Social Origins and the Educational and Occupational Achievements of the 1.5 and Second Generations (Essay‪)‬

SINCE THE 1960s, THE INTEGRATION OF newcomers has been a major topic of research, fuelled by the relatively large numbers of immigrants and shifting origins to North America. However, adult immigrants often arrive with young children or bear children, and the numbers of these immigrant offspring are also large. This sizable presence of immigrant offspring extends the interest in integration across subsequent generations. In North America as well as in Europe, research into the social, psychological, and economic integration of immigrant offspring has become a veritable growth industry, fuelling dissertations, special issues of journals, lectures, and government sponsored symposia. The socioeconomic integration of the immediate descendants of immigrants is central in this burgeoning research. Education and occupation (and income) are part of what social scientist Max Weber termed "life chances," and they are major indicators of social inequality. Socioeconomic inequalities between the foreign born as "newcomers" and groups with longer histories of residence are well documented, but an important derivative question is whether such inequalities persist for immigrant offspring. On the one hand, the decline or eradication of disadvantage for immigrant offspring would suggests that immigrant hardship reflects the immediate costs of migration, including the disruption of careers and social networks, the difficulties of credential recognition, and learning the destination country language(s). On the other hand, continued disadvantage across immigrant generations might signal structural impediments to both the foreign born and the next generation and imply a highly stratified society. Today in Canada and the United States, migrants often are persons of color, raising the specter of a racialized stratification system that will handicap their integration and their children's integration.