The Second Generation in Middle Adulthood

Since the 1960s, more immigrants have settled in Southern California than in any other metropolitan region of the world. About one-quarter of all adults living in San Diego County and neighboring Los Angeles and Orange Counties are children of immigrants, as are one half of all children and adolescents. What happens to immigrants’ children as they become adults and move across a life course marked by rapid social and economic change remains a puzzle that raises issues of critical theoretical, practical, and policy significance and is the subject of ongoing and heated public and political debates.

Sociologists Cynthia Feliciano and Rubén Rumbaut will conduct follow-up phone interviews with a representative subsample of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS-San Diego)—a panel study supported by RSF, which followed for over a decade a large, representative sample of young people, aged 13 to 14 in 1992 when the study started, who grew up in immigrant families in San Diego from junior high school through their mid-twenties. Specifically, they will follow up with 134 respondents with whom in-depth interviews were last conducted during 2002-2004. These respondents are now in their mid- to late thirties, an age at which we can better understand processes of educational and occupational attainment, inter-generational mobility, and family and identity formation.