The second generation

Haya Stier and Siew-Ean Khoo The children of migrants are a particularly intriguing group. Whether one or both parents were born overseas, the children are intimately exposed to an immigrant inheritance, in culture, in ethnicity and in language. At the same time, these children grow up, are educated and work in the country of their birth, not that of their parent or parents. How does this exposure to two cultures affect their lives? What difference does it make to their education, their jobs, their income, whom they marry and their own children? To what extent do they adopt the habits of the new country? THE SECOND GENERATION IN OTHER COUNTRIES There has been much research interest in the US, as a nation of immigrants, in the second generation and their incorporation into American society. Sociologists are particularly interested in the economic and social adaptation of the ʼnew’ second generation, the children of immigrants who arrived after the change in migration policy in 1965 which led to an increase in the migration of non-Europeans, notably Latin Americans and Asians, to the US. Since these children are of non-European and nonEnglish-speaking background, there is particular interest in their educational and labour market outcomes and how they compare with their third or more generation American peers on these characteristics. Research by Portes and Zhou (1993) on the children of immigrants in the US has led them to introduce the concept of ‘segmented assimilation’ to describe the diverse outcomes they observed among the second….