Children of Immigrants’ Assimilation Pathways: Examining Community, Neighborhood, Group and Individual Effects on Educational Attainment

Rennie Lee, University of California, Los Angeles

How the children of immigrants will assimilate to US society is of ongoing debate. This paper examines which pathway the children of immigrants will assimilate into. I answer this question by examining how four factors—individual, neighborhood, coethnic community, and national origin group—affects the children of immigrants’ educational attainment? I use a unique data set by matching individual survey data from the San Diego portion of the CILS data set with community, neighborhood, and group data with individuals in the CILS. The main finding of this paper is that neighborhood, community, group, and individual level factors all influence individual outcomes of the second generation. This paper shows modest support for classical assimilation theory and segmented assimilation theory.