Tag Archives | European Immigrants

Leapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants' Intergenerational Mobility across the Twentieth Century

Kendal Lowrey, Jennifer Van Hook, James D. Bachmeier, Thomas B. Foster

Sociological Science December 17, 2021
10.15195/v8.a23


During the early twentieth century, industrial-era European immigrants entered the United States with lower levels of education than the U.S. average. However, empirical research has yielded unclear and inconsistent evidence about the extent and pace of their integration, leaving openings for arguments that contest the narrative that these groups experienced rapid integration and instead assert that educational deficits among lower-status groups persisted across multiple generations. Here, we advance another argument, that European immigrants may have “leapfrogged” or exceeded U.S.-born non-Hispanic white attainment by the third generation. To assess these ideas, we reconstituted three-generation families by linking individuals across the 1940 census; years 1973, 1979, and 1981 to 1990 of the Current Population Survey; the 2000 census; and years 2001 to 2017 of the American Community Survey. Results show that most European immigrant groups not only caught up with U.S.-born whites by the second generation but surpassed them, and this advantage further increased in the third generation. This research provides a new understanding of the time to integration for twentieth-century European immigrant groups by showing that they integrated at a faster pace than previously thought, indicative of a process of accelerated upward mobility.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kendal Lowrey: Department of Sociology and Criminology, The Pennsylvania State University
E-mail: kll289@psu.edu

Jennifer Van Hook: Department of Sociology and Criminology, The Pennsylvania State University
E-mail: jxv21@psu.edu

James D. Bachmeier: Department of Sociology, Temple University
E-mail: james.bachmeier@temple.edu

Thomas B. Foster: Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau
E-mail: thomas.b.foster@census.gov

Acknowledgments: We acknowledge assistance provided by the Russell Sage Foundation; the U.S. Census Bureau; the Population Research Institute at Penn State University, which is supported by an infrastructure grant by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD041025); and the National Institutes of Health under the Social Environments and Population Health Training Program (T-32HD007514), as well as Peter Catron for his helpful comments on our paper at the 2021 Population Association of America research conference and the 2021 Data-Intensive Research Conference.

Disclaimer: Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau’s Disclosure Review Board has reviewed this data product for unauthorized disclosure of confidential information and have approved the disclosure avoidance practices applied to this release. DRB Approval Number: CBDRB-FY21-039.

  • Citation: Lowrey, Kendal, Jennifer Van Hook, James D. Bachmeier, and Thomas B. Foster. 2021. “Leapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants’ Intergenerational Mobility across the Twentieth Century.” Sociological Science 8: 480-512.
  • Received: October 22, 2021
  • Accepted: November 14, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Richard Breen
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a23


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