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IPR Seminar, Dr. Frank Bean, UC Irvine

Frank Bean
November 8, 2016
12:30PM - 1:30PM
038 Townshend Hall

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Add to Calendar 2016-11-08 12:30:00 2016-11-08 13:30:00 IPR Seminar, Dr. Frank Bean, UC Irvine Mexican-American Integration:  The NRC Report and Beyond The recent NAS/NRC book, Immigrant Integration into American Society, recently argues that almost all major U.S. immigrant groups show substantial evidence of multiple kinds of cross-generational integration.  For Mexican Americans, however, national-level research is ambiguous in regard to key structural measures (e.g., education and income), primarily because of data limitations in the CPS.  My recent book (with Brown and Bachmeier), Parents Without Papers, both reviews previous conceptual/theoretical integration perspectives in general and introduces and specifies a new approach emphasizing membership-exclusion and working-class-delay structural dynamics for the Mexican American (and possibly other) cases.  Using data that avoid the limitations of CPS data, we assess which of these several perspectives best fit the Mexican American experience by presenting new cross-generational findings on socio-cultural, neighborhood and education/income levels through the third-only generation for males and females, devoting special attention to the role that immigrant unauthorized status (a key marker of membership exclusion) plays in affecting later-generational integration.  The results show that long-  but not short-term unauthorized status appreciably hampers later-generation integration, even among the U.S.-born children of such immigrants, and even to some extent among their grandchildren.  Also, little difference in schooling emerges for third-only generation compared to second-generation males, but this minimal schooling gain is accompanied by considerably higher income in the third generation.  We suggest overall that for Mexican Americans these results accord with socioculturally pluralistic and membership-exclusion combined with working-class-delay structural theoretical perspectives.  The findings dramatically underscore the importance for integration of policies that provide pathways to legalization (and citizenship) for migrants who increasingly constitute a large and essential component of the country's workforce. 038 Townshend Hall Institute for Population Research popcenter@osu.edu America/New_York public

Mexican-American Integration:  The NRC Report and Beyond 

The recent NAS/NRC book, Immigrant Integration into American Society, recently argues that almost all major U.S. immigrant groups show substantial evidence of multiple kinds of cross-generational integration.  For Mexican Americans, however, national-level research is ambiguous in regard to key structural measures (e.g., education and income), primarily because of data limitations in the CPS.  My recent book (with Brown and Bachmeier), Parents Without Papers, both reviews previous conceptual/theoretical integration perspectives in general and introduces and specifies a new approach emphasizing membership-exclusion and working-class-delay structural dynamics for the Mexican American (and possibly other) cases.  Using data that avoid the limitations of CPS data, we assess which of these several perspectives best fit the Mexican American experience by presenting new cross-generational findings on socio-cultural, neighborhood and education/income levels through the third-only generation for males and females, devoting special attention to the role that immigrant unauthorized status (a key marker of membership exclusion) plays in affecting later-generational integration.  The results show that long-  but not short-term unauthorized status appreciably hampers later-generation integration, even among the U.S.-born children of such immigrants, and even to some extent among their grandchildren.  Also, little difference in schooling emerges for third-only generation compared to second-generation males, but this minimal schooling gain is accompanied by considerably higher income in the third generation.  We suggest overall that for Mexican Americans these results accord with socioculturally pluralistic and membership-exclusion combined with working-class-delay structural theoretical perspectives.  The findings dramatically underscore the importance for integration of policies that provide pathways to legalization (and citizenship) for migrants who increasingly constitute a large and essential component of the country's workforce.