Introduction from the Special Issue Editor: The Sociology of Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America

In the last two decades, the social sciences have seen a burst of research on immigration. So much so, that a few years ago I found it useful, perhaps even necessary, to give that vast literature an order by drawing a "conceptual map" (Pedraza-Bailey 1990). Recently, when the Social Problems editor, Merry Morash, invited me to be the Guest Editor of this special issue on immigration, race, and ethnicity in America, we advertised the Call for Papers widely and received the rather large response of 48 submissions. From these 48 submissions, working first with Merry Morash, at Michigan State University, and then, when Social Problems itself underwent a migration, with Robert Perrucci, at Purdue University, we distilled the nine articles that constitute this special issue. Certainly the articles we chose to include in this issue show a remarkable array of sociological themes chosen for research-poverty, family life, household structure, occupations, work, fertility, culture, and identity. They are also remarkably varied in the methodology chosen for research-qualitative and quantitative, ecological, participant observation, focus groups, and survey research. And the immigrant, racial, and ethnic groups researched themselves constitute a fine sampler of those that typify the American experience-African Americans, Cambodians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Central Americans, Native Americans. Because of this diversity of approaches, themes, research styles, and groups, I have chosen to draw on the map I sketched, conceptually, a few years ago, to reflect on the ways in which these papers exemplify or depart from the themes I identified then as well as to reflect on what is absent still, providing guidelines for future research. Basic to my perspective on American immigration is that the most commonplace statement is also the truest: with the exception of the Native American, everyone else is an immigrant to American soil. Hence, one way of organizing the research on American immigration consists of the historical time line of the four major waves of immigration to the United States, and the changes that have taken place in the economic foundation of the nation over the course of American history. As Muller and Espenshade (1985) point out, immigration to America can be broadly understood as consisting of four major waves: the first, that which consisted of Northwest Europeans who immigrated up to the mid-19th century; the second, that which consisted of Southern and Eastern Europeans at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th; the third, the movement from the South to the North of black Americans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans precipitated by two World Wars; and the fourth, from 1965 to the present, of immigrants mostly from Latin America and Asia. Nearly all of the articles in this special issue concentrate on contemporary immigrants of the last wave-Latin Americans and Asians. Exceptions include the piece by Aida Hurtado, Pat Gurin, and Timothy Peng, which contrasts native-born Americans and immigrants: Mexican Americans, the result of the only migration flow to the United States that has, from its start in the 19th century, never ceased, and Mexican immigrants, newly arrived to this soil. The articles by Max Pfeffer and Robin Jarrett also focus on black Americans that became concentrated in northern cities as the result of the internal migration of blacks from the