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Leapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants' Intergenerational Mobility Across the 20th Century

August 2021

Working Paper Number:

CES-21-20

Abstract

During the early twentieth century, industrial-era European immigrants entered the United States with lower levels of education than the U.S. average. However, empirical research has yielded unclear and inconsistent evidence about the extent and pace of their integration, leaving openings for arguments that contest the narrative that these groups experienced rapid integration and instead assert that educational deficits among lower-status groups persisted across multiple generations. Here, we advance another argument, that European immigrants may have 'leapfrogged' or exceeded U.S.-born non-Hispanic white attainment by the third generation. To assess these ideas, we reconstituted three-generation families by linking individuals across the 1940 Census, years 1973, 1979, 1981-90 of the Current Population Survey, the 2000 Census, and years 2001-2017 of the American Community Survey. Results show that most European immigrant groups not only caught up with U.S.-born whites by the second generation, but surpassed them, and this advantage further increased in the third generation. This research provides a new understanding of the time to integration for 20th century European immigrant groups by showing that they integrated at a faster pace than previously thought, indicative of a process of accelerated upward mobility.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

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ethnicity, ethnic, hispanic, mexican, immigrant, white, immigrated, disadvantaged, population, racial, interracial, race, generation, immigration, ancestry, intergenerational, migrating, migrant

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Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, Current Population Survey, Penn State University, 1940 Census, American Community Survey, Russell Sage Foundation, Protected Identification Key, Census 2000, National Institutes of Health, Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Personally Identifiable Information, Federal Statistical Research Data Center

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