Re-Emerging Inequality: Narrow Economic Gaps between Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Offspring Widen Over the Life Course

Scholarship investigating economic disparities between immigrants and non- immigrants posits that immigrants’ income disadvantages decline over time and across generations, but life course approaches contend that inequalities between groups widen as individuals age. Using data from the NLSY 1997, I show that the relative economic positions of children of Latino immigrants shift over the life course when compared to children of White and Black non-immigrants. Average family income among children of Latino immigrants resembles that of the children of White non-immigrants at age 25. But children of White non-immigrants experience faster income growth as they age, tending to outrank the children of Latino immigrants by the early thirties. Accounting for intergenerational legacies of disadvantage shows that children of Latino immigrants initially outrank the children of White non-immigrants from similar economic backgrounds – an “intergenerational premium” – but this intergenerational premium erodes with age. Contra the segmented assimilation hypothesis, children of Latino immigrants maintain favorable positions relative to children of Black non-immigrants regardless of parental income. These findings suggest that the temporal patterns of economic convergence between immigrants and non-immigrants are not linear. Though intergenerational progress is substantial, the life course is a critical period through which inequalities can be made anew.