A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology

Winner of the 2003 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography

"Bean and Stevens's authoritative book provides an astute and carefully balanced analysis of the continuous interaction between migration and American society."
-ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES

America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity provides a well-researched, accessible, and policy-relevant investigation of the broader impact of recent immigration on American society. It is a must read for scholars of migration and race and ethnicity, and it will make an excellent textbook for use in upper division and graduate-level classes in the social sciences, history, and related disciplines."
-AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

"The singular accomplishment of this impressive volume is its simultaneous consideration of the two anxieties that continue to vex sound immigration policy-that newcomers undermine economic prosperity; that they increase ethnic tensions and fragmentation. Policy-making will find here a much needed empirically rich, nuanced treatment of economic and cultural issues."
-KENNETH PREWITT, Columbia University

A timely, insightful, and comprehensive book by some of the leading and most experienced scholars on American immigration. America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity should be immediately placed in the 'must read' box of scholars and students alike."
-JAMES P. SMITH, RAND

"If I could recommend a curriculum for decisionmakers new to immigration issues, this volume would be my choice. By examining all the key issues, scholarship, and perceptions that surround immigration, and by applying clear-eyed, non-ideological analysis to them, the authors have provided important new insights for long-time students of the issues, as well as a practical policy handbook for real-world actors."
-DORIS MEISSNER, Migration Policy Institute

"Now in the midst of the largest immigration wave ever, the United States is, it seems, the only post industrial democracy in the world where immigration is both history and destiny. Over the last couple of decades this 'new immigration' has generated important new empirical, conceptual, and theoretical work. America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity is a critical addition to this new corpus of scholarship. The authors raise important new questions and proceed to deploy carefully crafted empirical data to systematically enhance our understanding of the complex dynamics at hand. The senior author is one of sociology's maitre penseurs and it shows: America's Newcomers will become a standard reference to social scientists, policy makers, and the informed public at large about one of the most important and urgent social concerns of our times. It is an exquisite achievement."
-MARCELO M. SUÁREZ-OROZCO, Harvard University

The attacks of September 11, 2001, facilitated by easy entry and lax immigration controls, cast into bold relief the importance and contradictions of U.S. immigration policy. Will we have to restrict immigration for fear of future terrorist attacks? On a broader scale, can the country's sense of national identity be maintained in the face of the cultural diversity that today's immigrants bring? How will the resulting demographic, social, and economic changes affect U.S. residents? As the debate about immigration policy heats up, it has become more critical than ever to examine immigration's role in our society. With a comprehensive social scientific assessment of immigration over the past thirty years, America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity provides the clearest picture to date of how immigration has actually affected the United States, while refuting common misconceptions and predicting how it might affect us in the future.

Frank Bean and Gillian Stevens show how, on the whole, immigration has been beneficial for the United States. Although about one million immigrants arrive each year, the job market has expanded sufficiently to absorb them without driving down wages significantly or preventing the native-born population from finding jobs. Immigration has not led to welfare dependency among immigrants, nor does evidence indicate that welfare is a magnet for immigrants. With the exception of unauthorized Mexican and Central American immigrants, studies show that most other immigrant groups have attained sufficient earnings and job mobility to move into the economic mainstream. Many Asian and Latino immigrants have established ethnic networks while maintaining their native cultural practices in the pursuit of that goal. While this phenomenon has led many people to believe that today's immigrants are slow to enter mainstream society, Bean and Stevens show that intermarriage and English language proficiency among these groups are just as high—if not higher—as among prior waves of European immigrants. America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity concludes by showing that the increased racial and ethnic diversity caused by immigration may be helping to blur the racial divide in the United States, transforming the country from a biracial to multi-ethnic and multi-racial society. Replacing myth with fact, America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity contains a wealth of information and belongs on the bookshelves of policymakers, pundits, scholars, students, and anyone who is concerned about the changing face of the United States.

FRANK D. BEAN is professor of sociology and director, Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine.

GILLIAN STEVENS is associate professor of sociology at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States examines in comprehensive detail the most rapidly growing and quickly changing minority group in the United States. Once a small population, this group is now recognized by official census counts and by society as a diverse people, comprised of Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Samoans, and many other heritages. However, the conception that Asians are a single and successful model minority still exists, though they are in fact a complex and multidimensional people still struggling in the pursuit of the American dream.

"...a major addition to the literature on recent immigration. The book is lucidly written by three demographers eager to convey their findings and analyses to general readers as well as to fellow professionals. It provides easily accessible information and useful commentary, making it an excellent resource for anyone interested in those groups now lumped together under a single Census Bureau rubric." —Choice

"This is a demographer's delight....The major question addressed in this book is: How well are the new Asian immigrants adapting to American society? Barringer, Gardner, and Levin cogently argue and convincingly demonstrate that the response to the question is much more complex than suggested by articles in the popular press....an important book and highly recommended." —Contemporary Sociology

"For the real scoop on the state of Asian America, turn to the Russell Sage Foundation's excellent Asians and Pacific Islanders of the United States. The best demographic overview, it makes a strong case for Asian-American success without overlooking genuine problems." —Reason

"...a comprehensive study of the size, diversity, and complexity of the Asian and Pacific Islander populations based on the 1980 census and subsequent mid-census assessments prior to the 1990 census....sheds a particularly interesting light on the shifting nature of recent Asian and Pacific Islander immigration and the related but often undocumented secondary movement of populations after arrival."—The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

HERBERT BARRINGER is professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii–Manoa.

ROBERT W. GARDNER was assistant director of the East-West Population Institute, Hawaii. He now teaches demography at the Harvard School of Public Health.

MICHAEL J. LEVIN is a member of the Population Division of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology

Winner of the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for the Best Book in Education

Winner of the 2009 Outstanding Book Award of the American Educational Research Association

"Passing the Torch moves beyond the immediate goals of open admission to explore outcomes in the second generation .... In short, the middle-class boost that a CUNY education represented for these women did not fade away; their children did not regress to the earlier patterns of their grandparents' generation. Some questions remain. Did standards erode over time as charged? Were subsequent cohorts as fortunate as the first? For now, evidence trumps rhetoric and the evidence shows open admissions delivered on its promises."
-CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

"Passing the Torch provides compelling new evidence on the benefits of college enrollment for disadvantaged Americans often seen as not 'college material.' The authors track the career histories of almost two thousand women from low-income families who enrolled in one of the seventeen campuses of the City University of New York in the 1970s under its open admissions program .... The book makes a compelling case that public higher education is still a critically important mechanism for social mobility in the United States and that making college attainable for low-income youth deserves a top spot on the domestic policy agenda."
-RICHARD J. MURNANE, Thompson Professor of Education and Society, Harvard University Graduate School of Education

"Like the 1944 GI Bill, open admissions at CUNY and elsewhere opened college for those who had never dreamed it was possible. Passing the Torch shows how open access programs affected the first generation's occupations, earnings, family structure, asset accumulation, childrearing practices, community involvement, and paid dividends for the second generation's cognitive development and educational success .... The prose is lucid, the data are compelling, and the issues are urgent. Passing the Torch is must reading for anyone concerned about higher education, social policy, educational equity, families, race, children, and national productivity."
-CAROLINE HODGES PERSELL, professor of sociology, New York University

"This remarkable book will give a much-needed jolt to the conventional wisdom about open-access higher education. ... A landmark study, Passing the Torch vividly documents the critical role that open access continues to play in keeping the American dream alive for our least advantaged citizens. It is destined to take its place alongside Bowen and Bok's The Shape of the River as one of the best books on the impact of higher education on opportunity in America."
-JEROME KARABEL, professor of sociology, University of California, Berkeley

The steady expansion of college enrollment rates over the last generation has been heralded as a major step toward reducing chronic economic disparities. But many of the policies that broadened access to higher education—including affirmative action, open admissions, and need-based financial aid—have come under attack in recent years by critics alleging that schools are admitting unqualified students who are unlikely to benefit from a college education. In Passing the Torch, Paul Attewell, David Lavin, Thurston Domina, and Tania Levey follow students admitted under the City University of New York’s “open admissions” policy, tracking its effects on them and their children, to find out whether widening college access can accelerate social mobility across generations.

Unlike previous research into the benefits of higher education, Passing the Torch follows the educational achievements of three generations over thirty years. The book focuses on a cohort of women who entered CUNY between 1970 and 1972, when the university began accepting all graduates of New York City high schools and increasing its representation of poor and minority students. The authors survey these women in order to identify how the opportunity to pursue higher education affected not only their long-term educational attainments and family well-being, but also how it affected their children’s educational achievements. Comparing the record of the CUNY alumnae to peers nationwide, the authors find that when women from underprivileged backgrounds go to college, their children are more likely to succeed in school and earn college degrees themselves. Mothers with a college degree are more likely to expect their children to go to college, to have extensive discussions with their children, and to be involved in their children’s schools. All of these parenting behaviors appear to foster higher test scores and college enrollment rates among their children. In addition, college-educated women are more likely to raise their children in stable two-parent households and to earn higher incomes; both factors have been demonstrated to increase children’s educational success.

The evidence marshaled in this important book reaffirms the American ideal of upward mobility through education. As the first study to indicate that increasing access to college among today’s disadvantaged students can reduce educational gaps in the next generation, Passing the Torch makes a powerful argument in favor of college for all.

PAUL ATTEWELL and DAVID LAVIN are professors of sociology in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

In 1899 the great African American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, published The Philadelphia Negro, the first systematic case study of an African American community and one of the foundations of American sociology. DuBois prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, Problem of the Century reflects upon his prophecy, exploring the ways in which the color line is still visible in the labor market, the housing market, education, family structure, and many other aspects of life at the turn of a new century.

The book opens with a theoretical discussion of the way racial identity is constructed and institutionalized. When the government classifies races and confers group rights upon them, is it subtly reenforcing damaging racial divisions, or redressing the group privileges that whites monopolized for so long? The book also delineates the social dynamics that underpin racial inequality. The contributors explore the causes and consequences of high rates of mortality and low rates of marriage in black communities, as well as the way race affects a person's chances of economic success. African Americans may soon lose their historical position as America's majority minority, and the book also examines how race plays out in the sometimes fractious relations between blacks and immigrants. The final part of the book shows how the color line manifests itself at work and in schools. Contributors find racial issues at play on both ends of the occupational ladder—among absentee fathers paying child support from their meager earnings and among black executives prospering in the corporate world. In the schools, the book explores how race defines a student's peer group and how peer pressure affects a student's grades.

Problem of the Century draws upon the distinguished faculty of sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania, where DuBois conducted his research for The Philadelphia Negro. The contributors combine a scrupulous commitment to empirical inquiry with an eclectic openness to different methods and approaches. Problem of the Century blends ethnographies and surveys, statistics and content analyses, census data and historical records, to provide a far-reaching examination of racial inequality in all its contemporary manifestations.

ELIJAH M. ANDERSON is Charles and William Day Professor of Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania.

DOUGLAS S. MASSEY is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania.

CONTRIBUTORS: Linda H. Aiken, Ivar Berg, Mary Blair-Loy, Camille Zubrinsky Charles, Randall Colins, Kathryn Edin, Irma T. Elo, Frank F. Furstenberg Jr.,  Jerry A. Jacobs,  Grace Kao,  Robin Leidner, Janice F. Madden, Ewa Morawska, Timothy J. Nelson, Samuel H. Preston,  Douglas M. Sloane, Tukufu Zuberi.  

One of Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books of 2000

For those interested in understanding the historical and scientific context of the census adjustment controversy, Who Counts? is absolutely essential reading. —Science

Ever since the founding fathers authorized a national headcount as the means of apportioning seats in the federal legislature, the decennial census has been a political battleground. Political power, and more recently the allocation of federal resources, depend directly upon who is counted and who is left out. Who Counts? is the story of the lawsuits, congressional hearings, and bureaucratic intrigues surrounding the 1990 census. These controversies formed largely around a single vexing question: should the method of conducting the census be modified in order to rectify the demonstrated undercount of poor urban minorities? But they also stemmed from a more general debate about the methods required to count an ever more diverse and mobile population of over two hundred million. The responses to these questions repeatedly pitted the innovations of statisticians and demographers against objections that their attempts to alter traditional methods may be flawed and even unconstitutional.

Who Counts? offers a detailed review of the preparation, implementation, and aftermath of the last three censuses. It recounts the growing criticisms of innaccuracy and undercounting, and the work to develop new enumeration strategies. The party shifts that followed national elections played an increasingly important role in the politization of the census, as the Department of Commerce asserted growing authority over the scientific endeavors of the Census Bureau. At the same time, each decade saw more city and state governments and private groups bringing suit to challenge census methodology and results. Who Counts? tracks the legal course that began in 1988, when a coalition led by New York City first sued to institute new statistical procedures in response to an alleged undercount of urban inhabitants. The challenge of accurately classifying an increasingly mixed population further threatens the legitimacy of the census, and Who Counts? investigates the difficulties of gaining unambiguous measurements of race and ethnicity, and the proposal that the race question be eliminated in favor of ethnic origin. Who Counts? concludes with a discussion of the proposed census design for 2000, as well as the implications of population counts on the composition and size of Congress. This volume reveals in extraordinary detail the interplay of law, politics, and science that propel the ongoing census debate, a debate whose outcome will have a tremendous impact on the distribution of political power and economic resources among the nation's communities.

MARGO J. ANDERSON is professor of history and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

STEPHEN E. FIENBERG is Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

During the 1970s, several striking population shifts attracted widespread attention and colorful journalistic labels. Urban gentrification, the rural renaissance, the rise of the Sunbelt—these phenomena signaled major reversals in long-term patterns of population distribution. In Regional and Metropolitan Growth and Decline in the United States, authors Frey and Speare place such reversals in context by examining a rich array of census data.

This comprehensive study describes new population distribution patterns, explores their consequences, and evaluates competing explanations of current trends. The authors also provide an in-depth look at the changing race, status, and household demographics of the nation's largest cities and discuss the broad societal forces precipitating such changes. Frey and Speare conclude that the 1970s represented a "transition decade" in the history of population distribution and that patterns now emerging do not suggest a return to the past.

With impressive scope and detail, this volume offers an unmatched picture of regional growth and decline across the United States.

WILLIAM H. FREY is faculty associate at the Population Studies Center, The University of Michigan.

ALDEN SPEARE, JR. is professor of sociology at Brown University.

A volume in the Population of the United States in the 1980s series.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series