Democracy in Immigrant America: Changing Demographics and Political Participation

In this relatively short manuscript divided into eight chapters, Ramakrishnan makes an unprecedented effort systematically to study political participation by immigrants and their offspring, across generations and major racial and national-origin groups. The main purpose is to assess the applicability of the traditional and the expanded, immigrant-oriented models of voting participation. The author also provides detailed examination of immigrant numbers and the corresponding electorates at national and state levels, as well as the degrees of racial disparity in voting and other forms of political participation. Whereas the analysis is mostly based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) Voter supplement files, 1994–2000, he diligently compensates for limitations in the CPS data with several attitudinal surveys such as the National Election Studies (for the white sample, 1964–94), the 1999 Post/Kaiser/ Harvard survey on Latinos, the 2000–01 Pilot National Asian American Political Survey, and the 2002 Public Policy Institute of California statewide surveys (for political participation beyond voting). In addition, he uses qualitative results from field interviews with leaders of ethnopolitical organizations and analysis of newspaper coverage in major metropolitan areas of California, Texas, and New York to construct his theory of political threat and ethnic mobilization. Observing that most of the work on immigrant politics focuses only on the immigrant generation, the author highlights the book’s unique capacity to separate out the contribution of the second generation. In fact, much of the discussion also covers findings regarding the third and later generations. And it is these cross-generational comparisons that constitute some of the most interesting findings of the book. What is the relationship between immigration generation and voting participation? The author presents six models of intergenerational differences in participation (Figure 5.2). In addition to straight-line assimilation, possible models include second-generation parity, disadvantage, and advantage, as well as firstgeneration self-selection. Ramakrishnan hypothesizes that immigrant voting participation needs to be understood not only by the traditional factors of age and socioeconomic status, social incorporation, institutional barriers, mobilization contexts, and state political culture, but also by three sets of immigrantspecific factors dealing with time-based factors. These include immigrant generation and length of stay, country-of-origin characteristics such as repressive regime and dual nationality, and indicators of American context such as residential ethnic concentration, multilingual ballots, and English language proficiency. After painstaking analysis, the author concludes that the findings provide some support for traditional time-based theories of immigrant assimilation, while cautioning that such predictions are limited by the persistence of racial and ethnic gaps in participation even among third and later generation respondents. Given the breadth of the analysis, it is difficult to do justice to the author’s efforts by selectively discussing some but not all of the methods and findings. Nevertheless, specifically because of the stated goal and scope of the project, which is presented in a relatively compact volume, methodologically sophisticated readers may be left with a desire to know more—such as how the voting-eligible population is operationalized, why noncitizen immigrants (who constitute up to 40% of Latino and Asian American voting-age populations) are left out of nearly all of the discussion and analysis, why Asians exhibit exceptions to general patterns, and how some of the findings such as the lack of effect of multilingual ballots among the foreign-born, compare to other studies. Because immigrant political incorporation is observed to proceed in a different manner for members of different racial and ethnic groups, one wonders if some of the findings would change if voting participation were analyzed with a selection bias model, simultaneously taking into consideration the separate stages and dynamics of becoming registered and turning out to vote—especially for the two nonwhite, immigrantmajority voting-age populations. Still, as one of its kind, this book is very much worthy of recommendation to anybody interested in contemporary immigrant politics and participation. It certainly provides a massive amount of empirical data to enrich, if not reopen, the debate over the utility of assimilation models for political participation in multicultural America.