Reconceptualizing Context: Origin, Destination and the New Second Generation

• In Event: 549 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Theorizing Migration and Assimilation

Abstract

This paper seeks to return scholarly attention to a core intellectual divide between segmented and conventional (or neo-) assimilation approaches, doing so through a theoretical and empirical reconsideration of contextual effects on second-generation outcomes. We evaluate multiple approaches to measuring receiving country contextual effects, generally considered exogeneous to the integration process. We further extend the concept of migration context to include characteristics of the country of emigration considered endogeneous to second-generation integration. We demonstrate that our proposed receiving country measures better predict second generation educational attainment than prevailing approaches, and that sending country characteristics are also independently associated with second generation outcomes, and thus should not be omitted from studies of the US second generation.

Authors

• Renee Reichl Luthra, University of Essex

• Thomas Georg Soehl, McGill University

• Roger Waldinger, Univ of California-Los Angeles