Second Generation Trajectories, a project funded under the Foundation’s past Immigration program, focused on the long-term prospects of second generation immigrants—or children of post-1965 immigrants who were born in the United States or were brought from abroad at an early age. Sociologists Roger Waldinger (UCLA) and Renee Reichl Luthra (University of Essex) studied ethnicity, politics, and socio-economic mobility among the contemporary immigrant second generation, drawing on data from three large original data-collection projects funded by the Russell Sage Foundation: the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) study, and the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York (ISGMNY) study. The investigators examined the data in concert to analyze the variation in second generation outcomes and assess whether immigrant offspring moved beyond, moved ahead, or simply reproduced their parents’ socioeconomic status.

Luthra’s most recent report, published in the latest issue of Demography, examines the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment between parents and children. The abstract states:

One in five U.S. residents under the age of 18 has at least one foreign-born parent. Given the large proportion of immigrants with very low levels of schooling, the strength of the intergenerational transmission of education between immigrant parent and child has important repercussions for the future of social stratification in the United States. We find that the educational transmission process between parent and child is much weaker in immigrant families than in native families and, among immigrants, differs significantly across national origins. We demonstrate how this variation causes a substantial overestimation of the importance of parental education in immigrant families in studies that use aggregate data. We also show that the common practice of "controlling" for family human capital using parental years of schooling is problematic when comparing families from different origin countries and especially when comparing native and immigrant families. We link these findings to analytical and empirical distinctions between group- and individual-level processes in intergenerational transmission.

Click here to download the report in full.