From parent to child? Transmission of educational attainment within immigrant families: methodological considerations.

One in five U.S. residents under the age of 18 has at least one foreign-born parent. Given the large proportion of immigrants with very low levels of schooling, the strength of the intergenerational transmission of education between immigrant parent and child has important repercussions for the future of social stratification in the United States. We find that the educational transmission process between parent and child is much weaker in immigrant families than in native families and, among immigrants, differs significantly across national origins. We demonstrate how this variation causes a substantial overestimation of the importance of parental education in immigrant families in studies that use aggregate data. We also show that the common practice of "controlling" for family human capital using parental years of schooling is problematic when comparing families from different origin countries and especially when comparing native and immigrant families. We link these findings to analytical and empirical distinctions between group- and individual-level processes in intergenerational transmission

Challenges When Identifying Migration from Geo-Located Twitter Data

Given the challenges in collecting up-to-date, comparable data on migrant populations the potential of digital trace data to study migration and migrants has sparked considerable interest among researchers and policy makers. In this paper we assess the reliability of one such data source that is heavily used within the research community: geolocated tweets. We assess strategies used in previous work to identify migrants based on their geolocation histories. We apply these approaches to infer the travel history of a set of Twitter users who regularly posted geolocated tweets between July 2012 and June 2015. In a second step we hand-code the entire tweet histories of a subset of the accounts identified as migrants by these methods. Upon close inspection very few of the accounts that are classified as migrants appear to be migrants in any conventional sense or international students. Rather we find these approaches identify other highly mobile populations such as frequent business or leisure travellers, or people who might best be described as “transnationals”. For demographic research that draws on this kind of data to generate estimates of migration flows this high mis-classification rate implies that findings are likely sensitive to the adjustment model used. For most research trying to use these data to study migrant populations, the data will be of limited utility. We suspect that increasing the correct classification rate substantially will not be easy and may introduce other biases

Reconceptualizing Context: A Multilevel Model of the Context of Reception and Second-Generation Educational Attainment

This paper seeks to return scholarly attention to a core intellectual divide between segmented and conventional (or neo-)assimilation approaches, doing so through a theoretical and empirical reconsideration of contextual effects on second-generation outcomes. We evaluate multiple approaches to measuring receiving country contextual effects and measuring their impact on the educational attainment of the children of immigrants. We demonstrate that our proposed measures better predict second-generation educational attainment than prevailing approaches, enabling a multilevel modeling strategy that accounts for the structure of immigrant families nested within different receiving contexts

Social politics: The importance of the family for naturalization decisions of the 1.5 generation

How do migrants make the decision to naturalize? The majority of the literature focuses on the economic costs and benefit calculus of individual migrants, usually those who arrived as adults. Yet a large and growing population of foreign-born individuals arrived as children. Despite spending their formative years in the United States, many remain foreign nationals into adulthood. Based on results from a discrete-time event history model of naturalization of 1.5 generation respondents in California we argue that the cost-benefit tradeoffs underlying most accounts of naturalization decisions will apply in different ways to this population. We show that especially for this population the decision to naturalize cannot be conceptualized as an individual choice but is strongly embedded within the family and co-ethnic context which, in turn, introduces symbolic concerns and country of origin related factors into the decision

Status Update and Interim Results from the Asymptomatic Carotid Surgery Trial-2 (ACST-2)

Objectives: ACST-2 is currently the largest trial ever conducted to compare carotid artery stenting (CAS) with carotid endarterectomy (CEA) in patients with severe asymptomatic carotid stenosis requiring revascularization. Methods: Patients are entered into ACST-2 when revascularization is felt to be clearly indicated, when CEA and CAS are both possible, but where there is substantial uncertainty as to which is most appropriate. Trial surgeons and interventionalists are expected to use their usual techniques and CE-approved devices. We report baseline characteristics and blinded combined interim results for 30-day mortality and major morbidity for 986 patients in the ongoing trial up to September 2012. Results: A total of 986 patients (687 men, 299 women), mean age 68.7 years (SD ± 8.1) were randomized equally to CEA or CAS. Most (96%) had ipsilateral stenosis of 70-99% (median 80%) with contralateral stenoses of 50-99% in 30% and contralateral occlusion in 8%. Patients were on appropriate medical treatment. For 691 patients undergoing intervention with at least 1-month follow-up and Rankin scoring at 6 months for any stroke, the overall serious cardiovascular event rate of periprocedural (within 30 days) disabling stroke, fatal myocardial infarction, and death at 30 days was 1.0%. Conclusions: Early ACST-2 results suggest contemporary carotid intervention for asymptomatic stenosis has a low risk of serious morbidity and mortality, on par with other recent trials. The trial continues to recruit, to monitor periprocedural events and all types of stroke, aiming to randomize up to 5,000 patients to determine any differential outcomes between interventions. Clinical trial: ISRCTN21144362. © 2013 European Society for Vascular Surgery. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The Ambiguities of Political Opportunity: Political claims making of Russian-Jewish Immigrants in New York City

How, and as what are immigrant minorities incorporated into the political process? A set of prominent approaches focus on the political opportunity structure immigrants encounter. Though promising in many aspects, political opportunity approaches fail to consider the internal heterogeneity of both immigrant populations and opportunity structures. This is partly a result of taking ethnic groups rather than political entrepreneurs as the unit of analysis and of not disaggregating the political context properly. This paper shows how Russian-Jewish immigrant political entrepreneurs in New York City used very di�fferent strategies of ethnic mobilization, each emphasizing a di�fferent ethnic cleavage: one was making claims in the name of Russians, the other downplaying the Russianness and highlighting the Jewish identity dimension. Both strategies had good chances at success thus illustrating that political opportunity structures may encourage di�fferent claims making strategies at the same time. Ethno-political entrepreneurs navigate complex and di�fferentiated political landscapes that are ex-ante only partially transparent

Renee Reichl Luthra Who assimilates? Statistical artefacts and intergenerational mobility in immigrant families Who assimilates? Statistical artefacts and intergenerational mobility in immigrant families

One in five US residents under the age of 18 has at least one foreign-born parent. Although the distribution of immigrants in terms of human capital is bimodal -the foreign born have disproportional concentrations at the highest and lowest skill levels -it is especially the large group of immigrants with little formal education that raises concerns about the impact of immigration on social inequality. Whether their educational disadvantage will persist and shape stratification in the over the long run is determined by the degree of intergenerational Who assimilates? Statistical artefacts and intergenerational mobility in immigrant families Renee Luthra ISER, University of Essex Thomas Soehl Dept of Sociology, McGill University Abstract: This paper assesses estimates of immigrant intergenerational mobility that are based on aggregate data sources. We show that aggregation bias strongly inflates estimates of the relationship between immigrants' educational attainment and the educational attainment of their children. Compared to natives, the educational transmission process between parent and child is much weaker in immigrant families. A number of group-level processes, such as societal discrimination, ethnic segregation, or ethnic networks, may render group characteristics more important predictors of second generation educational attainment than parental education

Modes of Difference and Connection: Language, Education and Religion in Migrant Families

This dissertation examines how home country language and religion are transmitted in migrant families. In a set of four essays I examine how these transmission processes are tied to processes of assimilation/acculturation, the maintenance of home-country ties and perceptions of discrimination of the children of immigrants in schools. The starting point of my analysis is that both language and religion, in important and similar ways, function as modes of connection in migrant families with family members and friends who remain in the place of origin. At the same time vis-�-vis in the destination country, language and religion are two key cultural practices that can categorically differentiate immigrants and their children from the national majority populations. Drawing on a recently collected nationally representative survey of immigrants and the children of immigrants in France, the Trajectories and Origins (TeO) project, the first two chapters of this dissertation focus on the processes of intergenerational transmission of language and religion. The third chapter, uses data about the schooling experiences of the second-generation in the TeO to develop and test a set of hypotheses about the incentive structures that migrant parents face when deciding to transmit different cultural practices to their destination-country-born children. A final essay examines how religion and language factor in the continuity of social attitudes in immigrants and their children by analyzing attitudes of immigrant and second-generation respondents from 83 countries around the world living in 23 European countries