Book Review: Immigrant America Portes, Alejandro and Rumbaut, Rubén. 2024. Immigrant America: A Portrait—5th Edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 474 pp., $29.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the new fifth edition, the portraits of "Immigrant America" now span more than 35 years.To put this in perspective-1985, the time when the authors started working on the first edition of the book is as close to the end of WWII (1945) as it is to today (2025).Taken together the five editions now comprise over 2000 pages.Such a long run is impressive as there are few books from this time that are still widely read, much less issued in new editions.Just like in previous editions, this one gives an overview of major topics in the study of international migration.While thoroughly edited and updated to reflect recent demographic trends in migration to the US, the overall structure of the book is substantively unchanged from previous versions.It covers a wide range of disparate topics: there are chapters on the history of migration to the US, reviews of key theories of migration, economic adaptation, language, religion, identity, and politics.These are all key issues one might want to cover in a survey course on international migration and thus "Immigrant America" might be considered as a textbook for undergraduates or background reading for a graduate seminar.What distinguishes the book from the typical textbook is the clear analytical lens the authors bring to the topic: the importance of the human capital and resources the newcomers bring with them on the one hand, and the context of reception they encounter on the other.The chapter on the "new second generation" has a central place-presenting what is certainly one of the key interventions in the scholarly debate around immigrant adaptation in the US over the past years.Whether one agrees or disagrees with the theoretical and empirical claims (or the claim to be a theory), it would be hard to deny that "segmented assimilation" has been a generative concept spawning intense scholarly debate in the past decades: symposia at conferences, special issues filled with assessments, numerous articles, and books that directly engage with the key arguments.To name just a few: Researchers
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.029 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".