Immigrants' financial well-being: The role of race/ethnicity, nativity, and education

Immigrants' integration into American society has occupied the interest of both scholars and the general public throughout the nation's history. One way to assess how contemporary immigrants integrate into American society is to examine immigrants' economic integration or their financial well-being. In this dissertation, I join with a handful of scholars who have moved beyond using income as an indicator of economic integration and have begun to examine wealth accumulation. This dissertation focuses on three dimensions of the U.S. social stratification system---and their intersections---that may affect immigrants' economic integration: race/ethnicity, nativity, and class. One particularly important indicator of class is immigrants' educational attainment. Overall educational attainment is certainly important for immigrant integration; however, immigrants' education is typically devalued upon migration. The devaluation suggests that the relationship between education and wealth accumulation for immigrants may differ from that for the native-born.;This dissertation examines two ways in which education may produce differential patterns of integration for contemporary immigrants: place of education and educational-occupational mismatch. First, this dissertation focuses on place of education or where immigrants complete their education---either in the United States or abroad. Second, the devaluation of immigrants' educational attainment may produce mismatch between immigrants' educational attainment and their occupation after arrival. This may lead immigrants to be either over- or underqualified relative to their coworkers. This dissertation draws on two datasets that correspond to the particular measure of class: for place of education, this dissertation uses the Survey of Income and Program Participation and for educational-occupational mismatch, this dissertation uses the New Immigrant Survey.;Results demonstrate strong racial/ethnic and educational stratification. For the native-born and U.S. educated immigrants, race/ethnicity is the primary stratifying factor and racial/ethnic wealth inequality conforms to expectations. Among the foreign educated; however, both Asian and Latino immigrants present contradictory patterns that alter the racial/ethnic hierarchy. In terms of educational-occupational mismatch, the relationship between educational-occupational mismatch and wealth accumulation depends on whether immigrants have more or less education than their same-occupation coworkers. This relationship also differs by race/ethnicity, revealing a Latino/non-Latino contrast. The differential pattern of wealth accumulation for Latino immigrants could reflect both their unique distribution of educational attainment and their disproportionate concentration in occupations with less education. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of the implications of both racial/ethnic and educational stratification for contemporary immigrant integration.