Time use of youths by immigrant and native-born parents: ATUS results.

Classical and contemporary literature on immigration has been driven by questions concerning how and when immigrants assimilate to American society. Understanding the assimilation process is especially important with regard to adolescents, whose trajectory will drive the future incorporation of immigrant groups into U.S. society. The literature presents two competing stories regarding the behaviors and life chances of immigrant youths. The dominant theory, called segmented assimilation, proposes that immigrant youths face a segmented path to assimilation, based on (1) the conditions of their parents’ departure from the home country; (2) their parents’ initial human capital; (3) the “mode of incorporation” that immigrants experience in the host country, including federal, state, and local immigration policies as well as reception by native groups; (4) cultural and economic barriers, including racial discrimination and, in the United States, the increasingly bifurcated labor market; and (5) the family and community resources that are available to confront such barriers.1 Second-generation youths who have parents with high levels of initial human capital, who receive a positive reception by native groups, and who have access to strong co-ethnic communities (where resources developed by earlier immigrants are available) are poised for upward mobility. Many Asian immigrant groups fit this assimilation pathway. By contrast, a substantial portion of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants have parents with low human capital, are received less positively by the host country, have access to weaker co-ethnic communities, and often live in areas mired by poverty, crime, and negative peer influence; their children are at risk of falling behind.2 In contrast to segmented assimilation theory, classical and neoclassical assimilation theory highlights a more positive conclusion: that, for the most part, immigrant youths successfully assimilate to mainstream American society and experience upward mobility compared with their parents, despite different starting points among immigrant groups.3 Adherents of classical assimilation admit that some immigrant groups experience downward mobility, but they emphasize that there may also be advantages to the second generation that stem from membership in an immigrant group.4 A study of second-generation immigrants in New York, for example, found that Russians and Chinese were doing better economically than native-born Whites.5 Adolescence is a time of increased peer influence, and one central question about youths with an immigrant background is the extent to which they adopt behaviors similar to those of their peers in the host country. One measure of this adaptation is how similarly immigrant youths structure their daily lives relative to their native-born peers. This article draws on American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data to shed light on the immigration assimilation process by examining the time use of native-born youths and youths from different immigrant backgrounds in order to discern possible strategies undertaken in the teenage years that might help explain successful assimilation in the adult years.