Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Structure

This program is led by Senior Scholar Joel Perlmann, who guides a research initiative, “Ethnicity and Economy in America—Past and Present,” that focuses on the processes by which immigrants and their descendants are assimilated into US economic life. The Levy Institute believes that this work will shed light on current policy issues related to immigration, such as international competitiveness, the labor market, income distribution, and poverty.

The program comprises three research projects. The first, “The Jews circa 1900: Social Structure in Europe and America,” focuses on social characteristics that help to explain the rapid socioeconomic rise of eastern European Jewish immigrants who entered the American economy at the turn of the 20th century. Census data that were previously unavailable or not machine readable are used to examine social and economic characteristics of eastern European Jews who emigrated to the United States, as well as those who remained in Europe.

The second project, “Assimilation and the Third Generation,” explores the assimilation of immigrants into the socioeconomic mainstream of the United States, and the social and economic experiences of their American-born children. Special attention is paid to a few large groups whose absorption seemed especially slow and painful during the first and second generations: Irish immigrants who arrived in the mid 19th century, Italians and Poles who immigrated between 1880 and 1920, Mexicans who arrived throughout much of the 20th century, and southern-born blacks who migrated north. Census data are used in new ways in order to identify and trace second- and third-generation Americans.

The third project, “The New Immigration’s Second Generation,” conducted by Perlmann and Research Associate Roger Waldinger, reviews literature that deals with the economic progress and difficulties faced by children of today’s immigrants (i.e., at the turn of the 21st century). Their experiences are compared with those faced by children of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century.

Research Group on Israeli Social Structure and Inequality

A second long-term research initiative, begun in the fall of 2008, is based around the Research Group on Israeli Social Structure and Inequality, which includes Perlmann and Research Associate Yuval Elmelech, as well as two scholars each from Columbia University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Yinon Cohen (Yosef H. Yerushalmi Professor of Israel and Jewish Studies) and Seymour Spilerman (Julian C. Levi Professor of Sociology) from the former, and Sergio DellaPergola (Shlomo Argov Chair in Israel-Diaspora Relations, Institute of Contemporary Jewry) and Barbara S. Okun (Associate Professor of Population Studies) from the latter.

The group expects to focus on three domains of inequality. First, ethnic origin and immigration status play key roles in shaping the Israeli stratification system. Crucial is the division between Jews and Arabs, and, among Jews, the division between Mizrachim (Jews from Muslim, mostly Arab, lands) and Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent). First- and second-generation Mizrachim lag behind Ashkenazim on the various measures of economic well-being, such as education and labor market attainment. The issue of second-generation catch-up or decline, reverberating through discussions of contemporary American and European immigration, is common in social science literature on Israel as well. A closer look at the evidence, especially by individual country of origin and over time, and a perspective of international comparisons characterize our approach.

Second, we will focus on the changing patterns of economic inequality. Israel today has among the highest rates of poverty in the developed world, and the gaps between the wealthy and the poor have increased substantially over the past three decades. We will be exploring the shifting income and wealth distributions in Israel during the recent years of increasing privatization policies and globalization trends.

Third, we hope later to study the results of the massive restructuring of Israeli higher education over the past decade and a half: the creation of a large number of smaller “colleges” of varying quality, where before there had been only a half dozen universities, all of them essentially research universities. The 2008 Israel Integrated Census of Population and Housing should provide data on the connection between the educational expansion and returns to schooling.

The 1967 Census of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: A Digitized Version
In the summer of 1967, just after the Six-Day War brought the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israel’s control, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics conducted a census of the occupied territories. The resulting seven volumes of reports provide the earliest detailed description of this population, including crucial data about respondents’ 1948 refugee status.

The Levy Economics Institute is making the contents of these volumes available in machine-readable form for the first time, in the hope that the data can be exploited by researchers interested in a fuller understanding of the social history of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. For an overview of our project and to access the hundreds of tables contained in the 1967 Census database, click here.