Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America ‐ by Lingxin Hao

Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America. Lingxin Hao. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 2007. 316 pp. ISBN 0871543389. $47.50 (cloth). Immigration streams continue to shape and reshape America. The growing immigrant share of the U.S. population generates considerable public discourse about the economic incorporation of immigrants into U.S. society. Much of the research on immigrants' economic wellbeing shows a disproportionate concentration of immigrants near the bottom of American society, but little attention focuses on the other end of the spectrum - wealth accumulation. Wealth is an important indicator of financial well-being. It is a measure of income, plus individuals' financial behaviors (such as propensities to save, consumption patterns, cultural values, investment strategies, and lifestyles) as well as contextual structures that either facilitate or block immigrants' opportunities for upward mobility. In Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America, Lingxin Hao extensively documents how racial and ethnic stratification constrains immigrants' wealth accumulation. She also persuasively demonstrates how nativity further differentiates the U.S. population and may, over time, contribute to a transformation of the stratification system. Hao integrates both wealth and immigration theory into a combined framework to explain immigrant wealth accumulation. She builds on segmented assimilation theory by incorporating nativity into a two-tiered sorting structure. In this dominance-differentiation perspective, race/ethnicity functions as the primary sorting mechanism and nativity serves as a secondary factor that creates further variation within racial/ethnic groups. The book underlies the importance of immigrants' race/ethnicity for wealth accumulation - similar contextual forces will cause immigrants' wealth accumulation to mirror that of their U.S.-born racial/ethnic counterparts. Yet immigrants' human and social capital as well as cultural values will uniquely contribute to their financial well-being. Hao argues that greater within racial/ethnic group variation (country lines) will help dissolve boundaries between racial/ethnic groups (color lines). As the number of Latino and Asian immigrants continues to grow, Hao contends that stratification between Whites, Latinos, and Asians will lessen as a result of increasing racial/ethnic heterogeneity. Hao pools data from the 1985-2003 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to create a sample of over 216,000 native-born and almost 23,000 foreign-born respondents. Hao takes advantage of the extensive financial information available in the SIPP data, focusing on net worth and wealth holding status (sufficient, insufficient, asset-poor, net-debtor, paycheck-to-paycheck). Analytically, she applies Tobit techniques to examine positive wealth and account for the censoring of zero or negative wealth values. Hao teases out the racial/ethnic and nativity dimensions by comparing the wealth accumulation of immigrant Latinos, Blacks, and Asians with both U.S.-born Whites and their U.S.-born racial/ethnic counterparts. The book provides a much needed overview of immigrants' financial well-being. Chapter 3 focuses on patterns of wealth attainment by race/ethnicity, education, and nativity. Results support the dominance-differentiation perspective by confirming well-established inequalities by race/ethnicity and revealing similar levels of wealth by nativity for each racial/ethnic group. Indeed, nativity is not a primary stratification factor, but contributes to differences in wealth attainment within racial/ethnic groups. Chapters 4-6 explore Latino, Black, and Asian immigrants in depth. Each chapter begins by discussing country of origin and demographic differences within these immigration streams. Hao then uses multiple wealth measures to explore the financial well-being of each racial/ethnic group relative to both native-born Whites and their same-race/co-ethnic peers. …