Villarreal Andrés, Tamborini Christopher R
University of California, Los Angeles.
US Social Security Administration.
Soc Forces. 2024 Jun;102(4):1484-1504. doi: 10.1093/sf/soad128. Epub 2023 Sep 29.
Whether immigrants and their descendants are catching up socioeconomically with the rest of society is a fundamental question in the study of immigrant assimilation. In this paper, we examine the progress that Hispanic immigrant men make catching up with the earnings of later-generation Whites across generations. We rely on data from multiple years of the Current Population Survey linked with individuals' tax earnings. This unique dataset allows us to overcome some important limitations of previous studies that employ a synthetic generation approach in which individuals born approximately one generation earlier are used as proxies for actual parents. Our matching strategy also enables us to identify the exact third generation and evaluate the contribution of ethnic attrition to estimates of intergenerational mobility. Second-generation Hispanic men are found to experience lower mobility than later-generation Whites for most values of parental earnings. However, their lower mobility can be explained by their immigrant parents' lower education levels. In contrast, third-generation Hispanic men experience lower mobility even after accounting for parental education and ethnic attrition. This finding is consistent with a stalling or reversal in the socioeconomic progress of Hispanics beyond the second generation.
移民及其后代在社会经济方面是否正在赶上社会其他群体，这是移民同化研究中的一个基本问题。在本文中，我们考察了西班牙裔移民男性在几代人时间里在收入方面赶上后代白人的进展情况。我们依赖于多年《当前人口调查》的数据，并将其与个人的纳税收入相联系。这个独特的数据集使我们能够克服以往研究的一些重要局限性，以往研究采用合成代际方法，即将大约早一代出生的人用作实际父母的替代。我们的匹配策略还使我们能够确定确切的第三代，并评估族裔损耗对代际流动性估计的影响。研究发现，对于大多数父母收入水平而言，第二代西班牙裔男性的流动性低于后代白人。然而，他们较低的流动性可以用其移民父母较低的教育水平来解释。相比之下，即使在考虑了父母教育程度和族裔损耗之后，第三代西班牙裔男性的流动性仍然较低。这一发现与西班牙裔在第二代之后社会经济进展停滞或逆转的情况相一致。
