Speaker: Dr Rennie Lee

Location: Zoom

Register for Zoom attendance: https://deakin.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcrceuhpjovGtewPk8u8iSGSGtHRkqiSbRa

Speaker

Dr Rennie Lee is a Senior Research Fellow at ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families (Life Course Centre) and Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland. Her work focuses on immigrant integration, racial and ethnic stratification, and gender and migration in crossnational contexts. Her work has been published in journals, such as Social Problems, ANNALS, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and her research has been covered in media outlets, including Washington Post, ABC News, and The Conversation.

Abstract

The Global Second Generation: Children of Immigrants in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom

Nearly 50 years after the opening up of western countries and mass migration in the 21st century, wealthy western societies are facing a new demographic landscape. More than immigrants themselves, the children of immigrants are crucial to determining the future of the ethnoracial composition and long-term effects of immigration policy in these host countries. In this talk, I will focus on the children of immigrants’ integration across four of the largest immigrant-receiving countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. I find that the fates of immigrants’ children differ by the host country where they grow up as they encounter a mix of institutional and structural factors in each host society—immigration policy, language policies, and racial and ethnic hierarchies—that create unique challenges. In particular, I show how the children of immigrants rely on coethnic communities as a resource to address the challenges they face.