ABSTRACT
Past and recent research finds that ethnicity results in varied outcomes of social mobility among different immigrant groups. Such divergent outcomes in turn lead to further changes in the character and salience of ethnicity. Much of the intellectual debate on ethnic differences takes place along the following lines: the cultural perspective, which emphasizes the role of internal agency and the extent to which ethnic cultures fit the requirements of the mainstream society; and the structural perspective, which emphasizes the role of social structure and the extent to which ethnic groups are constrained by the broader stratification system and networks of social relations within it. Social scientists from both perspectives have attempted to develop statistical models to
quantitatively measure the effects of “culture” and “structure” on the upward social mobility of immigrant groups. Under ideal circumstances, these models would include indicators illuminating pre-migration circumstances such as home-country values and norms and pre-migration socioeconomic characteristics. But because of data limitations, researchers typically control for “structure” by documenting specific contexts of exit, identifying aspects of post-migration social structures, and operationalizing those components for which they have data. This is not only a conventional practice but also a reasonable approach, since many post-migration socioeconomic differences of adult immigrants are likely either to reflect or be carryovers from, pre-migration differences. However, even the most sophisticated statistical model accounts for only some of the variance, leaving a large residual unexplained. More intractable are questions of how to conceptualize and measure ethnicity. Given data limitations, researchers often try valiantly to create measures that are ingenious, though not fully convincing, and have to place much weight on the effect of a dummy variable for ethnicity. However, the exact meaning or contents of this dummy variable remains ambiguous. I argue that ethnicity cannot be simply viewed as either a structural or a cultural measure;
rather it encompasses specific cultural values and behavioral patterns that are constantly interacting with both internal and external structural exigencies. Unpacking the ethnicity black box, therefore, necessitates a new conceptual framework from a community, rather than an individualist, perspective. Informed by the abundance of multidisciplinary research on international migration and ethnic communities, I have attempted to develop a community perspective that takes into account the interaction of individual characteristics, group-level cultural values and practices, and broader structural factors in explaining inter-group variations in immigrant mobility outcomes. In this chapter, I draw on existing research to sketch a conceptual framework from this community perspective and illustrate it with a case study.1
