"Anyone serious about immigration studies needs to read this book."
-Choice

"Immigration is transforming America. It's also producing a new generation of immigration researchers, fully equipped with the tools needed to illuminate the distinctive immigrant reality of the twenty-first century. This new collection offers a first harvest of today's emerging scholarship, assembling authors from a variety of disciplines, who engage this always vital topic in new, incisive, and stimulating ways."
-ROGER WALDINGER, UCLA

"Immigration Research for a New Century offers an incredible potpourri of research on the post-1965 wave of immigrants to the United States by a new generation of younger immigration scholars. The chapters cover almost every group from high tech engineers in Silicon Valley to Nuer refugees from the Sudan in Minnesota. Many of these studies report novel findings and fresh interpretations. For example, Greta Gilbertson and Audrey Singer find that some Dominican immigrants acquire U.S. citizenship not as the final stage of settlement, but as an insurance policy before returning to the Dominican Republic. In another chapter, Jennifer Lee explains the advantages of immigrant entrepreneurs relative to African American small businesses through differential access to networks of wholesalers and suppliers. Several papers describe the organization and content of 'transnational ties' among contemporary immigrants in the United States. There are many more gems sprinkled among the chapters in this fine volume."
-CHARLES HIRSCHMAN, University of Washington, Seattle

"This thought-provoking book offers fresh, valuable insights into a wide range of issues in immigration research. A prominent characteristic and strength of this volume is the immigration research from a broad disciplinary and methodological spectrum. This fine collection should not be missed by any student of immigration."
-PHILIP Q. YANG, Contemporary Sociology

The rapid rise in immigration over the past few decades has transformed the American social landscape, while the need to understand its impact on society has led to a burgeoning research literature. Predominantly non-European and of varied cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, the new immigrants present analytic challenges that cannot be wholly met by traditional immigration studies. Immigration Research for a New Century demonstrates how sociology, anthropology, history, political science, economics, and other disciplines intersect to answer questions about today's immigrants.

In Part I, leading scholars examine the emergence of an interdisciplinary body of work that incorporates such topics as the social construction of race, the importance of ethnic self-help and economic niches, the influence of migrant-homeland ties, and the types of solidarity and conflict found among migrant populations. The authors also explore the social and national origins of immigration scholars themselves, many of whom cameof age in an era of civil rights and ethnic reaffirmation, and may also be immigrants or children of immigrants. Together these essays demonstrate how social change, new patterns of immigration, and the scholars' personal backgrounds have altered the scope and emphases of the research literature, allowing scholars to ask new questions and to see old problems in new ways.

Part II contains the work of anew generation of immigrant scholars, reflecting the scope of a field bolstered by different disciplinary styles. These essays explore the complex variety of the immigrant experience, ranging from itinerant farmworkers to Silicon Valley engineers. The demands ofthe American labor force, ethnic, racial, and gender stereotyping, and state regulation are all shown to play important roles in the economic adaptation of immigrants. The ways in which immigrants participate politically, their relationships among themselves, their attitudes toward naturalization and citizenship, and their own sense of cultural identity are also addressed.

Immigration Research for a New Century examines the complex effects that immigration has had not only on American society but on scholarship itself, and offers the fresh insights of a new generation of immigration researchers.

NANCY FONER is professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Purchase.

RUBÉN G. RUMBAUT is professor of sociology at Michigan State University.

STEVEN J. GOLD is professor and associate chair in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Steven J. Gold, Rafael Alarcon, Nancy C. Carnevale, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Josh DeWind, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Herbert J. Gans, Greta Gilbertson, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Jon D. Holtzman, Jane Junn, Kathy A. Kaufman, Fred Krissman, Gallya Lahav, Jennifer Lee, Peggy Levitt, Howard Markel, Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, George J. Sanchez, Audrey Singer, Alexandra Minna Stern, Ayumi Takemaka, Mary C. Waters, Steven S. Zahniser, Aristide R. Zolberg. 

Honorable Mention 2005 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association

Immigration is one of the driving forces behind social change in the United States, continually reshaping the way Americans think about race and ethnicity. How have various racial and ethnic groups—including immigrants from around the globe, indigenous racial minorities, and African Americans—related to each other both historically and today? How have these groups been formed and transformed in the context of the continuous influx of new arrivals to this country? In Not Just Black and White, editors Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson bring together a distinguished group of social scientists and historians to consider the relationship between immigration and the ways in which concepts of race and ethnicity have evolved in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.

Not Just Black and White opens with an examination of historical and theoretical perspectives on race and ethnicity. The late John Higham, in the last scholarly contribution of his distinguished career, defines ethnicity broadly as a sense of community based on shared historical memories, using this concept to shed new light on the main contours of American history. The volume also considers the shifting role of state policy with regard to the construction of race and ethnicity. Former U.S. census director Kenneth Prewitt provides a definitive account of how racial and ethnic classifications in the census developed over time and how they operate today. Other contributors address the concept of panethnicity in relation to whites, Latinos, and Asian Americans, and explore socioeconomic trends that have affected, and continue to affect, the development of ethno-racial identities and relations. Joel Perlmann and Mary Waters offer a revealing comparison of patterns of intermarriage among ethnic groups in the early twentieth century and those today. The book concludes with a look at the nature of intergroup relations, both past and present, with special emphasis on how America’s principal non-immigrant minority—African Americans—fits into this mosaic.

With its attention to contemporary and historical scholarship, Not Just Black and White provides a wealth of new insights about immigration, race, and ethnicity that are fundamental to our understanding of how American society has developed thus far, and what it may look like in the future.

NANCY FONER is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, State University of New York, Purchase.

GEORGE M. FREDRICKSON is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard Alba, James Barrett, Albert M. Camarillo, Stephen Cornell, Nancy Denton, Yen Le Espiritu, Neil Foley, Steven Gold, Douglas Hartmann, Victoria Hattam, John Higham, Jose Itzigsohn, Gerald Jaynes, Philip Kasinitz, Erika Lee, John Lie, Joel Perlmann, Kenneth Prewitt, David Roediger, Joe W. Trotter, Mary C. Waters.

This volume is concerned with the question of how the United States educates and utilizes its intellectually gifted youth. It examines the manpower system from the point of view of supply and demand. It brings a deep understanding of the set of interrelated forces that determine the education and utilization of trained manpower.

JOHN K. FOLGER is director of the Tennessee Commission on Higher Education.

HELEN S. ASTIN is from the Bureau of Social Science Research.

ALAN E. BAYER is research sociologist with the American Council on Education in Washington.
 

The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America’s collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants’ ability to integrate into American society.

Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform’s ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution.

The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants’ propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants’ use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants’ benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants’ use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare.

Even though few states took the federal government’s invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law’s most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare.

MICHAEL E. FIX is senior vice president and director of studies at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and co-director of MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael E. Fix, Frank D. Bean, Randy Capps, Danielle A. Crosby, Ron Haskins, Everett Henderson, Ariel Kalil, Neeraj Kaushal, Leighton Ku, Jennifer Van Hook, and Michael J. Wishnie.

Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute

Winner of the 2007 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography

"Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout have written an imaginative chronicle of the century that just ended. While there are palpable differences in how the country looked in 1900 and 2000, they point to some striking similarities ... [They] argue that the amount of schooling a person receives now overshadows nativity, race, or income as the nation's prime divide. 'Since mid-century,' they suggest, 'education became a key sorter of Americans.' 'Differences in living standards and lifestyles' between those with a bachelor's degree and those without it 'had widened greatly.' The years ahead, they say, will see a deep divide separating 'education haves and have-nots.' While this is a widely accepted view, it hasn't had the scrutiny it needs."
-THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Century of Difference is extraordinarily ambitious. Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout set out to describe the key changes in American society over the course of a century, focusing on family composition, urbanization and suburbanization, income, employment, race and ethnicity, religion, and the culture wars. Their main challenge was to identify the salient changes in American society and to describe them clearly, showing how different subpopulations were affected. The book succeeds brilliantly. The writing is remarkably engaging, even though it is all about numbers. This will become a classic of historical sociology."
-STEVEN RUGGLES, University of Minnesota

"This landmark study carefully charts major social changes over the twentieth century that have profoundly affected our American lives. Like all good sociology, it provides a big picture interpretation that helps us better understand our own experiences in the context of larger social realities. History here illuminates the important, current trajectories of life. Century of Difference will serve social scientists and historians alike for many years to come as the authoritative reference on the previous century's key social changes."
-CHRISTIAN SMITH, University of Notre Dame

"Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout have written the definitive history of social and economic change in twentieth-century America. They document how we have gone from a society where ethnicity and race shaped our lives to one where education shapes our lives. Must reading for all policymakers and social scientists."
-DORA L. COSTA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In every generation, Americans have worried about the solidarity of the nation. Since the days of the Mayflower, those already settled here have wondered how newcomers with different cultures, values, and (frequently) skin color would influence America. Would the new groups create polarization and disharmony? Thus far, the United States has a remarkable track record of incorporating new people into American society, but acceptance and assimilation have never meant equality. In Century of Difference, Claude Fischer and Michael Hout provide a compelling—and often surprising—new take on the divisions and commonalities among the American public over the tumultuous course of the twentieth century.

Using a hundred years worth of census and opinion poll data, Century of Difference shows how the social, cultural, and economic fault lines in American life shifted in the last century. It demonstrates how distinctions that once loomed large later dissipated, only to be replaced by new ones. Fischer and Hout find that differences among groups by education, age, and income expanded, while those by gender, region, national origin, and, even in some ways, race narrowed. As the twentieth century opened, a person’s national origin was of paramount importance, with hostilities running high against Africans, Chinese, and southern and eastern Europeans. Today, diverse ancestries are celebrated with parades. More important than ancestry for today’s Americans is their level of schooling. Americans with advanced degrees are increasingly putting distance between themselves and the rest of society—in both a literal and a figurative sense. Differences in educational attainment are tied to expanding inequalities in earnings, job quality, and neighborhoods. Still, there is much that ties all Americans together. Century of Difference knocks down myths about a growing culture war. Using seventy years of survey data, Fischer and Hout show that Americans did not become more fragmented over values in the late-twentieth century, but rather were united over shared ideals of self-reliance, family, and even religion.

As public debate has flared up over such matters as immigration restrictions, the role of government in redistributing resources to the poor, and the role of religion in public life, it is important to take stock of the divisions and linkages that have typified the U.S. population over time. Century of Difference lucidly profiles the evolution of American social and cultural differences over the last century, examining the shifting importance of education, marital status, race, ancestry, gender, and other factors on the lives of Americans past and present.

CLAUDE S. FISCHER is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

MICHAEL HOUT is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

Provides a selection of existing and new measures of family change. The statistical time series are presented and organized around the topics of marriage, marital status, households, fertility, divorce, dependency, work and income, and poverty. The series selected for inclusion were chosen because of an apparent or assumed significant change which they displayed. They are illustrated by graphs and accompanied by a brief commentary. The statistical series are numbered in an appendix, and sources of the data are cited at the foot of the page of commentary.

ABBOTT L. FERRISS was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Emory University.

Presents statistical evidence of trends in the status of women relative to the status of men. Organized around the major life activities and concerns of women, the book deals with such topics as education, marriage, fertility, employment, health and illness, and death. The author interprets the statistical findings and presents suggestions for further analytical methods and interpretations. The two major surveys from which much of the data in this study are drawn, the Current Population Survey and the National Health Survey, are reviewed in two appendices.

ABBOTT L. FERRISS was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Emory University.

Assembles, collates, and analyzes data bearing on trends in American education. The author presents the basic data on school enrollment, retention, and attainment, indicating changes in the educational characteristics of the population and comparable time-series statistics on teachers and school finances reflecting change within the school system itself. Dr. Ferriss then relates these data to a statement of educational goals set some ten years ago, utilizing the data to provide an assessment of progress toward those goals.

ABBOTT L. FERRISS was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Emory University.

It is conventional wisdom that there is a grave crisis in our criminal courts: the widespread reliance on plea-bargaining and the settlement of most cases with just a few seconds before the judge endanger the rights of defendants. Not so, says Malcolm Feeley in this provocative and original book. Basing his argument on intensive study of the lower criminal court system, Feeley demonstrates that the absence of formal “due process” is preferred by all of the court’s participants, and especially by defendants. Moreover, he argues, “it is not all clear that as a group defendants would be better off in a more ‘formal’ court system,” since the real costs to those accused of misdemeanors and lesser felonies are not the fines and prison sentences meted out by the court, but the costs incurred before the case even comes before the judge—lost wages from missed work, commissions to bail bondsmen, attorney’s fees, and wasted time. Therefore, the overriding interest of the accused is not to secure the formal trappings of the judicial process, but to minimize the time, and money, spent dealing with the court.

Focusing on New Haven, Connecticut’s, lower court, Feeley found that the defense and prosecution often agreed that the pre-trial process was sufficient to “teach the defendant a lesson.” In effect, Feeley demonstrates that the informal practices of the lower courts as they are presently constituted are more “just” than they are usually given credit for being.

“... a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in understanding how courts work and how the criminal sanction is administered in modern, complex societies.”— Barry Mahoney, Institute for Court Management, Denver

“It is grounded in a firm grasp of theory as well as thorough field research.”—Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court Judge.

"… a feature that has long been the hallmark of good American sociology: it recreates a believable world of real men and women.”—Paul Wiles, Law & Society Review.

"This book's findings are well worth the attention of the serious criminal justice student, and the analyses reveal a thoughtful, probing, and provocative intelligence....an important contribution to the debate on the role and limits of discretion in American criminal justice. It deserves to be read by all those who are interested in the outcome of the debate." —Jerome H. Skolnick, American Bar Foundation Research Journal

MALCOLM M. FEELEY is professor of law and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

Winner of the 1998 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography

"A fascinating and authoritative account of American social history since 1960 as viewed through the prism of government statistics....[Farley] uses publicly available data, straight forward methods, and modest...language, to provide more information and insight about recent social trends than any other volume in print." —American Journal of Sociology

"A brilliant piece of work. Farley is absolutely masterful at taking tens of thousands of national survey statistics and weaving from them a fascinating and beautifully illustrated tapestry of who we are." —Barry Bluestone, Frank L. Boyden Professor of Political Economy, University of Massachusetts, Boston

The New American Reality presents a compelling portrait of an America strikingly different from what it was just forty years ago.Gone is the idealized vision of a two-parent, father-supported Ozzie and Harriet society. In its place is an America of varied races andethnic backgrounds, where families take on many forms and mothers frequently work outside the home. Drawing on a definitive analysis of the past four U.S. censuses, author Reynolds Farley reveals a country that offers new opportunities for a broader spectrum of people, while at the same time generating frustration and apprehension for many who once thought their futures secure.

The trends that have so transformed the nation were kindled in the 1960s, a watershed period during which many Americans redefined their attitudes toward the rights of women and blacks. The New American Reality describes the activism, federal policymaking, and legal victories that eliminated overtracial and sexual discrimination. But along with open doors came new challenges. Divorce and out-of-wedlock births grew commonplace, forcing more women to raise children alone and—despite improved wages—increasing their chances of falling into poverty. Residential segregation, inadequate schooling, and a particularly high ratio of female-headed families severely impaired the economic progress of African Americans, many of whom were left behind in declining central cities as businesses migrated to suburbs. A new generation of immigrants from many nations joined the ranks of those working to support families and improve their prospects, and rapidly transformed the nation's ethnic composition.

In the 1970s, unprecedented economic restructuring on a global scale created unexpected setbacks for the middle class. The long era of postwar prosperity ended as the nation's dominant industry shifted from manufacturing to services, competition from foreign producers increased, interest rates rose, and a new emphasis on technology and cost-cutting created a demand for more sophisticated skills in the workplace. The economic recovery of the 1980s generated greater prosperity for the well-educated and highly skilled, and created many low paying jobs, but offered little to remedy the stagnant and declining wages of the middle class. Income inequalitybecame a defining feature in the economic life of America: overall, the rich got richer while the poor and middle class found it increasingly difficult to meet their financial demands.

The New American Reality reports some good news about America. Our lives are longer and healthier, the elderly are much better off than ever before, consumer spending power has increased, and minorities and women have many more opportunities. But this book does not shy away from the significant problems facing large portions of the population, and provides a valuable perspective on efforts to remedy them. The New American Reality offers the information necessary to understandthe critical trends affecting America today, from how we earn a living to how and when we form families, where we live, and whether or not we will continue to prosper.

REYNOLDS FARLEY is professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and research scientist at its Population Studies Center.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series