Citizenship Acquisition and Assimilation in the Age of Mass Migration

• In Event: 549 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 11. Citizenship and Belonging

Abstract

Research on the assimilation of yesterday’s immigrants focuses on social and economic assimilation. However, the political dimension of assimilation (i.e. citizenship acquisition) has largely gone unnoticed. This article fills this gap by analyzing the effects of parent’s citizenship status on children’s later success. Specifically, I use a new panel dataset that links children in 1920 to when they were adults in the labor force in 1940. This paper finds that children of citizens betray similar outcomes as children of the native-born, while children of noncitizens report lower years of education and income than children of the native-born and children of citizens, even after accounting for problems of self-selection. While these findings will not surprise scholars of migration, the intergenerational effects of citizenship have never been tested with appropriate data or methods. Citizenship acquisition produced a path dependent effect where children of citizens performed better later in life than noncitizens, which in turn affected later generations.

Author

• Peter Catron, UCLA