Because older members of immigrant families are assumed to be less economically active and less likely to learn English and assimilate to American ways, researchers have overlooked and understudied this demographic group. But older relatives make significant contributions to immigrant families. Economically, they provide valuable childcare for young children, allowing younger adults to enter the workforce. Socially, they help to transmit ethnic identity to children born in America and maintain transnational ties with the family’s native land.

Throughout history, immigrants have held ties with their native lands after migrating; but today’s immigrants have greater opportunities to forge transnational identities. Does this mean that we are moving to a higher-level civil society that transcends citizenship and legal residency boundaries, or is the new transnationalism simply a more technologically advanced expression of old migrant behaviors? What difference does this make for immigrant political incorporation?

Supplemental Award: $34,415, June, 2010

Technology has allowed people the world over to stay connected despite great distance. This has permitted immigrants to maintain strong connections to their native countries after coming to the United States. Do those connections dampen the likelihood that immigrants will incorporate into American civic life?

In 2003, the Foundation set forth on an ambitious research initiative to assess how well the young adult children of recent immigrants in Los Angeles fare as they move through American schools and into the labor market. The project, dubbed the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) study, began with a telephone survey that collected data on the young adult children of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino immigrants, as well as three comparison groups of native parentage.

Recent evidence indicates that immigrants are moving away from, or bypassing altogether, traditional destinations and settling in new metropolitan and suburban areas, where previously they had scant representation. But we know relatively little about the context of their reception, the social and economic infrastructure, and their outcomes in these communities. Sometimes these new arrivals go directly to suburban areas, bypassing the central cities. Sometimes, these new destinations constitute the second step in a migration out of more expensive metropolitan areas.

The greatest predictor of one’s political attitudes and behavior is the political behavior exhibited by one’s family while growing up. However, we know relatively little about how knowledge, attitudes, and expectations about the political process are transmitted within immigrant families, especially families in which some members are citizens and others are not.

Diversity and social inclusion are no longer a concern only of large urban areas in the North or the Southwest. According to the 2000 census, five of the ten states with the fastest growing immigrant populations in the 1990s were in the South: North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. In all five, the foreign-born population more than doubled over the decade. Whether these immigrants are coming to the South directly or via secondary migration from traditional immigrant gateways, they are reshaping the ethnic and occupational make-up of the South.

In November 2003, the Foundation funded an extensive survey of 4500 households in Los Angeles to provide definitive information about the inter-generational progress of immigrant groups in what is now America's largest immigrant receiving city. The Foundation had previously sponsored a similar survey of New York's immigrant second generation, which included a series of in-depth interviews with a subsample of the survey respondents. This qualitative portion of the study yielded rich accounts of what it meant to be a second-generation young adult in New York at the end of the 1990s.

Supplemental Award: $28,000, November 2007

Between 1970 and 2000, the percentage of immigrant children in the U.S. school population tripled. Historically, schools have been important in guiding immigrant children into American civic life. However, recent emphasis on test performance, especially in reading, writing, and math, has forced schools to turn their attention away from civics courses. What effect will that have on the integration of immigrants into American life?