Divergent Destinies: Acculturation, Social Mobility, and Adult Transitions Among Latin American and Asian Immigrant Children

Rubén G. Rumbaut
University of California, Irvine

Abstract
What do we know about the trajectories of the rapidly growing population of children of immigrants in the United States (both those who immigrated as children and those born in the U.S. to immigrant parents) who are coming of age and making their transitions to adulthood—leaving the parental home, finishing their education, entering full-time work, forming families of their own? In today’s sharply politicized immigration debate, and in a context of widening inequality, central theoretical and policy questions concern the social mobility (both intra- and inter-generational) of the largest ethnic groups being formed as a result of mass immigration from Latin America and Asia. Findings will be presented from two research studies in Southern California, the region with the largest concentration of immigrants in the country. The focus is on the educational mobility of 1.5- and 2nd-generation young adults, and on factors which can seriously derail their mobility prospects, especially incarceration (among young men) and early child-bearing (among young women), compared to patterns observed for native-parentage white and black peers. The acculturation (especially linguistic) of these ethnic populations, and the paradoxical relationship of acculturation to mobility outcomes, will also be examined.

Biography
Rubén G. Rumbaut is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. A native of Havana, Cuba, he received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He is the Founding Chair of the Section on International Migration of the American Sociological Association, and a member of the Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences and of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. Dr. Rumbaut has directed (with Alejandro Portes) the landmark Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) since 1991. He also directs, in collaboration with a team of UC colleagues, a large-scale study of Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles; and is involved in comparative research on transitions to adulthood with multi-ethnic samples in San Diego and other field sites across the United States. He has published two companion books based on CILS (with Portes): Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America, and Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, which won the American Sociological Association’s best book award. Other books he has recently coauthored or coedited include Immigrant America: A Portrait (2006); Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies: Hispanics and the American Future (2006); and On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (2005).