Social politics: the importance of the family for naturalisation decisions of the 1.5 generation

How do migrants make the decision to naturalise? The majority of the literature focuses on the economic costs and benefit calculus of individual migrants, usually those who arrived as adults. Yet a large and growing population of foreign-born individuals arrived as children. Despite spending their f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of ethnic and migration studies Vol. 46; no. 7; pp. 1240 - 1260
Main Authors Soehl, Thomas, Waldinger, Roger, Luthra, Renee
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 18.05.2020
Carfax Publishing Company, Abingdon Science Park
Subjects
Adults
Children
Costs
Country of origin
Ethnicity
Expenditures
Families & family life
immigrant children
migrant families
Migrants
Naturalisation
Overseas sojourners
political incorporation
Politics
Respondents
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Summary:How do migrants make the decision to naturalise? The majority of the literature focuses on the economic costs and benefit calculus of individual migrants, usually those who arrived as adults. Yet a large and growing population of foreign-born individuals arrived as children. Despite spending their formative years in the United States, many remain foreign nationals into adulthood. Based on results from a discrete-time event-history model of naturalisation of 1.5 generation respondents in California we argue that the cost-benefit trade-offs underlying most accounts of naturalisation decisions will apply in different ways to this population. We show that especially for this population the decision to naturalise cannot be conceptualised as an individual choice but is strongly embedded within the family and co-ethnic context which, in turn, introduces symbolic concerns and country of origin related factors into the decision.
ISSN:1369-183X
1469-9451
DOI:10.1080/1369183X.2018.1534584