Alba’s work on the incorporation of immigrant-origin populations has expanded to cross-national comparisons. He continues his collaboration with Roxane Silberman of the Maurice Halbwachs Center of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris) on the comparison of second-generation Mexicans in the US with second-generation North Africans in France. Their paper on the potential relevance of segmented assimilation for the North-African case has been published in Ethnic & Racial Studies; and another paper comparing the educational systems in the two countries with reference to the life chances of the children of immigrants will appear soon. With Nancy Foner of the City University of New York, he has developed a comparative study of the electoral success of the immigrant populations in five nations, including the US. He and Mary Waters of Harvard are completing work on an edited volume that arises from a 2004 conference on the second generation in Europe and the US, held at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University.
The major expression of his comparative focus is a four-year NSF grant to study the children of immigrants in the school systems of the US and five European countries. Alba is the principal investigator leading a 10-university consortium and the Social Science Research Council. Senior social scientists at five American and five European universities are paired in binational projects that examine specific aspects of schools and their impacts on the second generation. Pre-doctoral students and post-doctoral scholars receive training in comparative research through their work on these projects. All told, twenty-six scholars are involved in the research.
Alba’s rehabilitation of the assimilation model in the US continues to attract attention on both sides of the Atlantic. His book with Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream, won the 2004 Thomas & Znaniecki Award of the International Migration section of the American Sociological Association and the 2005 Mirra Komarovsky Award. During fall, 2005, he went on a speaking tour of Germany to address the assimilation experience in the US and what Europeans might learn from it; in June, 2006, he gave a keynote address as the annual meeting of the Netherlands American Studies Association, and in September, 2006, he presented a keynote before the EQUALSOC European network of excellence. In June, 2006, his paper on the controversial Huntington thesis about Hispanics was published as part of a symposium in the APSA’s Perspectives on Politics. He had previously published on the web a report on linguistic assimilation to rebut the Huntington thesis; the substance of the report appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere in December, 2004. In the spring of 2008, he will be the Nathan Huggins Lecturer in Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, where he will address the potential for contemporary immigration to alter US racial divisions.
With Nancy Denton and Walter Ensel of CSDA, Alba is investigating the impacts and incorporation of immigrants arriving in new areas of settlement—namely, the small cities of the mid-Hudson valley. This study, supported by a grant from Russell Sage Foundation, has completed interviews with Spanish-speaking immigrants in the cities of Newburgh and Poughkeepsie and a separate set with natives of the areas. With David Strogatz of Public Health, he has completed a report on health disparities in diabetes in upstate New York cities, as revealed by hospitalization records.
Alba’s comparative research is currently supported by a 4-year, $1.5 million grant from NSF. The award was one of the 11 inaugural grants made by NSF’s PIRE (Program for International Research and Education) program; this was the only one made to social scientists. He also is a Co-Principal Investigator of a grant from Russell Sage Foundation to study new immigrants in the Hudson Valley of New York. He is the PI of the current R24 grant; and with David Strogatz, he is Co-Director of the Research Core of Albany’s EXPORT Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities. His comparative research was also supported by now-completed grants from Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation during the last three years.
Alba’s future research will focus especially on comparative studies of second-generation incorporation. With Nancy Denton and Donald Hernandez, he has revised a proposal to NICHD to analyze the social contexts in which the children of immigrants are being raised in the US.; this project has been approved by the Census Bureau for access to the New York City Research Data Center.
Alba serves as Director of the CSDA and of its Administrative Core. He provides leadership to the Center’s research in several areas, and he has collaborated effectively with several colleagues, including Nancy Denton, Walter Ensel, Donald Hernandez, and David Strogatz. Alba’s research program is especially central to the thematic research on the children of immigrants and to the Second Generation Initiative, but he has also contributed to the development of the research cluster on health disparities.
Use of infrastructure cores and activities
Alba relies on the Administrative Core for services related to proposal preparation and grant management. His role as PI of the NSF grant for the comparative study of the children of immigrants in schools would be impossible without this assistance. He also draws extensively on the Center’s data services for the preparation of large data sets for analysis—for example, the report on language assimilation would have been impossible without the preparatory work on the IPUMS carried out by CSDA staff.