44.013 - The Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture: Rubén G. Rumbaut

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

The “new immigration” has coincided with an era of widening inequality, diminishing opportunity and growing gaps in the educational attainments of children raised in rich and poor families. Immigrants and their children today comprise about a quarter of the U.S. population, transforming its ethnic diversity. Both the most educated and the least educated groups in the U.S. today are immigrants; what happens to their offspring remains a puzzle for educational research. The lecture will trace the story of the education and social mobility of a unique panel of 1.5- and second-generation respondents followed from 1991 (when they were in middle school at mean age 14) to 2015 (in their late 30s). The sample is representative of children of immigrants and refugees from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China and elsewhere who had settled in San Diego at the time of the baseline survey.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Commissioner

Papers

• From Middle School to Middle Adulthood: Education and the Social Mobility of the Immigrant Second Generation in an Age of Inequality - Rubén G. Rumbaut, University of California - Irvine

Discussant

• Min Zhou, University of California - Los Angeles