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Research on the social consequences of immigration usually pertains to one of three areas: immigrants' experiences of adaptation and assimilation, mobility of immigrant populations, and relationships between immigrant communities and nonimmigrant groups.

Adaptation and Assimilation

At the beginning of the 20th century, the principal stance on immigration was that the United States was a melting pot and that immigrants needed to assimilate to U.S. culture to be successful. Social campaigns during this period often strove to teach immigrant women how to make their families more "American." When immigrants lived in neighborhoods dominated by coethnics, enclaves were considered a source of social disorganization that undermined modern development.

By the end of the 20th century, the melting pot paradigm gave way to one of multiculturalism. Rather than a site of social disorganization, ethnic enclaves are now viewed as a source of social support for immigrants. They provide the necessary networks to locate employment and housing. Membership in religious organizations with co-ethnics is one of the primary sites of civic participation among immigrants upon arrival. Ethnic enclaves are also important sources for entrepreneurship, the major means for mobility for some new immigrants. Self-employment rates are particularly high for well-educated Korean and Middle Eastern immigrants, although they may not depend on co-ethnics for business, instead acting as economic intermediaries in other ethnic minority neighborhoods. Yet for other members of immigrant groups, the ethnic enclave can become the principal site of exploitation by co-ethnics. This is particularly true for undocumented workers in Chinatowns across the country, who often must depend on informal, unregulated, and low-wage economic opportunities from co-ethnics.

Recent scholarship examines the increasingly important ways that transnational ties shape immigrant experiences in the United States. From this perspective, immigrants maintain social, political, and economic ties with communities of origin. Transnational studies may involve political ties (hometown associations), economic ties (remittances), technology, cultural identity, or family relationships. The transnational perspective shows that in a globalized world, immigrants' adaptation to life in the United States is intricately linked to the lives of those in their countries of origin.

Mobility

Perhaps the best way to gauge the success of immigrants' adaptations to life in the United States is to study the lives of the second generation, that is, the fate of the children of immigrants. Given the great demographic shifts between the primarily European stock of the earlier waves of immigrants and the influx of immigrants of color since the 1960s, mobility among the children of today's immigrants is particularly indicative of the ways race and ethnicity shape the social structure of the United States.

Among the many factors considered in gauging mobility in the second generation are language acquisition, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status. Despite public concern to the contrary, findings suggest that by the second and third generations, proficiency in English is uniform among children of recent immigrants, much as was the case among the earlier waves of European immigrants. Findings based on other indicators of mobility, however, are mixed. On the one hand, when second-generation immigrants are isolated in ethnic enclaves in inner cities, upward mobility is far less likely. In other cases, immigrant youth may maintain their identity as foreigners to distinguish themselves from minority nonimmigrants.

One of the most important research findings on mobility among second-generation immigrants is that experiences typically differ between and within various groups, a process known as "segmented assimilation." For example, comparative studies of second-generation youth in New York and Los Angeles show that children of different genders and racial/ethnic backgrounds may have vastly different experiences.

Relationships Between Immigrants and Nonimmigrants

A third aspect of the consequences of U.S. immigration is interethnic relationships. Scholars from the Chicago School of sociology at the turn of the century mapped the social ecology of the city as a means of depicting the relationships between immigrant and nonimmigrant groups. Until recently, immigrant settlement patterns have not varied greatly. In urban areas like Chicago, most arrived to ethnic enclaves in the city and only those immigrants who were upwardly mobile, or their children or grandchildren, moved to the suburbs following scenarios of white flight. Moreover, Latino/a and Asian populations were once concentrated in California and in the Southwest. Cubans and other Caribbean immigrants settled in Florida and in the Northeast. In some areas, immigrants worked as migrant farm workers. For the most part, though, the study of immigrant incorporation was a study of urban communities.

In recent decades, however, immigrants have dispersed rapidly throughout the continental United States, living in rural, urban, and suburban communities. Immigrants, many of them undocumented, have become a major cause of conflict at many of these new destinations. Their presence is associated with various social problems including concentrations of day laborers, bilingual education, health care for the uninsured, and more. Minutemen militia groups have formed at the southern U.S. border with Mexico to try to keep out immigrants. Some municipal governments have passed local ordinances to prevent immigrants from settling in their towns. The "English only" movement has gained strength. Many fear that these tensions put immigrants' human rights at risk; stories of women and children illegally trafficked into the United States illustrate the ways immigrants may be victimized in the underground economy associated with immigration.

Recently, concerns over terrorism, heightened after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, fueled rising tensions over the roles and rights of immigrants in the United States and increased pressures to regulate and monitor immigrants' activities.

Bibliography:

1) Foner, Nancy. 2000. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

2) Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, ed. 2003. Gender and U.S. Immigration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

3) Kasinitz, Philip, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters, eds. 2004. Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage.

4) Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

5) Light, Ivan and Steven Gold. 2000. Ethnic Economies. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

6) Massey, D., J. Durand, and N. Malone. 2002. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in the Era of Economic Integration. New York: Russell Sage.

7) Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbaut. 1990. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

8) Rumbaut, Ruben G., ed. 2001. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

9) Suarez-Orozco, Carola and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco. 2001. The Children of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

10) Zuniga, Victor and Ruben Hernandez-Leon, eds. 2005. New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States. New York: Russell Sage.

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