Migration, Assimilation, and Social Welfare

This chapter reviews the theoretical perspectives used to understand immigrant assimilation, the challenges to studying assimilation and current research on diverse immigrant origins and across diverse locations of settlement. The authors review recent research on the integration and involvement of immigrants and their descendants into several key structural domains: education, labor markets and residential patterns. This review also focuses on variations in these outcomes among immigrants and their descendants in diverse contexts and policy regimes with cross-national comparisons from several immigrant receiving countries. Understanding how immigrants fare and the extent to which their children and grandchildren succeed requires an examination of immigrant characteristics, the migration process and the changes that occur in the context of reception.