Study Will Use Greater Los Angeles to Provide In-Depth Multigenerational Insights
on Successes and Struggles of Immigrant Groups

A UC Irvine-led team of social scientists has received a $1.7 million grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to study the economic and social mobility of contemporary immigrants and their offspring in the greater Los Angeles area.
The study, called Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA), will go beyond the scope and size of most current research on first- and second-generation immigrants by gathering information on topics as wide-ranging as income and politics. It will include an exceptionally large and varied generational pool of immigrants from the nation’s premier immigrant metropolis. When completed, the study will provide policymakers with a clearer picture of the long-term impact of immigration on the region, with reverberations for the country. It will also show how young adult children of immigrants are reshaping their adoptive society, even while they themselves are being transformed by their new country.
“The children of today’s immigrants represent the most consequential and lasting legacy of the new mass immigration to the United States,� said Rubén Rumbaut, a lead investigator for the study and co-director of the UCI Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy in the School of Social Sciences.

According to Rumbaut, the last four decades for the United States has been an era of mass migration that rivals, and on some indicators surpasses, the period from the 1880s to the 1920s, when huge flows of Europeans immigrated to the states. Contemporary immigrants and their children today add more than 60 million persons and account for approximately 22 percent of the national total and about half of all Californians.

The grant will fund the first phase of the three-year study, which includes surveying people in five counties: Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura. These counties are home to the largest concentrations of multiple generations of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Filipinos, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, Cambodians and Iranians living outside their respective countries of origin. The project will target young adults, ages 20 to 40, in the “1.5� generation (people who immigrated to the United States as children), the second generation (people born in the United States to immigrant parents), and in the case of Mexican-Americans, the third and subsequent generations.

IIMMLA will collect second-generation data not supplied by the U.S Census and in far greater detail than collected by the Census’ Current Population Survey. Researchers will look at a variety of economic factors including education, occupation, career mobility patterns, labor market status and wages. They will also look at sociocultural and political factors such as language, ethnic and racial identities, intermarriage and family formation, voter registration, party affiliation and voting behavior, and patterns of residential settlement.

Because of the area’s diversity, the study will capture immigrants from all social and economic profiles, including professionals, entrepreneurs, laborers, refugees and undocumented residents. These groups have encountered distinctly different contexts of reception within the same sprawling metropolis. “Assessing the nature and extent of the success of these immigrants’ incorporation in their adopted country is vitally important to informing future policy and public perceptions on immigration,� said Frank Bean, another lead investigator of the study and co-director of the UCI center.

A special focus of the study will be Mexican-Americans. The high concentrations of the Mexican-origin population in greater Los Angeles and the number of generations in the area provide a unique opportunity to determine how settlement patterns and adaptation processes can vary across generations. The bulk of Mexicans arrive in the United States with very little education and until the 1960s, they faced state-sanctioned discrimination in schools, housing and the workplace. More than two generations may be required to assess an immigrant group’s mobility, particularly for those who start the process from further behind.

The first phase of the study to begin in early 2004 will consist of telephone interviews of 4,800 randomly selected respondents and will be conducted by the Field Research Corporation, a public opinion survey research firm. Rumbaut and Bean’s colleagues in the study are Leo Chavez, Jennifer Lee, Susan Brown and Louis DeSipio of UCI and Min Zhou of UCLA.

ABOUT THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION: The Russell Sage Foundation is the principal American foundation devoted exclusively to research in the social sciences. Located in New York City, it is a research center, a funding source and an active member of the nation’s social science community. The foundation has supported previous UCI sociology research projects and published the books of UCI professors.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA: The University of California, Irvine is a top-ranked public university dedicated to the principles of research, scholarship and community. Founded in 1965, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students and about 1,300 faculty members. The third-largest employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $3 billion.