Richard Alba – författare

Why the number of young Americans from mixed families is surging and what this means for the country’s future Americans are under the spell of a distorted and polarizing story about their country’s future—the majority-minority narrative—which contends that inevitable demographic changes will create a society with a majority made up of minorities for the first time in the United States’s history. The Great Demographic Illusion reveals that this narrative obscures a more transformative development: the rising numbers of young Americans from ethno-racially mixed families, consisting of one white and one nonwhite parent. Examining the unprecedented significance of mixed parentage in the twenty-first-century United States, Richard Alba looks at how young Americans with this background will play pivotal roles in the country’s demographic future.Assembling a vast body of evidence, Alba explores where individuals of mixed parentage fit in American society. Most participate in and reshape the mainstream, as seen in their high levels of integration into social milieus that were previously white dominated. Yet, racism is evident in the very different experiences of individuals with black-white heritage. Alba’s portrait squares in key ways with the history of immigrant-group assimilation, and indicates that, once again, mainstream American society is expanding and becoming more inclusive.Nevertheless, there are also major limitations to mainstream expansion today, especially in its more modest magnitude and selective nature, which hinder the participation of black Americans and some other people of color. Alba calls for social policies to further open up the mainstream by correcting the restrictions imposed by intensifying economic inequality, shape-shifting racism, and the impaired legal status of many immigrant families.Countering rigid demographic beliefs and predictions, The Great Demographic Illusion offers a new way of understanding American society and its coming transformation.

First published in 1988, Ethnicity and Race in the U.S.A is a collection of studies, by leading scholars of ethnicity and race in the U.S.A. Including chapters on Blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and white ethnicities, it provides a data-based analysis. Drawing on the first published results from the 1980 census, it gives a unified and comprehensive picture of both the dynamic and the static elements in ethnic and race relations. It reveals the changing face of ethnicity and race in the U.S.A., and in particular outlines the tremendous changes taking places among the white ethnics. Based on a conference on ‘Ethnicity and Race in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century’ held at the State University of New York in Albany, the book will appeal to a wide range of scholars interested in American ethnic experience, including sociologists, historians, political scientists, social workers, and students in ethnic studies programmes.

First published in 1988, Ethnicity and Race in the U.S.A is a collection of studies, by leading scholars of ethnicity and race in the U.S.A. Including chapters on Blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and white ethnicities, it provides a data-based analysis. Drawing on the first published results from the 1980 census, it gives a unified and comprehensive picture of both the dynamic and the static elements in ethnic and race relations. It reveals the changing face of ethnicity and race in the U.S.A., and in particular outlines the tremendous changes taking places among the white ethnics. Based on a conference on ‘Ethnicity and Race in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century’ held at the State University of New York in Albany, the book will appeal to a wide range of scholars interested in American ethnic experience, including sociologists, historians, political scientists, social workers, and students in ethnic studies programmes.

An up-to-date and comparative look at immigration in Europe, the United States, and CanadaStrangers No More is the first book to compare immigrant integration across key Western countries. Focusing on low-status newcomers and their children, it examines how they are making their way in four critical European countries—France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands—and, across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada. This systematic, data-rich comparison reveals their progress and the barriers they face in an array of institutions—from labor markets and neighborhoods to educational and political systems—and considers the controversial questions of religion, race, identity, and intermarriage.Richard Alba and Nancy Foner shed new light on questions at the heart of concerns about immigration. They analyze why immigrant religion is a more significant divide in Western Europe than in the United States, where race is a more severe obstacle. They look at why, despite fears in Europe about the rise of immigrant ghettoes, residential segregation is much less of a problem for immigrant minorities there than in the United States. They explore why everywhere, growing economic inequality and the proliferation of precarious, low-wage jobs pose dilemmas for the second generation. They also evaluate perspectives often proposed to explain the success of immigrant integration in certain countries, including nationally specific models, the political economy, and the histories of Canada and the United States as settler societies.Strangers No More delves into issues of pivotal importance for the present and future of Western societies, where immigrants and their children form ever-larger shares of the population.