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41 Int'l Migration Rev. 3 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/imgratv41 and id is 1 raw text is: Did Manufacturing Matter? The Experience of Yesterday's Second Generation: A Reassessment Roger Waldinger Department ofSociology, UCLA Research on the new second generation takes the success of the earlier second generation of southern and eastern Europeans as its point of departure, but with little empirical basis. The hypothesis of segmented assimilation asserts that the children of the 1880-1920 immigration moved ahead due to the availability of well-paying, relatively low-skilled jobs in manufacturing. By contrast, defenders of the conventional approach to assimilation accent diffusionary processes, while conceding that the specific means by which the children of immigrants improved on their parents' condition remains a matter about which relatively little is known. This article returns to the world of the last second generation, just before it disappeared, to inquire into the extent and nature of the economic differences separating the adult immigrant offspring of the time from their third-generation-plus counterparts. Using data from the 1970 Census of Population, this article shows that manufacturing mattered, but in ways neither expected nor consistent with either of today's prevailing, theoretical approaches. The descendants of the last great migration to the United States had but a brief moment in the sun. Social scientists and social reformers of the early twentieth century worried about a second generation problem in ways eerily reminiscent of the formulations popular today (Smith, 1939). But history soon took care of the matter: immigration was controlled; the nation found new sources of social solidarity in the struggle against the Depression and various enemies abroad; and the cleavages produced by the earlier allergy to immigration were eclipsed after conflicts over race moved to the fore (Gerstle, 2001). While a white ethnic movement suddenly emerged when the civil rights battleground headed to the north, the moment proved evanescent. The neighborhoods and organizations formed out of the earlier immigrant experience were still there but fast dissolving, as they couldn't hold on to their own (Alba, 1990). Once the third generation headed out to suburbia - where social scientists proclaimed ethnicity to be strictly optional (Waters, 1990) - the world of the so-called white ethnics largely disappeared. © 2007 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2007.00055.x IMR Volume 41 Number 1 (Spring 2007):3-39 3

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