WCPC Inaugural Conference

WCPC Inaugural Conference - "Local Contexts and the Prospects for the Second Generation"
October 19-20, 2006

Public Keynote Address by Alejandro Portes
Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Thursday, October 19, 5:30 p.m.
Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall

Conference poster [ PDF ]

The West Coast Poverty Center’s inaugural research conference, "Local Contexts and the Prospects for the Second Generation", was held at the University of Washington on October 19 and 20. The conference was one of the first multi-disciplinary efforts to address issues of local context in the economic and social progress of second-generation immigrants.

The conference aimed to foster a critical dialog around such important issues as:

• The processes through which different immigrant and second generation groups selectively migrate and build communities within certain geographic locations, both metropolitan and non-metropolitan.
• The responsiveness of the second generation to economic opportunities in locations outside areas of traditional immigrant settlement and the effect of immigrant and second generation enclaving, or spatial concentration, at neighborhood, city, and state scales on social, economic, and political outcomes.
• Aspects of local context that are most critical to the inter-generation progression process, e.g. the role of the social safety net provided by government programs, the health care system, the structure and resources within the local educational system, and community, civic and religious organizations.
• Methodological issues embedded in the array of plausible interactions between place and group that influence the prospects for the second generation.
• The ways in which the current state of assimilation theory is adequate to the task of accommodating the interaction of group, period and place effects.

The conference was organized by Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography, Gunnar Almgren, Associate Professor of Social Work, Charles Hirschman, Boeing International Professor, Department of Sociology and Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, and Marcia K. Meyers, Professor of Social Work and Public Affairs.

Conference participants

• Alejandro Portes, Department of Sociology, Princeton University; Director, Center for Migration and Development
  
  
• Charles Hirschman, Boeing International Professor, Department of Sociology and Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, Keynote Discussant
  
  
• John Logan, Professor, Sociology, Brown University; Director of the Initiative in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, Panelist
  
  
• Paul Jargowsky, Associate Professor of Political Economy, University of Texas at Dallas; Director, Brunton Center for Development Studies, Panelist
  
  
• Min Zhou, Professor, Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles; Chair, Department of Asian American Studies
  
  
• Jamie Goodwin-White, Lecturer, Social Statistics, University of Southampton, Panelist
  
  
• John Mollenkopf, Professor, Political Science and Sociology, City University of New York; Director, Center for Urban Research
  
  
• Peggy Levitt, Associate Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Wellesley College, Research Fellow, Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations; Research Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University; Co-director, Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard
  
  
• Amon Emeka, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Southern California
  
  

Alejandro Portes is a premier sociologist who has shaped the study of immigration and urbanization for 30 years. He is Chair of the Department of Sociology at Princeton University as well as co-founder and director of Princeton’s Center for Migration and Development. In 1998, Portes became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. From 1998 to 1999, Portes served as president of the American Sociological Association. He has authored and edited numerous books and has published articles on a range of policy issues, including immigrant assimilation, Latin American politics, and United States/Cuba relations.
Keynote Topic: The History and Theory of Second Generation Incorporation

Charles Hirschman is Boeing International Professor in the Department of Sociology and Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. He is past president of the Population Association of America (2005) and is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a prolific scholar with interests in demography, migration, immigration and ethnicity, and Southeast Asia. He has authored several influential books, including The Handbook of International Migration (1999), and more than one hundred journal articles and book chapters. Recent publications include "Immigration and the American Century" Demography, 2005) and "The Role of Religion in the Origins and Adaptation of Immigrant Groups in the United States" (International Migration Review, 2004). He currently directs the University of Washington-Beyond High School project, a longitudinal study of educational attainment and the early life course of young adults. Hirschman is also a Faculty Affiliate at the West Coast Poverty Center.
Keynote Discussant

John Logan is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Initiative in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences at Brown University. Dr. Logan is an expert on issues of neighborhood change and individual mobility in US cities and has authored and edited a number of publications on the topic including “Immigrant Groups in the Suburbs: A Re-examination of Suburbanization and Spatial Assimilation (American Sociological Review 1999); “Immigrant Enclaves and Ethnic Communities in New York and Los Angeles (American Sociological Review 2002); “Segregation of Minorities in the Metropolis: Two Decades of Change (Demography 2000); and Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (University of California 1988).
Proposed Topic: Spatial Assimilation

Dr. Logan presented on the importance of the second generation in the political incorporation of immigrants, using evidence on naturalization and electoral participation of the major immigrant groups in the U.S. in the period 1996-2004.

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Paul Jargowsky is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas and Director of the Brunton Center for Development Studies. Dr. Jargowsky studies the geographic concentration of poverty, residential segregation by race and class, and educational attainment and economic mobility. He is author of the forthcoming studies Suburbs and Slums: The Evolution of Metropolitan America (Century Foundation) and Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios and the American City (Russell Sage, 1997).
Proposed Topic: Spatial Concentration and Immigrant Poverty

Dr. Jargowsky presented on the concentration of poverty among Hispanic immigrants and the second generation, and examined the role it plays, positive or negative, in the assimilation process.

To view Dr. Jargowsky's submitted paper, click here.

Min Zhou is Professor of Sociology and the Founding Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Zhou is an expert in issues of immigrant adaptation, Asian American immigrant experiences, and the “new second generation” in the US, including issues of intergenerational social mobility. She is author of Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (Temple University Press, 1992), co-author of Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (Russell Sage, 1998), and co-editor of Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (Routledge, 2004). Zhou is also on the External Advisory Board of the West Coast Poverty Center.
Proposed Topic: Comparative Labor Market Experiences of Immigrants

Dr. Zhou drew on an ethnographic study of immigrants in inner city Los Angeles to examine local social structures and how they shape patterned interpersonal relations that in turn affect social capital formation and its access.

For more information on Dr.Zhou's presented paper, please contact her directly.

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Jamie Goodwin-White is currently a Lecturer in Social Statistics at the University of Southampton. She completed her PhD in Geography at the University of Washington in Seattle in August of 005. Her research interests involve immigration, internal migration and inequality, with a specific focus on the ways in which geography shapes outcomes for the adult children of immigrants in the US. Her doctoral dissertation examined the effects of structures of wage inequality on the prospects for the economic incorporation of racialized immigrant, 2nd generation, and native-born groups in different local labor markets, as well as the relationships between immigrant concentration/clustering, relative wages of immigrants and natives, and inter- metropolitan migration of the foreign-stock population.

Dr. Goodwin-White presented on the ways in which local labor market context affect immigrant and second generation economic position.

John Mollenkopf is Professor of Political Science and Sociology, City University of New York Graduate Center and Director of the Center for Urban Research. Dr. Mollenkopf is a leading scholar in urban studies. He has authored or edited six books on urban politics, urban policy and New York City, including A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics (Princeton 1994). His current research focuses on the immigrant second generation and native minority young adults in the New York metropolitan area. He is co-editing a book on historical and contemporary perspectives on the political incorporation of immigrants, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council Committee on International Migration.
Proposed Topic: Race, Ethnicity and Immigrant Identity

Dr. Mollenkopf's presentation examined the ways in which immigrant socio-political incorporation depends on local context.

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Peggy Levitt is Associate Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Wellesley College, a Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and the Weatherhead Center for Affairs at Harvard University, and Co-director of the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard. Dr. Levitt is an influential scholar on immigration and the negotiation of transnational identity, and one of the few to study immigrants and their children in both their home and host countries. Her recent book, The Transnational Villagers (University of California Press, 2001) and co-edited volume, The Changing Face of Home (Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), examine the consequences of immigration both for those who leave and those who stay behind. Her most recent book, God Needs No Passport: How Immigration is Changing the Religious Landscape, will be published in 2007.
Proposed Topic: Social and Spiritual Capital in Immigrant Communities

Dr. Levitt's paper examines how religion simultaneously shapes processes of immigrant incorporation and enduring homeland involvements for transnational immigrants, using data from four Boston-area immigrant religious communities.

To view Dr. Levitt's submitted paper, click here.

Amon Emeka is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Amon Emeka received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington in 2004. Prior to attaining his doctorate degree, he received an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin and taught sociology and ethnic studies at a community college for seven years. His dissertation, “New Blacks, New Whites and the New Day,” examines patterns of intergenerational mobility between Black and White immigrants who arrived after 1965 and their American-born children who have recently begun to reach adulthood. His research agenda continues to revolve around the impact of race on the life chances of immigrants and their progeny, and he relies primarily on US census data and quantitative techniques to answer the very important questions he and other social scientists are grappling with.

Dr. Emeka addressed the ways in race and immigration interact to influence socioeconomic outcomes for black immigrants and their descendants from the Caribbean.

To view Dr. Emeka's submitted paper, click here.

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