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Abstract
Scott De Burgomaster
Despite considerable evidence that prior waves of immigrants have largely been absorbed into the main institutions of American society, concern over the eventual fate of newly arriving immigrants from Latin America and Asia persist. Much of the debate focuses on the pattern of their adaptation and the factors that explain different paths to incorporation. Immigration scholars, however, frequently treat theories of adaptation as antithetical; pitting one against another from which one emerges as the superior account of the immigrant experience. To complicate matters, firm conclusions regarding the trajectory of adaptation are difficult to draw given the recent arrival of late-twentieth-century immigrants where the majority of the second-generation are still children or adolescents and most attend primary and secondary school. Only recently have second generation immigrants begun to enter postsecondary institutions in large numbers and evidence of their future socioeconomic prospects more apparent. In order to close these gaps in the extant literature and develop a greater understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the assimilation process, I revisit a fundamental question to the study of immigration: How are immigrants assimilating into the American mainstream and what factors account for their pattern of incorporation? Specifically, the purpose of this study is to both describe and explain the postsecondary educational career paths of contemporary immigrant and native youth in the United States, through the lens of several theoretical perspectives of immigrant incorporation. The goal is not to identify a single best theory, but to evaluate how the key relationships that underscore each perspective work together to explain distinctiveness in the immigrant experience. With this aim in mind, I seek to answer four related questions. First, how does the educational career path among immigrant and native youth change over time and across generations? Second, how do educational trajectories reflect patterns predicted by popular theories of immigrant assimilation? Third, what factors account for generational differences in educational attainment? And finally, to what extent, and in what ways, does the importance of these factors vary for immigrants of different ethnic descent? |
