The Complexity of Immigrant Generations

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent research points to the complexity of immigrant generations. Immigrants arriving as children rather than as adults, interethnic marriage, and marriage between co-ethnics of different generations create a wide variety of marital unions, and the particular configuration can have important impacts on the ethnic attachments and socioeconomic outcomes of the children produced by these marriages. Another strand of research highlights how selective ethnic attrition can generate potentially serious problems for tracking the socioeconomic progress of the later-generation descendants of U.S. immigrant groups. This application proposes to synthesize these research strands to better understand the integration and attainment of the descendants of immigrants to the United States from key Hispanic and Asian countries. Using microdata from recent years of the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey (ACS), and the Current Population Survey (CPS), the proposed research will explore the links between generational complexity and ethnic identification for a number of important immigrant groups from Hispanic (Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic) and Asian (China, India, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines) source countries. The research will also evaluate the extent and selectivity of ethnic attrition among second- and third-generation members of each of these immigrant groups, and it will assess the implied biases in standard measures of attainment that almost always rely on ethnic self-identification for immigrant descendants in the third generation and beyond. Specifically, this project will: 1. Exploit information in the CPS on parents' countries of birth in order to conduct a comprehensive examination of generational complexity and how it relates to ethnic attrition among second-generation adults (ages 25-59) and among third-generation children (ages 17 and below who live with their parents). 2. Employ the larger samples and more detailed information on ethnic identification available in recent Census and ACS data to analyze the extent and selectivity of interethnic marriage and how this influences the ethnic identification and socioeconomic background of the children produced by these marriages. 3. Compare patterns across the various Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups and evaluate the usefulness of theoretical models of marriage markets and marital patterns for interpreting these patterns. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: For public health purposes, it is important to understand how health outcomes and behaviors and socioeconomic characteristics vary across segments of the population defined by race, ethnicity, Hispanic origin, nativity, and immigrant generation. Most research relies on self-reported measures of race, ethnicity and Hispanic origin, and the proposed project will assess the extent to which such self-reported measures can systematically bias estimates for particular racial/ethnic groups or immigrant generations. The project will also evaluate the scientific payoff from adopting a more nuanced conception of immigrant generations.