The Second Generation Initiative of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis aims to inform the social-science community and other interested publics about the most up-to-date data and findings concerning children growing up in immigrant families, whether in the United States or in other countries.

Currently, two major CSDA projects are grouped under the Second Generation Initiative:

Children in Newcomer and Native Families

The children in newcomer and native families makes available data generated from the 2000 Census by Don Hernandez, Nancy Denton, and Sociology graduate students Suzanne Macartney and Jessica Singer.  The site will initially have data for every state in the U.S. and selected metropolitan areas, as well as more detailed data for counties in California.  Detailed tables cover topics such as family composition of the home, family mobility and immigrant status, language proficiency, parental education, employment, earnings, poverty status, school enrollment, and neighborhood characteristics. Insofar as sample size allows, children are be classified into 9 native-born race/ethnic groups and 30 countries of origin. 

The Children of Immigrants in Schools

The children of immigrants in schools is the website of an NSF-funded project to support collaborative, interdisciplinary and internationally comparative research on the children of immigrants in schools.  In addition to research, the project aims to train a new generation of researchers to carry out comparative research on the second generation.  The research portion of the project pairs senior social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic in five binational studies to examine specific aspects of the interactions of school systems with the second generation.  To accomplish its training goals, the project will attach a pre-doctoral student and a postdoctoral scholar to each binational study.  For an article about this project, see: http://www2.asanet.org/footnotes/apr06/