tran's picture Van C. Tran Assistant Professor of Sociology
Columbia University

Pages

Race And Ethnicity - Other Research

Title Author Media
Educational Variations in Cohort Trends in the Black-White Earnings Gap Among Men: Evidence From Administrative Earnings Data Siwei Cheng, Christopher R. Tamborini, ChangHwan Kim, Arthur Sakamoto

Educational Variations in Cohort Trends in the Black-White Earnings Gap Among Men: Evidence From Administrative Earnings Data

Author: Siwei Cheng, Christopher R. Tamborini, ChangHwan Kim, Arthur Sakamoto
Publisher: Demography
Date: 12/2019

Despite efforts to improve the labor market situation of African Americans, the racial earnings gap has endured in the United States. Most prior studies on racial inequality have considered its cross-sectional or period patterns. This study adopts a demographic perspective to examine the evolution of earnings trajectories among white and black men across cohorts in the United States. Using more than 40 years of longitudinal earnings records from the U.S. Social Security Administration matched to the Survey of Income and Program Participation, our analyses reveal that the cohort trends in the racial earnings gap follow quite different patterns by education. Race continues to be a salient dimension of economic inequality over the life course and across cohorts, particularly at the top and the bottom of the educational distribution. Although the narrowing of the racial gap among high school graduates is in itself a positive development, it unfortunately derives primarily from the deteriorating economic position for whites without a college degree rather than an improvement in economic standing of their black counterparts.

The Boss is Watching: How Monitoring Decisions Hurt Black Workers Costas Cavounidis, Kevin Lang, Russell Weinstein

The Boss is Watching: How Monitoring Decisions Hurt Black Workers

Author: Costas Cavounidis, Kevin Lang, Russell Weinstein
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Date: 09/2019

African Americans face shorter employment durations than apparently similar whites. We hypothesize that employers discriminate in either acquiring or acting on ability-relevant information. We construct a model in which firms may "monitor" workers. Monitoring black but not white workers is self-sustaining: new black hires are more likely to have been screened by a previous employer, causing firms to discriminate in monitoring. We confirm the model's prediction that the unemployment hazard is initially higher for blacks but converges to that for whites. Two additional predictions, lower lifetime incomes and longer unemployment durations for blacks, are known to be strongly empirically supported.

New Destinations and the Early Childhood Education of Mexican-Origin Children Elizabeth Ackert, Robert Crosnoe, Tama Leventhal

New Destinations and the Early Childhood Education of Mexican-Origin Children

Author: Elizabeth Ackert, Robert Crosnoe, Tama Leventhal
Publisher: Demography
Date: 09/2019

This study examined differences in exposure to early childhood education among Mexican-origin children across Latino/a destinations. Early childhood educational enrollment patterns, which are highly sensitive to community resources and foundational components of long-term educational inequalities, can offer a valuable window into how destinations may be shaping incorporation among Mexican-origin families. Integrating data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort with county-level data from the decennial census, multilevel logistic regression models revealed that Mexican-origin, black, and white children had lower odds of enrollment in early childhood education programs if they lived in new Latino/a destinations versus established destinations. The negative association between new destinations and early childhood education enrollment persisted despite controls for household selectivity, state and local early childhood education contexts, Latino/a educational attainment, Latino-white residential segregation, and immigration enforcement agreements. Within the Mexican-origin subgroup, the enrollment gap between new and established destinations was widest among the least-acculturated families, as measured by parental nativity, duration of residence, citizenship status, and English proficiency. These findings highlight how both place and acculturation stratify outcomes within the large and growing Mexican-origin subset of the Latino/a population.

A Relational Inequality Approach to First- and Second-Generation Immigrant Earnings in German Workplaces Silvia Maja Melzer, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Reinhard Schunck, Peter Jacobebbinghaus

A Relational Inequality Approach to First- and Second-Generation Immigrant Earnings in German Workplaces

Author: Silvia Maja Melzer, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Reinhard Schunck, Peter Jacobebbinghaus
Publisher: Social Forces
Date: 09/2018

We conceptualize immigrant incorporation as a categorically driven process and contrast the bright distinctions between first-generation immigrants and natives, with more blurry second-generation contrasts. We analyze linked employer-employee data of a sample of 5,097 employees in 97 large German organizations and focus on first- and second-generation immigrants. We explore how generational status in the labor market and workplace contexts expands and contracts native-immigrant wage inequalities. We find a substantial average first-generation immigrant-native wage gap, which is not explained by individual human capital differences or most aspects of organizational context. In contrast, there is, on average, no second-generation wage gap, but there are substantial variations across workplaces. A series of results confirm predictions from relational inequality theory. For both first- and second-generation immigrants, working in a high-inequality workplace is associated with larger wage gaps. Second-generation immigrants perform better in workplaces where they have intersectional advantages over natives, and for first-generation immigrants collective bargaining protection narrows wage gaps with natives. Consistent with ethnic competition theory, in workplaces with very high shares of immigrant workers, the first-generation–native wage gap is larger. In contrast, increased contact between native Germans and second-generation immigrant coworkers reduces earnings gaps, but only up to a tipping point, after which competition processes reappear and earning gaps widen.

New Evidence of Generational Progress for Mexican Americans Brian Duncan, Jeffrey Grogger, Ana Sofia Leon, Stephen J. Trejo

New Evidence of Generational Progress for Mexican Americans

Author: Brian Duncan, Jeffrey Grogger, Ana Sofia Leon, Stephen J. Trejo
Publisher: NBER
Date: 11/2017

U.S.-born Mexican Americans suffer a large schooling deficit relative to other Americans, and standard data sources suggest that this deficit does not shrink between the 2nd and later generations. Standard data sources lack information on grandparents’ countries of birth, however, which creates potentially serious issues for tracking the progress of later-generation Mexican Americans. Exploiting unique NLSY97 data that address these measurement issues, we find substantial educational progress between the 2nd and 3rd generations for a recent cohort of Mexican Americans. Such progress is obscured when we instead mimic the limitations inherent in standard data sources.