A good deal of recent discussion among social scientists concerned with immigration is about the disadvantages faced by immigrants who enter the U. S. labor force with much-lower levels of skills than those possessed by the typical native white worker. Among contemporary immigrant groups, by far...

Contemporary ethnic and racial intermarriage are the subject of increasing discussion in connection with America's future population; with such concerns in mind, the paper suggests a reorientation of ethnic intermarriage studies and provides related data. Yet our long record of historical...

This paper serves as an opportunity to pull together some thoughts and questions about modes of incorporation as an explanation for ethnic differences in behavior. Specifically, I ask just what is the status of cultural explanations for ethnic behavior if ethnic behavior is approaches from a...

Past-present comparisons of second-generation progress are often plagued by vague references to the baseline, the past. This essay seeks to contribute some specificity to the understanding of second generations past for the sake of comparison and as a contribution to historical understanding in...

This paper presents a new approach to measuring the extent of intermarriage among Americans of different ethnic origins. Using U.S. Census microdata and CPS data, measurements of the rates of Italian- American intermarriages across four generations are made to demonstrate that these rates were...

The upward mobility of Jews who migrated to the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century has been explained as a function of premigrational cultural characteristics (such as a tradition of learning) or structural attributes (skills in certain industries and occupations that could be...

This paper stresses that the key to concerns about the progress of second-generation Americans is the fate of the Mexican second generation. It compares several indicators of the advances of second- generation Mexicans to those of non-Hispanic, native-born blacks and non-Hispanic, native-born...

This paper has a doubting, though friendly, look at the hypotheses of "second generation decline" and "segmented assimilation" that have framed the emerging research agenda on the new second generation. We begin with a review of the basic approach, outlining the logic of argument, and specifying...

In 1898 the U.S. Bureau of Immigration initiated a classification of immigrants into some 40 categories of "race or people;" nearly all the categories covered Europeans. In 1909 an effort was made to extend this system of classification to the U.S. Census, and the relevant measure passed in the...

One part of this paper is methodological, or bibliographical in nature; I argue that a body of evidence that scholars have dismissed for a century as useless may in fact be very valuable. The evidence to which I refer is data on Jewish literacy found in the 1897 Census of the Russian Empire. A...