From the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, this paper argues for the importance of play in education, with data on public recreation centers in New York City.
LUTHER H. GULICK was director of the Department of Child Hygiene at the Russell Sage Foundation.
“Weathering Katrina is a very thoughtful and elegantly executed monograph by a master of the craft. It is social science at its best.”
— Kai Erikson, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies, Yale University
“Mark VanLandingham’s book, Weathering Katrina, tells a fascinating story of how the Vietnamese community in New Orleans East survived a major natural disaster and thrived afterward. It makes a significant contribution to the literature on disasters, community resilience, and ethnic culture.”
—Min Zhou, professor of sociology and Asian American studies, University of California, Los Angeles
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The principal Vietnamese-American enclave was a remote, low-income area that flooded badly. Many residents arrived decades earlier as refugees from the Vietnam War and were marginally fluent in English. Yet, despite these poor odds of success, the Vietnamese made a surprisingly strong comeback in the wake of the flood. In Weathering Katrina, public health scholar Mark VanLandingham analyzes their path to recovery, and examines the extent to which culture helped them cope during this crisis.
Contrasting his longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews of Vietnamese residents with the work of other research teams, VanLandingham finds that on the principal measures of disaster recovery—housing stability, economic stability, health, and social adaptation—the Vietnamese community fared better than other communities. By Katrina’s one-year anniversary, almost 90 percent of the Vietnamese had returned to their neighborhood, higher than the rate of return for either blacks or whites. They also showed much lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than other groups. And by the second year after the flood, the employment rate for the Vietnamese had returned to its pre-Katrina level.
While some commentators initially attributed this resilience to fairly simple explanations such as strong leadership or to a set of vague cultural strengths characteristic of the Vietnamese and other “model minorities”, VanLandingham shows that in fact it was a broad set of factors that fostered their rapid recovery. Many of these factors had little to do with culture. First, these immigrants were highly selected—those who settled in New Orleans enjoyed higher human capital than those who stayed in Vietnam. Also, as a small, tightly knit community, the New Orleans Vietnamese could efficiently pass on information about job leads, business prospects, and other opportunities to one another. Finally, they had access to a number of special programs that were intended to facilitate recovery among immigrants, and enjoyed a positive social image both in New Orleans and across the U.S., which motivated many people and charities to offer the community additional resources. But culture—which VanLandingham is careful to define and delimit—was important, too. A shared history of overcoming previous challenges—and a powerful set of narratives that describe these successes; a shared set of perspectives or frames for interpreting events; and a shared sense of symbolic boundaries that distinguish them from broader society are important elements of culture that provided the Vietnamese with some strong advantages in the post-Katrina environment.
By carefully defining and disentangling the elements that enabled the swift recovery of the Vietnamese in New Orleans, Weathering Katrina enriches our understanding of this understudied immigrant community and of why some groups fare better than others after a major catastrophe like Katrina.
MARK J. VANLANDINGHAM is the Thomas C. Keller Professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
“If marriage patterns indicate the durability of the color line, Marriage Vows and Racial Choices is a rich account of how the color line shapes the experience of marriage. With lucid prose, Jessica Vasquez-Tokos goes inside the lives of Latina wives and Latino husbands to show how race colors whom they marry, how they stay married, and how they raise children. Demography is destiny, and Marriage Vows and Racial Choices is a must read for anyone who hopes to understand how that destiny is unfolding.”
—Tomás R. Jiménez, associate professor of sociology, Stanford University
“Jessica Vasquez-Tokos’s key contribution in this important new book is to open a black box inside theories of assimilation by illuminating how people actually make their marriage choices. Marriage Vows and Racial Choices details how race and ethnicity, generation, and gender ideologies and images about them play into people’s decisions on whom to marry. A strong empirical scientist, she follows her data to unanticipated places, deepening our understanding of immigration and contemporary America and reframing the debate.”
—Robert C. Smith, professor of sociology, immigration studies, and public affairs, Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College and CUNY Graduate Center
Choosing whom to marry involves more than emotion, as racial politics, cultural mores, and local demographics all shape romantic choices. In Marriage Vows and Racial Choices, sociologist Jessica Vasquez-Tokos explores the decisions of Latinos who marry either within or outside of their racial and ethnic groups. Drawing from in-depth interviews with nearly fifty couples, she examines their marital choices and how these unions influence their identities as Americans.
Vasquez-Tokos finds that their experiences in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood shape their perceptions of race, which in turn influence their romantic expectations. Most Latinos marry other Latinos, but those who intermarry tend to marry whites. She finds that some Latina women who had domineering fathers assumed that most Latino men shared this trait and gravitated toward white men who differed from their fathers. Other Latina respondents who married white men fused ideas of race and class and perceived whites as higher status and considered themselves to be “marrying up.” Latinos who married non-Latino minorities—African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans—often sought out non-white partners because they shared similar experiences of racial marginalization. Latinos who married Latinos of a different national origin expressed a desire for shared cultural commonalities with their partners, but—like those who married whites—often associated their own national-origin groups with oppressive gender roles.
Vasquez-Tokos also investigates how racial and cultural identities are maintained or altered for the respondents’ children. Within Latino-white marriages, biculturalism—in contrast with Latinos adopting a white “American” identity—is likely to emerge. For instance, white women who married Latino men often embraced aspects of Latino culture and passed it along to their children. Yet, for these children, upholding Latino cultural ties depended on their proximity to other Latinos, particularly extended family members. Both location and family relationships shape how parents and children from interracial families understand themselves culturally.
As interracial marriages become more common, Marriage Vows and Racial Choices shows how race, gender, and class influence our marital choices and personal lives.
JESSICA VASQUEZ-TOKOS is associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
“Scott W. Allard is one of the nation’s foremost experts on poverty, and Places in Need is a tour de force. This carefully-researched book offers more than innovative economic analysis and important lessons for social policy. It represents a deeply moral call to update our thinking about vulnerable people across America and rethink outdated assumptions about how to assist them. Places in Need must become required reading for anyone who seeks to understand modern American poverty, let alone begin to combat it.”
—Arthur Brooks, president, American Enterprise Institute
“Places in Need tells the story of how poverty has grown dramatically in suburban America due to displacement, immigration, and job loss and how the existing social safety net is ill-equipped to address this new challenge. Scott W. Allard’s analysis expertly marshals both quantitative and qualitative data to give a nuanced account of the difficulties of meeting social needs in suburban locales. His insights and policy recommendations should be carefully studied by policymakers and social service providers as they come to grips with this new reality.”
—Paul Jargowsky, Professor of Public Policy, Rutgers University, Camden
“An exceptionally rich book that astutely focuses on key current issues related to the geography of poverty in the United States and trends therein. Scott W. Allard’s analysis is impressive in both its breadth and depth. His insights regarding the implications of geographic location for anti-poverty policy—how best to support low-income individuals and families in urban, suburban, and rural areas—make Places in Need essential reading for scholars, policymakers, and policy practitioners alike.”
—Lawrence M. Berger, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Social Work and director, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin
Americans think of suburbs as prosperous areas that are relatively free from poverty and unemployment. Yet, today more poor people live in the suburbs than in cities themselves. In Places in Need, social policy expert Scott W. Allard tracks how the number of poor people living in suburbs has more than doubled over the last 25 years, with little attention from either academics or policymakers. Rising suburban poverty has not coincided with a decrease in urban poverty, meaning that solutions for reducing poverty must work in both cities and suburbs. Allard notes that because the suburban social safety net is less developed than the urban safety net, a better understanding of suburban communities is critical for understanding and alleviating poverty in metropolitan areas.
Using census data, administrative data from safety net programs, and interviews with nonprofit leaders in the Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. metropolitan areas, Allard shows that poor suburban households resemble their urban counterparts in terms of labor force participation, family structure, and educational attainment. In the last few decades, suburbs have seen increases in single-parent households, decreases in the number of college graduates, and higher unemployment rates. As a result, suburban demand for safety net assistance has increased. Concerning is evidence suburban social service providers—which serve clients spread out over large geographical areas, and often lack the political and philanthropic support that urban nonprofit organizations can command—do not have sufficient resources to meet the demand.
To strengthen local safety nets, Allard argues for expanding funding and eligibility to federal programs such as SNAP and the Earned Income Tax Credit, which have proven effective in urban and suburban communities alike. He also proposes to increase the capabilities of community-based service providers through a mix of new funding and capacity-building efforts.
Places in Need demonstrates why researchers, policymakers, and nonprofit leaders should focus more on the shared fate of poor urban and suburban communities. This account of suburban vulnerability amidst persistent urban poverty provides a valuable foundation for developing more effective antipoverty strategies.
SCOTT W. ALLARD is professor of public policy at the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance.
Winner of the 2019 Western Social Science Association Best Book Award
“Immigration is a topic that frequently frustrates social scientists: we revere careful data analysis but such analysis seems to have little impact on popular perspectives and public policy. Along comes this gem of a volume to help us understand why: frames matter as much as facts. Drawing on a wealth of research as well as their own analysis of media content and opinion surveys, the authors offer a remarkably nuanced view of the cues and wordings that shift public attitudes to be more or less favorably disposed to immigrants and immigration reform. With results that are sometimes surprising but always informative, Framing Immigrants will be required reading for anyone hoping to break through America’s immigration policy stalemate.”
—MANUEL PASTOR, professor of sociology, American studies, and ethnicity and director, Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, University of Southern California
“Immigration and immigrants are topics about which many people have strong opinions paired with misinformation or no knowledge. Thus media framing can have an outsize impact, for both good and ill. Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan do a terrific job of sorting out what impact the media have on the politics of immigration, when, how, why, and to what effect. An exemplary piece of research.”
—JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
“Framing Immigrants delivers an authoritative account of the power of frames. Combining content analysis of news coverage with original survey experiments, the authors show that not only do frames differ starkly across news organizations in ways that reveal their political stripes, but also that frames matter. The ways in which the media frames immigrants—and especially unauthorized immigrants—significantly affects public opinion, preferences, support for the Dream Act, the deportation of unauthorized immigrants, and comprehensive immigration reform. Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan take the readers along a compelling and surprising journey, and provide a rich, interdisciplinary resource that will inspire future generations of immigration researchers.”
—JENNIFER LEE, Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
While undocumented immigration is controversial, the general public is largely unfamiliar with the particulars of immigration policy. Given that public opinion on the topic is malleable, to what extent do mass media shape the public debate on immigration? In Framing Immigrants, political scientists Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan explore how conservative, liberal, and mainstream news outlets frame and discuss undocumented immigrants. Drawing from original voter surveys, they show that how the media frames immigration has significant consequences for public opinion and has implications for the passage of new immigration policies.
The authors analyze media coverage of several key immigration policy issues—including mass deportations, comprehensive immigration reform, and measures focused on immigrant children, such as the DREAM Act—to chart how news sources across the ideological spectrum produce specific “frames” for the immigration debate. In the past few years, liberal and mainstream outlets have tended to frame immigrants lacking legal status as “undocumented” (rather than “illegal”) and to approach the topic of legalization through human-interest stories, often mentioning children. Conservative outlets, on the other hand, tend to discuss legalization using impersonal statistics and invoking the rule of law. Yet, regardless of the media’s ideological positions, the authors’ surveys show that “negative” frames more strongly influence public support for different immigration policies than do positive frames. For instance, survey participants who were exposed to language portraying immigrants as law-breakers seeking “amnesty” tended to oppose legalization measures. At the same time, support for legalization was higher when participants were exposed to language referring to immigrants living in the United States for a decade or more.
Framing Immigrants shows that despite heated debates on immigration across the political aisle, the general public has yet to form a consistent position on undocumented immigrants. By analyzing how the media influences public opinion, this book provides a valuable resource for immigration advocates, policymakers, and researchers.
CHRIS HAYNES is assistant professor of political science at the University of New Haven.
JENNIFER MEROLLA is professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside
S. KARTHICK RAMAKRISHNAN is professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Riverside.
“At a time of increasing diversity and inequality in U.S. society, understanding inequality in college graduation is more important than ever. With unique data and a nuanced understanding of the college attainment process, Charles Hirschman offers new insights on how inequality is generated and how greater equity may be pursued.”
—ADAM GAMORAN, president, William T. Grant Foundation
“Charles Hirschman takes on one of the most vexing questions in American social stratification—why have rates of college completion stagnated for the last few decades? And why do traits like ethnicity and race and gender continue to shape young people’s educational attainment? This masterful study of 10,000 students provides a sophisticated and rigorous examination of the college pathways of young Americans. From High School to College teases out the effects of immigrant generation, parental social class, and cultural variables to explain why men and some racial and ethnic minorities have fallen behind. This welcome addition to our knowledge of why some children succeed in getting a college education should be required reading for policy makers, social scientists, and everyone concerned with America’s educational inequalities.”
—MARY C. WATERS, M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
“Charles Hirschman has ably extended the conditional educational transition model of Robert Mare and combined it with the insights of William Sewell and his colleagues in a comprehensive and intensive analysis of college aspirations, preparation, and attainment. Beginning with a simple, five-step model of the post-high school educational process, From High School to College addresses the influences of socioeconomic background, gender, academic performance, social influences, culture, work, and social participation in the high school years. The ethnic heterogeneity of Hirschman’s Washington State sample and an embedded experiment in support for low-income students add dimensions to the analysis that amplify its implications for educational policy and practice.”
—ROBERT M. HAUSER, executive director, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Today, over 75 percent of high school seniors aspire to graduate from college. However, only one-third of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree, and college graduation rates vary significantly by race/ethnicity and parental socioeconomic status. If most young adults aspire to obtain a college degree, why are these disparities so great? In From High School to College, Charles Hirschman analyzes the period between leaving high school and completing college for nearly 10,000 public and private school students across the Pacific Northwest.
Hirschman finds that although there are few gender, racial, or immigration-related disparities in students’ aspirations to attend and complete college, certain groups succeed at the highest rates. For example, he finds that women achieve better high school grades and report receiving more support and encouragement from family, peers, and educators. They tend to outperform men in terms of preparing for college, enrolling in college within a year of finishing high school, and completing a degree. Similarly, second-generation immigrants are better prepared for college than first-generation immigrants, in part because they do not have to face language barriers or learn how to navigate the American educational system.
Hirschman also documents that racial disparities in college graduation rates remain stark. In his sample, 35 percent of white students graduated from college within seven years of completing high school, compared to only 19 percent of black students and 18 percent of Hispanic students. Students’ socioeconomic origins—including parental education and employment, home ownership, and family structure—account for most of the college graduation gap between disadvantaged minorities and white students. Further, while a few Asian ethnic groups have achieved college completion rates on par with whites, such as Chinese and Koreans, others, whose socioeconomic origins more resemble those of black and Hispanic students, such as Filipinos and Cambodians, also lag behind in preparedness, enrollment, and graduation from college.
With a growing number of young adults seeking college degrees, understanding the barriers that different students encounter provides vital information for social scientists and educators. From High School to College illuminates how gender, immigration, and ethnicity influence the path to college graduation.
CHARLES HIRSCHMAN is Boeing International Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington.
Western European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have witnessed a significant increase in Muslim immigrants, which has given rise to nativist groups that question their belonging. Contributors Thomas Faist and Christian Ulbricht discuss how German politicians have implicitly compared the purported “backward” values of Muslim immigrants with the German idea of Leitkultur, or a society that values civil liberties and human rights, reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of Muslim immigrants. Similarly, Marieke Slootman and Jan Willem Duyvendak find that in the Netherlands, the conception of citizenship has shifted to focus less on political rights and duties and more on cultural norms and values. In this context, Turkish and Moroccan Muslim immigrants face increasing pressure to adopt “Dutch” culture, yet are simultaneously portrayed as having regressive views on gender and sexuality that make them unable to assimilate.
Religion is less of a barrier to immigrants’ inclusion in the United States, where instead undocumented status drives much of the political and social marginalization of immigrants. As Mary C. Waters and Philip Kasinitz note, undocumented immigrants in the United States. are ineligible for the services and freedoms that citizens take for granted and often live in fear of detention and deportation. Yet, as Irene Bloemraad points out, Americans’ conception of national identity expanded to be more inclusive of immigrants and their children with political mobilization and changes in law, institutions, and culture in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Canadians’ views also dramatically expanded in recent decades, with multiculturalism now an important part of their national identity, in contrast to Europeans’ fear that diversity undermines national solidarity.
With immigration to North America and Western Europe a continuing reality, each region will have to confront anti-immigrant sentiments that create barriers for and threaten the inclusion of newcomers. Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity investigates the multifaceted connections among immigration, belonging, and citizenship, and provides new ways of thinking about national identity.
NANCY FONER is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
PATRICK SIMON is Director of Research at the Institut national d’études démographiques (National Institute for Demographic Studies).
CONTRIBUTORS: Irene Bloemraad, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Thomas Faist, Nancy Foner, Gary Gerstle, Philip Kasinitz, Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Deborah J. Schildkraut, Patrick Simon, Marieke Slootman, Varun Uberoi, Christian Ulbricht, Mary C. Waters
Winner of the 2016 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography
Honorable Mention, 2016 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association
“Parents Without Papers exposes the effects of legal status on immigrants’ life chances, which persist over generations. Through carefully collected data, meticulous analysis, and theoretical acuity, the authors offer a sobering account of the injurious consequences of an undocumented status on long-term patterns of immigrant integration, making a unique and significant contribution to immigration scholarship. Their findings also have much to offer for policy, making a compelling case for the legalization of undocumented immigrants to ensure a better future for the immigrants themselves and for the country as a whole.”
—CECILIA MENJÍVAR, Cowden Distinguished Professor, Arizona State University
“Parents Without Papers is a major contribution to our understanding of immigrant incorporation and Mexican American mobility. Conceptually, theoretically, and empirically it shows the multifaceted impact that ‘illegal’ status has on Mexican American communities including immigrants and the native born second and third generations. The volume will become essential to scholars and policy makers seriously concerned about immigrant policy. “
—RODOLFO O. DE LA GARZA, Eaton Professor of Administrative Law and Municipal Science, Columbia University
For several decades, Mexican immigrants in the United States have outnumbered those from any other country. Though the economy increasingly needs their labor, many remain unauthorized. In Parents Without Papers, immigration scholars Frank D. Bean, Susan K. Brown, and James D. Bachmeier document the extent to which the outsider status of these newcomers inflicts multiple hardships on their children and grandchildren. Parents Without Papers provides both a general conceptualization of immigrant integration and an in-depth examination of the Mexican American case. The authors draw upon unique retrospective data to shed light on three generations of integration. They show in particular that the “membership exclusion” experienced by unauthorized Mexican immigrants—that is, their fear of deportation, lack of civil rights, and poor access to good jobs—hinders the education of their children, even those who are U.S.-born. Moreover, they find that children are hampered not by the unauthorized entry of parents itself but rather by the long-term inability of parents, especially mothers, to acquire green cards. When unauthorized parents attain legal status, the disadvantages of the second generation begin to disappear. These second-generation men and women achieve schooling on par with those whose parents come legally. By the third generation, socioeconomic levels for women equal or surpass those of native white women. But men reach parity only through greater labor-force participation and longer working hours, results consistent with the idea that their integration is delayed by working-class imperatives to support their families rather than attend college. An innovative analysis of the transmission of advantage and disadvantage among Mexican Americans, Parents Without Papers presents a powerful case for immigration policy reforms that provide not only realistic levels of legal less-skilled migration but also attainable pathways to legalization. Such measures, combined with affordable access to college, are more important than ever for the integration of vulnerable Mexican immigrants and their descendants.
FRANK D. BEAN is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Research on International Migration at the University of California, Irvine.
SUSAN K. BROWN is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
JAMES D. BACHMEIER is assistant professor of sociology at Temple University.
Immigrant Gifts to American Life, published in 1932, describes the purpose and content of the Buffalo Exhibition and other similar expositions. The Buffalo Exhibition was a public show of the arts and skills foreigners have brought and contributed to in the United States, under the direction of Allen H. Eaton, author of this book and at that time field secretary of the American Federation of Arts. They utilized a common interest in the aesthetic values men live by to promote a better understanding of social and civic values.
ALLEN H. EATON, Department of Surveys and Exhibits, Russell Sage Foundation
Two Worlds of Childhood is a cross-cultural study of child rearing and education in the U.S. and the Soviet Union, published in 1970. Bronfenbrenner conducted research in the Soviet Union to study child rearing in the family and collective settings.
URIE BRONFENBRENNER was professor of Psychology and of Child Development and Family Studies at Cornell University, and one of the founders of the Head Start Program.
