The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective

by Richard Alba

One fifth of the population of the United States belongs to the immigrant or second generations. While the US is generally thought of as the immigrant society par excellence, it now has a number of rivals in Europe. The Next Generation brings together studies from top immigration scholars to explore how the integration of immigrants affects the generations that come after. The original essays explore the early beginnings of the second generation in the United States and Western Europe, exploring the overall patterns of success of the second generation. While there are many striking similarities in the situations of the children of labor immigrants coming from outside the highly developed worlds of Europe and North America, wherever one looks, subtle features of national and local contexts interact with characteristics of the immigrant groups themselves to create variations in second-generation trajectories. The contributors show that these issues are of the utmost importance for the future, for they will determine the degree to which contemporary immigration will produce either durable ethno-racial cleavages or mainstream integration. Dalia Abdel-Hady, Frank D. Bean, Susan K. Brown, Maurice Crul, Nancy A. Denton, Rosita Fibbi, Nancy Foner, Anthony F. Heath, Donald J. Hernandez, Tariqul Islam, Frank Kalter, Philip Kasinitz, Mark A. Leach, Mathias Lerch, Suzanne E. Macartney, Karen G Marotz, Noriko Matsumoto, Tariq Modood, Joel Perlmann, Karen Phalet, Jeffrey G. Reitz, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Roxanne Silberman, Philippe Wanner, Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida, andYe Zhang.

369 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2011

About the author

Richard D. Alba was an American sociologist, and a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY and at the Sociology Department at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he founded the University at Albany's Center for Social and Demographic Analysis (CSDA). He was known for developing assimilation theory to fit the contemporary, multi-racial era of immigration, with studies in America, France and Germany. In 2020 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.