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Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age

Inheriting the City provides one of the most comprehensive and compelling assessments of immigrant incorporation in the United States to date. The book draws upon 3,415 surveys and over 330 interviews to understand the patterns of educational attainment, labor force participation, marriage and family formation, and political participation among 1.5 and second-generation young adults aged 18 to 32 in New York City. Ethnographies of the second generation which were published in the 2004 companion volume, Becoming New Yorkers, also inform the analysis. The authors compare the outcomes and experiences of five immigrant groups—Chinese, Russian Jews, Dominicans, South Americans, and West Indians— to one another and to native-born whites, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans. The comparison between immigrant and native groups is a major strength of the book because the authors are able to evaluate the incorporation of second-generation groups relative to their “proximal hosts”– the racial categories in which they would be placed by others. Previous studies lacked such a comparison, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about second-generation progress or decline. The main findings of the book challenge the major theoretical models of immigrant incorporation, including Gans’ second-generation decline and Portes and Zhou’s segmented assimilation. The second-generation in New York City is incorporating into the different spheres of education, work, culture, and politics, but this process is not the result of maintaining ties to the immigrant community nor is it characterized by the adoption of an oppositional culture. Most secondgeneration young adults are exceeding the educational levels of their parents, and they earn as much or more than native groups by thriving in the mainstream economy, not by working in ethnic niches. The Chinese second-generation, for example, is the most upwardly mobile despite their relatively poor origins, and they are the least likely to retain their parents’ language. They are successful in part because they grow up in households with several adults making financial contributions, and they reside in neighborhoods with good schools. Dominicans are doing the least well of the secondgeneration groups. This is not because they have adopted an adversarial stance to the larger mainstream, but because of the lower levels of family resources upon arrival, exposure to structured disadvantage in segregated neighborhoods, and high levels of remittances sent to the Dominican Republic which divert investments from U.S. communities. To understand the relative success of the second generation, Inheriting the City offers a much more expansive discussion of immigrant origins than past studies of immigrant incorporation. The authors discuss the exceptional nature of immigrant parents and their selectivity; the families and neighborhoods within which the second generation grew up; and how parents’ norms, expectations, and strategic repertoires shaped those of their children. They maintain that the sons and daughters of immigrants fare as well as they do because of the second-generation advantage. The second generation is not “torn between two worlds,” as the straight-line assimilation model suggests. Instead, these young adults are able to develop dynamic strategies where they follow the values and norms of their immigrant parents and the beliefs and cultural scripts of their native-born peers. They are able to combine both cultural systems to their advantage as they navigate the transition to adulthood. This second-generation advantage not only aids in educational attainment and occupational mobility, but it also helps to offset the long-term negative effects of delinquent behavior in adolescence and experiences of racial discrimination. While the authors are optimistic about the success of the second generation, they recognize that African Americans and Puerto Ricans are being left behind. Young adults from these groups are doing less well on