13
The University of Manchester Research Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic Minority Groups in Britain DOI: 10.17645/si.v6i3.1542 Document Version Final published version Link to publication record in Manchester Research Explorer Citation for published version (APA): Li, Y. (2018). Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic Minority Groups in Britain. Social Inclusion, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v6i3.1542 Published in: Social Inclusion Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on Manchester Research Explorer is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Proof version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Explorer are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Takedown policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the University of Manchester’s Takedown Procedures [http://man.ac.uk/04Y6Bo] or contact [email protected] providing relevant details, so we can investigate your claim. Download date:13. Apr. 2020

Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

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Page 1: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

The University of Manchester Research

Integration Journey The Social Mobility Trajectory ofEthnic Minority Groups in BritainDOI1017645siv6i31542

Document VersionFinal published version

Link to publication record in Manchester Research Explorer

Citation for published version (APA)Li Y (2018) Integration Journey The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic Minority Groups in Britain SocialInclusion 6(3) httpsdoiorg1017645siv6i31542

Published inSocial Inclusion

Citing this paperPlease note that where the full-text provided on Manchester Research Explorer is the Author Accepted Manuscriptor Proof version this may differ from the final Published version If citing it is advised that you check and use thepublishers definitive version

General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Explorer are retained by theauthors andor other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights

Takedown policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the University of Manchesterrsquos TakedownProcedures [httpmanacuk04Y6Bo] or contact umlscholarlycommunicationsmanchesteracuk providingrelevant details so we can investigate your claim

Download date13 Apr 2020

Social Inclusion (ISSN 2183ndash2803)2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX

DOI 1017645siv6i31542

Article

Integration Journey The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic MinorityGroups in Britain

Yaojun Li 1 2

1 Institute for Empirical Social Science Research Xirsquoan Jiaotong University Xirsquoan 710049 Shaanxi China2 Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research University of Manchester Manchester M139PL UK E-Mail YaojunLimanchesteracuk

Submitted 8 March 2018 | Accepted4 July 2018 | Published in press

AbstractThis article studies the processes of social mobility by the main ethno-generational groups in Britain We compare theorigin-education-destination (OED) links between the first- and second- generation ethnic minority groups with those ofwhites with a particular focus on whether the second generation are getting closer to whites than do the first generationin the links hence becoming increasingly integrated into the socio-economic lives of British society Using data from theUK Household Longitudinal Study and adopting structural equation modelling (SEM) methods we find strong evidence offirst-generation setback and some signs of second-generation catch-up Indians and Chinese are making progress but thetwo black groups and PakistanisBangladeshis are lagging behind The analysis shows persisting ethnic disadvantages inthe labour market in spite of their high levels of educational achievement and it also shows an emerging order of ethnichierarchy running from Indian Chinese black Caribbean PakistaniBangladeshi to black African groups

Keywordsethnicity generation minorities social mobility UK

IssueThis article is part of the issue ldquoMigration Boundaries and Differentiated Citizenshiprdquo edited by Terry Wotherspoon (Uni-versity of Saskatchewan Canada)

copy 2018 by the author licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon Portugal) This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-tion 40 International License (CC BY)

1 Introduction

One of the most important features in contemporaryBritish sociology is the ongoing debate on the patternsand trends of social mobility Is mobility rising decliningor showing a trendless fluctuation High levels of socialmobility in terms of both absolute and relative rates andin the downward as well as the upward directions areusually taken as evidence of a vibrant and meritocraticsociety whilst low levels of mobility are emblematic ofa rigid and exclusive society (Goldthorpe 2013 Payne2017 Vandecasteele 2016)

Social mobility research has consistently shown thatthere are marked class differences in educational at-tainment occupational achievement and labour mar-ket earnings in British society While there is little dis-agreement about this overall conclusion there are dif-ferent views about how social divisions are changing

over time In the numerous studies conducted over threedecades Goldthorpe and his colleagues (see for exam-ple Goldthorpe Llewellyn amp Payne 1987 Goldthorpeamp Mills 2008) hold that there is little change in mobil-ity in British society in terms of either absolute or rela-tive rates A somewhatmore optimistic account is shownin findings by another group of researchers (Devine amp Li2013 Heath amp Payne 2000 Lambert Prandy amp Bottero2007 Li amp Devine 2011 2014 Li amp Heath 2016) Whiledetails differ a common feature in these studies is theevidence they provide on signs of social progress as ex-hibited by a small but significant rise in relative mobilityrates A third view is held by economists arguing that so-cial mobility is declining in Britain (Blanden GoodmanGregg amp Machin 2004)

While there are heated debates a closer look wouldreveal greater commonality than difference Among so-ciologists the main issue is whether there are signs of

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 1

weakening origin-destination associations Goldthorpersquosmain argument is that mobility trends tend to showtrendless fluctuations But he and Mills also show ris-ing relative mobility in the analysis of lsquocomplete tablesrsquonamely between male origins and conjugal households(Goldthorpe amp Mills 2008 fig 9) This kind of growingalthough limited openness is also found in Breen Lui-jkx Muumlller and Pollakrsquos (2009) analysis of educationalmobility and in Li and Heathrsquos (2016) study of social mo-bility (Li amp Heath 2016 fig 3 panel a) Secondly itis noted that the differences between sociologists andeconomists aremoremethodological than substantive innature the former use the occupation-based measureand the latter use the incomeearnings-based measurein examining trends of intergenerational mobility Whenthe twomeasures are directly compared the substantivefindings are not much different (Erikson amp Goldthorpe2010) Furthermore by usingMostellerrsquos (1968) iterativeadjustment method Goldthorpe showed that lsquoanalysesbased on five-class mobility tableshellipcapture a strongerintergenerational association than do quintile family in-comeearnings tablesrsquo (Goldthorpe 2013 p 439 em-phasis in the original) Thus in spite of the debatesamong exponents of the three theses the overwhelm-ing evidence points to the same basic conclusion that iswhile there are profound inequalities in British societyclass mobility might be on the increase although direc-tions of income mobility are less certain

The possibility of a loosening social (class) structurecalls for explanation Goldthorpe and Mills (2008) at-tribute this to the rising participation rates of womenin the labour market who compete with men for moreadvantaged positions Breen et al (2009) suggest thatthe welfare system adopted since the SecondWorldWarcoupled with greater provision of educational opportuni-ties may have reduced the class inequality in educationalattainment in the developed countries although Sturgisand Buscha (2015) argue that the impact of educationalexpansion on social fluidity was both indirect and weakLi and Heath (2016) suggest that the rising compositionof ethnic minority members in the population may be animportant contributing factor if the minorities do not fol-low the same pattern of social reproduction as do themajority group

The addition of ethnicity as a separate dimensionto mobility research poses a new challenge to the al-ready complicated analysis but offers a new perspec-tive Do immigrants and their children in Britain havethe same opportunities as do the majority group Dothey suffer greater downward mobility and experiencea lsquoperverse opennessrsquo (Hout 1984 p 1393) Earlier re-search tends to ignore the ethnic dimension due to in-sufficient ethnic minority samples in the datasets suchas the National Child Development Study (NCDS) of 1958and the British Cohort Study (BCS) of 1970 the sourcesused by Blanden et al (2004) and by Goldthorpe andhis colleagues mentioned above In recent years moreattention is being paid to ethnic social mobility For in-

stance Platt (2005) examined themobility profiles of chil-dren of black Caribbean and Indian heritages who wereaged 8 to 15 in 1971 using the Longitudinal Study withlinked records from the censuses of population in Eng-land and Wales from 1971 to 1991 and she found thatblack Caribbean and Indian families were less able thanwhites to transmit resources to their offspring Heathand McMahon (2005) compared the mobility profilesof Irish black Caribbeans Indians and Pakistanis withwhite British using data from the General HouseholdSurvey (GHS) for the years 1985ndash1992 They found thatlsquoclass origins operated in much the same way amongethnic minorities as they did among British-born whitesrsquo(Heath amp McMahon 2005 p 411) More recently Liand Heath (2016) used data from the GHS the BritishHousehold Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK HouseholdLongitudinal Study (UKHLS) to look at the mobility tra-jectories of the main ethnic minority groups in Britainover four decades from the 1980s to the 2010s Theyfound that black Africans and PakistanisBangladeshisfaced even greater disadvantages than Platt (2005) foundfor black Caribbeans and Indians These and other stud-ies in this regard have provided significant insights to theorigin-destination associations of the ethnic minoritiesin Britain Yet they do not show how education medi-ates the origin-destination association whether the roleis similar for ethnic minorities as for whites or whetherthe impact is stronger for the second than for the firstgeneration Given this the present study seeks to makea contribution to scholarship in this regard by examin-ing the ethno-generational differences in social mobilityprocesses in contemporary UK society namely how theorigin-destination association is mediated via education

Addressing issues of ethnic mobility processes is ar-guably more difficult than that on the general popula-tion Firstly there is the distinction between migrationand ethnicity to be made and secondly there is the mul-tiplicity issue to consider as ethnic minority groups arefrequently found to be more different from one anotherthan they are as a whole from the white majority Thusaddressing issues of ethnic integration requires investi-gation of how the lsquofatesrsquo of different groupings changeover time andor across generations in terms of the inter-play between family origin educational attainment andlabour-market (occupational) destination

Figure 1 suggests a framework of analysis for ethno-generational social mobility in terms of origin educationand destination (OED) relations The solid thick line rep-resents the majority group (white British in the presentcase) the thin line represents the first-generation andthe dashed line represents the second-generation eth-nic minority groups In the origin-education (OE) rela-tions the lines for the first- and the second- genera-tion groups are set close to each other and to that ofwhites on the assumption that the educational attain-ment of the two generations and of whites would besimilarly affected by family origins parents tend to usewhatever socio-economic resources at their command to

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 2

Educaon

Ethno-generaonal

Desnaon

White G1 G2

Origin

Figure 1 The OED moderated by ethno-generational status Notes First generation (G1) refers to ethnic minority respon-dents who were foreign born and who arrived in the UK at age 13 or older Second generation (G2) refers to those whowere UK born or who arrived in the UK by age 12 The lines for the first and the second generation ethnic minorities areplaced outside of those for whites for convenience but the distances between the G1 and G2 lines with the white linesindicate the degree of integration

help with their childrenrsquos schooling and it is class ratherthan ethnicity or nativity that will play a predominantrole in this regard The extent to which this assumptionwill be borne out in reality is an empirical matter de-pending on the interplay between micro-level decision-making and macro-level economic conditions and em-ployer preferences (for a discussion see Li 2018) Forthe ED and OD relations there is reason to believe thatthe two generations will have quite different trajectorieswith the first generation to face more disadvantages intranslating their educational qualifications into occupa-tional achievement but the second to follow the major-ity groupmore closely Immigrants tend to have overseasqualifications unrecognised by British employers theirparental resources are less functional in helping themob-tain good jobs and coming from developing countriestheir parental resources are not expected to bear resem-blance with those of whites Overall the immigrant gen-eration are expected to have weaker associations in theED and the OD relations than do themajority group as isimplied by the wider gaps between the first-generationand thewhite lines than between the second-generationand the white lines

However it can be expected that the first-generationsetbackswill be largely avoided by the second generationwho were born in the country or who arrived as childrenand are thus raised and educated in the UK Unlike theirparental generation who might have a lsquosojournerrsquo orien-tation to their stay in Britain and may cherish the hopeof returning to their country of origin the second genera-tion have a different orientation For them theUK is theircountry English is their mother tongue and British ed-ucation is their passport to labour market achievementFurthermore unlike their parental generation whose mi-gration process has disrupted their social networks withfriendship ties left behind in the country of origin thesecond generation will make friends with school matesneighbours and others in the social circles just like theirmajority peers with both bonding and bridging social

capital to help them with their work and personal livesIn short the human-social-economic capital of the sec-ond generation is expected to yield the essentially samereturns to their occupational attainment as it does forwhites Even if there might be lingering disadvantagesagainst the second generation these can be expected tobe negligible as compared with those faced by the firstgeneration (Heath amp Li 2008) Given these and otherfactors in favour of the second vis-agrave-vis the first genera-tion we may expect the second-generation to resemblewhites in their educational and occupational attainmentor at least have ED and OD links much closer to whitesrsquothan to those of the first generation co-ethnics as shownin the framework of Figure 1

The distinction made in the foregoing discussion be-tween the first and the second generation makes con-ceptual sense but existing studies do not usually makesuch differentiations On the whole existing researchsuggests that ethnic minorities suffer marked disadvan-tages relative to whites in terms of higher rates ofunemployment especially during recession years (alsocalled lsquohyper-cyclical unemploymentrsquo in the relevant lit-erature) lower class positions and lower levels of earn-ings (Berthoud amp Blekesaune 2006 Heath amp Li 2008 Li2010 2018 Li amp Heath 2008 2010 in press NEP 2007)Such studies also show considerable inter-ethnic differ-ences which exhibit themselves in a more salient man-ner than those that exist between ethnic minorities asa whole and whites Some ethnic groups such as thoseof black and PakistaniBangladeshi heritages are usuallyfound to face greater difficulties than do other groupsGiven this we need to differentiate both the main eth-nic minority groups and the generational statuses

As mobility research is primarily concerned with thestrength of association between origins and destinationsan issue that is of central importance for analysing eth-nic social mobility is whether ethnic minorities the mi-grant generation in particular have lower origin statusesthan do the majority group in the destination country

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 3

white British in our case As immigrants tend to comefrom poorer countries we may expect them to havelower parental classes and lower educational qualifica-tions than do whites Existing research has howeversuggested that most immigrant groups in the UK werelsquopositively selectedrsquo not only as compared with their co-ethnics who have stayed in the origin countries but alsowith themainstream population This may sound surpris-ing at first sight but a momentrsquos reflection would sug-gest this as an inevitable outcome of the raised thresh-olds of entry in the wave of the Race Relations Acts sincethe 1960s (Borjas 1992 Feliciano amp Lanuza 2017 Heathamp Brinbaum 2014 Ichou 2014 Li amp Heath 2008) Butthe labour market setbacks they typically face would putthem into lower class positions and poorer economic sit-uations (Li 2018) which would result in a lower startingpoint for the second generation In such circumstancesthe second generation may not follow white childrenin educational and occupational attainment Empiricalfindings in this regard are inconclusive Some studieshave found the second generation faring better in ed-ucation than do whites (Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017 Li2018) similarly well in occupational attainment (CheungampHeath 2007) butworse in avoidance of unemployment(Li amp Heath 2008 2016) An explanation for the second-generational educational success is provided in terms oflsquoreinvigorated aspirationrsquo (Li 2018) that is parental de-pressed class would push them to redoubled efforts lead-ing to higher levels of educational attainment as a pre-emptive strategy against the possible discrimination inthe labour market Overall while there has been consid-erable research on separate OE ED and OD links no anal-ysis is currently available that addresses the three linkssimultaneously for the ethno-generational groups in con-temporary British society

Summarising the discussion above we wish to ad-dress the following questions in the present study

bull Do class origins exert the same influences on theeducational and occupational attainment of theethno-generational groups as for the white major-ity in Britain

bull Do the second generation experience greater sim-ilarity to whites than do the first generation in ed-ucational and occupational attainment and

bull Do men and women of ethnic minority back-grounds have similar experiences to their whitepeers in the OED trajectories

2 Data and Methods

To address these questions we use data from the firstthree waves of the UKHLS which has a large general pop-ulation sample and an ethnic boost sample enabling us

to differentiate detailed ethno-generational groups andwhich also contains rich information on parental socio-economic position and respondentsrsquo own educationaland occupational attainment The data allow us to disag-gregate the socialmobility trajectories of different ethno-generational and gender groups simultaneously and totest whether processes of social reproduction operatefor the majority and for different ethno-generational mi-nority groups in a similar fashion The survey started in2009 and is the successor to the BHPS From Wave 2onwards the BHPS respondents were lsquorolledrsquo into theUKLHS and their information is included in this analysis1

For origin and destination we adopt both classand status approaches With regard to the former wecoded parental and respondentrsquos class using the seven-category National Statistics Socio-economic Classifica-tion (NS-SEC) schema (1) higher salariat (higher-gradeprofessionals and managers) (2) lower salariat (lower-grade professionals and managers) (3) intermediate(clerical and other routine non-manual workers of highergrades) (4) small employer and own account (exclud-ing professionals) (5) lower supervisory and technicalworkers (6) semi-routine (7) routine workers Includ-ing motherrsquos class is important given recent research ev-idence (Beller 2009 Li amp Devine 2011) For parentalclass we followed a variant of the dominance approach(Erikson 1984) which takes the higher of fatherrsquos ormotherrsquos class position if both parentsrsquo class informationis available (which is usually fatherrsquos position) or the non-missing parentrsquos class position if only one parentrsquos occu-pational information is available The class measure isused in addressing issues of class advancement or de-cline by the ethno-generational groups

As for socio-economic status we used informationon both parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo job titles and turnedthem into standard International Socio-Economic Index(ISEI) scores following the conversion programme de-signed by Ganzeboom De Graaf and Treiman (1992)With regard to parental socio-economic status scoreswe first coded fatherrsquos and motherrsquos ISEIs and then usedthe Euclidian method2 to derive the family status whichcan more accurately capture the advantages and disad-vantages of different types of family such as dual- oversingle- career families in terms of the socio-economic-cultural resources in their possession For instance theresources of one family where both parents were in se-nior (professional ormanagerial) salariat positionswouldbemuch greater than those of another family where oneparent was in a senior salariat position but the other wasa cleaner or shop assistant or non-employed or where itwas a single-parent family with say the mother workingas a nurse Using the dominance class approach wouldyield the same level of family class but with the Euclidianapproach the differences between them can be brought

1 The response rates are high at around 80 for the general population sample and 70 for the ethnic minority boost sample see UK Data (nd)2 Using the Euclidian method the parental socio-economic status is defined as the square root of the sum of the squares on each parentrsquos ISEIs whenboth parentsrsquo scores are available (sqrt of (fatherrsquos ISEI^2 + motherrsquos ISEI^2)) or the available score for one parent As black Caribbean women aremore likely to form single-parent households in Britain and as they are also frequently found to work as nurses in the NHS using the dominance classapproach would inflate the family resources they have relative to dual-career high-salariat families

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 4

into much sharper relief The parental and respondentrsquosstatus scores are used in assessing the OED relations viathe structural equation modelling (SEM) method

With regard to ethnicity we follow the standard prac-tice of ethnic studies in Britain and include white blackCaribbean black African Indian PakistaniBangladeshiChinese and lsquoOtherrsquo As the main purpose in the articleis to assess the ethnic integration whites are used asthe reference group for whom no generational divisionsare further differentiated Lessard-Phillips and Li (2017p 49) differentiated six generational groupings for whiteBritish and white Irish each and five generational group-ings for white Other in their study of educational attain-ment and Li and Heath (2008 2010 2018) also differ-entiated different white groupings (although not gener-ational ones) in their study of long-term risks of unem-ployment access to salariat positions and labour-marketearnings and found increasing convergence among thethree groupings Given this whites in all generations areused as one broad group The lsquoOtherrsquo group in our ethnic-ity variable is very diverse in composition and we do notdifferentiate generations for them either As for genera-tional status we define the first generation as those bornoutside the UK and arriving at age 13 or older and thesecond generations as those born in the UK or arrivingby age 12 on the grounds that unlike the former the lat-terwould have receivedmost (or all) of their education inBritain and would acquire the same kind of human capi-tal and have fluent English as whites Higher generationsare included in the second for each of the main ethnicminority groups (for detailed information on ethnic gen-erations see Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017) It is noted herethat the first generation are not necessarily the parentsof the second generation Finally in this regard we needto bear in mind that while some ethnic groups tend tohave stronger community ties which may foster higherlevels of lsquoethnic capitalrsquo conducive to childrenrsquos educa-tional attainment (Modood 2004) the bonding ties mayalso place a particular emphasis on tradition and cultureleaving a negative impact on female participation in thelabour market (Portes 1998) Given the complex inter-play between ethno-generational and gender divisionswe conduct the analyses for men and women separatelyWe confine our study to respondents aged 16 to 65 formen and 16 to 63 for women The sample sizes for theseven ethnic groups are 36503 891 1140 1722 1895268 and 1913 respectively

Our main concern with the ethno-generational so-cial mobility in Britain includes two sub-themes net so-cial mobility between parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo classpositions and origin-destination associations as medi-ated by education To address the first issue we usethe net dissimilarity index (NDI) designed by Lieberson(1975 for application in mobility research see also Li ampHeath 2016)

The NDI is defined as NDxy = pr(X gt Y) minus pr(Y gt X)and further defined as

n

1114012i=2

xi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

yj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠ minus

n

1114012i=2

yi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

xj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠

where in our case X indicates the parental class positionand Y that of the respondent It is noted here that we re-versed the class order in calculating the NDI with 1 refer-ring to the routine manual and 7 to the higher salariat

Mobility researchers tend to use the dissimilarity in-dex (DI) which shows the percentage of cases that wouldhave to be reallocated to make the two distributionsidentical as a measure of the overall difference betweentwo distributions Yet the DI is insensitive to ordering anddoes not provide any directional statement about thedifferences between fatherrsquos and respondentrsquos classesThe NDI however does provide a directional statementabout class decline or advancement with a positivevalue indicating net upward and a negative value indicat-ing net downward mobility The range of the NDI is fromminus1 to 1 in Liebersonrsquos original article but is here rescaledto range from minus100 to 100 so that the scales could beunderstood akin to percentage-point differences To ad-dress the second issue we use SEM with parental andrespondentrsquos ISEI scores to represent origin and destina-tion status positions For education we follow Duncan(1968 p 92) in using levels rather than years of educa-tion and we code an eight-way variable (1) no formaleducation (2) primary (3) GCSE (O-Level) or equivalent(4) incomplete A-Level (5) A-Level or equivalent (6) sub-degree (7) first degree and (8) higher degree (mastersor PhDs)

3 Results

We begin by looking at class and educational distribu-tions by ethnic groups and by gender For class we alsolook at advancement or decline as shown in the NDI inTable 1 based on parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo seven-classdistributions As the presentation of all these distribu-tions would take too much space we only show the pro-portions of parents and respondents in salariat positionsAgain for brevity we only show the proportions with(first or higher) degree qualifications by respondentsThe data on degree-level education are presented hereto give an indication of possible mechanism of class de-cline or advancement The majority group (white) areused as the notional reference group in this table eventhough only univariate rather than multivariate analysisis conducted

The data in Table 1 show two main features first-generation class decline and second-generation catch-up Both features are displayed within the overall struc-ture of class rigidity and ethnic disadvantage of Britishsociety The features can be better grasped by lookingat the figures for whites for whom 34 of the parents39 of male and 36 of female respondents are insalariat positions and 23 have degree levels of educa-tion With these as benchmark figures we find a salient

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 5

Table 1 Parental and respondentsrsquo salariat positions () net difference index (NDI) for intergenerational class advance-ment and respondentsrsquo degree-level education () by ethnicity generation and gender (N = 44332) Source The UKHLSwaves 1ndash3

() salariat

Parents Respondents NDI on class advancement () degree+

1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen

MenWhite mdash 34 mdash 39 mdash 10 mdash 23B Caribbean 23 34 27 35 minus151 minus78 21 18B African 47 57 35 38 minus277 minus225 43 31Indian 40 30 43 53 minus101 301 53 39PakBan 34 14 24 31 minus245 198 37 26Chinese 55 24 51 45 minus117 37 65 47Other 39 46 34 42 minus203 minus118 43 28

WomenWhite mdash 34 mdash 36 mdash minus03 mdash 23B Caribbean 21 30 30 39 18 167 20 27B African 46 51 29 31 minus339 minus225 31 34Indian 41 26 33 39 minus181 225 41 32PakBan 29 15 28 26 minus142 257 19 22Chinese 58 22 51 42 minus216 85 56 38Other 40 41 38 37 minus147 minus44 38 25

Notes 1st and 2nd gen refer to first and second generations For analysis of the NDI the seven-class schema for parents and respon-dents is used for each of the ethnic minority groups by generation and by gender Weighted analysis for this and all other analyses inthis study

feature of first-generation lsquopositive selectionrsquo followedby subsequent class decline and second-generation ed-ucational achievement The term lsquopositive selectionrsquo isusually used to refer to the socio-economic resourcesof movers relative to stayers in the origin country notto the majority group in the destination countries Mostimmigrants to the UK come from developing countriesand onemight expect them to have poor family class andlow education Yet the data on proportions of parentalsalariat and own degree-level education of our first-generation respondents suggest that they are not onlyhighly positively selected relative to their compatriotswho stayed in the origin countries but also compare wellwith the majority group in the UK We do not of coursehave direct evidence on parental and own resources forstayers in all the source countries from which our first-generation respondents come but we do have evidenceon China which renders strong support to the intuitivethinking3 Most ethno-generational groupings are withthe exceptions of black Caribbean men and women andPakistaniBangladeshi women as likely as or more likelythan whites to have salariat parents and degree-level ed-ucation 65 of Chinese and 53 of Indian men in thefirst generation have degree-level education over twiceas high as for white men (23) The parental class advan-tage of first-generation men is also clear especially by

Chinese and black African men at 55 and 47 respec-tively as against 34 for white men This gives substan-tial evidence on the immigrant positive selection in theUK as compared not only with their fellow-countrymenwho have stayed in the origin country but also with thewhite British One might of course argue that immi-grantsrsquo parental salariat position and their own degree-level education do not carry the same returns to labourmarket positions in Britain as do those for whites Thismay be true to some extent For instance a farmer inIndia may not have as much land as his counterpart inBritain But if we take a relative position in terms of theproportion of compatriots who do not have similar lev-els of resources then it makes sense to say that immi-grants tend to have better economic resources and hu-man capital than do their compatriots who have stayedin the home country and it is this lsquosuperiorrsquo position be-fore coupled with class decline after immigration whichmay well serve as a source of reinvigorated aspiration totheir offspring (Li 2018)

When we compare the first- and the second- gener-ationrsquos parental class positions we find clear evidenceof immigrant class decline As our second generationare those born in the UK or arriving by age 12 theirparentsrsquo class position is indexed by the jobs they weredoing in the UK labour market hence measured in a

3 For men aged 25ndash69 in China only 11 of the parents and 14 of the respondents were in salariat positions (Li Zhang amp Kong 2015 p 25) TheChinese immigrant menrsquos class positions were therefore not only much higher than those of their fellow countrymen in China but also higher thanthose of the white British

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 6

way comparable to that of white parents As comparedwith whites we find that all second-generation groupsrsquoparental class is lower than that of whites with the ex-ception of black Africans The immigrant class declinecan also be seen from comparing the first- and thesecond- generationrsquos own class positions Although bothgenerations have much higher levels of education thando whites (except for black Caribbean men and Pak-istaniBangladeshi women) their proportions in salariatpositions are generally lower than for whites (except forChinese and Indians)

The interplay between parental and respondentsrsquoclass positions may present itself as class decline or ad-vancement as is captured by the NDI under the mid-dle columns of Table 1 Here we see clear evidenceof first-generation class decline and some evidence ofsecond-generation advancement With the sole excep-tion of black Caribbean women all first-generation menand women in all ethnic minority groups suffered classsetbacks in other words they worked in jobs at a lowerlevel than that of their parents Amongst the second gen-eration Indian PakistaniBangladeshi men and womenand black African women were finding themselves inhigher occupational levels than their parents Most ofthese features apply to ethnic minority groups of bothsexes to a fairly similar extent although women tend tohave lower class positions and educational qualificationsthan do their male counterparts

The analysis above gives fairly clear evidence ofpositive-selection and class setback by the migrant- (andsome advancement for the second-) generation Yet theanalysis is at a descriptive level Moving from this wenow turn to a more formal test to see how family originaffects the respondentrsquos education which in turn affectstheir class destination using the SEM method

In the SEM framework for OED analysis the effectsof OE ED and OD links are simultaneously assessed Thecoefficient for the OD link is called lsquodirectrsquo effect themul-tiplication of the OE and the ED coefficients is called lsquoindi-rectrsquo effect and the sum of the direct and the indirect ef-fects is called lsquototalrsquo effect The five effects for the ethno-generational groups by sex are summarised in Table 2all measured as standardised coefficients By compar-ing the coefficients of the ethno-generational groupingswith those of whites we can see whether the strengthof association is significantly different hence whether aparticular group is successfully integrated into British so-ciety in the domains under consideration Similarly bycomparing the changes between the first and the sec-ond generations we can gain insights into whether a par-ticular group is making significant progress over genera-tions4 Our main interest here is to see whether the sec-ond generation is much closer than the first generationto whites in each of the links As ethnic minorities tendto be younger than whites we have included age as a co-variate in all models Younger cohorts may for instance

have benefited from the expansion of higher educationand of salariat class in British society than older ones5

The data in Table 2 show some important featuresFirst when all factors in the models are taken into ac-count the effects of education on destination (ED) aremuch more salient than the effects of origin on destina-tion (OD) With the sole exception of second-generationChinesewomen the coefficients on the ED link are highlysignificant for all ethno-generational groupings But weneed to remind ourselves that origin effects are medi-ated via education and that in addition to separate EDeffects there are still sizeable direct and indirect effectsThus the origin effects manifest themselves in a pow-erful albeit not always direct manner since the medi-ating effects are mostly stronger than the direct effectsSecond with the sole exception of first-generation blackCaribbean men who have been found to have the lowesteducation in Table 1 and who here show a significantlystronger ED association than for white men there are nosignificant differences in the ED link between the ethno-generational groupings and their white peers This how-ever does not mean the education has the same returnsfor minorities as for the majority group As shown in theemboldened figures there are significantly weaker indi-rect and total effects for the second-generational menand women than for whites which may explain why thesecond-generation members are so much better qual-ified but have worse labour market outcomes as fre-quently observed in research And third looking at thegenerational changes as indicated by italicised figures onthe second generation we find that second-generationblack Caribbean men have significantly weaker indirectand total effects than their first-generation counterpartsas do Indian menrsquos OE and Indian womenrsquos indirect linksThe mechanisms in these cases may be different As forblack Caribbean men it may be the lsquodownward spiralrsquoto the white working class norms and aspirations as dis-cussed in Li and Heath (2008) which may explain theirgreater integration For Indians the first-generation classdecline and second-generation success may better ex-plain their intergenerational advancement and the loos-ening links over the generation

The findings on a greater distance between the sec-ond than between the first generation ethnic minoritygroups and whites in the mobility pathways run counterto the expectations as specified in Figure 1 and also seemcounter-intuitive For decades ethnic studies scholarshave been predicting over time and intergenerationalprogress in assimilation (Alba 2005 Gordon 1964 Li2010 Park amp Burgess 19211969) So how do we makesense of the findings Firstly we need to think howthe weaker strength of association comes about If onegroup cannot pass the resources to their offspring aseffectively as another this would weaken the strengthof origin-destination associations Duncan (1968) for in-stance shows that black people in the US were poor

4 Significance tests in both regards are conducted via the procedure of lsquononlinear combination of estimatorsrsquo (nlcom in Stata) within the SEM structure5 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer and the Academic Editor for this insightful point

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 7

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 2: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

Social Inclusion (ISSN 2183ndash2803)2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX

DOI 1017645siv6i31542

Article

Integration Journey The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic MinorityGroups in Britain

Yaojun Li 1 2

1 Institute for Empirical Social Science Research Xirsquoan Jiaotong University Xirsquoan 710049 Shaanxi China2 Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research University of Manchester Manchester M139PL UK E-Mail YaojunLimanchesteracuk

Submitted 8 March 2018 | Accepted4 July 2018 | Published in press

AbstractThis article studies the processes of social mobility by the main ethno-generational groups in Britain We compare theorigin-education-destination (OED) links between the first- and second- generation ethnic minority groups with those ofwhites with a particular focus on whether the second generation are getting closer to whites than do the first generationin the links hence becoming increasingly integrated into the socio-economic lives of British society Using data from theUK Household Longitudinal Study and adopting structural equation modelling (SEM) methods we find strong evidence offirst-generation setback and some signs of second-generation catch-up Indians and Chinese are making progress but thetwo black groups and PakistanisBangladeshis are lagging behind The analysis shows persisting ethnic disadvantages inthe labour market in spite of their high levels of educational achievement and it also shows an emerging order of ethnichierarchy running from Indian Chinese black Caribbean PakistaniBangladeshi to black African groups

Keywordsethnicity generation minorities social mobility UK

IssueThis article is part of the issue ldquoMigration Boundaries and Differentiated Citizenshiprdquo edited by Terry Wotherspoon (Uni-versity of Saskatchewan Canada)

copy 2018 by the author licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon Portugal) This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-tion 40 International License (CC BY)

1 Introduction

One of the most important features in contemporaryBritish sociology is the ongoing debate on the patternsand trends of social mobility Is mobility rising decliningor showing a trendless fluctuation High levels of socialmobility in terms of both absolute and relative rates andin the downward as well as the upward directions areusually taken as evidence of a vibrant and meritocraticsociety whilst low levels of mobility are emblematic ofa rigid and exclusive society (Goldthorpe 2013 Payne2017 Vandecasteele 2016)

Social mobility research has consistently shown thatthere are marked class differences in educational at-tainment occupational achievement and labour mar-ket earnings in British society While there is little dis-agreement about this overall conclusion there are dif-ferent views about how social divisions are changing

over time In the numerous studies conducted over threedecades Goldthorpe and his colleagues (see for exam-ple Goldthorpe Llewellyn amp Payne 1987 Goldthorpeamp Mills 2008) hold that there is little change in mobil-ity in British society in terms of either absolute or rela-tive rates A somewhatmore optimistic account is shownin findings by another group of researchers (Devine amp Li2013 Heath amp Payne 2000 Lambert Prandy amp Bottero2007 Li amp Devine 2011 2014 Li amp Heath 2016) Whiledetails differ a common feature in these studies is theevidence they provide on signs of social progress as ex-hibited by a small but significant rise in relative mobilityrates A third view is held by economists arguing that so-cial mobility is declining in Britain (Blanden GoodmanGregg amp Machin 2004)

While there are heated debates a closer look wouldreveal greater commonality than difference Among so-ciologists the main issue is whether there are signs of

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 1

weakening origin-destination associations Goldthorpersquosmain argument is that mobility trends tend to showtrendless fluctuations But he and Mills also show ris-ing relative mobility in the analysis of lsquocomplete tablesrsquonamely between male origins and conjugal households(Goldthorpe amp Mills 2008 fig 9) This kind of growingalthough limited openness is also found in Breen Lui-jkx Muumlller and Pollakrsquos (2009) analysis of educationalmobility and in Li and Heathrsquos (2016) study of social mo-bility (Li amp Heath 2016 fig 3 panel a) Secondly itis noted that the differences between sociologists andeconomists aremoremethodological than substantive innature the former use the occupation-based measureand the latter use the incomeearnings-based measurein examining trends of intergenerational mobility Whenthe twomeasures are directly compared the substantivefindings are not much different (Erikson amp Goldthorpe2010) Furthermore by usingMostellerrsquos (1968) iterativeadjustment method Goldthorpe showed that lsquoanalysesbased on five-class mobility tableshellipcapture a strongerintergenerational association than do quintile family in-comeearnings tablesrsquo (Goldthorpe 2013 p 439 em-phasis in the original) Thus in spite of the debatesamong exponents of the three theses the overwhelm-ing evidence points to the same basic conclusion that iswhile there are profound inequalities in British societyclass mobility might be on the increase although direc-tions of income mobility are less certain

The possibility of a loosening social (class) structurecalls for explanation Goldthorpe and Mills (2008) at-tribute this to the rising participation rates of womenin the labour market who compete with men for moreadvantaged positions Breen et al (2009) suggest thatthe welfare system adopted since the SecondWorldWarcoupled with greater provision of educational opportuni-ties may have reduced the class inequality in educationalattainment in the developed countries although Sturgisand Buscha (2015) argue that the impact of educationalexpansion on social fluidity was both indirect and weakLi and Heath (2016) suggest that the rising compositionof ethnic minority members in the population may be animportant contributing factor if the minorities do not fol-low the same pattern of social reproduction as do themajority group

The addition of ethnicity as a separate dimensionto mobility research poses a new challenge to the al-ready complicated analysis but offers a new perspec-tive Do immigrants and their children in Britain havethe same opportunities as do the majority group Dothey suffer greater downward mobility and experiencea lsquoperverse opennessrsquo (Hout 1984 p 1393) Earlier re-search tends to ignore the ethnic dimension due to in-sufficient ethnic minority samples in the datasets suchas the National Child Development Study (NCDS) of 1958and the British Cohort Study (BCS) of 1970 the sourcesused by Blanden et al (2004) and by Goldthorpe andhis colleagues mentioned above In recent years moreattention is being paid to ethnic social mobility For in-

stance Platt (2005) examined themobility profiles of chil-dren of black Caribbean and Indian heritages who wereaged 8 to 15 in 1971 using the Longitudinal Study withlinked records from the censuses of population in Eng-land and Wales from 1971 to 1991 and she found thatblack Caribbean and Indian families were less able thanwhites to transmit resources to their offspring Heathand McMahon (2005) compared the mobility profilesof Irish black Caribbeans Indians and Pakistanis withwhite British using data from the General HouseholdSurvey (GHS) for the years 1985ndash1992 They found thatlsquoclass origins operated in much the same way amongethnic minorities as they did among British-born whitesrsquo(Heath amp McMahon 2005 p 411) More recently Liand Heath (2016) used data from the GHS the BritishHousehold Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK HouseholdLongitudinal Study (UKHLS) to look at the mobility tra-jectories of the main ethnic minority groups in Britainover four decades from the 1980s to the 2010s Theyfound that black Africans and PakistanisBangladeshisfaced even greater disadvantages than Platt (2005) foundfor black Caribbeans and Indians These and other stud-ies in this regard have provided significant insights to theorigin-destination associations of the ethnic minoritiesin Britain Yet they do not show how education medi-ates the origin-destination association whether the roleis similar for ethnic minorities as for whites or whetherthe impact is stronger for the second than for the firstgeneration Given this the present study seeks to makea contribution to scholarship in this regard by examin-ing the ethno-generational differences in social mobilityprocesses in contemporary UK society namely how theorigin-destination association is mediated via education

Addressing issues of ethnic mobility processes is ar-guably more difficult than that on the general popula-tion Firstly there is the distinction between migrationand ethnicity to be made and secondly there is the mul-tiplicity issue to consider as ethnic minority groups arefrequently found to be more different from one anotherthan they are as a whole from the white majority Thusaddressing issues of ethnic integration requires investi-gation of how the lsquofatesrsquo of different groupings changeover time andor across generations in terms of the inter-play between family origin educational attainment andlabour-market (occupational) destination

Figure 1 suggests a framework of analysis for ethno-generational social mobility in terms of origin educationand destination (OED) relations The solid thick line rep-resents the majority group (white British in the presentcase) the thin line represents the first-generation andthe dashed line represents the second-generation eth-nic minority groups In the origin-education (OE) rela-tions the lines for the first- and the second- genera-tion groups are set close to each other and to that ofwhites on the assumption that the educational attain-ment of the two generations and of whites would besimilarly affected by family origins parents tend to usewhatever socio-economic resources at their command to

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 2

Educaon

Ethno-generaonal

Desnaon

White G1 G2

Origin

Figure 1 The OED moderated by ethno-generational status Notes First generation (G1) refers to ethnic minority respon-dents who were foreign born and who arrived in the UK at age 13 or older Second generation (G2) refers to those whowere UK born or who arrived in the UK by age 12 The lines for the first and the second generation ethnic minorities areplaced outside of those for whites for convenience but the distances between the G1 and G2 lines with the white linesindicate the degree of integration

help with their childrenrsquos schooling and it is class ratherthan ethnicity or nativity that will play a predominantrole in this regard The extent to which this assumptionwill be borne out in reality is an empirical matter de-pending on the interplay between micro-level decision-making and macro-level economic conditions and em-ployer preferences (for a discussion see Li 2018) Forthe ED and OD relations there is reason to believe thatthe two generations will have quite different trajectorieswith the first generation to face more disadvantages intranslating their educational qualifications into occupa-tional achievement but the second to follow the major-ity groupmore closely Immigrants tend to have overseasqualifications unrecognised by British employers theirparental resources are less functional in helping themob-tain good jobs and coming from developing countriestheir parental resources are not expected to bear resem-blance with those of whites Overall the immigrant gen-eration are expected to have weaker associations in theED and the OD relations than do themajority group as isimplied by the wider gaps between the first-generationand thewhite lines than between the second-generationand the white lines

However it can be expected that the first-generationsetbackswill be largely avoided by the second generationwho were born in the country or who arrived as childrenand are thus raised and educated in the UK Unlike theirparental generation who might have a lsquosojournerrsquo orien-tation to their stay in Britain and may cherish the hopeof returning to their country of origin the second genera-tion have a different orientation For them theUK is theircountry English is their mother tongue and British ed-ucation is their passport to labour market achievementFurthermore unlike their parental generation whose mi-gration process has disrupted their social networks withfriendship ties left behind in the country of origin thesecond generation will make friends with school matesneighbours and others in the social circles just like theirmajority peers with both bonding and bridging social

capital to help them with their work and personal livesIn short the human-social-economic capital of the sec-ond generation is expected to yield the essentially samereturns to their occupational attainment as it does forwhites Even if there might be lingering disadvantagesagainst the second generation these can be expected tobe negligible as compared with those faced by the firstgeneration (Heath amp Li 2008) Given these and otherfactors in favour of the second vis-agrave-vis the first genera-tion we may expect the second-generation to resemblewhites in their educational and occupational attainmentor at least have ED and OD links much closer to whitesrsquothan to those of the first generation co-ethnics as shownin the framework of Figure 1

The distinction made in the foregoing discussion be-tween the first and the second generation makes con-ceptual sense but existing studies do not usually makesuch differentiations On the whole existing researchsuggests that ethnic minorities suffer marked disadvan-tages relative to whites in terms of higher rates ofunemployment especially during recession years (alsocalled lsquohyper-cyclical unemploymentrsquo in the relevant lit-erature) lower class positions and lower levels of earn-ings (Berthoud amp Blekesaune 2006 Heath amp Li 2008 Li2010 2018 Li amp Heath 2008 2010 in press NEP 2007)Such studies also show considerable inter-ethnic differ-ences which exhibit themselves in a more salient man-ner than those that exist between ethnic minorities asa whole and whites Some ethnic groups such as thoseof black and PakistaniBangladeshi heritages are usuallyfound to face greater difficulties than do other groupsGiven this we need to differentiate both the main eth-nic minority groups and the generational statuses

As mobility research is primarily concerned with thestrength of association between origins and destinationsan issue that is of central importance for analysing eth-nic social mobility is whether ethnic minorities the mi-grant generation in particular have lower origin statusesthan do the majority group in the destination country

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 3

white British in our case As immigrants tend to comefrom poorer countries we may expect them to havelower parental classes and lower educational qualifica-tions than do whites Existing research has howeversuggested that most immigrant groups in the UK werelsquopositively selectedrsquo not only as compared with their co-ethnics who have stayed in the origin countries but alsowith themainstream population This may sound surpris-ing at first sight but a momentrsquos reflection would sug-gest this as an inevitable outcome of the raised thresh-olds of entry in the wave of the Race Relations Acts sincethe 1960s (Borjas 1992 Feliciano amp Lanuza 2017 Heathamp Brinbaum 2014 Ichou 2014 Li amp Heath 2008) Butthe labour market setbacks they typically face would putthem into lower class positions and poorer economic sit-uations (Li 2018) which would result in a lower startingpoint for the second generation In such circumstancesthe second generation may not follow white childrenin educational and occupational attainment Empiricalfindings in this regard are inconclusive Some studieshave found the second generation faring better in ed-ucation than do whites (Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017 Li2018) similarly well in occupational attainment (CheungampHeath 2007) butworse in avoidance of unemployment(Li amp Heath 2008 2016) An explanation for the second-generational educational success is provided in terms oflsquoreinvigorated aspirationrsquo (Li 2018) that is parental de-pressed class would push them to redoubled efforts lead-ing to higher levels of educational attainment as a pre-emptive strategy against the possible discrimination inthe labour market Overall while there has been consid-erable research on separate OE ED and OD links no anal-ysis is currently available that addresses the three linkssimultaneously for the ethno-generational groups in con-temporary British society

Summarising the discussion above we wish to ad-dress the following questions in the present study

bull Do class origins exert the same influences on theeducational and occupational attainment of theethno-generational groups as for the white major-ity in Britain

bull Do the second generation experience greater sim-ilarity to whites than do the first generation in ed-ucational and occupational attainment and

bull Do men and women of ethnic minority back-grounds have similar experiences to their whitepeers in the OED trajectories

2 Data and Methods

To address these questions we use data from the firstthree waves of the UKHLS which has a large general pop-ulation sample and an ethnic boost sample enabling us

to differentiate detailed ethno-generational groups andwhich also contains rich information on parental socio-economic position and respondentsrsquo own educationaland occupational attainment The data allow us to disag-gregate the socialmobility trajectories of different ethno-generational and gender groups simultaneously and totest whether processes of social reproduction operatefor the majority and for different ethno-generational mi-nority groups in a similar fashion The survey started in2009 and is the successor to the BHPS From Wave 2onwards the BHPS respondents were lsquorolledrsquo into theUKLHS and their information is included in this analysis1

For origin and destination we adopt both classand status approaches With regard to the former wecoded parental and respondentrsquos class using the seven-category National Statistics Socio-economic Classifica-tion (NS-SEC) schema (1) higher salariat (higher-gradeprofessionals and managers) (2) lower salariat (lower-grade professionals and managers) (3) intermediate(clerical and other routine non-manual workers of highergrades) (4) small employer and own account (exclud-ing professionals) (5) lower supervisory and technicalworkers (6) semi-routine (7) routine workers Includ-ing motherrsquos class is important given recent research ev-idence (Beller 2009 Li amp Devine 2011) For parentalclass we followed a variant of the dominance approach(Erikson 1984) which takes the higher of fatherrsquos ormotherrsquos class position if both parentsrsquo class informationis available (which is usually fatherrsquos position) or the non-missing parentrsquos class position if only one parentrsquos occu-pational information is available The class measure isused in addressing issues of class advancement or de-cline by the ethno-generational groups

As for socio-economic status we used informationon both parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo job titles and turnedthem into standard International Socio-Economic Index(ISEI) scores following the conversion programme de-signed by Ganzeboom De Graaf and Treiman (1992)With regard to parental socio-economic status scoreswe first coded fatherrsquos and motherrsquos ISEIs and then usedthe Euclidian method2 to derive the family status whichcan more accurately capture the advantages and disad-vantages of different types of family such as dual- oversingle- career families in terms of the socio-economic-cultural resources in their possession For instance theresources of one family where both parents were in se-nior (professional ormanagerial) salariat positionswouldbemuch greater than those of another family where oneparent was in a senior salariat position but the other wasa cleaner or shop assistant or non-employed or where itwas a single-parent family with say the mother workingas a nurse Using the dominance class approach wouldyield the same level of family class but with the Euclidianapproach the differences between them can be brought

1 The response rates are high at around 80 for the general population sample and 70 for the ethnic minority boost sample see UK Data (nd)2 Using the Euclidian method the parental socio-economic status is defined as the square root of the sum of the squares on each parentrsquos ISEIs whenboth parentsrsquo scores are available (sqrt of (fatherrsquos ISEI^2 + motherrsquos ISEI^2)) or the available score for one parent As black Caribbean women aremore likely to form single-parent households in Britain and as they are also frequently found to work as nurses in the NHS using the dominance classapproach would inflate the family resources they have relative to dual-career high-salariat families

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 4

into much sharper relief The parental and respondentrsquosstatus scores are used in assessing the OED relations viathe structural equation modelling (SEM) method

With regard to ethnicity we follow the standard prac-tice of ethnic studies in Britain and include white blackCaribbean black African Indian PakistaniBangladeshiChinese and lsquoOtherrsquo As the main purpose in the articleis to assess the ethnic integration whites are used asthe reference group for whom no generational divisionsare further differentiated Lessard-Phillips and Li (2017p 49) differentiated six generational groupings for whiteBritish and white Irish each and five generational group-ings for white Other in their study of educational attain-ment and Li and Heath (2008 2010 2018) also differ-entiated different white groupings (although not gener-ational ones) in their study of long-term risks of unem-ployment access to salariat positions and labour-marketearnings and found increasing convergence among thethree groupings Given this whites in all generations areused as one broad group The lsquoOtherrsquo group in our ethnic-ity variable is very diverse in composition and we do notdifferentiate generations for them either As for genera-tional status we define the first generation as those bornoutside the UK and arriving at age 13 or older and thesecond generations as those born in the UK or arrivingby age 12 on the grounds that unlike the former the lat-terwould have receivedmost (or all) of their education inBritain and would acquire the same kind of human capi-tal and have fluent English as whites Higher generationsare included in the second for each of the main ethnicminority groups (for detailed information on ethnic gen-erations see Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017) It is noted herethat the first generation are not necessarily the parentsof the second generation Finally in this regard we needto bear in mind that while some ethnic groups tend tohave stronger community ties which may foster higherlevels of lsquoethnic capitalrsquo conducive to childrenrsquos educa-tional attainment (Modood 2004) the bonding ties mayalso place a particular emphasis on tradition and cultureleaving a negative impact on female participation in thelabour market (Portes 1998) Given the complex inter-play between ethno-generational and gender divisionswe conduct the analyses for men and women separatelyWe confine our study to respondents aged 16 to 65 formen and 16 to 63 for women The sample sizes for theseven ethnic groups are 36503 891 1140 1722 1895268 and 1913 respectively

Our main concern with the ethno-generational so-cial mobility in Britain includes two sub-themes net so-cial mobility between parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo classpositions and origin-destination associations as medi-ated by education To address the first issue we usethe net dissimilarity index (NDI) designed by Lieberson(1975 for application in mobility research see also Li ampHeath 2016)

The NDI is defined as NDxy = pr(X gt Y) minus pr(Y gt X)and further defined as

n

1114012i=2

xi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

yj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠ minus

n

1114012i=2

yi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

xj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠

where in our case X indicates the parental class positionand Y that of the respondent It is noted here that we re-versed the class order in calculating the NDI with 1 refer-ring to the routine manual and 7 to the higher salariat

Mobility researchers tend to use the dissimilarity in-dex (DI) which shows the percentage of cases that wouldhave to be reallocated to make the two distributionsidentical as a measure of the overall difference betweentwo distributions Yet the DI is insensitive to ordering anddoes not provide any directional statement about thedifferences between fatherrsquos and respondentrsquos classesThe NDI however does provide a directional statementabout class decline or advancement with a positivevalue indicating net upward and a negative value indicat-ing net downward mobility The range of the NDI is fromminus1 to 1 in Liebersonrsquos original article but is here rescaledto range from minus100 to 100 so that the scales could beunderstood akin to percentage-point differences To ad-dress the second issue we use SEM with parental andrespondentrsquos ISEI scores to represent origin and destina-tion status positions For education we follow Duncan(1968 p 92) in using levels rather than years of educa-tion and we code an eight-way variable (1) no formaleducation (2) primary (3) GCSE (O-Level) or equivalent(4) incomplete A-Level (5) A-Level or equivalent (6) sub-degree (7) first degree and (8) higher degree (mastersor PhDs)

3 Results

We begin by looking at class and educational distribu-tions by ethnic groups and by gender For class we alsolook at advancement or decline as shown in the NDI inTable 1 based on parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo seven-classdistributions As the presentation of all these distribu-tions would take too much space we only show the pro-portions of parents and respondents in salariat positionsAgain for brevity we only show the proportions with(first or higher) degree qualifications by respondentsThe data on degree-level education are presented hereto give an indication of possible mechanism of class de-cline or advancement The majority group (white) areused as the notional reference group in this table eventhough only univariate rather than multivariate analysisis conducted

The data in Table 1 show two main features first-generation class decline and second-generation catch-up Both features are displayed within the overall struc-ture of class rigidity and ethnic disadvantage of Britishsociety The features can be better grasped by lookingat the figures for whites for whom 34 of the parents39 of male and 36 of female respondents are insalariat positions and 23 have degree levels of educa-tion With these as benchmark figures we find a salient

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 5

Table 1 Parental and respondentsrsquo salariat positions () net difference index (NDI) for intergenerational class advance-ment and respondentsrsquo degree-level education () by ethnicity generation and gender (N = 44332) Source The UKHLSwaves 1ndash3

() salariat

Parents Respondents NDI on class advancement () degree+

1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen

MenWhite mdash 34 mdash 39 mdash 10 mdash 23B Caribbean 23 34 27 35 minus151 minus78 21 18B African 47 57 35 38 minus277 minus225 43 31Indian 40 30 43 53 minus101 301 53 39PakBan 34 14 24 31 minus245 198 37 26Chinese 55 24 51 45 minus117 37 65 47Other 39 46 34 42 minus203 minus118 43 28

WomenWhite mdash 34 mdash 36 mdash minus03 mdash 23B Caribbean 21 30 30 39 18 167 20 27B African 46 51 29 31 minus339 minus225 31 34Indian 41 26 33 39 minus181 225 41 32PakBan 29 15 28 26 minus142 257 19 22Chinese 58 22 51 42 minus216 85 56 38Other 40 41 38 37 minus147 minus44 38 25

Notes 1st and 2nd gen refer to first and second generations For analysis of the NDI the seven-class schema for parents and respon-dents is used for each of the ethnic minority groups by generation and by gender Weighted analysis for this and all other analyses inthis study

feature of first-generation lsquopositive selectionrsquo followedby subsequent class decline and second-generation ed-ucational achievement The term lsquopositive selectionrsquo isusually used to refer to the socio-economic resourcesof movers relative to stayers in the origin country notto the majority group in the destination countries Mostimmigrants to the UK come from developing countriesand onemight expect them to have poor family class andlow education Yet the data on proportions of parentalsalariat and own degree-level education of our first-generation respondents suggest that they are not onlyhighly positively selected relative to their compatriotswho stayed in the origin countries but also compare wellwith the majority group in the UK We do not of coursehave direct evidence on parental and own resources forstayers in all the source countries from which our first-generation respondents come but we do have evidenceon China which renders strong support to the intuitivethinking3 Most ethno-generational groupings are withthe exceptions of black Caribbean men and women andPakistaniBangladeshi women as likely as or more likelythan whites to have salariat parents and degree-level ed-ucation 65 of Chinese and 53 of Indian men in thefirst generation have degree-level education over twiceas high as for white men (23) The parental class advan-tage of first-generation men is also clear especially by

Chinese and black African men at 55 and 47 respec-tively as against 34 for white men This gives substan-tial evidence on the immigrant positive selection in theUK as compared not only with their fellow-countrymenwho have stayed in the origin country but also with thewhite British One might of course argue that immi-grantsrsquo parental salariat position and their own degree-level education do not carry the same returns to labourmarket positions in Britain as do those for whites Thismay be true to some extent For instance a farmer inIndia may not have as much land as his counterpart inBritain But if we take a relative position in terms of theproportion of compatriots who do not have similar lev-els of resources then it makes sense to say that immi-grants tend to have better economic resources and hu-man capital than do their compatriots who have stayedin the home country and it is this lsquosuperiorrsquo position be-fore coupled with class decline after immigration whichmay well serve as a source of reinvigorated aspiration totheir offspring (Li 2018)

When we compare the first- and the second- gener-ationrsquos parental class positions we find clear evidenceof immigrant class decline As our second generationare those born in the UK or arriving by age 12 theirparentsrsquo class position is indexed by the jobs they weredoing in the UK labour market hence measured in a

3 For men aged 25ndash69 in China only 11 of the parents and 14 of the respondents were in salariat positions (Li Zhang amp Kong 2015 p 25) TheChinese immigrant menrsquos class positions were therefore not only much higher than those of their fellow countrymen in China but also higher thanthose of the white British

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 6

way comparable to that of white parents As comparedwith whites we find that all second-generation groupsrsquoparental class is lower than that of whites with the ex-ception of black Africans The immigrant class declinecan also be seen from comparing the first- and thesecond- generationrsquos own class positions Although bothgenerations have much higher levels of education thando whites (except for black Caribbean men and Pak-istaniBangladeshi women) their proportions in salariatpositions are generally lower than for whites (except forChinese and Indians)

The interplay between parental and respondentsrsquoclass positions may present itself as class decline or ad-vancement as is captured by the NDI under the mid-dle columns of Table 1 Here we see clear evidenceof first-generation class decline and some evidence ofsecond-generation advancement With the sole excep-tion of black Caribbean women all first-generation menand women in all ethnic minority groups suffered classsetbacks in other words they worked in jobs at a lowerlevel than that of their parents Amongst the second gen-eration Indian PakistaniBangladeshi men and womenand black African women were finding themselves inhigher occupational levels than their parents Most ofthese features apply to ethnic minority groups of bothsexes to a fairly similar extent although women tend tohave lower class positions and educational qualificationsthan do their male counterparts

The analysis above gives fairly clear evidence ofpositive-selection and class setback by the migrant- (andsome advancement for the second-) generation Yet theanalysis is at a descriptive level Moving from this wenow turn to a more formal test to see how family originaffects the respondentrsquos education which in turn affectstheir class destination using the SEM method

In the SEM framework for OED analysis the effectsof OE ED and OD links are simultaneously assessed Thecoefficient for the OD link is called lsquodirectrsquo effect themul-tiplication of the OE and the ED coefficients is called lsquoindi-rectrsquo effect and the sum of the direct and the indirect ef-fects is called lsquototalrsquo effect The five effects for the ethno-generational groups by sex are summarised in Table 2all measured as standardised coefficients By compar-ing the coefficients of the ethno-generational groupingswith those of whites we can see whether the strengthof association is significantly different hence whether aparticular group is successfully integrated into British so-ciety in the domains under consideration Similarly bycomparing the changes between the first and the sec-ond generations we can gain insights into whether a par-ticular group is making significant progress over genera-tions4 Our main interest here is to see whether the sec-ond generation is much closer than the first generationto whites in each of the links As ethnic minorities tendto be younger than whites we have included age as a co-variate in all models Younger cohorts may for instance

have benefited from the expansion of higher educationand of salariat class in British society than older ones5

The data in Table 2 show some important featuresFirst when all factors in the models are taken into ac-count the effects of education on destination (ED) aremuch more salient than the effects of origin on destina-tion (OD) With the sole exception of second-generationChinesewomen the coefficients on the ED link are highlysignificant for all ethno-generational groupings But weneed to remind ourselves that origin effects are medi-ated via education and that in addition to separate EDeffects there are still sizeable direct and indirect effectsThus the origin effects manifest themselves in a pow-erful albeit not always direct manner since the medi-ating effects are mostly stronger than the direct effectsSecond with the sole exception of first-generation blackCaribbean men who have been found to have the lowesteducation in Table 1 and who here show a significantlystronger ED association than for white men there are nosignificant differences in the ED link between the ethno-generational groupings and their white peers This how-ever does not mean the education has the same returnsfor minorities as for the majority group As shown in theemboldened figures there are significantly weaker indi-rect and total effects for the second-generational menand women than for whites which may explain why thesecond-generation members are so much better qual-ified but have worse labour market outcomes as fre-quently observed in research And third looking at thegenerational changes as indicated by italicised figures onthe second generation we find that second-generationblack Caribbean men have significantly weaker indirectand total effects than their first-generation counterpartsas do Indian menrsquos OE and Indian womenrsquos indirect linksThe mechanisms in these cases may be different As forblack Caribbean men it may be the lsquodownward spiralrsquoto the white working class norms and aspirations as dis-cussed in Li and Heath (2008) which may explain theirgreater integration For Indians the first-generation classdecline and second-generation success may better ex-plain their intergenerational advancement and the loos-ening links over the generation

The findings on a greater distance between the sec-ond than between the first generation ethnic minoritygroups and whites in the mobility pathways run counterto the expectations as specified in Figure 1 and also seemcounter-intuitive For decades ethnic studies scholarshave been predicting over time and intergenerationalprogress in assimilation (Alba 2005 Gordon 1964 Li2010 Park amp Burgess 19211969) So how do we makesense of the findings Firstly we need to think howthe weaker strength of association comes about If onegroup cannot pass the resources to their offspring aseffectively as another this would weaken the strengthof origin-destination associations Duncan (1968) for in-stance shows that black people in the US were poor

4 Significance tests in both regards are conducted via the procedure of lsquononlinear combination of estimatorsrsquo (nlcom in Stata) within the SEM structure5 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer and the Academic Editor for this insightful point

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 7

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 3: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

weakening origin-destination associations Goldthorpersquosmain argument is that mobility trends tend to showtrendless fluctuations But he and Mills also show ris-ing relative mobility in the analysis of lsquocomplete tablesrsquonamely between male origins and conjugal households(Goldthorpe amp Mills 2008 fig 9) This kind of growingalthough limited openness is also found in Breen Lui-jkx Muumlller and Pollakrsquos (2009) analysis of educationalmobility and in Li and Heathrsquos (2016) study of social mo-bility (Li amp Heath 2016 fig 3 panel a) Secondly itis noted that the differences between sociologists andeconomists aremoremethodological than substantive innature the former use the occupation-based measureand the latter use the incomeearnings-based measurein examining trends of intergenerational mobility Whenthe twomeasures are directly compared the substantivefindings are not much different (Erikson amp Goldthorpe2010) Furthermore by usingMostellerrsquos (1968) iterativeadjustment method Goldthorpe showed that lsquoanalysesbased on five-class mobility tableshellipcapture a strongerintergenerational association than do quintile family in-comeearnings tablesrsquo (Goldthorpe 2013 p 439 em-phasis in the original) Thus in spite of the debatesamong exponents of the three theses the overwhelm-ing evidence points to the same basic conclusion that iswhile there are profound inequalities in British societyclass mobility might be on the increase although direc-tions of income mobility are less certain

The possibility of a loosening social (class) structurecalls for explanation Goldthorpe and Mills (2008) at-tribute this to the rising participation rates of womenin the labour market who compete with men for moreadvantaged positions Breen et al (2009) suggest thatthe welfare system adopted since the SecondWorldWarcoupled with greater provision of educational opportuni-ties may have reduced the class inequality in educationalattainment in the developed countries although Sturgisand Buscha (2015) argue that the impact of educationalexpansion on social fluidity was both indirect and weakLi and Heath (2016) suggest that the rising compositionof ethnic minority members in the population may be animportant contributing factor if the minorities do not fol-low the same pattern of social reproduction as do themajority group

The addition of ethnicity as a separate dimensionto mobility research poses a new challenge to the al-ready complicated analysis but offers a new perspec-tive Do immigrants and their children in Britain havethe same opportunities as do the majority group Dothey suffer greater downward mobility and experiencea lsquoperverse opennessrsquo (Hout 1984 p 1393) Earlier re-search tends to ignore the ethnic dimension due to in-sufficient ethnic minority samples in the datasets suchas the National Child Development Study (NCDS) of 1958and the British Cohort Study (BCS) of 1970 the sourcesused by Blanden et al (2004) and by Goldthorpe andhis colleagues mentioned above In recent years moreattention is being paid to ethnic social mobility For in-

stance Platt (2005) examined themobility profiles of chil-dren of black Caribbean and Indian heritages who wereaged 8 to 15 in 1971 using the Longitudinal Study withlinked records from the censuses of population in Eng-land and Wales from 1971 to 1991 and she found thatblack Caribbean and Indian families were less able thanwhites to transmit resources to their offspring Heathand McMahon (2005) compared the mobility profilesof Irish black Caribbeans Indians and Pakistanis withwhite British using data from the General HouseholdSurvey (GHS) for the years 1985ndash1992 They found thatlsquoclass origins operated in much the same way amongethnic minorities as they did among British-born whitesrsquo(Heath amp McMahon 2005 p 411) More recently Liand Heath (2016) used data from the GHS the BritishHousehold Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK HouseholdLongitudinal Study (UKHLS) to look at the mobility tra-jectories of the main ethnic minority groups in Britainover four decades from the 1980s to the 2010s Theyfound that black Africans and PakistanisBangladeshisfaced even greater disadvantages than Platt (2005) foundfor black Caribbeans and Indians These and other stud-ies in this regard have provided significant insights to theorigin-destination associations of the ethnic minoritiesin Britain Yet they do not show how education medi-ates the origin-destination association whether the roleis similar for ethnic minorities as for whites or whetherthe impact is stronger for the second than for the firstgeneration Given this the present study seeks to makea contribution to scholarship in this regard by examin-ing the ethno-generational differences in social mobilityprocesses in contemporary UK society namely how theorigin-destination association is mediated via education

Addressing issues of ethnic mobility processes is ar-guably more difficult than that on the general popula-tion Firstly there is the distinction between migrationand ethnicity to be made and secondly there is the mul-tiplicity issue to consider as ethnic minority groups arefrequently found to be more different from one anotherthan they are as a whole from the white majority Thusaddressing issues of ethnic integration requires investi-gation of how the lsquofatesrsquo of different groupings changeover time andor across generations in terms of the inter-play between family origin educational attainment andlabour-market (occupational) destination

Figure 1 suggests a framework of analysis for ethno-generational social mobility in terms of origin educationand destination (OED) relations The solid thick line rep-resents the majority group (white British in the presentcase) the thin line represents the first-generation andthe dashed line represents the second-generation eth-nic minority groups In the origin-education (OE) rela-tions the lines for the first- and the second- genera-tion groups are set close to each other and to that ofwhites on the assumption that the educational attain-ment of the two generations and of whites would besimilarly affected by family origins parents tend to usewhatever socio-economic resources at their command to

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 2

Educaon

Ethno-generaonal

Desnaon

White G1 G2

Origin

Figure 1 The OED moderated by ethno-generational status Notes First generation (G1) refers to ethnic minority respon-dents who were foreign born and who arrived in the UK at age 13 or older Second generation (G2) refers to those whowere UK born or who arrived in the UK by age 12 The lines for the first and the second generation ethnic minorities areplaced outside of those for whites for convenience but the distances between the G1 and G2 lines with the white linesindicate the degree of integration

help with their childrenrsquos schooling and it is class ratherthan ethnicity or nativity that will play a predominantrole in this regard The extent to which this assumptionwill be borne out in reality is an empirical matter de-pending on the interplay between micro-level decision-making and macro-level economic conditions and em-ployer preferences (for a discussion see Li 2018) Forthe ED and OD relations there is reason to believe thatthe two generations will have quite different trajectorieswith the first generation to face more disadvantages intranslating their educational qualifications into occupa-tional achievement but the second to follow the major-ity groupmore closely Immigrants tend to have overseasqualifications unrecognised by British employers theirparental resources are less functional in helping themob-tain good jobs and coming from developing countriestheir parental resources are not expected to bear resem-blance with those of whites Overall the immigrant gen-eration are expected to have weaker associations in theED and the OD relations than do themajority group as isimplied by the wider gaps between the first-generationand thewhite lines than between the second-generationand the white lines

However it can be expected that the first-generationsetbackswill be largely avoided by the second generationwho were born in the country or who arrived as childrenand are thus raised and educated in the UK Unlike theirparental generation who might have a lsquosojournerrsquo orien-tation to their stay in Britain and may cherish the hopeof returning to their country of origin the second genera-tion have a different orientation For them theUK is theircountry English is their mother tongue and British ed-ucation is their passport to labour market achievementFurthermore unlike their parental generation whose mi-gration process has disrupted their social networks withfriendship ties left behind in the country of origin thesecond generation will make friends with school matesneighbours and others in the social circles just like theirmajority peers with both bonding and bridging social

capital to help them with their work and personal livesIn short the human-social-economic capital of the sec-ond generation is expected to yield the essentially samereturns to their occupational attainment as it does forwhites Even if there might be lingering disadvantagesagainst the second generation these can be expected tobe negligible as compared with those faced by the firstgeneration (Heath amp Li 2008) Given these and otherfactors in favour of the second vis-agrave-vis the first genera-tion we may expect the second-generation to resemblewhites in their educational and occupational attainmentor at least have ED and OD links much closer to whitesrsquothan to those of the first generation co-ethnics as shownin the framework of Figure 1

The distinction made in the foregoing discussion be-tween the first and the second generation makes con-ceptual sense but existing studies do not usually makesuch differentiations On the whole existing researchsuggests that ethnic minorities suffer marked disadvan-tages relative to whites in terms of higher rates ofunemployment especially during recession years (alsocalled lsquohyper-cyclical unemploymentrsquo in the relevant lit-erature) lower class positions and lower levels of earn-ings (Berthoud amp Blekesaune 2006 Heath amp Li 2008 Li2010 2018 Li amp Heath 2008 2010 in press NEP 2007)Such studies also show considerable inter-ethnic differ-ences which exhibit themselves in a more salient man-ner than those that exist between ethnic minorities asa whole and whites Some ethnic groups such as thoseof black and PakistaniBangladeshi heritages are usuallyfound to face greater difficulties than do other groupsGiven this we need to differentiate both the main eth-nic minority groups and the generational statuses

As mobility research is primarily concerned with thestrength of association between origins and destinationsan issue that is of central importance for analysing eth-nic social mobility is whether ethnic minorities the mi-grant generation in particular have lower origin statusesthan do the majority group in the destination country

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 3

white British in our case As immigrants tend to comefrom poorer countries we may expect them to havelower parental classes and lower educational qualifica-tions than do whites Existing research has howeversuggested that most immigrant groups in the UK werelsquopositively selectedrsquo not only as compared with their co-ethnics who have stayed in the origin countries but alsowith themainstream population This may sound surpris-ing at first sight but a momentrsquos reflection would sug-gest this as an inevitable outcome of the raised thresh-olds of entry in the wave of the Race Relations Acts sincethe 1960s (Borjas 1992 Feliciano amp Lanuza 2017 Heathamp Brinbaum 2014 Ichou 2014 Li amp Heath 2008) Butthe labour market setbacks they typically face would putthem into lower class positions and poorer economic sit-uations (Li 2018) which would result in a lower startingpoint for the second generation In such circumstancesthe second generation may not follow white childrenin educational and occupational attainment Empiricalfindings in this regard are inconclusive Some studieshave found the second generation faring better in ed-ucation than do whites (Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017 Li2018) similarly well in occupational attainment (CheungampHeath 2007) butworse in avoidance of unemployment(Li amp Heath 2008 2016) An explanation for the second-generational educational success is provided in terms oflsquoreinvigorated aspirationrsquo (Li 2018) that is parental de-pressed class would push them to redoubled efforts lead-ing to higher levels of educational attainment as a pre-emptive strategy against the possible discrimination inthe labour market Overall while there has been consid-erable research on separate OE ED and OD links no anal-ysis is currently available that addresses the three linkssimultaneously for the ethno-generational groups in con-temporary British society

Summarising the discussion above we wish to ad-dress the following questions in the present study

bull Do class origins exert the same influences on theeducational and occupational attainment of theethno-generational groups as for the white major-ity in Britain

bull Do the second generation experience greater sim-ilarity to whites than do the first generation in ed-ucational and occupational attainment and

bull Do men and women of ethnic minority back-grounds have similar experiences to their whitepeers in the OED trajectories

2 Data and Methods

To address these questions we use data from the firstthree waves of the UKHLS which has a large general pop-ulation sample and an ethnic boost sample enabling us

to differentiate detailed ethno-generational groups andwhich also contains rich information on parental socio-economic position and respondentsrsquo own educationaland occupational attainment The data allow us to disag-gregate the socialmobility trajectories of different ethno-generational and gender groups simultaneously and totest whether processes of social reproduction operatefor the majority and for different ethno-generational mi-nority groups in a similar fashion The survey started in2009 and is the successor to the BHPS From Wave 2onwards the BHPS respondents were lsquorolledrsquo into theUKLHS and their information is included in this analysis1

For origin and destination we adopt both classand status approaches With regard to the former wecoded parental and respondentrsquos class using the seven-category National Statistics Socio-economic Classifica-tion (NS-SEC) schema (1) higher salariat (higher-gradeprofessionals and managers) (2) lower salariat (lower-grade professionals and managers) (3) intermediate(clerical and other routine non-manual workers of highergrades) (4) small employer and own account (exclud-ing professionals) (5) lower supervisory and technicalworkers (6) semi-routine (7) routine workers Includ-ing motherrsquos class is important given recent research ev-idence (Beller 2009 Li amp Devine 2011) For parentalclass we followed a variant of the dominance approach(Erikson 1984) which takes the higher of fatherrsquos ormotherrsquos class position if both parentsrsquo class informationis available (which is usually fatherrsquos position) or the non-missing parentrsquos class position if only one parentrsquos occu-pational information is available The class measure isused in addressing issues of class advancement or de-cline by the ethno-generational groups

As for socio-economic status we used informationon both parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo job titles and turnedthem into standard International Socio-Economic Index(ISEI) scores following the conversion programme de-signed by Ganzeboom De Graaf and Treiman (1992)With regard to parental socio-economic status scoreswe first coded fatherrsquos and motherrsquos ISEIs and then usedthe Euclidian method2 to derive the family status whichcan more accurately capture the advantages and disad-vantages of different types of family such as dual- oversingle- career families in terms of the socio-economic-cultural resources in their possession For instance theresources of one family where both parents were in se-nior (professional ormanagerial) salariat positionswouldbemuch greater than those of another family where oneparent was in a senior salariat position but the other wasa cleaner or shop assistant or non-employed or where itwas a single-parent family with say the mother workingas a nurse Using the dominance class approach wouldyield the same level of family class but with the Euclidianapproach the differences between them can be brought

1 The response rates are high at around 80 for the general population sample and 70 for the ethnic minority boost sample see UK Data (nd)2 Using the Euclidian method the parental socio-economic status is defined as the square root of the sum of the squares on each parentrsquos ISEIs whenboth parentsrsquo scores are available (sqrt of (fatherrsquos ISEI^2 + motherrsquos ISEI^2)) or the available score for one parent As black Caribbean women aremore likely to form single-parent households in Britain and as they are also frequently found to work as nurses in the NHS using the dominance classapproach would inflate the family resources they have relative to dual-career high-salariat families

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 4

into much sharper relief The parental and respondentrsquosstatus scores are used in assessing the OED relations viathe structural equation modelling (SEM) method

With regard to ethnicity we follow the standard prac-tice of ethnic studies in Britain and include white blackCaribbean black African Indian PakistaniBangladeshiChinese and lsquoOtherrsquo As the main purpose in the articleis to assess the ethnic integration whites are used asthe reference group for whom no generational divisionsare further differentiated Lessard-Phillips and Li (2017p 49) differentiated six generational groupings for whiteBritish and white Irish each and five generational group-ings for white Other in their study of educational attain-ment and Li and Heath (2008 2010 2018) also differ-entiated different white groupings (although not gener-ational ones) in their study of long-term risks of unem-ployment access to salariat positions and labour-marketearnings and found increasing convergence among thethree groupings Given this whites in all generations areused as one broad group The lsquoOtherrsquo group in our ethnic-ity variable is very diverse in composition and we do notdifferentiate generations for them either As for genera-tional status we define the first generation as those bornoutside the UK and arriving at age 13 or older and thesecond generations as those born in the UK or arrivingby age 12 on the grounds that unlike the former the lat-terwould have receivedmost (or all) of their education inBritain and would acquire the same kind of human capi-tal and have fluent English as whites Higher generationsare included in the second for each of the main ethnicminority groups (for detailed information on ethnic gen-erations see Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017) It is noted herethat the first generation are not necessarily the parentsof the second generation Finally in this regard we needto bear in mind that while some ethnic groups tend tohave stronger community ties which may foster higherlevels of lsquoethnic capitalrsquo conducive to childrenrsquos educa-tional attainment (Modood 2004) the bonding ties mayalso place a particular emphasis on tradition and cultureleaving a negative impact on female participation in thelabour market (Portes 1998) Given the complex inter-play between ethno-generational and gender divisionswe conduct the analyses for men and women separatelyWe confine our study to respondents aged 16 to 65 formen and 16 to 63 for women The sample sizes for theseven ethnic groups are 36503 891 1140 1722 1895268 and 1913 respectively

Our main concern with the ethno-generational so-cial mobility in Britain includes two sub-themes net so-cial mobility between parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo classpositions and origin-destination associations as medi-ated by education To address the first issue we usethe net dissimilarity index (NDI) designed by Lieberson(1975 for application in mobility research see also Li ampHeath 2016)

The NDI is defined as NDxy = pr(X gt Y) minus pr(Y gt X)and further defined as

n

1114012i=2

xi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

yj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠ minus

n

1114012i=2

yi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

xj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠

where in our case X indicates the parental class positionand Y that of the respondent It is noted here that we re-versed the class order in calculating the NDI with 1 refer-ring to the routine manual and 7 to the higher salariat

Mobility researchers tend to use the dissimilarity in-dex (DI) which shows the percentage of cases that wouldhave to be reallocated to make the two distributionsidentical as a measure of the overall difference betweentwo distributions Yet the DI is insensitive to ordering anddoes not provide any directional statement about thedifferences between fatherrsquos and respondentrsquos classesThe NDI however does provide a directional statementabout class decline or advancement with a positivevalue indicating net upward and a negative value indicat-ing net downward mobility The range of the NDI is fromminus1 to 1 in Liebersonrsquos original article but is here rescaledto range from minus100 to 100 so that the scales could beunderstood akin to percentage-point differences To ad-dress the second issue we use SEM with parental andrespondentrsquos ISEI scores to represent origin and destina-tion status positions For education we follow Duncan(1968 p 92) in using levels rather than years of educa-tion and we code an eight-way variable (1) no formaleducation (2) primary (3) GCSE (O-Level) or equivalent(4) incomplete A-Level (5) A-Level or equivalent (6) sub-degree (7) first degree and (8) higher degree (mastersor PhDs)

3 Results

We begin by looking at class and educational distribu-tions by ethnic groups and by gender For class we alsolook at advancement or decline as shown in the NDI inTable 1 based on parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo seven-classdistributions As the presentation of all these distribu-tions would take too much space we only show the pro-portions of parents and respondents in salariat positionsAgain for brevity we only show the proportions with(first or higher) degree qualifications by respondentsThe data on degree-level education are presented hereto give an indication of possible mechanism of class de-cline or advancement The majority group (white) areused as the notional reference group in this table eventhough only univariate rather than multivariate analysisis conducted

The data in Table 1 show two main features first-generation class decline and second-generation catch-up Both features are displayed within the overall struc-ture of class rigidity and ethnic disadvantage of Britishsociety The features can be better grasped by lookingat the figures for whites for whom 34 of the parents39 of male and 36 of female respondents are insalariat positions and 23 have degree levels of educa-tion With these as benchmark figures we find a salient

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 5

Table 1 Parental and respondentsrsquo salariat positions () net difference index (NDI) for intergenerational class advance-ment and respondentsrsquo degree-level education () by ethnicity generation and gender (N = 44332) Source The UKHLSwaves 1ndash3

() salariat

Parents Respondents NDI on class advancement () degree+

1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen

MenWhite mdash 34 mdash 39 mdash 10 mdash 23B Caribbean 23 34 27 35 minus151 minus78 21 18B African 47 57 35 38 minus277 minus225 43 31Indian 40 30 43 53 minus101 301 53 39PakBan 34 14 24 31 minus245 198 37 26Chinese 55 24 51 45 minus117 37 65 47Other 39 46 34 42 minus203 minus118 43 28

WomenWhite mdash 34 mdash 36 mdash minus03 mdash 23B Caribbean 21 30 30 39 18 167 20 27B African 46 51 29 31 minus339 minus225 31 34Indian 41 26 33 39 minus181 225 41 32PakBan 29 15 28 26 minus142 257 19 22Chinese 58 22 51 42 minus216 85 56 38Other 40 41 38 37 minus147 minus44 38 25

Notes 1st and 2nd gen refer to first and second generations For analysis of the NDI the seven-class schema for parents and respon-dents is used for each of the ethnic minority groups by generation and by gender Weighted analysis for this and all other analyses inthis study

feature of first-generation lsquopositive selectionrsquo followedby subsequent class decline and second-generation ed-ucational achievement The term lsquopositive selectionrsquo isusually used to refer to the socio-economic resourcesof movers relative to stayers in the origin country notto the majority group in the destination countries Mostimmigrants to the UK come from developing countriesand onemight expect them to have poor family class andlow education Yet the data on proportions of parentalsalariat and own degree-level education of our first-generation respondents suggest that they are not onlyhighly positively selected relative to their compatriotswho stayed in the origin countries but also compare wellwith the majority group in the UK We do not of coursehave direct evidence on parental and own resources forstayers in all the source countries from which our first-generation respondents come but we do have evidenceon China which renders strong support to the intuitivethinking3 Most ethno-generational groupings are withthe exceptions of black Caribbean men and women andPakistaniBangladeshi women as likely as or more likelythan whites to have salariat parents and degree-level ed-ucation 65 of Chinese and 53 of Indian men in thefirst generation have degree-level education over twiceas high as for white men (23) The parental class advan-tage of first-generation men is also clear especially by

Chinese and black African men at 55 and 47 respec-tively as against 34 for white men This gives substan-tial evidence on the immigrant positive selection in theUK as compared not only with their fellow-countrymenwho have stayed in the origin country but also with thewhite British One might of course argue that immi-grantsrsquo parental salariat position and their own degree-level education do not carry the same returns to labourmarket positions in Britain as do those for whites Thismay be true to some extent For instance a farmer inIndia may not have as much land as his counterpart inBritain But if we take a relative position in terms of theproportion of compatriots who do not have similar lev-els of resources then it makes sense to say that immi-grants tend to have better economic resources and hu-man capital than do their compatriots who have stayedin the home country and it is this lsquosuperiorrsquo position be-fore coupled with class decline after immigration whichmay well serve as a source of reinvigorated aspiration totheir offspring (Li 2018)

When we compare the first- and the second- gener-ationrsquos parental class positions we find clear evidenceof immigrant class decline As our second generationare those born in the UK or arriving by age 12 theirparentsrsquo class position is indexed by the jobs they weredoing in the UK labour market hence measured in a

3 For men aged 25ndash69 in China only 11 of the parents and 14 of the respondents were in salariat positions (Li Zhang amp Kong 2015 p 25) TheChinese immigrant menrsquos class positions were therefore not only much higher than those of their fellow countrymen in China but also higher thanthose of the white British

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 6

way comparable to that of white parents As comparedwith whites we find that all second-generation groupsrsquoparental class is lower than that of whites with the ex-ception of black Africans The immigrant class declinecan also be seen from comparing the first- and thesecond- generationrsquos own class positions Although bothgenerations have much higher levels of education thando whites (except for black Caribbean men and Pak-istaniBangladeshi women) their proportions in salariatpositions are generally lower than for whites (except forChinese and Indians)

The interplay between parental and respondentsrsquoclass positions may present itself as class decline or ad-vancement as is captured by the NDI under the mid-dle columns of Table 1 Here we see clear evidenceof first-generation class decline and some evidence ofsecond-generation advancement With the sole excep-tion of black Caribbean women all first-generation menand women in all ethnic minority groups suffered classsetbacks in other words they worked in jobs at a lowerlevel than that of their parents Amongst the second gen-eration Indian PakistaniBangladeshi men and womenand black African women were finding themselves inhigher occupational levels than their parents Most ofthese features apply to ethnic minority groups of bothsexes to a fairly similar extent although women tend tohave lower class positions and educational qualificationsthan do their male counterparts

The analysis above gives fairly clear evidence ofpositive-selection and class setback by the migrant- (andsome advancement for the second-) generation Yet theanalysis is at a descriptive level Moving from this wenow turn to a more formal test to see how family originaffects the respondentrsquos education which in turn affectstheir class destination using the SEM method

In the SEM framework for OED analysis the effectsof OE ED and OD links are simultaneously assessed Thecoefficient for the OD link is called lsquodirectrsquo effect themul-tiplication of the OE and the ED coefficients is called lsquoindi-rectrsquo effect and the sum of the direct and the indirect ef-fects is called lsquototalrsquo effect The five effects for the ethno-generational groups by sex are summarised in Table 2all measured as standardised coefficients By compar-ing the coefficients of the ethno-generational groupingswith those of whites we can see whether the strengthof association is significantly different hence whether aparticular group is successfully integrated into British so-ciety in the domains under consideration Similarly bycomparing the changes between the first and the sec-ond generations we can gain insights into whether a par-ticular group is making significant progress over genera-tions4 Our main interest here is to see whether the sec-ond generation is much closer than the first generationto whites in each of the links As ethnic minorities tendto be younger than whites we have included age as a co-variate in all models Younger cohorts may for instance

have benefited from the expansion of higher educationand of salariat class in British society than older ones5

The data in Table 2 show some important featuresFirst when all factors in the models are taken into ac-count the effects of education on destination (ED) aremuch more salient than the effects of origin on destina-tion (OD) With the sole exception of second-generationChinesewomen the coefficients on the ED link are highlysignificant for all ethno-generational groupings But weneed to remind ourselves that origin effects are medi-ated via education and that in addition to separate EDeffects there are still sizeable direct and indirect effectsThus the origin effects manifest themselves in a pow-erful albeit not always direct manner since the medi-ating effects are mostly stronger than the direct effectsSecond with the sole exception of first-generation blackCaribbean men who have been found to have the lowesteducation in Table 1 and who here show a significantlystronger ED association than for white men there are nosignificant differences in the ED link between the ethno-generational groupings and their white peers This how-ever does not mean the education has the same returnsfor minorities as for the majority group As shown in theemboldened figures there are significantly weaker indi-rect and total effects for the second-generational menand women than for whites which may explain why thesecond-generation members are so much better qual-ified but have worse labour market outcomes as fre-quently observed in research And third looking at thegenerational changes as indicated by italicised figures onthe second generation we find that second-generationblack Caribbean men have significantly weaker indirectand total effects than their first-generation counterpartsas do Indian menrsquos OE and Indian womenrsquos indirect linksThe mechanisms in these cases may be different As forblack Caribbean men it may be the lsquodownward spiralrsquoto the white working class norms and aspirations as dis-cussed in Li and Heath (2008) which may explain theirgreater integration For Indians the first-generation classdecline and second-generation success may better ex-plain their intergenerational advancement and the loos-ening links over the generation

The findings on a greater distance between the sec-ond than between the first generation ethnic minoritygroups and whites in the mobility pathways run counterto the expectations as specified in Figure 1 and also seemcounter-intuitive For decades ethnic studies scholarshave been predicting over time and intergenerationalprogress in assimilation (Alba 2005 Gordon 1964 Li2010 Park amp Burgess 19211969) So how do we makesense of the findings Firstly we need to think howthe weaker strength of association comes about If onegroup cannot pass the resources to their offspring aseffectively as another this would weaken the strengthof origin-destination associations Duncan (1968) for in-stance shows that black people in the US were poor

4 Significance tests in both regards are conducted via the procedure of lsquononlinear combination of estimatorsrsquo (nlcom in Stata) within the SEM structure5 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer and the Academic Editor for this insightful point

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 7

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 4: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

Educaon

Ethno-generaonal

Desnaon

White G1 G2

Origin

Figure 1 The OED moderated by ethno-generational status Notes First generation (G1) refers to ethnic minority respon-dents who were foreign born and who arrived in the UK at age 13 or older Second generation (G2) refers to those whowere UK born or who arrived in the UK by age 12 The lines for the first and the second generation ethnic minorities areplaced outside of those for whites for convenience but the distances between the G1 and G2 lines with the white linesindicate the degree of integration

help with their childrenrsquos schooling and it is class ratherthan ethnicity or nativity that will play a predominantrole in this regard The extent to which this assumptionwill be borne out in reality is an empirical matter de-pending on the interplay between micro-level decision-making and macro-level economic conditions and em-ployer preferences (for a discussion see Li 2018) Forthe ED and OD relations there is reason to believe thatthe two generations will have quite different trajectorieswith the first generation to face more disadvantages intranslating their educational qualifications into occupa-tional achievement but the second to follow the major-ity groupmore closely Immigrants tend to have overseasqualifications unrecognised by British employers theirparental resources are less functional in helping themob-tain good jobs and coming from developing countriestheir parental resources are not expected to bear resem-blance with those of whites Overall the immigrant gen-eration are expected to have weaker associations in theED and the OD relations than do themajority group as isimplied by the wider gaps between the first-generationand thewhite lines than between the second-generationand the white lines

However it can be expected that the first-generationsetbackswill be largely avoided by the second generationwho were born in the country or who arrived as childrenand are thus raised and educated in the UK Unlike theirparental generation who might have a lsquosojournerrsquo orien-tation to their stay in Britain and may cherish the hopeof returning to their country of origin the second genera-tion have a different orientation For them theUK is theircountry English is their mother tongue and British ed-ucation is their passport to labour market achievementFurthermore unlike their parental generation whose mi-gration process has disrupted their social networks withfriendship ties left behind in the country of origin thesecond generation will make friends with school matesneighbours and others in the social circles just like theirmajority peers with both bonding and bridging social

capital to help them with their work and personal livesIn short the human-social-economic capital of the sec-ond generation is expected to yield the essentially samereturns to their occupational attainment as it does forwhites Even if there might be lingering disadvantagesagainst the second generation these can be expected tobe negligible as compared with those faced by the firstgeneration (Heath amp Li 2008) Given these and otherfactors in favour of the second vis-agrave-vis the first genera-tion we may expect the second-generation to resemblewhites in their educational and occupational attainmentor at least have ED and OD links much closer to whitesrsquothan to those of the first generation co-ethnics as shownin the framework of Figure 1

The distinction made in the foregoing discussion be-tween the first and the second generation makes con-ceptual sense but existing studies do not usually makesuch differentiations On the whole existing researchsuggests that ethnic minorities suffer marked disadvan-tages relative to whites in terms of higher rates ofunemployment especially during recession years (alsocalled lsquohyper-cyclical unemploymentrsquo in the relevant lit-erature) lower class positions and lower levels of earn-ings (Berthoud amp Blekesaune 2006 Heath amp Li 2008 Li2010 2018 Li amp Heath 2008 2010 in press NEP 2007)Such studies also show considerable inter-ethnic differ-ences which exhibit themselves in a more salient man-ner than those that exist between ethnic minorities asa whole and whites Some ethnic groups such as thoseof black and PakistaniBangladeshi heritages are usuallyfound to face greater difficulties than do other groupsGiven this we need to differentiate both the main eth-nic minority groups and the generational statuses

As mobility research is primarily concerned with thestrength of association between origins and destinationsan issue that is of central importance for analysing eth-nic social mobility is whether ethnic minorities the mi-grant generation in particular have lower origin statusesthan do the majority group in the destination country

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 3

white British in our case As immigrants tend to comefrom poorer countries we may expect them to havelower parental classes and lower educational qualifica-tions than do whites Existing research has howeversuggested that most immigrant groups in the UK werelsquopositively selectedrsquo not only as compared with their co-ethnics who have stayed in the origin countries but alsowith themainstream population This may sound surpris-ing at first sight but a momentrsquos reflection would sug-gest this as an inevitable outcome of the raised thresh-olds of entry in the wave of the Race Relations Acts sincethe 1960s (Borjas 1992 Feliciano amp Lanuza 2017 Heathamp Brinbaum 2014 Ichou 2014 Li amp Heath 2008) Butthe labour market setbacks they typically face would putthem into lower class positions and poorer economic sit-uations (Li 2018) which would result in a lower startingpoint for the second generation In such circumstancesthe second generation may not follow white childrenin educational and occupational attainment Empiricalfindings in this regard are inconclusive Some studieshave found the second generation faring better in ed-ucation than do whites (Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017 Li2018) similarly well in occupational attainment (CheungampHeath 2007) butworse in avoidance of unemployment(Li amp Heath 2008 2016) An explanation for the second-generational educational success is provided in terms oflsquoreinvigorated aspirationrsquo (Li 2018) that is parental de-pressed class would push them to redoubled efforts lead-ing to higher levels of educational attainment as a pre-emptive strategy against the possible discrimination inthe labour market Overall while there has been consid-erable research on separate OE ED and OD links no anal-ysis is currently available that addresses the three linkssimultaneously for the ethno-generational groups in con-temporary British society

Summarising the discussion above we wish to ad-dress the following questions in the present study

bull Do class origins exert the same influences on theeducational and occupational attainment of theethno-generational groups as for the white major-ity in Britain

bull Do the second generation experience greater sim-ilarity to whites than do the first generation in ed-ucational and occupational attainment and

bull Do men and women of ethnic minority back-grounds have similar experiences to their whitepeers in the OED trajectories

2 Data and Methods

To address these questions we use data from the firstthree waves of the UKHLS which has a large general pop-ulation sample and an ethnic boost sample enabling us

to differentiate detailed ethno-generational groups andwhich also contains rich information on parental socio-economic position and respondentsrsquo own educationaland occupational attainment The data allow us to disag-gregate the socialmobility trajectories of different ethno-generational and gender groups simultaneously and totest whether processes of social reproduction operatefor the majority and for different ethno-generational mi-nority groups in a similar fashion The survey started in2009 and is the successor to the BHPS From Wave 2onwards the BHPS respondents were lsquorolledrsquo into theUKLHS and their information is included in this analysis1

For origin and destination we adopt both classand status approaches With regard to the former wecoded parental and respondentrsquos class using the seven-category National Statistics Socio-economic Classifica-tion (NS-SEC) schema (1) higher salariat (higher-gradeprofessionals and managers) (2) lower salariat (lower-grade professionals and managers) (3) intermediate(clerical and other routine non-manual workers of highergrades) (4) small employer and own account (exclud-ing professionals) (5) lower supervisory and technicalworkers (6) semi-routine (7) routine workers Includ-ing motherrsquos class is important given recent research ev-idence (Beller 2009 Li amp Devine 2011) For parentalclass we followed a variant of the dominance approach(Erikson 1984) which takes the higher of fatherrsquos ormotherrsquos class position if both parentsrsquo class informationis available (which is usually fatherrsquos position) or the non-missing parentrsquos class position if only one parentrsquos occu-pational information is available The class measure isused in addressing issues of class advancement or de-cline by the ethno-generational groups

As for socio-economic status we used informationon both parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo job titles and turnedthem into standard International Socio-Economic Index(ISEI) scores following the conversion programme de-signed by Ganzeboom De Graaf and Treiman (1992)With regard to parental socio-economic status scoreswe first coded fatherrsquos and motherrsquos ISEIs and then usedthe Euclidian method2 to derive the family status whichcan more accurately capture the advantages and disad-vantages of different types of family such as dual- oversingle- career families in terms of the socio-economic-cultural resources in their possession For instance theresources of one family where both parents were in se-nior (professional ormanagerial) salariat positionswouldbemuch greater than those of another family where oneparent was in a senior salariat position but the other wasa cleaner or shop assistant or non-employed or where itwas a single-parent family with say the mother workingas a nurse Using the dominance class approach wouldyield the same level of family class but with the Euclidianapproach the differences between them can be brought

1 The response rates are high at around 80 for the general population sample and 70 for the ethnic minority boost sample see UK Data (nd)2 Using the Euclidian method the parental socio-economic status is defined as the square root of the sum of the squares on each parentrsquos ISEIs whenboth parentsrsquo scores are available (sqrt of (fatherrsquos ISEI^2 + motherrsquos ISEI^2)) or the available score for one parent As black Caribbean women aremore likely to form single-parent households in Britain and as they are also frequently found to work as nurses in the NHS using the dominance classapproach would inflate the family resources they have relative to dual-career high-salariat families

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 4

into much sharper relief The parental and respondentrsquosstatus scores are used in assessing the OED relations viathe structural equation modelling (SEM) method

With regard to ethnicity we follow the standard prac-tice of ethnic studies in Britain and include white blackCaribbean black African Indian PakistaniBangladeshiChinese and lsquoOtherrsquo As the main purpose in the articleis to assess the ethnic integration whites are used asthe reference group for whom no generational divisionsare further differentiated Lessard-Phillips and Li (2017p 49) differentiated six generational groupings for whiteBritish and white Irish each and five generational group-ings for white Other in their study of educational attain-ment and Li and Heath (2008 2010 2018) also differ-entiated different white groupings (although not gener-ational ones) in their study of long-term risks of unem-ployment access to salariat positions and labour-marketearnings and found increasing convergence among thethree groupings Given this whites in all generations areused as one broad group The lsquoOtherrsquo group in our ethnic-ity variable is very diverse in composition and we do notdifferentiate generations for them either As for genera-tional status we define the first generation as those bornoutside the UK and arriving at age 13 or older and thesecond generations as those born in the UK or arrivingby age 12 on the grounds that unlike the former the lat-terwould have receivedmost (or all) of their education inBritain and would acquire the same kind of human capi-tal and have fluent English as whites Higher generationsare included in the second for each of the main ethnicminority groups (for detailed information on ethnic gen-erations see Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017) It is noted herethat the first generation are not necessarily the parentsof the second generation Finally in this regard we needto bear in mind that while some ethnic groups tend tohave stronger community ties which may foster higherlevels of lsquoethnic capitalrsquo conducive to childrenrsquos educa-tional attainment (Modood 2004) the bonding ties mayalso place a particular emphasis on tradition and cultureleaving a negative impact on female participation in thelabour market (Portes 1998) Given the complex inter-play between ethno-generational and gender divisionswe conduct the analyses for men and women separatelyWe confine our study to respondents aged 16 to 65 formen and 16 to 63 for women The sample sizes for theseven ethnic groups are 36503 891 1140 1722 1895268 and 1913 respectively

Our main concern with the ethno-generational so-cial mobility in Britain includes two sub-themes net so-cial mobility between parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo classpositions and origin-destination associations as medi-ated by education To address the first issue we usethe net dissimilarity index (NDI) designed by Lieberson(1975 for application in mobility research see also Li ampHeath 2016)

The NDI is defined as NDxy = pr(X gt Y) minus pr(Y gt X)and further defined as

n

1114012i=2

xi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

yj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠ minus

n

1114012i=2

yi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

xj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠

where in our case X indicates the parental class positionand Y that of the respondent It is noted here that we re-versed the class order in calculating the NDI with 1 refer-ring to the routine manual and 7 to the higher salariat

Mobility researchers tend to use the dissimilarity in-dex (DI) which shows the percentage of cases that wouldhave to be reallocated to make the two distributionsidentical as a measure of the overall difference betweentwo distributions Yet the DI is insensitive to ordering anddoes not provide any directional statement about thedifferences between fatherrsquos and respondentrsquos classesThe NDI however does provide a directional statementabout class decline or advancement with a positivevalue indicating net upward and a negative value indicat-ing net downward mobility The range of the NDI is fromminus1 to 1 in Liebersonrsquos original article but is here rescaledto range from minus100 to 100 so that the scales could beunderstood akin to percentage-point differences To ad-dress the second issue we use SEM with parental andrespondentrsquos ISEI scores to represent origin and destina-tion status positions For education we follow Duncan(1968 p 92) in using levels rather than years of educa-tion and we code an eight-way variable (1) no formaleducation (2) primary (3) GCSE (O-Level) or equivalent(4) incomplete A-Level (5) A-Level or equivalent (6) sub-degree (7) first degree and (8) higher degree (mastersor PhDs)

3 Results

We begin by looking at class and educational distribu-tions by ethnic groups and by gender For class we alsolook at advancement or decline as shown in the NDI inTable 1 based on parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo seven-classdistributions As the presentation of all these distribu-tions would take too much space we only show the pro-portions of parents and respondents in salariat positionsAgain for brevity we only show the proportions with(first or higher) degree qualifications by respondentsThe data on degree-level education are presented hereto give an indication of possible mechanism of class de-cline or advancement The majority group (white) areused as the notional reference group in this table eventhough only univariate rather than multivariate analysisis conducted

The data in Table 1 show two main features first-generation class decline and second-generation catch-up Both features are displayed within the overall struc-ture of class rigidity and ethnic disadvantage of Britishsociety The features can be better grasped by lookingat the figures for whites for whom 34 of the parents39 of male and 36 of female respondents are insalariat positions and 23 have degree levels of educa-tion With these as benchmark figures we find a salient

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 5

Table 1 Parental and respondentsrsquo salariat positions () net difference index (NDI) for intergenerational class advance-ment and respondentsrsquo degree-level education () by ethnicity generation and gender (N = 44332) Source The UKHLSwaves 1ndash3

() salariat

Parents Respondents NDI on class advancement () degree+

1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen

MenWhite mdash 34 mdash 39 mdash 10 mdash 23B Caribbean 23 34 27 35 minus151 minus78 21 18B African 47 57 35 38 minus277 minus225 43 31Indian 40 30 43 53 minus101 301 53 39PakBan 34 14 24 31 minus245 198 37 26Chinese 55 24 51 45 minus117 37 65 47Other 39 46 34 42 minus203 minus118 43 28

WomenWhite mdash 34 mdash 36 mdash minus03 mdash 23B Caribbean 21 30 30 39 18 167 20 27B African 46 51 29 31 minus339 minus225 31 34Indian 41 26 33 39 minus181 225 41 32PakBan 29 15 28 26 minus142 257 19 22Chinese 58 22 51 42 minus216 85 56 38Other 40 41 38 37 minus147 minus44 38 25

Notes 1st and 2nd gen refer to first and second generations For analysis of the NDI the seven-class schema for parents and respon-dents is used for each of the ethnic minority groups by generation and by gender Weighted analysis for this and all other analyses inthis study

feature of first-generation lsquopositive selectionrsquo followedby subsequent class decline and second-generation ed-ucational achievement The term lsquopositive selectionrsquo isusually used to refer to the socio-economic resourcesof movers relative to stayers in the origin country notto the majority group in the destination countries Mostimmigrants to the UK come from developing countriesand onemight expect them to have poor family class andlow education Yet the data on proportions of parentalsalariat and own degree-level education of our first-generation respondents suggest that they are not onlyhighly positively selected relative to their compatriotswho stayed in the origin countries but also compare wellwith the majority group in the UK We do not of coursehave direct evidence on parental and own resources forstayers in all the source countries from which our first-generation respondents come but we do have evidenceon China which renders strong support to the intuitivethinking3 Most ethno-generational groupings are withthe exceptions of black Caribbean men and women andPakistaniBangladeshi women as likely as or more likelythan whites to have salariat parents and degree-level ed-ucation 65 of Chinese and 53 of Indian men in thefirst generation have degree-level education over twiceas high as for white men (23) The parental class advan-tage of first-generation men is also clear especially by

Chinese and black African men at 55 and 47 respec-tively as against 34 for white men This gives substan-tial evidence on the immigrant positive selection in theUK as compared not only with their fellow-countrymenwho have stayed in the origin country but also with thewhite British One might of course argue that immi-grantsrsquo parental salariat position and their own degree-level education do not carry the same returns to labourmarket positions in Britain as do those for whites Thismay be true to some extent For instance a farmer inIndia may not have as much land as his counterpart inBritain But if we take a relative position in terms of theproportion of compatriots who do not have similar lev-els of resources then it makes sense to say that immi-grants tend to have better economic resources and hu-man capital than do their compatriots who have stayedin the home country and it is this lsquosuperiorrsquo position be-fore coupled with class decline after immigration whichmay well serve as a source of reinvigorated aspiration totheir offspring (Li 2018)

When we compare the first- and the second- gener-ationrsquos parental class positions we find clear evidenceof immigrant class decline As our second generationare those born in the UK or arriving by age 12 theirparentsrsquo class position is indexed by the jobs they weredoing in the UK labour market hence measured in a

3 For men aged 25ndash69 in China only 11 of the parents and 14 of the respondents were in salariat positions (Li Zhang amp Kong 2015 p 25) TheChinese immigrant menrsquos class positions were therefore not only much higher than those of their fellow countrymen in China but also higher thanthose of the white British

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 6

way comparable to that of white parents As comparedwith whites we find that all second-generation groupsrsquoparental class is lower than that of whites with the ex-ception of black Africans The immigrant class declinecan also be seen from comparing the first- and thesecond- generationrsquos own class positions Although bothgenerations have much higher levels of education thando whites (except for black Caribbean men and Pak-istaniBangladeshi women) their proportions in salariatpositions are generally lower than for whites (except forChinese and Indians)

The interplay between parental and respondentsrsquoclass positions may present itself as class decline or ad-vancement as is captured by the NDI under the mid-dle columns of Table 1 Here we see clear evidenceof first-generation class decline and some evidence ofsecond-generation advancement With the sole excep-tion of black Caribbean women all first-generation menand women in all ethnic minority groups suffered classsetbacks in other words they worked in jobs at a lowerlevel than that of their parents Amongst the second gen-eration Indian PakistaniBangladeshi men and womenand black African women were finding themselves inhigher occupational levels than their parents Most ofthese features apply to ethnic minority groups of bothsexes to a fairly similar extent although women tend tohave lower class positions and educational qualificationsthan do their male counterparts

The analysis above gives fairly clear evidence ofpositive-selection and class setback by the migrant- (andsome advancement for the second-) generation Yet theanalysis is at a descriptive level Moving from this wenow turn to a more formal test to see how family originaffects the respondentrsquos education which in turn affectstheir class destination using the SEM method

In the SEM framework for OED analysis the effectsof OE ED and OD links are simultaneously assessed Thecoefficient for the OD link is called lsquodirectrsquo effect themul-tiplication of the OE and the ED coefficients is called lsquoindi-rectrsquo effect and the sum of the direct and the indirect ef-fects is called lsquototalrsquo effect The five effects for the ethno-generational groups by sex are summarised in Table 2all measured as standardised coefficients By compar-ing the coefficients of the ethno-generational groupingswith those of whites we can see whether the strengthof association is significantly different hence whether aparticular group is successfully integrated into British so-ciety in the domains under consideration Similarly bycomparing the changes between the first and the sec-ond generations we can gain insights into whether a par-ticular group is making significant progress over genera-tions4 Our main interest here is to see whether the sec-ond generation is much closer than the first generationto whites in each of the links As ethnic minorities tendto be younger than whites we have included age as a co-variate in all models Younger cohorts may for instance

have benefited from the expansion of higher educationand of salariat class in British society than older ones5

The data in Table 2 show some important featuresFirst when all factors in the models are taken into ac-count the effects of education on destination (ED) aremuch more salient than the effects of origin on destina-tion (OD) With the sole exception of second-generationChinesewomen the coefficients on the ED link are highlysignificant for all ethno-generational groupings But weneed to remind ourselves that origin effects are medi-ated via education and that in addition to separate EDeffects there are still sizeable direct and indirect effectsThus the origin effects manifest themselves in a pow-erful albeit not always direct manner since the medi-ating effects are mostly stronger than the direct effectsSecond with the sole exception of first-generation blackCaribbean men who have been found to have the lowesteducation in Table 1 and who here show a significantlystronger ED association than for white men there are nosignificant differences in the ED link between the ethno-generational groupings and their white peers This how-ever does not mean the education has the same returnsfor minorities as for the majority group As shown in theemboldened figures there are significantly weaker indi-rect and total effects for the second-generational menand women than for whites which may explain why thesecond-generation members are so much better qual-ified but have worse labour market outcomes as fre-quently observed in research And third looking at thegenerational changes as indicated by italicised figures onthe second generation we find that second-generationblack Caribbean men have significantly weaker indirectand total effects than their first-generation counterpartsas do Indian menrsquos OE and Indian womenrsquos indirect linksThe mechanisms in these cases may be different As forblack Caribbean men it may be the lsquodownward spiralrsquoto the white working class norms and aspirations as dis-cussed in Li and Heath (2008) which may explain theirgreater integration For Indians the first-generation classdecline and second-generation success may better ex-plain their intergenerational advancement and the loos-ening links over the generation

The findings on a greater distance between the sec-ond than between the first generation ethnic minoritygroups and whites in the mobility pathways run counterto the expectations as specified in Figure 1 and also seemcounter-intuitive For decades ethnic studies scholarshave been predicting over time and intergenerationalprogress in assimilation (Alba 2005 Gordon 1964 Li2010 Park amp Burgess 19211969) So how do we makesense of the findings Firstly we need to think howthe weaker strength of association comes about If onegroup cannot pass the resources to their offspring aseffectively as another this would weaken the strengthof origin-destination associations Duncan (1968) for in-stance shows that black people in the US were poor

4 Significance tests in both regards are conducted via the procedure of lsquononlinear combination of estimatorsrsquo (nlcom in Stata) within the SEM structure5 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer and the Academic Editor for this insightful point

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 7

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

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Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 5: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

white British in our case As immigrants tend to comefrom poorer countries we may expect them to havelower parental classes and lower educational qualifica-tions than do whites Existing research has howeversuggested that most immigrant groups in the UK werelsquopositively selectedrsquo not only as compared with their co-ethnics who have stayed in the origin countries but alsowith themainstream population This may sound surpris-ing at first sight but a momentrsquos reflection would sug-gest this as an inevitable outcome of the raised thresh-olds of entry in the wave of the Race Relations Acts sincethe 1960s (Borjas 1992 Feliciano amp Lanuza 2017 Heathamp Brinbaum 2014 Ichou 2014 Li amp Heath 2008) Butthe labour market setbacks they typically face would putthem into lower class positions and poorer economic sit-uations (Li 2018) which would result in a lower startingpoint for the second generation In such circumstancesthe second generation may not follow white childrenin educational and occupational attainment Empiricalfindings in this regard are inconclusive Some studieshave found the second generation faring better in ed-ucation than do whites (Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017 Li2018) similarly well in occupational attainment (CheungampHeath 2007) butworse in avoidance of unemployment(Li amp Heath 2008 2016) An explanation for the second-generational educational success is provided in terms oflsquoreinvigorated aspirationrsquo (Li 2018) that is parental de-pressed class would push them to redoubled efforts lead-ing to higher levels of educational attainment as a pre-emptive strategy against the possible discrimination inthe labour market Overall while there has been consid-erable research on separate OE ED and OD links no anal-ysis is currently available that addresses the three linkssimultaneously for the ethno-generational groups in con-temporary British society

Summarising the discussion above we wish to ad-dress the following questions in the present study

bull Do class origins exert the same influences on theeducational and occupational attainment of theethno-generational groups as for the white major-ity in Britain

bull Do the second generation experience greater sim-ilarity to whites than do the first generation in ed-ucational and occupational attainment and

bull Do men and women of ethnic minority back-grounds have similar experiences to their whitepeers in the OED trajectories

2 Data and Methods

To address these questions we use data from the firstthree waves of the UKHLS which has a large general pop-ulation sample and an ethnic boost sample enabling us

to differentiate detailed ethno-generational groups andwhich also contains rich information on parental socio-economic position and respondentsrsquo own educationaland occupational attainment The data allow us to disag-gregate the socialmobility trajectories of different ethno-generational and gender groups simultaneously and totest whether processes of social reproduction operatefor the majority and for different ethno-generational mi-nority groups in a similar fashion The survey started in2009 and is the successor to the BHPS From Wave 2onwards the BHPS respondents were lsquorolledrsquo into theUKLHS and their information is included in this analysis1

For origin and destination we adopt both classand status approaches With regard to the former wecoded parental and respondentrsquos class using the seven-category National Statistics Socio-economic Classifica-tion (NS-SEC) schema (1) higher salariat (higher-gradeprofessionals and managers) (2) lower salariat (lower-grade professionals and managers) (3) intermediate(clerical and other routine non-manual workers of highergrades) (4) small employer and own account (exclud-ing professionals) (5) lower supervisory and technicalworkers (6) semi-routine (7) routine workers Includ-ing motherrsquos class is important given recent research ev-idence (Beller 2009 Li amp Devine 2011) For parentalclass we followed a variant of the dominance approach(Erikson 1984) which takes the higher of fatherrsquos ormotherrsquos class position if both parentsrsquo class informationis available (which is usually fatherrsquos position) or the non-missing parentrsquos class position if only one parentrsquos occu-pational information is available The class measure isused in addressing issues of class advancement or de-cline by the ethno-generational groups

As for socio-economic status we used informationon both parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo job titles and turnedthem into standard International Socio-Economic Index(ISEI) scores following the conversion programme de-signed by Ganzeboom De Graaf and Treiman (1992)With regard to parental socio-economic status scoreswe first coded fatherrsquos and motherrsquos ISEIs and then usedthe Euclidian method2 to derive the family status whichcan more accurately capture the advantages and disad-vantages of different types of family such as dual- oversingle- career families in terms of the socio-economic-cultural resources in their possession For instance theresources of one family where both parents were in se-nior (professional ormanagerial) salariat positionswouldbemuch greater than those of another family where oneparent was in a senior salariat position but the other wasa cleaner or shop assistant or non-employed or where itwas a single-parent family with say the mother workingas a nurse Using the dominance class approach wouldyield the same level of family class but with the Euclidianapproach the differences between them can be brought

1 The response rates are high at around 80 for the general population sample and 70 for the ethnic minority boost sample see UK Data (nd)2 Using the Euclidian method the parental socio-economic status is defined as the square root of the sum of the squares on each parentrsquos ISEIs whenboth parentsrsquo scores are available (sqrt of (fatherrsquos ISEI^2 + motherrsquos ISEI^2)) or the available score for one parent As black Caribbean women aremore likely to form single-parent households in Britain and as they are also frequently found to work as nurses in the NHS using the dominance classapproach would inflate the family resources they have relative to dual-career high-salariat families

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 4

into much sharper relief The parental and respondentrsquosstatus scores are used in assessing the OED relations viathe structural equation modelling (SEM) method

With regard to ethnicity we follow the standard prac-tice of ethnic studies in Britain and include white blackCaribbean black African Indian PakistaniBangladeshiChinese and lsquoOtherrsquo As the main purpose in the articleis to assess the ethnic integration whites are used asthe reference group for whom no generational divisionsare further differentiated Lessard-Phillips and Li (2017p 49) differentiated six generational groupings for whiteBritish and white Irish each and five generational group-ings for white Other in their study of educational attain-ment and Li and Heath (2008 2010 2018) also differ-entiated different white groupings (although not gener-ational ones) in their study of long-term risks of unem-ployment access to salariat positions and labour-marketearnings and found increasing convergence among thethree groupings Given this whites in all generations areused as one broad group The lsquoOtherrsquo group in our ethnic-ity variable is very diverse in composition and we do notdifferentiate generations for them either As for genera-tional status we define the first generation as those bornoutside the UK and arriving at age 13 or older and thesecond generations as those born in the UK or arrivingby age 12 on the grounds that unlike the former the lat-terwould have receivedmost (or all) of their education inBritain and would acquire the same kind of human capi-tal and have fluent English as whites Higher generationsare included in the second for each of the main ethnicminority groups (for detailed information on ethnic gen-erations see Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017) It is noted herethat the first generation are not necessarily the parentsof the second generation Finally in this regard we needto bear in mind that while some ethnic groups tend tohave stronger community ties which may foster higherlevels of lsquoethnic capitalrsquo conducive to childrenrsquos educa-tional attainment (Modood 2004) the bonding ties mayalso place a particular emphasis on tradition and cultureleaving a negative impact on female participation in thelabour market (Portes 1998) Given the complex inter-play between ethno-generational and gender divisionswe conduct the analyses for men and women separatelyWe confine our study to respondents aged 16 to 65 formen and 16 to 63 for women The sample sizes for theseven ethnic groups are 36503 891 1140 1722 1895268 and 1913 respectively

Our main concern with the ethno-generational so-cial mobility in Britain includes two sub-themes net so-cial mobility between parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo classpositions and origin-destination associations as medi-ated by education To address the first issue we usethe net dissimilarity index (NDI) designed by Lieberson(1975 for application in mobility research see also Li ampHeath 2016)

The NDI is defined as NDxy = pr(X gt Y) minus pr(Y gt X)and further defined as

n

1114012i=2

xi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

yj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠ minus

n

1114012i=2

yi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

xj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠

where in our case X indicates the parental class positionand Y that of the respondent It is noted here that we re-versed the class order in calculating the NDI with 1 refer-ring to the routine manual and 7 to the higher salariat

Mobility researchers tend to use the dissimilarity in-dex (DI) which shows the percentage of cases that wouldhave to be reallocated to make the two distributionsidentical as a measure of the overall difference betweentwo distributions Yet the DI is insensitive to ordering anddoes not provide any directional statement about thedifferences between fatherrsquos and respondentrsquos classesThe NDI however does provide a directional statementabout class decline or advancement with a positivevalue indicating net upward and a negative value indicat-ing net downward mobility The range of the NDI is fromminus1 to 1 in Liebersonrsquos original article but is here rescaledto range from minus100 to 100 so that the scales could beunderstood akin to percentage-point differences To ad-dress the second issue we use SEM with parental andrespondentrsquos ISEI scores to represent origin and destina-tion status positions For education we follow Duncan(1968 p 92) in using levels rather than years of educa-tion and we code an eight-way variable (1) no formaleducation (2) primary (3) GCSE (O-Level) or equivalent(4) incomplete A-Level (5) A-Level or equivalent (6) sub-degree (7) first degree and (8) higher degree (mastersor PhDs)

3 Results

We begin by looking at class and educational distribu-tions by ethnic groups and by gender For class we alsolook at advancement or decline as shown in the NDI inTable 1 based on parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo seven-classdistributions As the presentation of all these distribu-tions would take too much space we only show the pro-portions of parents and respondents in salariat positionsAgain for brevity we only show the proportions with(first or higher) degree qualifications by respondentsThe data on degree-level education are presented hereto give an indication of possible mechanism of class de-cline or advancement The majority group (white) areused as the notional reference group in this table eventhough only univariate rather than multivariate analysisis conducted

The data in Table 1 show two main features first-generation class decline and second-generation catch-up Both features are displayed within the overall struc-ture of class rigidity and ethnic disadvantage of Britishsociety The features can be better grasped by lookingat the figures for whites for whom 34 of the parents39 of male and 36 of female respondents are insalariat positions and 23 have degree levels of educa-tion With these as benchmark figures we find a salient

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 5

Table 1 Parental and respondentsrsquo salariat positions () net difference index (NDI) for intergenerational class advance-ment and respondentsrsquo degree-level education () by ethnicity generation and gender (N = 44332) Source The UKHLSwaves 1ndash3

() salariat

Parents Respondents NDI on class advancement () degree+

1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen

MenWhite mdash 34 mdash 39 mdash 10 mdash 23B Caribbean 23 34 27 35 minus151 minus78 21 18B African 47 57 35 38 minus277 minus225 43 31Indian 40 30 43 53 minus101 301 53 39PakBan 34 14 24 31 minus245 198 37 26Chinese 55 24 51 45 minus117 37 65 47Other 39 46 34 42 minus203 minus118 43 28

WomenWhite mdash 34 mdash 36 mdash minus03 mdash 23B Caribbean 21 30 30 39 18 167 20 27B African 46 51 29 31 minus339 minus225 31 34Indian 41 26 33 39 minus181 225 41 32PakBan 29 15 28 26 minus142 257 19 22Chinese 58 22 51 42 minus216 85 56 38Other 40 41 38 37 minus147 minus44 38 25

Notes 1st and 2nd gen refer to first and second generations For analysis of the NDI the seven-class schema for parents and respon-dents is used for each of the ethnic minority groups by generation and by gender Weighted analysis for this and all other analyses inthis study

feature of first-generation lsquopositive selectionrsquo followedby subsequent class decline and second-generation ed-ucational achievement The term lsquopositive selectionrsquo isusually used to refer to the socio-economic resourcesof movers relative to stayers in the origin country notto the majority group in the destination countries Mostimmigrants to the UK come from developing countriesand onemight expect them to have poor family class andlow education Yet the data on proportions of parentalsalariat and own degree-level education of our first-generation respondents suggest that they are not onlyhighly positively selected relative to their compatriotswho stayed in the origin countries but also compare wellwith the majority group in the UK We do not of coursehave direct evidence on parental and own resources forstayers in all the source countries from which our first-generation respondents come but we do have evidenceon China which renders strong support to the intuitivethinking3 Most ethno-generational groupings are withthe exceptions of black Caribbean men and women andPakistaniBangladeshi women as likely as or more likelythan whites to have salariat parents and degree-level ed-ucation 65 of Chinese and 53 of Indian men in thefirst generation have degree-level education over twiceas high as for white men (23) The parental class advan-tage of first-generation men is also clear especially by

Chinese and black African men at 55 and 47 respec-tively as against 34 for white men This gives substan-tial evidence on the immigrant positive selection in theUK as compared not only with their fellow-countrymenwho have stayed in the origin country but also with thewhite British One might of course argue that immi-grantsrsquo parental salariat position and their own degree-level education do not carry the same returns to labourmarket positions in Britain as do those for whites Thismay be true to some extent For instance a farmer inIndia may not have as much land as his counterpart inBritain But if we take a relative position in terms of theproportion of compatriots who do not have similar lev-els of resources then it makes sense to say that immi-grants tend to have better economic resources and hu-man capital than do their compatriots who have stayedin the home country and it is this lsquosuperiorrsquo position be-fore coupled with class decline after immigration whichmay well serve as a source of reinvigorated aspiration totheir offspring (Li 2018)

When we compare the first- and the second- gener-ationrsquos parental class positions we find clear evidenceof immigrant class decline As our second generationare those born in the UK or arriving by age 12 theirparentsrsquo class position is indexed by the jobs they weredoing in the UK labour market hence measured in a

3 For men aged 25ndash69 in China only 11 of the parents and 14 of the respondents were in salariat positions (Li Zhang amp Kong 2015 p 25) TheChinese immigrant menrsquos class positions were therefore not only much higher than those of their fellow countrymen in China but also higher thanthose of the white British

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 6

way comparable to that of white parents As comparedwith whites we find that all second-generation groupsrsquoparental class is lower than that of whites with the ex-ception of black Africans The immigrant class declinecan also be seen from comparing the first- and thesecond- generationrsquos own class positions Although bothgenerations have much higher levels of education thando whites (except for black Caribbean men and Pak-istaniBangladeshi women) their proportions in salariatpositions are generally lower than for whites (except forChinese and Indians)

The interplay between parental and respondentsrsquoclass positions may present itself as class decline or ad-vancement as is captured by the NDI under the mid-dle columns of Table 1 Here we see clear evidenceof first-generation class decline and some evidence ofsecond-generation advancement With the sole excep-tion of black Caribbean women all first-generation menand women in all ethnic minority groups suffered classsetbacks in other words they worked in jobs at a lowerlevel than that of their parents Amongst the second gen-eration Indian PakistaniBangladeshi men and womenand black African women were finding themselves inhigher occupational levels than their parents Most ofthese features apply to ethnic minority groups of bothsexes to a fairly similar extent although women tend tohave lower class positions and educational qualificationsthan do their male counterparts

The analysis above gives fairly clear evidence ofpositive-selection and class setback by the migrant- (andsome advancement for the second-) generation Yet theanalysis is at a descriptive level Moving from this wenow turn to a more formal test to see how family originaffects the respondentrsquos education which in turn affectstheir class destination using the SEM method

In the SEM framework for OED analysis the effectsof OE ED and OD links are simultaneously assessed Thecoefficient for the OD link is called lsquodirectrsquo effect themul-tiplication of the OE and the ED coefficients is called lsquoindi-rectrsquo effect and the sum of the direct and the indirect ef-fects is called lsquototalrsquo effect The five effects for the ethno-generational groups by sex are summarised in Table 2all measured as standardised coefficients By compar-ing the coefficients of the ethno-generational groupingswith those of whites we can see whether the strengthof association is significantly different hence whether aparticular group is successfully integrated into British so-ciety in the domains under consideration Similarly bycomparing the changes between the first and the sec-ond generations we can gain insights into whether a par-ticular group is making significant progress over genera-tions4 Our main interest here is to see whether the sec-ond generation is much closer than the first generationto whites in each of the links As ethnic minorities tendto be younger than whites we have included age as a co-variate in all models Younger cohorts may for instance

have benefited from the expansion of higher educationand of salariat class in British society than older ones5

The data in Table 2 show some important featuresFirst when all factors in the models are taken into ac-count the effects of education on destination (ED) aremuch more salient than the effects of origin on destina-tion (OD) With the sole exception of second-generationChinesewomen the coefficients on the ED link are highlysignificant for all ethno-generational groupings But weneed to remind ourselves that origin effects are medi-ated via education and that in addition to separate EDeffects there are still sizeable direct and indirect effectsThus the origin effects manifest themselves in a pow-erful albeit not always direct manner since the medi-ating effects are mostly stronger than the direct effectsSecond with the sole exception of first-generation blackCaribbean men who have been found to have the lowesteducation in Table 1 and who here show a significantlystronger ED association than for white men there are nosignificant differences in the ED link between the ethno-generational groupings and their white peers This how-ever does not mean the education has the same returnsfor minorities as for the majority group As shown in theemboldened figures there are significantly weaker indi-rect and total effects for the second-generational menand women than for whites which may explain why thesecond-generation members are so much better qual-ified but have worse labour market outcomes as fre-quently observed in research And third looking at thegenerational changes as indicated by italicised figures onthe second generation we find that second-generationblack Caribbean men have significantly weaker indirectand total effects than their first-generation counterpartsas do Indian menrsquos OE and Indian womenrsquos indirect linksThe mechanisms in these cases may be different As forblack Caribbean men it may be the lsquodownward spiralrsquoto the white working class norms and aspirations as dis-cussed in Li and Heath (2008) which may explain theirgreater integration For Indians the first-generation classdecline and second-generation success may better ex-plain their intergenerational advancement and the loos-ening links over the generation

The findings on a greater distance between the sec-ond than between the first generation ethnic minoritygroups and whites in the mobility pathways run counterto the expectations as specified in Figure 1 and also seemcounter-intuitive For decades ethnic studies scholarshave been predicting over time and intergenerationalprogress in assimilation (Alba 2005 Gordon 1964 Li2010 Park amp Burgess 19211969) So how do we makesense of the findings Firstly we need to think howthe weaker strength of association comes about If onegroup cannot pass the resources to their offspring aseffectively as another this would weaken the strengthof origin-destination associations Duncan (1968) for in-stance shows that black people in the US were poor

4 Significance tests in both regards are conducted via the procedure of lsquononlinear combination of estimatorsrsquo (nlcom in Stata) within the SEM structure5 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer and the Academic Editor for this insightful point

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 7

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 6: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

into much sharper relief The parental and respondentrsquosstatus scores are used in assessing the OED relations viathe structural equation modelling (SEM) method

With regard to ethnicity we follow the standard prac-tice of ethnic studies in Britain and include white blackCaribbean black African Indian PakistaniBangladeshiChinese and lsquoOtherrsquo As the main purpose in the articleis to assess the ethnic integration whites are used asthe reference group for whom no generational divisionsare further differentiated Lessard-Phillips and Li (2017p 49) differentiated six generational groupings for whiteBritish and white Irish each and five generational group-ings for white Other in their study of educational attain-ment and Li and Heath (2008 2010 2018) also differ-entiated different white groupings (although not gener-ational ones) in their study of long-term risks of unem-ployment access to salariat positions and labour-marketearnings and found increasing convergence among thethree groupings Given this whites in all generations areused as one broad group The lsquoOtherrsquo group in our ethnic-ity variable is very diverse in composition and we do notdifferentiate generations for them either As for genera-tional status we define the first generation as those bornoutside the UK and arriving at age 13 or older and thesecond generations as those born in the UK or arrivingby age 12 on the grounds that unlike the former the lat-terwould have receivedmost (or all) of their education inBritain and would acquire the same kind of human capi-tal and have fluent English as whites Higher generationsare included in the second for each of the main ethnicminority groups (for detailed information on ethnic gen-erations see Lessard-Phillips amp Li 2017) It is noted herethat the first generation are not necessarily the parentsof the second generation Finally in this regard we needto bear in mind that while some ethnic groups tend tohave stronger community ties which may foster higherlevels of lsquoethnic capitalrsquo conducive to childrenrsquos educa-tional attainment (Modood 2004) the bonding ties mayalso place a particular emphasis on tradition and cultureleaving a negative impact on female participation in thelabour market (Portes 1998) Given the complex inter-play between ethno-generational and gender divisionswe conduct the analyses for men and women separatelyWe confine our study to respondents aged 16 to 65 formen and 16 to 63 for women The sample sizes for theseven ethnic groups are 36503 891 1140 1722 1895268 and 1913 respectively

Our main concern with the ethno-generational so-cial mobility in Britain includes two sub-themes net so-cial mobility between parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo classpositions and origin-destination associations as medi-ated by education To address the first issue we usethe net dissimilarity index (NDI) designed by Lieberson(1975 for application in mobility research see also Li ampHeath 2016)

The NDI is defined as NDxy = pr(X gt Y) minus pr(Y gt X)and further defined as

n

1114012i=2

xi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

yj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠ minus

n

1114012i=2

yi

⎛⎜⎜⎜⎜⎜⎝n=iminus11114012j=1

xj

⎞⎟⎟⎟⎟⎟⎠

where in our case X indicates the parental class positionand Y that of the respondent It is noted here that we re-versed the class order in calculating the NDI with 1 refer-ring to the routine manual and 7 to the higher salariat

Mobility researchers tend to use the dissimilarity in-dex (DI) which shows the percentage of cases that wouldhave to be reallocated to make the two distributionsidentical as a measure of the overall difference betweentwo distributions Yet the DI is insensitive to ordering anddoes not provide any directional statement about thedifferences between fatherrsquos and respondentrsquos classesThe NDI however does provide a directional statementabout class decline or advancement with a positivevalue indicating net upward and a negative value indicat-ing net downward mobility The range of the NDI is fromminus1 to 1 in Liebersonrsquos original article but is here rescaledto range from minus100 to 100 so that the scales could beunderstood akin to percentage-point differences To ad-dress the second issue we use SEM with parental andrespondentrsquos ISEI scores to represent origin and destina-tion status positions For education we follow Duncan(1968 p 92) in using levels rather than years of educa-tion and we code an eight-way variable (1) no formaleducation (2) primary (3) GCSE (O-Level) or equivalent(4) incomplete A-Level (5) A-Level or equivalent (6) sub-degree (7) first degree and (8) higher degree (mastersor PhDs)

3 Results

We begin by looking at class and educational distribu-tions by ethnic groups and by gender For class we alsolook at advancement or decline as shown in the NDI inTable 1 based on parentsrsquo and respondentsrsquo seven-classdistributions As the presentation of all these distribu-tions would take too much space we only show the pro-portions of parents and respondents in salariat positionsAgain for brevity we only show the proportions with(first or higher) degree qualifications by respondentsThe data on degree-level education are presented hereto give an indication of possible mechanism of class de-cline or advancement The majority group (white) areused as the notional reference group in this table eventhough only univariate rather than multivariate analysisis conducted

The data in Table 1 show two main features first-generation class decline and second-generation catch-up Both features are displayed within the overall struc-ture of class rigidity and ethnic disadvantage of Britishsociety The features can be better grasped by lookingat the figures for whites for whom 34 of the parents39 of male and 36 of female respondents are insalariat positions and 23 have degree levels of educa-tion With these as benchmark figures we find a salient

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 5

Table 1 Parental and respondentsrsquo salariat positions () net difference index (NDI) for intergenerational class advance-ment and respondentsrsquo degree-level education () by ethnicity generation and gender (N = 44332) Source The UKHLSwaves 1ndash3

() salariat

Parents Respondents NDI on class advancement () degree+

1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen

MenWhite mdash 34 mdash 39 mdash 10 mdash 23B Caribbean 23 34 27 35 minus151 minus78 21 18B African 47 57 35 38 minus277 minus225 43 31Indian 40 30 43 53 minus101 301 53 39PakBan 34 14 24 31 minus245 198 37 26Chinese 55 24 51 45 minus117 37 65 47Other 39 46 34 42 minus203 minus118 43 28

WomenWhite mdash 34 mdash 36 mdash minus03 mdash 23B Caribbean 21 30 30 39 18 167 20 27B African 46 51 29 31 minus339 minus225 31 34Indian 41 26 33 39 minus181 225 41 32PakBan 29 15 28 26 minus142 257 19 22Chinese 58 22 51 42 minus216 85 56 38Other 40 41 38 37 minus147 minus44 38 25

Notes 1st and 2nd gen refer to first and second generations For analysis of the NDI the seven-class schema for parents and respon-dents is used for each of the ethnic minority groups by generation and by gender Weighted analysis for this and all other analyses inthis study

feature of first-generation lsquopositive selectionrsquo followedby subsequent class decline and second-generation ed-ucational achievement The term lsquopositive selectionrsquo isusually used to refer to the socio-economic resourcesof movers relative to stayers in the origin country notto the majority group in the destination countries Mostimmigrants to the UK come from developing countriesand onemight expect them to have poor family class andlow education Yet the data on proportions of parentalsalariat and own degree-level education of our first-generation respondents suggest that they are not onlyhighly positively selected relative to their compatriotswho stayed in the origin countries but also compare wellwith the majority group in the UK We do not of coursehave direct evidence on parental and own resources forstayers in all the source countries from which our first-generation respondents come but we do have evidenceon China which renders strong support to the intuitivethinking3 Most ethno-generational groupings are withthe exceptions of black Caribbean men and women andPakistaniBangladeshi women as likely as or more likelythan whites to have salariat parents and degree-level ed-ucation 65 of Chinese and 53 of Indian men in thefirst generation have degree-level education over twiceas high as for white men (23) The parental class advan-tage of first-generation men is also clear especially by

Chinese and black African men at 55 and 47 respec-tively as against 34 for white men This gives substan-tial evidence on the immigrant positive selection in theUK as compared not only with their fellow-countrymenwho have stayed in the origin country but also with thewhite British One might of course argue that immi-grantsrsquo parental salariat position and their own degree-level education do not carry the same returns to labourmarket positions in Britain as do those for whites Thismay be true to some extent For instance a farmer inIndia may not have as much land as his counterpart inBritain But if we take a relative position in terms of theproportion of compatriots who do not have similar lev-els of resources then it makes sense to say that immi-grants tend to have better economic resources and hu-man capital than do their compatriots who have stayedin the home country and it is this lsquosuperiorrsquo position be-fore coupled with class decline after immigration whichmay well serve as a source of reinvigorated aspiration totheir offspring (Li 2018)

When we compare the first- and the second- gener-ationrsquos parental class positions we find clear evidenceof immigrant class decline As our second generationare those born in the UK or arriving by age 12 theirparentsrsquo class position is indexed by the jobs they weredoing in the UK labour market hence measured in a

3 For men aged 25ndash69 in China only 11 of the parents and 14 of the respondents were in salariat positions (Li Zhang amp Kong 2015 p 25) TheChinese immigrant menrsquos class positions were therefore not only much higher than those of their fellow countrymen in China but also higher thanthose of the white British

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 6

way comparable to that of white parents As comparedwith whites we find that all second-generation groupsrsquoparental class is lower than that of whites with the ex-ception of black Africans The immigrant class declinecan also be seen from comparing the first- and thesecond- generationrsquos own class positions Although bothgenerations have much higher levels of education thando whites (except for black Caribbean men and Pak-istaniBangladeshi women) their proportions in salariatpositions are generally lower than for whites (except forChinese and Indians)

The interplay between parental and respondentsrsquoclass positions may present itself as class decline or ad-vancement as is captured by the NDI under the mid-dle columns of Table 1 Here we see clear evidenceof first-generation class decline and some evidence ofsecond-generation advancement With the sole excep-tion of black Caribbean women all first-generation menand women in all ethnic minority groups suffered classsetbacks in other words they worked in jobs at a lowerlevel than that of their parents Amongst the second gen-eration Indian PakistaniBangladeshi men and womenand black African women were finding themselves inhigher occupational levels than their parents Most ofthese features apply to ethnic minority groups of bothsexes to a fairly similar extent although women tend tohave lower class positions and educational qualificationsthan do their male counterparts

The analysis above gives fairly clear evidence ofpositive-selection and class setback by the migrant- (andsome advancement for the second-) generation Yet theanalysis is at a descriptive level Moving from this wenow turn to a more formal test to see how family originaffects the respondentrsquos education which in turn affectstheir class destination using the SEM method

In the SEM framework for OED analysis the effectsof OE ED and OD links are simultaneously assessed Thecoefficient for the OD link is called lsquodirectrsquo effect themul-tiplication of the OE and the ED coefficients is called lsquoindi-rectrsquo effect and the sum of the direct and the indirect ef-fects is called lsquototalrsquo effect The five effects for the ethno-generational groups by sex are summarised in Table 2all measured as standardised coefficients By compar-ing the coefficients of the ethno-generational groupingswith those of whites we can see whether the strengthof association is significantly different hence whether aparticular group is successfully integrated into British so-ciety in the domains under consideration Similarly bycomparing the changes between the first and the sec-ond generations we can gain insights into whether a par-ticular group is making significant progress over genera-tions4 Our main interest here is to see whether the sec-ond generation is much closer than the first generationto whites in each of the links As ethnic minorities tendto be younger than whites we have included age as a co-variate in all models Younger cohorts may for instance

have benefited from the expansion of higher educationand of salariat class in British society than older ones5

The data in Table 2 show some important featuresFirst when all factors in the models are taken into ac-count the effects of education on destination (ED) aremuch more salient than the effects of origin on destina-tion (OD) With the sole exception of second-generationChinesewomen the coefficients on the ED link are highlysignificant for all ethno-generational groupings But weneed to remind ourselves that origin effects are medi-ated via education and that in addition to separate EDeffects there are still sizeable direct and indirect effectsThus the origin effects manifest themselves in a pow-erful albeit not always direct manner since the medi-ating effects are mostly stronger than the direct effectsSecond with the sole exception of first-generation blackCaribbean men who have been found to have the lowesteducation in Table 1 and who here show a significantlystronger ED association than for white men there are nosignificant differences in the ED link between the ethno-generational groupings and their white peers This how-ever does not mean the education has the same returnsfor minorities as for the majority group As shown in theemboldened figures there are significantly weaker indi-rect and total effects for the second-generational menand women than for whites which may explain why thesecond-generation members are so much better qual-ified but have worse labour market outcomes as fre-quently observed in research And third looking at thegenerational changes as indicated by italicised figures onthe second generation we find that second-generationblack Caribbean men have significantly weaker indirectand total effects than their first-generation counterpartsas do Indian menrsquos OE and Indian womenrsquos indirect linksThe mechanisms in these cases may be different As forblack Caribbean men it may be the lsquodownward spiralrsquoto the white working class norms and aspirations as dis-cussed in Li and Heath (2008) which may explain theirgreater integration For Indians the first-generation classdecline and second-generation success may better ex-plain their intergenerational advancement and the loos-ening links over the generation

The findings on a greater distance between the sec-ond than between the first generation ethnic minoritygroups and whites in the mobility pathways run counterto the expectations as specified in Figure 1 and also seemcounter-intuitive For decades ethnic studies scholarshave been predicting over time and intergenerationalprogress in assimilation (Alba 2005 Gordon 1964 Li2010 Park amp Burgess 19211969) So how do we makesense of the findings Firstly we need to think howthe weaker strength of association comes about If onegroup cannot pass the resources to their offspring aseffectively as another this would weaken the strengthof origin-destination associations Duncan (1968) for in-stance shows that black people in the US were poor

4 Significance tests in both regards are conducted via the procedure of lsquononlinear combination of estimatorsrsquo (nlcom in Stata) within the SEM structure5 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer and the Academic Editor for this insightful point

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 7

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 7: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

Table 1 Parental and respondentsrsquo salariat positions () net difference index (NDI) for intergenerational class advance-ment and respondentsrsquo degree-level education () by ethnicity generation and gender (N = 44332) Source The UKHLSwaves 1ndash3

() salariat

Parents Respondents NDI on class advancement () degree+

1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen 1st gen 2nd gen

MenWhite mdash 34 mdash 39 mdash 10 mdash 23B Caribbean 23 34 27 35 minus151 minus78 21 18B African 47 57 35 38 minus277 minus225 43 31Indian 40 30 43 53 minus101 301 53 39PakBan 34 14 24 31 minus245 198 37 26Chinese 55 24 51 45 minus117 37 65 47Other 39 46 34 42 minus203 minus118 43 28

WomenWhite mdash 34 mdash 36 mdash minus03 mdash 23B Caribbean 21 30 30 39 18 167 20 27B African 46 51 29 31 minus339 minus225 31 34Indian 41 26 33 39 minus181 225 41 32PakBan 29 15 28 26 minus142 257 19 22Chinese 58 22 51 42 minus216 85 56 38Other 40 41 38 37 minus147 minus44 38 25

Notes 1st and 2nd gen refer to first and second generations For analysis of the NDI the seven-class schema for parents and respon-dents is used for each of the ethnic minority groups by generation and by gender Weighted analysis for this and all other analyses inthis study

feature of first-generation lsquopositive selectionrsquo followedby subsequent class decline and second-generation ed-ucational achievement The term lsquopositive selectionrsquo isusually used to refer to the socio-economic resourcesof movers relative to stayers in the origin country notto the majority group in the destination countries Mostimmigrants to the UK come from developing countriesand onemight expect them to have poor family class andlow education Yet the data on proportions of parentalsalariat and own degree-level education of our first-generation respondents suggest that they are not onlyhighly positively selected relative to their compatriotswho stayed in the origin countries but also compare wellwith the majority group in the UK We do not of coursehave direct evidence on parental and own resources forstayers in all the source countries from which our first-generation respondents come but we do have evidenceon China which renders strong support to the intuitivethinking3 Most ethno-generational groupings are withthe exceptions of black Caribbean men and women andPakistaniBangladeshi women as likely as or more likelythan whites to have salariat parents and degree-level ed-ucation 65 of Chinese and 53 of Indian men in thefirst generation have degree-level education over twiceas high as for white men (23) The parental class advan-tage of first-generation men is also clear especially by

Chinese and black African men at 55 and 47 respec-tively as against 34 for white men This gives substan-tial evidence on the immigrant positive selection in theUK as compared not only with their fellow-countrymenwho have stayed in the origin country but also with thewhite British One might of course argue that immi-grantsrsquo parental salariat position and their own degree-level education do not carry the same returns to labourmarket positions in Britain as do those for whites Thismay be true to some extent For instance a farmer inIndia may not have as much land as his counterpart inBritain But if we take a relative position in terms of theproportion of compatriots who do not have similar lev-els of resources then it makes sense to say that immi-grants tend to have better economic resources and hu-man capital than do their compatriots who have stayedin the home country and it is this lsquosuperiorrsquo position be-fore coupled with class decline after immigration whichmay well serve as a source of reinvigorated aspiration totheir offspring (Li 2018)

When we compare the first- and the second- gener-ationrsquos parental class positions we find clear evidenceof immigrant class decline As our second generationare those born in the UK or arriving by age 12 theirparentsrsquo class position is indexed by the jobs they weredoing in the UK labour market hence measured in a

3 For men aged 25ndash69 in China only 11 of the parents and 14 of the respondents were in salariat positions (Li Zhang amp Kong 2015 p 25) TheChinese immigrant menrsquos class positions were therefore not only much higher than those of their fellow countrymen in China but also higher thanthose of the white British

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 6

way comparable to that of white parents As comparedwith whites we find that all second-generation groupsrsquoparental class is lower than that of whites with the ex-ception of black Africans The immigrant class declinecan also be seen from comparing the first- and thesecond- generationrsquos own class positions Although bothgenerations have much higher levels of education thando whites (except for black Caribbean men and Pak-istaniBangladeshi women) their proportions in salariatpositions are generally lower than for whites (except forChinese and Indians)

The interplay between parental and respondentsrsquoclass positions may present itself as class decline or ad-vancement as is captured by the NDI under the mid-dle columns of Table 1 Here we see clear evidenceof first-generation class decline and some evidence ofsecond-generation advancement With the sole excep-tion of black Caribbean women all first-generation menand women in all ethnic minority groups suffered classsetbacks in other words they worked in jobs at a lowerlevel than that of their parents Amongst the second gen-eration Indian PakistaniBangladeshi men and womenand black African women were finding themselves inhigher occupational levels than their parents Most ofthese features apply to ethnic minority groups of bothsexes to a fairly similar extent although women tend tohave lower class positions and educational qualificationsthan do their male counterparts

The analysis above gives fairly clear evidence ofpositive-selection and class setback by the migrant- (andsome advancement for the second-) generation Yet theanalysis is at a descriptive level Moving from this wenow turn to a more formal test to see how family originaffects the respondentrsquos education which in turn affectstheir class destination using the SEM method

In the SEM framework for OED analysis the effectsof OE ED and OD links are simultaneously assessed Thecoefficient for the OD link is called lsquodirectrsquo effect themul-tiplication of the OE and the ED coefficients is called lsquoindi-rectrsquo effect and the sum of the direct and the indirect ef-fects is called lsquototalrsquo effect The five effects for the ethno-generational groups by sex are summarised in Table 2all measured as standardised coefficients By compar-ing the coefficients of the ethno-generational groupingswith those of whites we can see whether the strengthof association is significantly different hence whether aparticular group is successfully integrated into British so-ciety in the domains under consideration Similarly bycomparing the changes between the first and the sec-ond generations we can gain insights into whether a par-ticular group is making significant progress over genera-tions4 Our main interest here is to see whether the sec-ond generation is much closer than the first generationto whites in each of the links As ethnic minorities tendto be younger than whites we have included age as a co-variate in all models Younger cohorts may for instance

have benefited from the expansion of higher educationand of salariat class in British society than older ones5

The data in Table 2 show some important featuresFirst when all factors in the models are taken into ac-count the effects of education on destination (ED) aremuch more salient than the effects of origin on destina-tion (OD) With the sole exception of second-generationChinesewomen the coefficients on the ED link are highlysignificant for all ethno-generational groupings But weneed to remind ourselves that origin effects are medi-ated via education and that in addition to separate EDeffects there are still sizeable direct and indirect effectsThus the origin effects manifest themselves in a pow-erful albeit not always direct manner since the medi-ating effects are mostly stronger than the direct effectsSecond with the sole exception of first-generation blackCaribbean men who have been found to have the lowesteducation in Table 1 and who here show a significantlystronger ED association than for white men there are nosignificant differences in the ED link between the ethno-generational groupings and their white peers This how-ever does not mean the education has the same returnsfor minorities as for the majority group As shown in theemboldened figures there are significantly weaker indi-rect and total effects for the second-generational menand women than for whites which may explain why thesecond-generation members are so much better qual-ified but have worse labour market outcomes as fre-quently observed in research And third looking at thegenerational changes as indicated by italicised figures onthe second generation we find that second-generationblack Caribbean men have significantly weaker indirectand total effects than their first-generation counterpartsas do Indian menrsquos OE and Indian womenrsquos indirect linksThe mechanisms in these cases may be different As forblack Caribbean men it may be the lsquodownward spiralrsquoto the white working class norms and aspirations as dis-cussed in Li and Heath (2008) which may explain theirgreater integration For Indians the first-generation classdecline and second-generation success may better ex-plain their intergenerational advancement and the loos-ening links over the generation

The findings on a greater distance between the sec-ond than between the first generation ethnic minoritygroups and whites in the mobility pathways run counterto the expectations as specified in Figure 1 and also seemcounter-intuitive For decades ethnic studies scholarshave been predicting over time and intergenerationalprogress in assimilation (Alba 2005 Gordon 1964 Li2010 Park amp Burgess 19211969) So how do we makesense of the findings Firstly we need to think howthe weaker strength of association comes about If onegroup cannot pass the resources to their offspring aseffectively as another this would weaken the strengthof origin-destination associations Duncan (1968) for in-stance shows that black people in the US were poor

4 Significance tests in both regards are conducted via the procedure of lsquononlinear combination of estimatorsrsquo (nlcom in Stata) within the SEM structure5 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer and the Academic Editor for this insightful point

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 7

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 8: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

way comparable to that of white parents As comparedwith whites we find that all second-generation groupsrsquoparental class is lower than that of whites with the ex-ception of black Africans The immigrant class declinecan also be seen from comparing the first- and thesecond- generationrsquos own class positions Although bothgenerations have much higher levels of education thando whites (except for black Caribbean men and Pak-istaniBangladeshi women) their proportions in salariatpositions are generally lower than for whites (except forChinese and Indians)

The interplay between parental and respondentsrsquoclass positions may present itself as class decline or ad-vancement as is captured by the NDI under the mid-dle columns of Table 1 Here we see clear evidenceof first-generation class decline and some evidence ofsecond-generation advancement With the sole excep-tion of black Caribbean women all first-generation menand women in all ethnic minority groups suffered classsetbacks in other words they worked in jobs at a lowerlevel than that of their parents Amongst the second gen-eration Indian PakistaniBangladeshi men and womenand black African women were finding themselves inhigher occupational levels than their parents Most ofthese features apply to ethnic minority groups of bothsexes to a fairly similar extent although women tend tohave lower class positions and educational qualificationsthan do their male counterparts

The analysis above gives fairly clear evidence ofpositive-selection and class setback by the migrant- (andsome advancement for the second-) generation Yet theanalysis is at a descriptive level Moving from this wenow turn to a more formal test to see how family originaffects the respondentrsquos education which in turn affectstheir class destination using the SEM method

In the SEM framework for OED analysis the effectsof OE ED and OD links are simultaneously assessed Thecoefficient for the OD link is called lsquodirectrsquo effect themul-tiplication of the OE and the ED coefficients is called lsquoindi-rectrsquo effect and the sum of the direct and the indirect ef-fects is called lsquototalrsquo effect The five effects for the ethno-generational groups by sex are summarised in Table 2all measured as standardised coefficients By compar-ing the coefficients of the ethno-generational groupingswith those of whites we can see whether the strengthof association is significantly different hence whether aparticular group is successfully integrated into British so-ciety in the domains under consideration Similarly bycomparing the changes between the first and the sec-ond generations we can gain insights into whether a par-ticular group is making significant progress over genera-tions4 Our main interest here is to see whether the sec-ond generation is much closer than the first generationto whites in each of the links As ethnic minorities tendto be younger than whites we have included age as a co-variate in all models Younger cohorts may for instance

have benefited from the expansion of higher educationand of salariat class in British society than older ones5

The data in Table 2 show some important featuresFirst when all factors in the models are taken into ac-count the effects of education on destination (ED) aremuch more salient than the effects of origin on destina-tion (OD) With the sole exception of second-generationChinesewomen the coefficients on the ED link are highlysignificant for all ethno-generational groupings But weneed to remind ourselves that origin effects are medi-ated via education and that in addition to separate EDeffects there are still sizeable direct and indirect effectsThus the origin effects manifest themselves in a pow-erful albeit not always direct manner since the medi-ating effects are mostly stronger than the direct effectsSecond with the sole exception of first-generation blackCaribbean men who have been found to have the lowesteducation in Table 1 and who here show a significantlystronger ED association than for white men there are nosignificant differences in the ED link between the ethno-generational groupings and their white peers This how-ever does not mean the education has the same returnsfor minorities as for the majority group As shown in theemboldened figures there are significantly weaker indi-rect and total effects for the second-generational menand women than for whites which may explain why thesecond-generation members are so much better qual-ified but have worse labour market outcomes as fre-quently observed in research And third looking at thegenerational changes as indicated by italicised figures onthe second generation we find that second-generationblack Caribbean men have significantly weaker indirectand total effects than their first-generation counterpartsas do Indian menrsquos OE and Indian womenrsquos indirect linksThe mechanisms in these cases may be different As forblack Caribbean men it may be the lsquodownward spiralrsquoto the white working class norms and aspirations as dis-cussed in Li and Heath (2008) which may explain theirgreater integration For Indians the first-generation classdecline and second-generation success may better ex-plain their intergenerational advancement and the loos-ening links over the generation

The findings on a greater distance between the sec-ond than between the first generation ethnic minoritygroups and whites in the mobility pathways run counterto the expectations as specified in Figure 1 and also seemcounter-intuitive For decades ethnic studies scholarshave been predicting over time and intergenerationalprogress in assimilation (Alba 2005 Gordon 1964 Li2010 Park amp Burgess 19211969) So how do we makesense of the findings Firstly we need to think howthe weaker strength of association comes about If onegroup cannot pass the resources to their offspring aseffectively as another this would weaken the strengthof origin-destination associations Duncan (1968) for in-stance shows that black people in the US were poor

4 Significance tests in both regards are conducted via the procedure of lsquononlinear combination of estimatorsrsquo (nlcom in Stata) within the SEM structure5 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer and the Academic Editor for this insightful point

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 7

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 9: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

Table 2 Standardised coefficients for the OED by ethno-generational groups and sex Source The UKHLS waves 1ndash3

OE ED OD Indirect Total

MenWhite 316 456 087 157 239G1 Black Caribbean 411 732 013 339 316G1 Black African 246 424 050 107 158G1 Indian 248 442 097 126 206G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 285 428 001 120 125G1 Chinese 259 312 091 069 179G2 Black Caribbean 195 317 minus063 062 minus008G2 Black African 198 558 minus068 111 025G2 Indian 075 508 109 044 184G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 127 480 minus020 066 043G2 Chinese 142 650 127 097 215Other 235 433 074 109 minus086

WomenWhite 356 465 066 165 231G1 Black Caribbean 357 487 minus002 174 172G1 Black African 274 424 141 116 257G1 Indian 348 548 053 191 244G1 PakistaniBangladeshi 326 392 201 128 329G1 Chinese 298 381 166 114 279G2 Black Caribbean 096 451 minus058 043 minus014G2 Black African 219 364 101 080 181G2 Indian 237 370 041 088 129G2 PakistaniBangladeshi 214 416 024 089 113G2 Chinese 229 085 406 019 426Other 247 447 120 111 231

Notes p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001 Significant differences between the ethno-generational groupings and whites (at the 005level or above) are shown in bold and significant differences between the first and the second generations of a particular group areshown in italics and placed on the coefficients for the second generation

not because they were born into poverty but becausethey were born black In this case advantaged class ori-gins had less importance for the mobility chances ofblacks than for whites exhibiting a greater fluidity ora lsquoperverse opennessrsquo Essentially what Duncan is ar-guing about here is that whilst most blacks in the USwere in very low positions some would achieve occu-pational success but even for these lucky ones hold-ing professional-managerial positions their childrenmaystill face higher risks of downward mobility than for theirwhite peers Secondly we need to think about not onlyparental position but that of the respondents as wellWehave noted above that most immigrants suffered classdecline and that the second-generationrsquos education wason the whole higher and their class position lower thanthose of whites Thus relative to the first generationthe second-generationrsquos much lower starting-point andstill lower end-point would also imply a weaker origin-destination association

Finally we show in Figure 2 a summary pictureof the ethnic integration trajectory over generations inBritain The data chart the changing fortunes of the firstand the second generations starting from parental classto own education and destination (OED) where we also

include avoidance of unemployment (D1 in the figure) aspart of the labour market position Unemployment is animportant area of ethnic disadvantage but it is hard tointegrate this into the SEM framework methodologicallyHowever we can obtain the net effects using logit modelThe data are shown for men and women separately

Figure 2 clearly shows that the ethnic minoritygroups suffer in the British labour market Even thoughtheir family position is generally high and their own edu-cation is well above that of whites they encounter muchhigher risks of unemployment and enjoy much loweraccess to advantaged (salariat) positions For instanceChinese menrsquos degree-level education is 34 percentage-points higher than that of white men but their salariatoccupancy is 7 points lower net of all confoundingfactors which have been controlled for in the mod-els with a differential of 41 points The correspond-ing figures are 36 31 29 and 7 points for Indian Pak-istaniBangladeshi black African and black Caribbeanmen The first-generationrsquos class position (D2) would gen-erally serve as parental class situation for the second gen-eration which is much lower than that of whites Yeteven though they start from such disadvantaged posi-tions the second generation with the sole exception

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 8

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 10: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

Figure 2 Integration trajectories of ethno-generational groups by sex NotesWhitesrsquo values are set at 0 and those of ethno-generational groupings are expressed as net differences from whites in terms of percentage points O parental salariatpositions E respondentrsquos degree-level education D1 respondentrsquos avoidance of unemployment D2 respondentrsquos accessto salariat Parental class age age squared and ethno-generational status are included in estimating degree-level educa-tion and education is further included in modelling unemployment and access to salariat All data points except O areaverage marginal effects (AME) from the relevant models

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 9

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 11: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

of black Caribbean men still manage to acquire muchhigher education than white men only to face higher un-employment rates and lower chances of career progres-sion in their own labour market position The same situ-ation is found for women albeit to a smaller extent

4 Discussion and Conclusion

This study analysed the processes of social mobility byethnic minority groups over generations in contempo-rary Britain We used the OED framework for assessingwhether the ethnic minority groups in their first andsecond (or higher) generations experienced similar pro-cesses of social mobility with increasing social integra-tion Drawing data from the UKHLS and adopting theSEM procedure we paid particular attention to whetherthe second-generation ethnic minority groups would ap-proximate whites in the processes of social mobility Thefirst generation is expected to experience setback due tolanguage barriers overseas qualifications lack of knowl-edge of local labour market and overt or covert formsof racial discrimination but the second generation is ex-pected to experience no such social exclusion

Whilst our analysis does show serious setbacks bythe first generation the second generationrsquos OEOD linksand indirect and total effects are rather weak suggest-ing significantly greater fluidity than in the white pat-tern forming an apparent paradox unpredicted from theclassical theories Yet closer reflection suggests that thepatterns thatmanifest themselves are well-grounded Ascompared with whites ethnic minority families may bebetter able to foster upwardmobility just as they are lessable to prevent downward mobility In other words eth-nic minority children from lower family positions wouldbemore instilled to performwell in education thanwhitechildren from similar origin classes just as those fromhigher family positions would be more likely to experi-ence downward mobility due to inadequate or less ef-fective bridging social capital possessed by their parentsOur analysis does show that in spite of their humblefamily origins the second generation outperform theirwhite peers in education but their excellences in humancapital do not bring them equal returns to labour mar-ket positions With so much higher educational creden-tials they are still behind whites in avoidance of unem-ployment and in salariat occupancy Further analysis re-veals that even among those with degree levels of ed-ucation they are significantly behind whites (69 and76 for second-generation and white men respectivelyin salariat occupancy)6

Overall our analysis which we believe is the first sys-tematic attempt at exploring the OED relations for ethno-generational and gender groups using the most authori-tative data sources in theUK shows thatmembers of eth-nic minority backgrounds have taken a long and bumpyjourney in Britain There is clear evidence of persisting

ethnic inequality over generations There are also signsof a growing ethnic polarisation as shownby the class de-clines experienced by both generations of black AfricansPrime Minister May (2017) said that the continued dis-advantages by ethnic minorities in Britain must be lsquoex-plained or changedrsquo Our evidence shows such persistingethnic disadvantages hence the serious needs for over-coming issues of social exclusion This is a challenge forthe government employers and wider society alike

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Anthony Heath at Nuffield Col-lege Oxford University attendants at the RunnymedeConference on Race and Class held at LSE May 2015attendants at the Social Mobility and Labour MarketSymposiums April 2018 at Cathie Marsh Institute forSocial Research Manchester University the five anony-mous reviewers and the academic editor of this issue fortheir insightful comments and suggestions on the ear-lier versions of the article I am grateful to the UKrsquos Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Engineer-ing and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) forfunding the projects for this research Socio-EconomicPosition of the Minority Ethnic Groups in Britain (RES-163-25-0003 as PI) Social Mobility and Social Capitalin China and Britain (ESI0351681 as PI) Understand-ing the Dynamics of Ethnic Identity and Inequality in theUK (ESJ0200361 as Co-PI) and The Social Complexityof Immigration and Diversity (EPH02171X1 as Co-PI)And I also wish to thank the Institute for Empirical So-cial Science Research (IESSR) Xirsquoan Jiaotong UniversityChina for providing facilities for conducting part of theanalysis reported in the article during my stay there as avisiting professor I am alone responsible for the errorsin the article

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests

References

Alba R (2005) Bright vs blurred boundaries Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France Ger-many and the United States Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies 28(1) 20ndash49

Beller E (2009) Bringing intergenerational social mo-bility research into the twenty-first century Whymothersmatter American Sociological Review 74(4)507ndash528

Berthoud R amp Blekesaune M (2006) Persistent em-ployment disadvantage 1974 to 2003 (Working Pa-per of Institute for Social and Economic Research2006ndash09) Colchester University of Essex

Blanden J Goodman A Gregg P amp Machin S (2004)

6 Our data do not show whether the qualifications were obtained from Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities This is a task for future analysiswhen appropriate data become available

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 10

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 12: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

Changes in intergenerational income mobility inBritain InM Corak (Ed)Generational incomemobil-ity in North America and Europe (pp 122ndash146) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Borjas G (1992) Ethnic capital and intergenerationalmobility Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1)123ndash150

Breen R Luijkx R Muumlller W amp Pollak R (2009) Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment Evi-dence from eight European countries American Jour-nal of Sociology 114(5) 1475ndash1521

Cheung S amp Heath A (2007) Nice work if you can getit Ethnic penalties in Great Britain In A Heath amp SCheung (Eds) Unequal chances Ethnic minorities inWestern labour markets (pp 505ndash548) Oxford Ox-ford University Press

Devine F amp Li Y (2013) The changing relationshipbetween origins education and destinations in the1990s and 2000s British Journal of Sociology of Edu-cation 34(56) 766ndash791

Duncan O D (1968) Inheritance of poverty or inheri-tance of race In D Moynihan (Ed) On understand-ing poverty (pp 85ndash110) New York NY Basic Books

Erikson R (1984) Social class of men women and fami-lies Sociology 18(4) 500ndash514

Erikson R amp Goldthorpe J H (2010) Has social mobil-ity in Britain decreased Reconciling divergent find-ings on income and class mobility British Journal ofSociology 61(2) 211ndash230

Feliciano C amp Lanuza Y (2017) An immigrant paradoxContextual attainment and intergenerational educa-tional mobility American Sociological Review 82(1)211ndash241

Ganzeboom H B G De Graaf P amp Treiman D (1992)A standard international socio-economic index ofoccupational status Social Science Research 21(1)1ndash56

Goldthorpe J H Llewellyn C amp Payne C (1987) So-cialmobility and class structure inmodern Britain Ox-ford Clarendon Press

Goldthorpe J H (2013) Understandingmdashand misunder-standingmdashsocial mobility in Britain The entry of theeconomists the confusion of politicians and the lim-its of educational policy Journal of Social Policy42(3) 431ndash450

Goldthorpe J H amp Mills C (2008) Trends in intergen-erational class mobility in modern Britain Evidencefrom national surveys National Institute EconomicReview 205(1) 83ndash100

GordonM (1964)Assimilation in American life The roleof race religion and national origins New York NYOxford University Press

Heath A amp Brinbaum Y (Eds) (2014) Unequal attain-ments Ethnic educational inequalities in tenWesterncountries (Proceedings of the British Academy 196)Oxford Oxford University Press

Heath A amp Li Y (2008) Period life-cycle and gen-erational effects on ethnic minority success in the

labour market Koumllner Zeitschrift fuumlr Soziologie undSozialpsychologie 48(October) 277ndash306

Heath A F amp McMahon D (2005) Social mobilityof ethnic minorities In G Loury T Modood amp STeles (Eds) Ethnicity social mobility and public pol-icy Comparing the US and UK (pp 393ndash413) Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press

Heath A amp Payne C (2000) Social mobility In A HHalsey amp J Webb (Eds) Twentieth-century British so-cial trends (254ndash278) Basingstoke MacMillan

Hout M (1984) Status autonomy and training in oc-cupational mobility American Journal of Sociology89(6) 1379ndash1409

Ichou M (2014) Who they were there Immigrantsrsquo ed-ucational selectivity and their childrenrsquos educationalattainment European Sociological Review 30(6)750ndash765

Lambert P Prandy K amp Bottero W (2007) Byslow degrees Two centuries of social reproductionand mobility in Britain Sociological Research On-line 12(1) Retrieved fromwwwsocresonlineorguk121prandyhtml

Lessard-Phillips L amp Li Y (2017) Social stratificationof education by ethnic minority groups over gener-ations in the UK Social Inclusion 5(1) 45ndash54

Li Y (2010) The labour market situation of minorityethnic groups in Britain and the USA EurAmericaA Journal of European and American Studies 40(2)259ndash309

Li Y (2018) Against the odds Educational attainmentand labour market position of the second genera-tion minority ethnic members in the UK Ethnicitieshttpdxdoiorg1011771468796818777546

Li Y amp Devine F (2011) Is social mobility really declin-ing Intergenerational class mobility in Britain in the1990s and the 2000s Sociological Research Online16(3) 1ndash15 Retrieved from wwwsocresonlineorguk1634html

Li Y amp Devine F (2014) Social mobility in Britain 1991-2011 In L Archer AMann amp J Stanley (Eds)Under-standing employer engagement in education Theo-ries and evidence (pp 79ndash91) London Routledge

Li Y amp Heath A (2008) Ethnic minority men in Britishlabour market (1972ndash2005) International Journal ofSociology and Social Policy 28(56) 231ndash244

Li Y amp Heath A (2010) Struggling onto the ladderclimbing the rungs Employment status and class po-sition by minority ethnic groups in Britain (1972ndash2005) In J Stillwell P Norman C Thomas amp PSurridge (Eds) Population employment health andwell-being (pp 83ndash97) London Springer

Li Y amp Heath A (2016) Class matters A study of minor-ity andmajority social mobility in Britain 1982ndash2011American Journal of Sociology 122(1) 162ndash200

Li Y amp Heath A (in press) Persisting disadvantages Astudy of labourmarket dynamics of ethnic unemploy-ment and earnings in the UK (2009ndash2015) Journal ofEthnic Minority Studies

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 11

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12

Page 13: Integration Journey: The Social Mobility Trajectory of Ethnic … · 2018-07-26 · weakeningorigin-destinationassociations.Goldthorpe’s main argument is that mobility trends tend

Li Y Zhang S amp Kong J (2015) Social mobility in Chinaand Britain A comparative study International Re-view of Social Research 5(1) 20ndash34

Lieberson S (1975) Rank-sum comparisons betweengroups In D Heise (Ed) Sociological methodology(pp 276ndash291) San Francisco CA Jossey-Bass

May T (2017) Prime Minister launches world-leadingproject on impact of ethnicity on everyday lifeGovUk Retrieved from wwwgovukgovernmentnewsprime-minister-launches-worldleading-project-on-impact-of-ethnicity-on-everyday-life accessed on12102017

Modood T (2004) Capitals ethnic identity and educa-tional qualifications Cultural Trends 13(2) 87ndash105

Mosteller F (1968) Association and estimation in contin-gency tables Journal of the American Statistical Asso-ciation 63(321) 1ndash28

NEP (2007) The business commission on race equality inthe workplace London National Employment Panelamp the EMBF 6076

Park R E amp Burgess EW (1969) Introduction to the sci-ence of sociology Chicago IL University of Chicago

Press (Original work published 1921)Payne G (2017) The new social mobility How the politi-

cians got it wrong Bristol Policy PressPlatt L (2005) Intergenerational social mobility of mi-

nority ethnic groups in Britain Sociology 39(3)455ndash461

Portes A (1998) Social capital Its origins and applica-tions in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 24 1ndash24

Sturgis P amp Buscha F (2015) Increasing inter-generational social mobility Is educational expan-sion the answer British Journal of Sociology 66(3)512ndash533

UKData (nd) Key dataUKData Service Retrieved fromukdataserviceacukget-datakey-dataaspxtab-uk-surveys

Vandecasteele L (2016) Social origin education andsocio-economic inequalities Trends in the UnitedKingdom In F Bernhardi amp G Ballarino (Eds) Edu-cation occupation and social origin (pp 215ndash236)Cheltenham Edward Elgar

About the Author

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at Department of Sociology and Cathie Marsh Institute for SocialResearch Manchester University UK His research interests are in social mobility and social stratifi-cation social capital socio-economic integration of ethnic minority including migrant groups and ininternational comparative analysis He has published around 100 journal articles book chapters andresearch reports which have appeared in leading sociology journals in Europe and the US book collec-tions and government and think-tank reports He has also conducted many research projects fundedby academic and government agencies in Britain China the US Australia and Qatar

Social Inclusion 2018 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages XndashX 12