Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age

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Behind the contentious politics of immigration lies the question of how well new immigrants are becoming part of American society. To address this question, Inheriting the City draws on the results of a ground-breaking study of young adults of immigrant parents in metropolitan New York to provide a comprehensive look at their social, economic, cultural, and political lives.

Inheriting the City examines five immigrant groups to disentangle the complicated question of how they are faring relative to native-born groups, and how achievement differs between and within these groups. While some experts worry that these young adults would not do as well as previous waves of immigrants due to lack of high-paying manufacturing jobs, poor public schools, and an entrenched racial divide, Inheriting the City finds that the second generation is rapidly moving into the mainstream–speaking English, working in jobs that resemble those held by native New Yorkers their age, and creatively combining their ethnic cultures and norms with American ones. Far from descending into an urban underclass, the children of immigrants are using immigrant advantages to avoid some of the obstacles that native minority groups cannot.

Author Bio

Presented By:

John Mollenkopf is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology and Director of the Center for Urban Research at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has authored or edited fifteen books on urban politics and policy and the role of race, ethnicity, and immigration in urban America, most recently Bringing Outsiders In: Transatlantic Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation (co-edited with Jennifer Hochschild, forthcoming from Cornell University Press). With Philip Kasinitz, Mary Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway, he recently completed Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (Harvard University Press, 2008), a study of educational attainment, labor market outcomes, and political and civic involvement among second generation immigrant and native minority young adults in metropolitan New York. His current research focuses on the impact of immigration on racial and ethnic empowerment in New York and Los Angeles and the comparative politics of immigrant political incorporation.

Mollenkopf serves on the selection committees for the “Worlds in Motion” PhD Fellowship of the Zeit Foundation in Hamburg, Germany and the “New Americans Fellowship” of the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation. He is also a consultant to a study of the reasons for and barriers to naturalization being conducted by the Citizenship and Immigration Services division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Services. He received his PhD from Harvard and BA from Carleton College.


Presented By:

Philip Kasinitz is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College of the City University of New York. He currently chairs the Ph.D. Program in Sociology at the Graduate Center and is a former President of the Eastern Sociological Society. Prior to coming to CUNY he taught at Williams College and was a visiting professor at Princeton. His book Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Cornell University Press, 1992) won the Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the ASA. He is the editor of Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Time (New York University Press, 1995), co-editor (with Josh DeWind and Charles Hirschman) of Handbook on International Migration (Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), and (with Mollenkopf and Waters) Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of The New Second Generation (Russell AgeFoundation 2004), which received an honorable mention for the 2005 Robert Park Award. His most recent book, Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (with Waters, Mollenkopf and Jennifer Holdaway) was published by the Harvard University Press in April 2008. He has been a member of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on International Migration and the historical advisory board of the new museum of American Immigration on Ellis Island. Professor Kasinitz received his B.A. from Boston University on 1979 and his Ph.D. from the Sociology Department of New York University in 1987.