For decades, Alejandro Portes (CASBS fellow 1980-81) has been among our most distinguished scholars elucidating the causes and consequences of immigration and assimilation. René D. Flores (CASBS fellow 2023-24) engages Portes in a conversation spanning large swaths of Portes's formidable intellectual biography, including his personal journey from Cuba and its influence on his academic trajectory, as well as his approach to social science inquiry and its delivery of insights leading to some of his most celebrated and consequential works.
For decades, Alejandro Portes (CASBS fellow 1980-81) has been among our most distinguished scholars elucidating the causes and consequences of immigration and assimilation. René D. Flores (CASBS fellow 2023-24) engages Portes in a conversation spanning large swaths of Portes's formidable intellectual biography, including his personal journey from Cuba and its influence on his academic trajectory, as well as his approach to social science inquiry and its delivery of insights leading to some of his most celebrated and consequential works.
ALEJANDRO PORTES: Princeton faculty page | CV | Univ. of Miami faculty page | Wikipedia page | on Google Scholar |
Biographical sketches of Portes: American Sociological Association | National Academy of Education | Princeton | National Institutes of Health | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences |
Robert K. Merton's full quote about Alejandro Portes is contained in the September/October 1998 issue of Footnotes, a publication of the American Sociological Association. Access the full text.
Works referenced in this episode
Alejandro Portes, "Rationality in the Slum: An Essay on Interpretive Sociology," Comparative Studies in Society and History, v13 n3, June 1972.
Alejandro Portes, "Dilemmas of a Golden Exile: Integration of Cuban Refugee Families in Milwaukee," American Sociological Review, v34 n4, August 1969.
Alejandro Portes and Robert Bach, Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Univ. of California Press, 1985.
Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its Variants," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1993.
Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, Univ. of California Press, 2024 (fifth ed.)
Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, Univ. of California Press, 2001.
Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, Russell Sage Foundation, 2015. (Notably, Jennifer Lee was a CASBS fellow in 2002-03; Min Zhou was a CASBS fellow in 2006-06.)
Bonus: 2019-20 CASBS fellow Catherine Ramírez discusses the influence of Alejandro Portes in "What Does Assimilation Mean?" Public Books, Feb. 27, 2020. The essay was written as part of CASBS's partnership with Public Books. Ramírez writes, "By showing that there are many strata in society into which people assimilate, and many outcomes of assimilation, Portes and his coauthors have enriched our understanding of the processes by which people become American, however precarious that status may be.”
René D. Flores: Univ. of Chicago faculty page | CASBS page | on Google Scholar | Personal website |
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Immigration, migration, and related contested issues involving citizenship, assimilation, detention, border and economic security, and others are at center stage in the United States and other countries around the world right now. These often divisive issues are driving policy from what appears to be a mostly political and ideological perspective, generating heat without light, draconian action without reasoned understanding based on facts and a shared sense of humanity. Perhaps most prominent among those who have illuminated our understanding is Alejandro Portes.
For decades, Portes has painstakingly identified structural forces underlying the causes and consequences of immigration and assimilation. He was a CASBS fellow in 1980 to 81 and in today's episode of Human Centered, a conversation with the man himself. Alejandro Portes is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Princeton University, as well as Professor of Law and Distinguished Scholar of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami.
He co-founded Princeton Center for Migration and Development. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Philosophical Society, former president of the American Sociological Association, and the International Sociological Association and the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees. He has authored a few hundred academic articles and chapters on international migration and other areas such as economic sociology and Latin American and Caribbean urbanization.
He is known by many for examining the determinants of economic and social adaptation among second generation youth in the US and for elucidating the process of social integration of migrants as well as the transnational political and economic communities they create in the developed world. We'll include a host of links to his works in the episode notes. Fortunately, much of today's conversation is a Portes intellectual biography of sorts, and joining him to guide the discussion is 2023-24 CASBS fellow René D. Flores, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and a former student of Portes while at Princeton. René's primary interests are in the fields of international migration, race and ethnicity, and social stratification. His research explores the emergence of social boundaries around immigrants and racial minorities across the world, as well as how these boundaries contribute to the reproduction of ethnic-based social inequality.
You're about to hear how Portes' personal journey as a Cuban migrant helped shape what he calls the existential need to reveal and understand. How he generated insights that led to some of his most celebrated works, including his Segmented Assimilation Framework, and what he sees as the present and future challenges for sociology and social scientific inquiry in general. Find out why none other than Robert K. Merton, among the founding fathers of both casbos and modern sociology as we know it, once called Alejandro Portes the grand master of the sociology of immigration. Let's listen.
René D. Flores: Today, we are on sacred grounds. We are at CASBS, and it's a pleasure to have Professor Alejandro Portes with us today. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Alejandro Portes: My pleasure.
René D. Flores: So you are one of the most cited social scientists. You have over 158,000 citations, many accomplishments. One of the questions that I always have is, how do scholars become creative? Where do they find their sorts of innovation? Do you have a specific process that you follow in order to come up with ideas, in order to come up with interesting questions?
Alejandro Portes: Well, René, I'd like to respond to you by citing one of the fathers of our profession, namely Max Weber, in his memorable 1919 address, 100 years ago, Science as a Vocation. And that lecture of Weber had a number of memorable points, but addressing one of them addresses your issue. He refers to this, to what you're talking about as insights, and insights that can be translated into what he called ideal types.
But he warns scientists that you don't go after ideas. Ideas come to you. You can sit in your in your CASBS office now, where you are now, squeezing everything you can, hoping for some great insight to come at that time in your year there, and nothing comes.
Sometimes nothing comes because you cannot invent it. The insights that eventually could, can become concepts, or in Weber's terminology, ideal types, come to you. And they are, they don't come very often.
The idea comes to you in the course of investigation. You can, that is, you can be doing a project and for many, for a long time, many weeks and so on, and you are just doing a project that is assembling data, analyzing data in the computer, but nothing particularly shows up. And then out of this process, all of a sudden the idea comes to you.
That's the insight. It's not worth pursuing insight that are going to make you famous. It doesn't happen that way. What happens is that in the course of your investigation and so on, sometimes things click.
René D. Flores: How did you end up finding your way to sociology? What was the path for you?
Alejandro Portes: The choice of discipline for me was very straightforward because I needed to understand what had happened in my country, what had happened in Cuba. One day, I am just a kid minding my own business, going to school, taking exams and so on, just walking in the streets of Havana. And the next day, I find myself out of the country in exile in Miami without understanding what had happened.
I was too young to realize what were the social forces that went into making the Cuban Revolution. And there were only two disciplines that offer some promise to understand that, history and sociology. From the very first time that I enrolled in a university, which was three years later at the Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires, I selected sociology from the start for that reason.
That is, out of the need, the existential need to review and understand what were the forces that could produce something as momentous as a communist revolution in a little country like mine.
René D. Flores: And through sociology, you acquire the theoretical skills, the tools to understand these larger social forces that shaped your life in a very dramatic way. I can see that.
And then you were a graduate student at Wisconsin. You were part of that wonderful team, people like Professor Hayler, William Sewell, that were working on the status-attainment research, and how people achieve social mobility over generation, over time. And you were part of that research enterprise as a graduate student. But then you ended up shifting away towards the study of migration, towards the study of social movements in Latin America.
Was that an easy decision to make? What motivated that shift?
Alejandro Portes: I was very interested in following, again, what had happened in Cuba about the determinants of left-wing radicalism among poor people in third world countries. And I had visited Chile on an earlier occasion, just before going to the university, and the going theories at that time were that the rings of poverty around major cities in Latin America, like Santiago or Rio de Janeiro, those rings that people call the favelas or the poblaciones or the callampas, and so on were centers for radicalism, so that people out of the theory at that time was governed by a psychological frustration, aggression hypothesis. So basically, people were frustrated by their poverty and their lack of opportunities, and that would result in an aggression against the established city, the middle and upper classes that could, in a sense, usher a popular revolution in a number of global south countries.
So I was interested in finding out what was happening among poor people in the cities, and I selected Chile because it was a very politicized country at that time, very divided between the Christian Democrats, the Progressive Center, right? And increasingly powerful alliance of the Communists and Socialist countries that eventually elected Salvador Allende to the presidency of the country. I actually conducted my dissertation just years before the victory of Allende in the Chilean election, but it allowed me to do an actual field study of social conditions and political attitudes in the poblaciones, that is, the popular settlements surrounding the capital city of Chile.
And out of that study, René, working in these areas, taking the bus to here and there in the periphery of Santiago, came a first insight, namely that poor people in the urban settlements were not radical at all, were not irrational at all, were not about to invade the center of the city, and so on. They were rational. The insight was called rationality in the slum.
So one of my very first articles to show that people there were poor because of the condition, of the social and economic conditions in which they grew up and they had to work. But within those conditions, they were trying like everybody else, like everybody else in middle-class areas of the city to get ahead, to obtain a legal title to the plot of land that they had occupied, to obtain services like water and electricity, to get a better job, to send their kids to school just like anybody else. So basically, there was no reason to expect that people in these settlements were going to rise up and attack violently the rest of the city.
And actually, this idea of rationality in the slum should have come handy when the tragedy of the Salvador Allende presidency came out, because when, that is, people who believe in the radicalism in the slum hypothesis and thought that these surrounding areas of poverty were going to rise up and defend the regime against the military coup were very disappointed. Nobody did. No one rose up. The city was completely cuyacent in line with what we had discovered. These people were not radical and were not, they were simply like everybody else, seeking opportunities in an economics of scarcity as that of a country like Chile. So the prediction actually panned out.
René D. Flores: That's interesting. I wonder why they were these psychological theories, assuming that these folks were irrational. I wonder if part of it is that researchers were not actually out there doing primary research, doing fieldwork like you were doing.
Alejandro Portes: Yes. I think that the frustration-aggression hypothesis was imported from psychology into political science and political sociology by a number of people who wrote about rebellions and so on at the time, William Kornhauser and Seymour Martin Lipset, and others who actually had not done this kind of fieldwork. So I came from Wisconsin to Santiago de Chile, imbued in those theories.
Those were the theories that I had read that would predict that I would find a very conscious, very radicalized population in these areas ready to confront the system and transform it and so on. As the literature on Political Sociology and Political Science would have led me to believe, well, one of the reasons to do empirical research, René, is that the actual research consistently surprises you. It consistently challenges the received notions with which you arrive in the area and in the field to question the notions that were predominant at the time in this.
And actually, I was not the only one who came up with the same conclusion. Janice Perlman, doing work in the favelas of Rio, came out with the same view. Wayne Cornelius, completing his work on the popular settlements around Mexico City.
Same thing, Daniel Goldrich, in the barriadas of Lima. So one researcher after another completed that, and that is the combination of all these empirical studies. Mine was my dissertation at the time.
But the combination of this work of Cornelius, Perlman, and others, led to a completely changed view of urban poverty in Latin America and of the orientations of the favelados, of the people who had inhabited the Villas Miseria in Buenos Aires, that moved away from these original fears of a radicalized, more like population, to understand that the situation of these groups was a consequence of the structure of an economy of scarcity, a lack of opportunities, and so on, with which they were struggling to get ahead in one way or another.
René D. Flores: I wanted to ask you about your own position within the field of migration, the fact that you yourself are an immigrant, and that's not very common with some of the classic immigration work. That work is typically done by Native scholars, except in some cases you have Florian Zanicki working with Polish immigrants. But it's not as common, particularly during those times.
Do you think your own position as an immigrant gave you specific insights about the immigration experiences? In what way do you think that shaped the work that you do?
Alejandro Portes: Well, I think that from that very first story that I did as a graduate student at Wisconsin with the support of the program led by David Mechanic and William Sewell, it was motivated in a certain sense by my own biography and my own experiences. So I wanted to see what my coethnics, people of the same nationality and who had experienced the same history of being pushed out of their country and trying to make a new life in the United States, how were they doing and what were their views and so on. But there is a difference between the motivations to do a study that often, almost always have existential roots in your own personal history, almost always, and the conclusions.
That is, you can be motivated but it is not a very good idea to carry the preconceived notions or those that are inherited from the leadership that you have read in the university and graduate schools to inform the conclusions of the study. Because the actual empirical work of interviewing those families in Milwaukee and other areas of Wisconsin and so on was completely different from what I had expected to find. The results that I reported in that first study in the American Sociological Review, Dilemmas of a Golden Exile, portrayed a view that I would not have understood if I had not done the empirical work and realized that this was the situation in which these families found themselves.
René D. Flores: Then in 1980, you came to CASBS, and you occupied one of the most fabled offices, which is Studio 51, and I looked up some of the prior occupants of your office, and they include folks like Kingsley Davis, Milton Friedman, Emanuel Wallerstein, Robert Putnam, quite a lineup there. Can you tell us a little bit about your CASBS experience? I mean, CASBS has a reputation for allowing scholars to re-embrace themselves, to take a step back and ask big questions. Was that your experience, or how was that for you?
Alejandro Portes: Well, it was, as I wrote in my final report, it was one of the most productive years of my scholarly life. I did a lot of work there because of being three of the regular teaching and other administrative obligations that are attached to being an academic. And I came to the center with a clear project in mind. What I needed to do there was the fact to analyze and write up the results of the study that had started in 1972 of Cuban and Mexican immigrants in the United States.
René D. Flores: Latin Journey, right?
Alejandro Portes: That time, I didn't call it that, but it was the results of this longitudinal study, three ways of interviews with Mexicans who we had originally interviewed in Laredo and El Paso, and of Cubans who arrive in Miami and how they evolve over time. One of the key results in passing of that longitudinal study was another insight which is associated with my name over time, which was the notion of the ethnic enclave, the immigrant economic enclave. That came out of the comparison between the patterns of integration of the Mexican immigrants that we have followed, that distributed themselves all over the geography of the Southwest and Midwest, and remained primarily salaried, that is, workers.
And the peculiar pattern of the Cubans, who arrived at the same time and would have followed that for the most part, remained in Miami and didn't go anywhere. They remained, stayed, stayed, stayed there and work in firms created previously by their coethnics and then created their own enterprises, leading to this kind of entrepreneurial hub that eventually was going to be called the Cuban Ancliff with consequences that we see up to today. So basically, that study was not written up at that time.
There was a lot of work to do. And like it happened with most of people who go to the center, the first months of your experience are spent catching up. That is finishing what you did, wanted to finish, before you have to complete your projects and so on, before you start the one that brought you there.
So the first, probably the first semester, I was catching up with other things that I had to do. And only on the second semester I started working. With that result, the book was not completed.
When I left Stanford, went to Johns Hopkins and worked on it for another two years. But eventually it was completed out of the result. And I was able, in a future visit to the center, to deliver to the director, the final product of that year had been, namely, Latin Journey, Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States, that was published by California in 1985.
René D. Flores: And that's interesting because I can see how you in your work, you were essentially following immigrants and their children as they settled in the US, starting from, we're talking about the post-1965 immigration wave. When in 1993, you published one of your seminal papers with Min Zhou, The New Second Generation, Segmented Assimilation and Its Variance. At that time, the second generation had come of age, right?
The descendants of those early immigrants that came after 1965. And then you make the case at that point that not all of these immigrants were following the same experiences of their European, their past European counterparts that the European immigrants had arrived before. Some of them, essentially, they are becoming integrated, but into different segments of the US population.
Some of them are becoming part of the mainstream middle class, but some of them are actually experiencing downward assimilation, as you call that. They are becoming trapped in inner cities. They're dropping out of school.
They're getting tangled with the criminal justice system. Can you tell us a little bit about how did you and your collaborators come to develop this idea? What were the discussions that you were having?
Alejandro Portes: This concept of segmented assimilation came to me. I did not search for it, and it came out of another project. Back in 1990, I published another book called Immigrant America, A Portrait with Ruben Rumbaut, and which was actually a summary of what we knew at that moment.
By that time, immigration had become important, but in a conversation Ruben and I had prior to the publication of Immigrant America, I think it was in Atlanta, we spotted the fact that the literature on immigration at that time only dealt with immigrants. And there was very little information on what was happening to their children. There was a lot of information with what had happened to the children of Italians and Poles and so on in the early 20th century, but there was nothing about what was happening to the children of this new wave of immigration stemming out of the 1965 Immigration Act and successive ways of refugees like the Vietnamese, the Cambodians and so on in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
So there was nothing at that time. And so we decided to launch an empirical study of not immigrants, but children of immigrants. And we did it by focusing our study on two major urban areas, Miami, which was familiar to me already, and San Diego, which is where my co-author and collaborator Ruben Rumbaut was based.
So the schools, all the schools in the metropolitan areas of Miami and San Diego, were included into what eventually became known as the Children of Immigrants, Longitudinal Studies, or CILS. And we did, we first, the first interview wave happened about when these kids were about 14 to 15 years, in eighth, ninth grade. And our idea of following what I had already done with Cuban and Mexican adult immigrants that was published in Latin Journey was to follow them in time and see their evolution and how they did in time.
And actually, we completed two more waves, three years after the first one and then in early adulthood. Out of that study, it was very clear to me, and very clear to Ruben as well, that there were very distinct paths in the process of adaptation of children of immigrants to American society. It is the land of opportunity, but for that, there has to be certain conditions to be met in terms of the human capital of the parents, the mode of reception of the immigrants, and so on.
So we found, to make a story short, that while there were, in our sample, many examples of success of kids advancing in school, doing well in terms of grades, going to the university, and so on, there were also very poignant experiences of falling behind, of failure, of dropping out of school, of getting into trouble with the law, of premature childbearing by and so on. And that, out of that contrast, out of those differences, eventually the idea came to me one day without looking for it, that the process of assimilation in the United States was not unilinear and it was not homogenous, but it had become segmented along clear paths. If you think of it, it's obvious that not everybody, not all children, and certainly not all children of immigrants, end up in the same place in the American economic and occupational structure, that there are successes and there are failures.
But segmented assimilation as a concept was more than that, because it pointed out what were the forces behind it. It was not only to say that there were this variation, but what were the forces that underlined it. And that was the concept that I developed originally with Min Zhou that had worked already.
Her dissertation had been on the Chinese enclave in New York called Chinatown. And we were working very closely, and eventually it was taken to be the theoretical basis for the book that resulted from this, from SILS, Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, which was Legacies, the story of the second generation that was published in 2001.
René D. Flores: And this argument that not all immigrants are following the linear history path that laid out by the, by immigration scholars in the Chicago School. This framework of segmental assimilation, there were other folks that were talking about second generation decline, but that was very generative. It really created a lot of interests, incentivized a lot of research, but there were also some critics of this approach.
And some people argue that the second generation isn't actually doing as badly, even if they haven't reached parity with Native whites. Other folks have criticized the role that racialized Native minorities, like African Americans or Mexican Americans, the role that they play in the, particularly in the Danworth assimilation path, the fact that that proximity to these racialized minorities is one of the triggers of potential negative outcomes along with others. But some people criticized that. Can you tell us about what you make of these critics?
Alejandro Portes: I appreciate very much that question, René. It's very thoughtful. There are two points that are worth making.
First, that is, every concept that have garnered attention by scholarly public in our disciplines invariably has its critics. That is, there is no question that the concept of ethnic enclave had its critics. It was not working.
The concept of informal economy had its critics. It's part of the game, and it's in part the fact that other scholars are not going to make their careers by just praising what somebody else had done. It is part of our profession to this kind of free confrontation of different points of view, and I think it's a healthy one.
It's the way that in a democratic environment where we live, that creates a free play of ideas. So that always happens. But I would hasten to add that always in time, I never became too overworked with the criticisms, because I think that over time, things take their level.
And even today, I have, I see lots of articles, of empirical articles on the second generation children of immigrants in the United States and also in Europe, they invariably cite our work. And the other point that I wanted to make, the second one, René, is tied to the concept of adumbration. Robert Merton dedicated the first chapter of his major opus, Social Theory and Social Structure, to the concept of adumbration by citing Whitehead in the first page of the first chapter of Social Theory and Social Structure to the point that Whitehead notes that everything of importance has been said by someone who did not discover it.
Once a concept or an idea or an insight had been carried out, had been put in force of the relevant public forcefully and visibly, then it's relatively easy to find predecessors. That is a very common exercise in our field. If something is true, it's not new.
If it is new, it's not true. Basically, he called attention to that because his own work had been subjected to this syndrome. Certainly, that is the concept with which I have been associated over the year, have had quite a few cases of people saying, this is not new, this has happened before.
It's like when Borges say that every famous novelist or author creates his or her own predecessors.
René D. Flores: This observation of Merton reminds me of something that Paul Astorfeld once said, which is that everything becomes obvious once you know the answer, once you already know it in retrospective. But looking back, is there anything you would change about the concept of segmented assimilation? Is there anything you would change about the formulation of it?
Alejandro Portes: I think that in the initial formulation, that is, and I will not blame Ruben or Min Zhou for it's probably my fault. We were swayed by a literature that had taken place, that had been by educational researchers and by a scholar whose name I don't recall right now, who was of African origin.
René D. Flores: John Ogbu.
Alejandro Portes: Ogbu had become very popular precisely in his typology of what happens to immigrants and African Americans and what was the difference. And it was a very, and that was it, that is, and in the work, for example, of the Mexican, of the Argentine educational scholar Marcelo Suarez Orozco, he carried out this research in which he identified the idea that Mexican kids in school often fell into gangs and so on and learn not to learn. That was the idea, learn not to learn, because of the, that is, learning to learn and staying in school was acting white.
That was the, so this, that's, that literature, I think that we went too much into the cultural side of this and had to quickly correct that, because the, that is, the conditions that lead to a downward assimilation, that is the dropping out of school, getting in gangs, suffering from premature, premature childbearing, and some of the ones that we could identify empirically, were not necessarily the results of any kind of cultural syndrome. When we actually interviewed our respondents, including both who were in those situations that had dropped out of school, or were raising kids as teenagers and so on, we never found a culture of confrontation, never found an oppositional culture that said, we are doing this because we are opposed to the middle class we want to do. It was just like in the slums of Chile.
This, that is, when you found a woman, a Haitian woman, that with two kids that told us, I really want to go to community college. I want to get my degree in therapy, but I don't have the time. I don't have the time. I have to take care of these kids. I have to work to get this money. I just can't, I'm just trapped in this situation.
That is structural. That's not cultural. So basically, we corrected the argument in the sense that is, I think that the original one was too influenced by the idea of the oppositional culture.
There's no oppositional culture. We didn't find any instance afterwards in every case in the story that we did, even of success out of disadvantage in the second generation that was published later on by identifying members of our sample who actually had grown up in situations of great disadvantage and great poverty. Never you found a coherent opposition to the mainstream, a confrontational one.
It was structural. It was the conditions in which they were. And I think that to the extent that people took us to task for the culturalist bent of the original one, that was justified. I think that perhaps we went out too much in following others, not following our own data.
René D. Flores: That's interesting. I think it really highlights the scientific process, right? That you develop a concept, but sometimes you have to go back and refine it.
You have to refine the mechanisms involved. And one of the things I appreciate about the Segmented Assimilation framework is that, as you pointed out a few minutes ago, is that it points out the mechanisms involved. It points out the forces that underline which segment immigrants will land in.
Essentially, it's a very theoretically-oriented concept. And you've talked about the need for sociology to move away from grand theories, from trying to have a comprehensive, systematic understanding of the whole social world, and to focus more on middle-range theories. In looking at a specific social phenomenon and understand the mechanisms that are involved, and you've done that in your research, my question is, why do you think there's not as much of this middle-range theorizing in sociology, especially relative to other disciplines?
I'm thinking about psychology, for example. First of all, do you agree with that premise? And if you do, do you think this is driven by our training, or is there something about the nature of the sociological questions that we study?
Alejandro Portes: Well, I have given some reflection to that in this late stage of my career, where I do not find many instances of insights that can be captured and led to some. Let me say one example of a study that did, is the study of Edward Teyes and Will Morte's Generations of Exclusion. They did not use the concept of Segmented Assimilation, they used the concept of racialization.
But the idea was basically the same. That is, the children, descendants of Mexican immigrants, were not moving up into the American mainstreams and were staying there because of structural forces, not because of any opposition or culture. So even if the concept was not there, the story by Teyes and Ortiz, I regard as fundamental in understanding this.
Just like the study by Lee and Zhao of the Asian American Achievement Paradox is a great example of a theoretically-informed study that challenges the idea, the challenge, the these achieve concepts of tiger mums, and things of that sort that were being paraded by some seekers of publicity. The great merit of Lee and Zhao in the Asian American Paradox is that they themselves are Asian Americans. So they were not, in a sense, just writing a book in defense of their own group and complaining about their dis-
they were writing a book saying, our group has been successful because a stereotype promise, because people believe that if you're Asian, you're intelligent. This was remarkable because it was very honest piece of scholarly work done by people of that ethnicity. That usually is people write from their belly button and complain about what had happened to them or their group and so on.
This was exactly the opposite. They were, in a sense, documenting why there were structural reasons for the success of Asian kids as well as structural reasons for the relative lack of success of Mexican kids and that following that idea and following a middle range type of theorizing. On the other hand, that is, at the other extreme of this is what I have seen.
That is something that seems to me a very common tendency these days, which is to what I call one variable study. That is, studies that are descriptive in a sense of describing the situation, let's say, racial discrimination, or let's say, gender discrimination, or let's say, inequality in different forms, but simply documenting the existence and the rise of this. I'm giving numerous examples about the relative suffering of particular population but without providing a consistent interpretation.
Theory begins when you try to provide an explanation. Theory is the series of responses to the question, why? It's not simply describing what happens… So I'm not particularly impressed with one variable, descriptive research, which I think it has become very common.
René D. Flores: And that's interesting to see that a lot of the research that takes place in sociology, but also in other disciplines, it's about adding empirical data points, right? This is how Somalians are doing in New Orleans. This is how Mexican immigrants are doing in LA, but they often do not add up to an explanation, to a theory.
And I think for that, I agree with you that we need theoretical lenses, a theoretical construction to understand that. And I remember in grad school, I took classes with you. You famously taught contemporary theory at Princeton. And what many people don't know is that the first few weeks of the class, we're reading philosophy of science. We're reading folks like King Cade and understanding what is the hypothesis, what is an if-then statement. How do you formulate a theory?
Because you really want to provide us with those tools. I remember in your final exam, you had a question about, you asked us to develop a theory on the spot. Develop a theory and we had to literally link up different hypotheses and I did and I failed. You basically said, no, that's not a theory and I'm going to tell you why. You said, this is not meeting the standards of a theory. This kind of framework, I really benefited from and I've tried to incorporate that into my work.
I really appreciate that perspective. I wanted to ask you about the present of immigration studies. I was just talking with Thomas Jimenez at Stanford and he told me that when he got his PhD in the mid-2000s, at that point, everybody was talking about the second generation. Assimilation was a dominant question. What is happening to the children of immigrants that came after 1965? But the momentum after that quickly shifted and now a lot of the energy in the field of migration is about topics like illegality, surveillance, deportation, deportation fears, and now unaccompanied minors.
It seems like in sociology, we've left the study of long-term processes like assimilation to the study of the present to focus on the most down-throating portion of the immigrant population. These are very important questions, of course. But I wonder how come there's almost no one today studying assimilation. And I wonder why are we living on the table by not studying these longer-term processes? So I want to know, what do you think of this shift in the focus of immigration studies?
Alejandro Portes: It reflects what I mentioned before, like one variable research that is a sort of documented in the process of deportation. That is, how ICE picks up people, where these people are placed in these private prisons that ICE hires, where they are sent out, how they are shackled in planes and going there. That's very vivid descriptive material, but it doesn't answer the question, why?
Why is ICE in place? What is its role? What are its limitations?
What role does it play in the American politics? What is the play of forces that are involved in this situation? So you see a lot of descriptive studies that sure, there is deportation and that can be documented in many ways.
There is poverty, there is absence of opportunities and so on. But why all of these things are happening? One of the most important issues that we have today, I have devoted the first chapter of the fifth edition of Immigrant America, one of the issues that seems to me that deserves far more attention that it has received, namely immigration in the framework of the rise of national populism.
First, why has national populism emerged with such force in the American electorate and the citizens of native whites? And to the point that it is seriously compromising the viability of the continuation of democracy, because we have a real charismatic leader followed by a large number of people who are blindly believing that he is the solution to his problems. That rise of national populism interacts with immigration at present, with the different forces of immigration in different and very peculiar ways in which there is a new form of victimization of discrimination against immigrants of all kinds, rising out of the idea of that this is white racism, of the conviction by the large proportion of the American white citizenry that this is our country and we are losing it out.
There are things that are coming out like in the right, like replacement theory. That is, we are being replaced by people who look like you and I. This country is ours and it's not going to do that.
Well, this moment is an extraordinarily poignant and difficult moment for the life, the political life of the nation, and also for the condition of immigrants and their future. It interacts in particular in very dangerous ways with the columns of asylum seekers coming in. Those columns of asylum seekers walking in caravans through Mexico play right into the fears and into the sense of threat that is being felt by the Native white electorate.
So this question of is the country actually being invaded? What is the future of these asylum seekers? What happens to other categories of immigrants who are not asylum seekers but are being in one way or another affected by this? That's the strategic research question on immigration studies today.
René D. Flores: That's a really interesting point that really points to our last question, which is about the future. I wanted to ask you about your opinions on the future of sociology. We increasingly see other disciplines, economists, political scientists, tackling some key sociological questions.
They're looking at social mobility, they're looking at immigrant adaptation, sometimes even identity studies. What do you think of this trend and what do you think should be the sociological response to this trend?
Alejandro Portes: Well, thank you, René. Having embraced this as a life work and embraced sociology as a discipline, I can not but be somewhat disappointed by the fact that often it had developed into social activism of one form or another in the sense of embracing particular positions generally on the left. I think that first of all, of course, that put sociology often in the camp of the enemies of the right wing, of the races.
That is, in Florida, for example, sociology has been taken out of the curriculum in secondary schools because it is part of walkism. The walk, the militant, the positions of militant advocacy on the left is being labeled in the right wing by people like the governor of Florida at present. I think that one that is, if we are going to survive as a discipline, I think that we need to recover the fundamental motivations for the study of social events scientifically.
And that means that we need to differentiate between political convictions and actual scholarly work, both in terms of research and theorizing. We are all entitled to our own political opinions. We know this, but sometimes it is necessary in order to carry out serious scholarly work to try to divest oneself from one's convictions.
I think that if I had studied immigration from an ideological point of view, the result would have been denunciations against the discrimination of immigrants everywhere, their inferiority, their second-rate place and so on, without answering the question, why would that happen and why is that difference? And I think that for our discipline to endure, there has to be greater attention to the canons of theory building and of research and the attention to insights that are important in terms of understanding different aspects of the field. Insights are not denunciations.
Insights do not come out from anger. They come out from reflection on what one has learned. I think that the position of sociology at this point is iffy. It’s iffy. Well, we can do the best we that is having been committed to sociology as a social science discipline throughout my career. I would do all I can to buttress that in terms of my courses and writing.
But I hope that others do as well. And on the positive side, there are a number of your and my colleagues that are very meritorious and that have carried out extraordinary work. I think of one of the most recent inductees in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern Professor Bruce Carruthers, who is an economic sociologist, a wonderful scholar who had produced a great deal of work.
I think of my colleague, Min Zhou, the single sociologist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences last year that had a lifetime of contributions to knowledge based on particularly her interest on Asian immigration and her colleague Jennifer Lee as well. So I think that we have some rooms for optimism on this, but our path is not covered with roses.
René D. Flores: That's interesting. Very sober conclusion. I agree with you that we seem to have a very challenging road ahead as a discipline. But I feel that the work that you do, that's tackling big questions of the day in an empirically rigorous way, in a theoretically infused way, provides an example of the kind of work that we can do. So I want to thank you, Alejandro, for your time. This has been very generative for me, and very insightful and I'm sure our listeners will appreciate that conversation.
Alejandro Portes: Thank you, René. Look forward to visiting the Center at some point in the future.
Narrator: That was Alejandro Portes in conversation with René Di Flores. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.