This paper serves as an opportunity to pull together some thoughts and questions about modes of incorporation as an explanation for ethnic differences in behavior. Specifically, I ask just what is the status of cultural explanations for ethnic behavior if ethnic behavior is approached from a...

This working paper directs to an historical puzzle, the rapid upward mobility of the east-European Jews who came to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Theoretically important issues are inherent in the explanations for Jewish upward mobility, and in any case, this particular historical...

If a child has a white mother and a black father, then the child is racially...what? How the next Census, to be held in the year 2000, should handle the "multiracial" child will be decided by October. Moreover, every government agency counts races in roughly the same way, and it is the...

We have constructed some preliminary comparisons involving present-day immigrants and natives, as well as their children, based on the 1990 Census. In particular we are interested in whether the prognosis for the second generation is as grim as recent discussions of "second generation decline"...

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) surveys of Jewish opinion are unique both in being conducted annually and in the subject matter covered. This paper assesses the quality of these samples. I first summarize my earlier findings on the implications of limiting a sample to respondents who...

The old ways in which surveys of Jews handled marginal cases no longer make sense, and the number of cases involved is no longer small. I examine in detail the public-use samples of the two recent national surveys of Americans of recent Jewish origin the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS)...

While there have been very few national surveys of American Jews, two that we do have are from the same period, 2000-01. They were conducted by different researchers using different sampling methods. Known as the NJPS and the AJIS, these surveys are now available as public-use datasets, but they...

This paper stresses that the key to concerns about the progress of second-generation Americans is the fate of the Mexican second generation. It compares several indicators of the advances of second-generation Mexicans to those of non-Hispanic, native-born blacks and non-Hispanic, native-born...

Past-present comparisons of second-generation progress are often plagued by vague references to the baseline, the past. This essay seeks to contribute some specificity to the understanding of second generations past for the sake of comparison and as a contribution to historical understanding in...

This working paper concerns the local origins of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States, circa 1900. New evidence is drawn from a large random sample of Russian-Jewish immigrant arrivals in the United States. It provides information on origins not merely by large regions, or even by the...