ABSTRACT

Immigrants from Latin America and Asia since the 1960s have forced us to reconceptualize how we study race relations in the United States. The same is true for intermarriage. Interracial marriages have increased from 150,000 marriages in 1960 to 3.1 million in 2000, accounting for 6.2 percent of all marriages compared to less than 1 percent in 1960. In 2008, the percentage had further increased to 7.6 percent, representing one in every 13 marriages (Lee and Bean 2010). Moreover, intermarriage has always been the litmus test for the social distance between people from different racial and ethnic groups, assimilation of the various groups into US society, the color line, and panethnicity. While there are still important lessons to be learned from blackwhite intermarriages in the United States, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are changing the way we measure, conceptualize, theorize, and research intermarriage. Moreover, these intermarriages inform public policy decisions in profound ways. This chapter focuses on the everexpanding role of “immigrant intermarriage,” which, broadly defined, includes any marriage in which an immigrant, or his or her child, marries someone from a different racial or ethnic group in the United States. I first look at the major theoretical contributions that scholars have provided for under-

standing immigrant intermarriages: assimilation, social distance, color line, and panethnicity. Second, I examine the methodological considerations of studying these intermarriages, specifically the range of datasets as well as the different analytical techniques used. Third, I will highlight the key empirical findings of the most recent studies. Finally, I talk about future developments and directions in studies on immigrant intermarriage. This chapter highlights four general themes: first, a move from dichotomous and linear

concepts to multicategorical and multidimensional concepts, which depict richer and more realistic models of interrelationships; second, the need for datasets that include smaller subgroups and provide more detail about immigration and marital history; third, innovation in multivariate models and mixed methods; and fourth, the importance of understanding not only the changing nature of intergroup relations across time and generations, but also the intersection of these changes with social class, gender, and religion.