The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (91 page)

network (Reitzes et al., 1991; Hayward et al., 1996). Many older people retire

by choice when they think they are ready to, both socially and economically, and these retirees tend to be very satisfied with their retirements. But others leave the labor force due to job loss or their own ± or a family member's ± poor health and disability. Those who are pushed or pulled out, related to either job loss or

health, tend to struggle more and are generally less satisfied with their retirement.

Early withdrawal from the labor force has been a dominant trend over the past

two decades, but not all early withdrawal has been by choice. Middle-aged

workers leave the labor force in their fifties due tò`downsizing'' layoffs and

the difficulty of finding work, particularly well-paying work, above age 50. One study of those laid off from blue-collar manufacturing jobs revealed that only 40

percent of those 55 and over found new jobs, compared with 70 percent of

individuals in their twenties (Barlett and Steele, 1992). By the 1990s, downsizing hit white-collar workers as well. Of the 4.5 million workers who lost jobs in the early 1990s recession, two-thirds were white-collar workers with college degrees (Gordon, 1996). White-collar downsizing has also proven to be problematic for

older workers. While 80 percent of displaced younger workers found new jobs,

only one-half of those aged 55±64 were as fortunate (Applebaum and Gregory,

1990). Many of these workers end up in ``bridge'' jobs, which span the time

between one's original full-time career and retirement (Quinn and Kozy, 1996).

Whether part-time or full-time, they tend to be low paid and a step down from

previous employment (Couch, 1998).

Poor health often impinges on economic security by literally forcing some

older people out of the labor force. African American men are significantly more likely than white men to leave the labor force early due to their chronic health, in part because they are two and a half times more likely to suffer from hypertension, circulatory problems, diabetes, and nervous disorders (Hayward et al.,

1996). Additionally, they are more likely to work in blue-collar jobs, and these 388

M. Harrington Meyer and P. Herd

accompany more health problems than white-collar jobs (Daly and Bound,

1996). For women, health impacts labor force participation in two key ways.

First, though women live longer than men, they have more chronic illnesses that

interfere with their ability to work (George, 1996). Second, women are more

likely to leave the labor force to care for a frail parent, spouse, or other family member (Stoller, 1994). Leaving the labor force by necessity, rather than by

choice, causes women to be less satisfied with retirement (Mathews and Brown,

1987; Shaw, 1996). Sometimes these two factors intersect with unfortunate

results: some older women with chronic conditions would like to retire but are

unable to because previous caregiving responsibilities have left them financially insecure.

Clearly, concerns about financial security in old age revolve predominantly

around women, particularly women of color. Most women who are old today

worked sporadically throughout their life course. They generally have had

extended periods of time out of the labor force raising children and caring for

elderly parents (Hooyman and Gonyea, 1995). Lack of experience, training, and

connections, combined with sexist, racist, and ageist hiring practices, means that women in the labor force in middle age face a difficult path. Thè`bridge jobs,''

which are perceived as a step down for men, may be the only career option

available for many older women (Shaw, 1996). For women in younger genera-

tions, however, financial prospects in old age may be better. Overall labor force participation rates for women increased from 38 percent in 1960 to close to 60

percent in 1997, and their educational attainment since 1985 has been higher

than men's (Castro, 1998). Our optimism is guarded, however, because recent

projections for 2020 estimate that there will be no decline in poverty rates

among women, largely due to increasing numbers of never married and divorced

women and women's continued unpaid caregiving, both within and outside of

marriage (Smeeding et al., 1999). The key issue is that families, particularly

women, need to have more options in place to enable them to balance work and

family responsibilities (Harrington Meyer, 2000).

Conclusions

The coming years are going to bring dramatic changes and challenges to the USA

in terms of how we care for our aging population. From health care to economic

policy, change will be an absolute necessity to accommodate the combination of

increased longevity and the aging babyboomers. As Maggie Kuhn, founder of the

Gray Panthers, remarked, `Ìnstead of avoiding all the world's problems or

becoming overwhelmed by them, I like to see them as an invitation'' (Kuhn,

1991). The challenge, as we see it, is to ameliorate inequities in the present

structure of government programs for the elderly and to mitigate the cumulative

disadvantages produced by racism, sexism, and poverty throughout the life

course. How do you think we should respond to the invitation?

27

Immigration and Ethnicity: the

United States at the Dawn of the

Twenty-first Century

RubeÂn G. Rumbaut

American ethnic groups have been forged, along with peculiarly American

ideologies and classifications of ``race,'' in the tumultuous course of the United States' national expansion. In myriad ways, their unequal modes of incorporation reflect fundamentally different starting points, contexts of reception, and attendant definitions of the situation. The development of social, political, and economic inequalities based on race and ethnicity has been not only a central

theme but a central dilemma of the country's history, shaped over many genera-

tions by the European conquest of indigenous peoples and by massive waves of

both voluntary and involuntary migration from all over the world. Indeed,

immigration as well as enslavement, annexation, and conquest have been the

originating processes by which American ethnicities have been formed and

through which, over time, the United States has been transformed into what is

arguably the world's most ethnically diverse society. The national self-image

created by that history reflects the experience of a country that has time and

again been revitalized and renewed by immigration. But chimerical conceptions

of ``race'' also derive from those fateful encounters, those social relations formed between strangers: phenotypical and cultural differences came to be associated

with steep gradients of privilege and power, and became hardened into invidious, indelible, outward markers of social status and identity in caste and class

hierarchies. It took a bloody civil war in one century, and a civil rights revolution in the next, to end slavery and the legal underpinnings of racial exclusion, but not their bitter legacy.

Already in The Souls of Black Folk, written soon after Africa was partitioned

by European colonial powers and Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and

the Hawaiian islands were seized by the United States in the wake of the

390

RubeÂn G. Rumbaut

Spanish-American-Cuban War, W. E. B. Du Bois had prophesied famously that

``the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line ± the

relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea'' (Du Bois, 1903, p. 10). To be sure, much has changed since then in international and intergroup relations, mainly in the years after the Second World War, including the decolonization of Africa and Asia and the

English-speaking Caribbean, and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the United

States. But much has not, so that another pre-eminent African American scholar,

John Hope Franklin, could ``venture to state categorically that the problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of the color line'' (Franklin, 1993, p. 5).

That ``color line'' has historically defined the boundary between two broad

modes of ethnic incorporation into American social life: one epitomized by

`àssimilation,'' the master process that purports to explain how it came to be

that tens of millions of European immigrants from heterogeneous national and

cultural origins and their descendants were absorbed into the mainstream of the

society, their identities eventually becoming largely symbolic and fading into à`twilight of ethnicity'' (Nahirny and Fishman, 1965; Gans, 1979; Alba 1985; Waters, 1990; but see also Glazer and Moynihan, 1963); and another largely

resistant to such absorption into the majority regardless of level of acculturation or socioeconomic attainment, characterized instead by persistently high social

distances in intergroup relations, discrimination, and segregation of racialized minorities (see Massey and Denton, 1993; Pedraza and Rumbaut, 1996). Thus,

for example, in The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (1945), the most

authoritative statement of the matter near mid-century, Warner and Srole

described the straight-linè`progressive advance'' of eight immigrant groups in

the major status hierarchies of Yankee City (Newburyport, Massachusetts),

explicitly linking upward social mobility to assimilation, which they saw as

determined largely by the degree of ethnocultural (religion and language) and

above all racial difference from the dominant group. Whilè`racial groups'' were

subordinated through caste restrictions on residential, occupational, associa-

tional, and marital choice, the clash of `èthnic groups'' with the dominant

institutions of thè`host society'' was not much of a contest, particularly

among the young. The polity, the industrial economy, the public school, popular

culture, and the American family system all undercut and absorbed ethnicity in

various ways, so that even when ``the ethnic parent tries to orient the child to an ethnic past . . . the child often insists on being more American than Americans''

(p. 284). And for the upwardly mobile, with socioeconomic success came inter-

marriage and the further dilution of ethnicity.

Our conventional models of immigrant acculturation and ethnic self-

identification processes largely derive from the historical experience of those

(and earlier) European immigrants and their descendants. Indeed, only a few

decades before, the large-scalè`new'' immigration of putatively `ùnassimilable''

southern and eastern Europeans ± Italians, Poles, Greeks, Russian Jews, and

many others ± had occasioned vitriolic public alarms and widespread fears about

thè`mongrelization of the race,'' culminating in forced Americanization cam-

paigns and the passage of the restrictionist national-origins quota laws of the

Immigration and Ethnicity

391

1920s (see Higham 1955). But today a new era of mass immigration, now

overwhelmingly non-European in composition, is again raising familiar doubts

about the assimilability of the newcomers and the dark prospect that they might

become consigned to a vast multiethnic underclass ± and questions about the

applicability of explanatory models developed in connection with the experience

of European ethnics.

The Size, Composition, and Concentration of

Contemporary

Contemporary Immigration

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, new American ethnic groups are forming

faster than ever before, an outcome now due entirely to international migration

and once more accompanied by the official construction of ethnoracial cate-

gories into which to classify them. The emerging ethnic groups of the twenty-

first century will be the children and grandchildren of today's immigrants. Their numbers and diversity will ensure that the process will have a profound societal impact, although it is too early to grasp except in opaque speculation their

probable trajectories of incorporation. Four decades into a new era of mass

immigration, it is now a commonplace to observe that the United States is in the midst of its most profound demographic transformation in a century. Whether in

terms of its size, composition, or spatial concentration, the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon is impressive (see table 27.1). Thè`foreign [or immigrant]

stock'' population of the United States in 1997 numbered approximately 55

million people ± that is, persons who are either foreign-born (27 million) or

US-born children of immigrants (28 million). That figure is one-fifth (20.5

percent) of the total US population, and growing rapidly through ongoing

immigration and natural increase (Rumbaut, 1998).

Still, as table 27.1 shows, the current proportions fall well short of those that obtained during the last era of mass immigration a century ago. During the

period from 1880 to 1930, the foreign-stock population consistently comprised

one-third of the national total (peaking at 35.3 percent in the 1910 census), with the foreign-born share reaching nearly 15 percent of the total in 1890 and again in 1910, compared to 8 percent in 1990 and 10 percent today. In that earlier

period, it was not only the sheer size of the immigration flows but the sharp shift in national origins after 1890 from northwest to southern and eastern European

countries that heightened nativist fears. Today's immigration is likewise large in volume and marked by an even sharper shift in its composition: while the