Philip Kasinitz

• CEO at The Graduate Center, CUNY

Since the beginning of European settlement, New York’s role as a centre of capitalist accumulation has been tied to international migration. Immigration has accounted for much of its population growth and the local culture is, by US standards, unusually cosmopolitan. Institutions, traditions and political accommodations created by earlier waves of...

In this essay, we review what is known about the role of race and legal status in the incorporation of immigrants in twenty-first-century America. While race and ethnicity matter in the social mobility of immigrants, racialization is not the impassable stumbling block critical race theory predicts. The research paints a remarkably consistent pictur...

The Broadway musical theatre was largely the creation of the children of immigrants. These newcomers to American culture rarely emphasized their ethnic origins and they had little interest in preserving the musical and dramatic forms of their parent’s homelands. Nevertheless, while striving to produce work, they saw as distinctly “American” these a...

Jimenez provides us with a detailed and on the whole optimistic description of how diversity operates in a highly diverse region in California by focusing on the reactions of long-term natives to their increasingly diverse circumstances. The work is notable for its focus on social relations and everyday life, as well as exploring what diversity mea...

In the introduction to this special issue, we consider a number of questions central to the study of super-diversity in urban contexts in Western Europe and the United States. We begin with a discussion of why the super-diversity concept has had more impact on scholarship in Western Europe than the United States, where it has had much less resonanc...

Philip Kasinitz on the brash young insurgents of “Hamilton” - and the American Revolution.

Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s The Asian American Achievement Paradox is a remarkable analysis of the educational upward mobility of Chinese and Vietnamese Americans in Los Angeles. It also provides important insights about the status of contemporary Asian Americans more generally. While critical of the ‘model minority’ thesis, the authors take seriou...

We examine how recent immigration to the United States has affected African Americans. We first review the research on the growing diversity within the black population, driven largely by the presence of black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. As their children and grandchildren come of age, relations between immigrants and African American...

Herbert Gans's 1979 article on ‘symbolic ethnicity’ among later-generation white ethnics in the USA flew in the face of much of what was then conventional wisdom. Today, however, with the lessons of more than three decades of history, his prediction of a steady diminution of ethnic identity and ethnic mobilization among third-plus-generation white...

This chapter explores the role that New York's immigrants, and more importantly their children, have played in fostering cultural innovation in the arts, broadly defined. It focuses primarily on two historical periods. The first section deals with the mid-twentieth century—roughly the period between 1920 and the early 1960s when the children of the...

Using New York City as an example, this essay examines how American cities that have a long and continuous history of absorbing immigrants develop welcoming institutions and policies for current immigrants and their children. Cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and New York have been gateway cities for many previous waves of immigrants and conti...

Controversies about international migration expose the changing structure of and underlying assumptions about societal membership in many nations. The sociology of international migration has emerged as an increasingly important subfield over the past decade in large part because it has tended to move beyond more narrow economic and demographic pro...

Finding a good foothold in the labor market is a crucial test for the second generation in western Europe and the United States. In recent years, as large numbers of the children of immigrants have come of age and embarked on their careers, we can begin to see what place they will occupy as adults. Knowing whether they are finding satisfactory empl...

The overall well-being and integration of second-generation immigrant youth constitute an important topic for researchers and policy makers, one that has generated a great deal of empirical research. While the article by Haller, Portes and Lynch organizes that research into two competing camps–segmented assimilation vs. other theories of assimilati...

This article examines the debate between key theories of immigrant assimilation by exploring the effect of acculturation types - dissonant, consonant, and selective - on socioeconomic outcomes in young adulthood. Drawing on survey data from the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York, we show that while all three types occur, dissonant...

Using census data, we compare the economic status of blacks and whites in two neighbouring countries - the USA and Canada - examining the effects of international migration of people of colour upon systems of racial hierarchy. At first impression, the racial income gap is markedly smaller in Canada than in the USA. However, this is largely due to t...

1. We are two of the three principal investigators of the Second Generation in Metropolitan New York Study, along with John H. Mollenkopf. The study was funded by the Russell Sage, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations, the UJA Federation of Greater New York and the NIH (Grants 5R03HD044598-2 and 990-0173). Parts of this article have previously...

Inheriting the City presents the results of a major research project on the children of immigrants in New York City, focusing on eight groups, five of which are immigrant groups: Dominicans; South Americans from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru; English-speaking West Indians; the Chinese; and Russian Jews. The three comparison groups are native whites, n...

Looking at the achievements of today’s young immigrants and refugees there is an inevitable temptation to make comparisons with immigrants and refugees of the past, particularly the immigrants of the last great wave, who arrived in the United States roughly between 1882 and 1924, and the refugees who arrived immediately before and after the Second...

Given the long history of racism in the United States, observers have been concerned that labeling the children of immigrants as “nonwhite” could lead to their downward assimilation. The success of at least some members of the contemporary second generation points to another possibility. The institutions and strategies developed by previous waves o...

In this essay, I discuss Robin M. Williams Jr.’s unique sociological approach to the study of race and the ways his background and the historical moment in which he wrote contributed to his sociological vision.

The United States is an immigrant nation-nowhere is the truth of this statement more evident than in its major cities. Immigrants and their children comprise nearly three-fifths of New York City's population and even more of Miami and Los Angeles. But the United States is also a nation with entrenched racial divisions that are being complicated by...

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This article provides a descriptive snap shot of Jewish, young adult children of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union, now living in the New York Metropolitan area. By exploring their communities, friendship networks, patterns of language retention and acquisition and the ways in which they construct their Jewish identity, the article seeks...

The rapid pace of immigration over the past four decades has led to one out of every ten people living in the United States being foreign born, with another one in ten having an immigrant parent. These first and second-generation immigrants have settled mainly in the largest central cities of the most populous states. This trend poses the question...

More than half of New Yorkers under the age of 18 are the children of immigrants. This second generation shares with previous waves of immigrant youth the experience of attempting to reconcile their cultural heritage with American society. In Becoming New Yorkers, noted social scientists Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf, and Mary Waters bring toget...

Many observers have noted that immigrants to the United States are highly concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas of a relatively few states. Though immigrants diffused into many places that had previously seen relatively few immigrants during the 1990s, as of the 2000 census, 77 percent of the nation's 31.1 million foreign born residents st...

This chapter explains that, more than for any other immigrant group in greater Miami, the future life chances of the children of Anglophone Caribbean immigrants will probably be shaped by race rather than ethnicity. It explains that although about half the group strongly asserts a nation-of-origin identity, the fact that racial identity is stronger...

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Some communities sustain ethnic diversity by design. Others have it thrust upon them. Over the past one-quarter century, Jackson Heights, a middle-class community in northern Queens, New York, has become one of the Nation's most ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Little in the area's earlier history prepared it to play this role, and few of its long-t...

settled in the U.S. after 1965. While many studies have examined specific immigrant groups or considered the policy implications of the new immigration, fewer have analyzed how the new immigrants are helping to reweave the economic, social, and political fabric of American cities. In particular, research is only now beginning to focus on the crucia...

After three decades of renewed, large-scale immigration to the United States, social scientists are increasingly turning their attention to processes of immigrant incorporation and reexamining the perspectives of social scientists who studied similar processes in the past. This essay reviews the insights and questions raised by the foregoing articl...

"After three decades of renewed, large-scale immigration to the United States, social scientists are increasingly turning their attention to processes of immigrant incorporation and reexamining the perspectives of social scientists who studied similar processes in the past. This essay reviews the insights and questions raised by the foregoing artic...

Much of the recent literature on poverty assumes that the social and spatial isolation of impoverished inner city neighborhoods contributes to the poor job prospects of their residents. In this case study we examine a neighborhood, the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, New York, in which there is a concentration of poor people living in close proximity...

In American cities nostalgic invocations of the past are frequently used to express dissatisfaction with the present. Ethnographers often report these invocations at face value and tend to pay little attention to the context in which they are constructed and the purposes to which they are put. This article analyzes the meanings of the nostalgic nar...