Review: Unequal Origins: Immigrant Selection and the Education of the Second Generation by Cynthia Feliciano

Abstract

Unequal Origins: Immigrant Selection and the Education of the Second Generation by Cynthia Feliciano. The New Americans: Recent Immigration and American Society. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2006. 190 pp. ISBN 1593320876. This book is a part of LFB Scholarly Publishing’s series, The New Americans: Recent Immigration and American Society. Unequal Origins focuses on local, domestic implications and influences of the country of origin, particularly for second-generation immigrants and their education. Given that education enables social and economic mobility, research can provide insights on different pathways in education and can help us understand why certain ethnic second-generation immigrants “succeed” by joining the mainstream middle class and why others “fail,” trapped in impoverished situations. By exploring the influences of immigrant selectivity — “how immigrants’ characteristics compare to those remaining in the country of origin” (p. 3) — we may begin to better understand some of these differences. Additionally, Feliciano’s use of the “hour- glass economy, characterized by many jobs at the high or low extremes, and few jobs in the middle” (p. 19) helps us conceptualize the challenges immigrants face as industrial work opportunities are squeezed out of the United States marketplace. The book is timely in that it comes to print in the midst of political and nation-wide discussions regarding immigration, education, and employment. The research findings in this book challenge many popular perceptions that immigrants are less educated than their native US counterparts and that those who immigrate are the less desirable citizens of their country of origin. In fact, the author portrays “the story of the immigrant generation…[as] one of educational polarization, with substantial percentages of immigrants at both the bottom and the top of the educational distribution” (p.11) and sheds light on those at the top of the distribution. The story not often told is of self-selected immigrants who are defined as those who are “generally positively selected — or more educated than the other populations in their home countries” (p. 13). Immigrants who make this journey, documented or not, generally select themselves, are more willing to work in different positions, and are more flexible than US natives. The author’s findings also suggest that the distance of the home country in relation to the US further increases the probability of self-selection given that longer journeys contain “greater travel costs and psychological costs in moving to another country” (p. 52). Unequal Origins is organized systematically, with a different research study embedded within each chapter. Findings established in one study are incorporated in the next and utilize different data sets for each proposed study. This cumulative process enables a deeper and richer conceptualization of ethnic differences among second-generation students and of their educational