Prof. Alejandro Portes – författare

This revised and updated fifth edition of Immigrant America: A Portrait provides a comprehensive and current overview of immigration to the United States, including its history, the principal theories seeking to account for its diverse origins, the main types of immigrants, and the various forms of immigrants' incorporation within American society. With the latest available data, Immigrant America further explores the economic, political, regional, linguistic, and religious aspects of immigration. It offers detailed analyses of the adaptation process experienced by adult children of immigrants and adds an updated and expanded concluding chapter on changing immigration policy regimes both past and present.

Latin Journey details an eight-year study of Mexican and Cuban immigrants.

What leads to national progress? The growing consensus in the social sciences is that neither capital flows, nor the savings rate, nor diffuse values are the key, but that it lies in the quality of a nation’s institutions. This book is the first comparative study of how real institutions affect national development. It seeks to examine and deepen this insight through a systematic study of institutions in five Latin American countries and how they differ within and across nations. Postal systems, stock exchanges, public health services and others were included in the sample, all studied with the same methodology. The country chapters present detailed results of this empirical exercise for each individual country. The introductory chapters present the theoretical framework and research methodology for the full study. The summary results of this ambitious study presented in the concluding chapter draw comparisons across countries and discuss what these results mean for national development in Latin America.

Much like the United States, the countries of Western Europe have experienced massive immigration in the last three decades. Spain, in particular, has been transformed from an immigrant-exporting country to one receiving hundreds of thousands of new immigrants. Today, almost 13 percent of the country’s population is foreign-born. Spanish Legacies, written by internationally known experts on immigration, explores how the children of immigrants—the second generation—are coping with the challenges of adaptation to Spanish society, comparing their experiences with those of their peers in the United States. Using a rich data set based on both survey and ethnographic material, Spanish Legacies describes the experiences of growing up by the large population of second-generation youths in Spain and the principal outcomes of the process—from national self-identification and experiences of discrimination to educational attainment and labor-market entry. The study is based on a sample of almost 7,000 second-generation students who were interviewed in Madrid and Barcelona in 2008 and then followed and re-interviewed four years later. A survey of immigrant parents, a replacement sample for lost respondents in the second survey, and a survey of native-parentage students complement this rich data set. Outcomes of the adaptation process in Spain are systematically presented in five chapters, introduced by real-life histories of selected respondents drawn by the study’s ethnographic module. Systematic comparisons with results from the United States show a number of surprising similarities in the adaptation of children of immigrants in both countries, as well as differences marked by contrasting experiences of discrimination, self-identities, and ambition.

Over the last quarter century, no other city like Miami has rapidly transformed into a global city. The Global Edge charts the social tensions and unexpected consequences of this remarkable process of change. Acting as a follow-up to the highly successful City on the Edge, The Global Edge examines Miami in the context of globalization and scrutinizes its newfound place as a major international city. Written by two well-known scholars in the field, the book examines Miami’s rise as a finance and banking center and the simultaneous emergence of a highly diverse but contentious ethnic mosaic. The Global Edge serves as a case study of Miami’s present cultural, economic, and political transformation, and describes how its future course can provide key lessons for other metropolitan areas throughout the world.