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Almost 30 percent of the more than 68 million young adults aged eighteen to thirty-four in the United States today are either foreign born or of foreign parentage. As these newcomers make their transitions to adulthood, say Rubén Rumbaut and Golnaz Komaie, they differ significantly not only from one another but also from their native-parentage counterparts, including blacks and whites. The authors document the demographic changes in the United States over the past forty years and describe the ways in which generation and national origin shape the experiences of these newcomers as they become adults. Rumbaut and Komaie point out that immigrant groups experience gaps in social, economic, and legal status that are even greater than the gaps between native whites and blacks. By far the most-educated (Indians) and the least-educated (Mexicans) groups in the United States today are first-generation immigrants, as are the groups with the lowest poverty rate (Filipinos) and the highest poverty rate (Dominicans). These social and economic divides reflect three very different ways immigrants enter the country: through regular immigration channels, without legal authorization, or as state-sponsored refugees. For many ethnic groups, significant progress takes place from the first to the second generation. But, say the authors, for millions of young immigrants, a lack of legal permanent residency status blocks their prospects for social mobility. Having an undocumented status has become all the more consequential with the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive federal immigration reforms. In the coming two decades, as the U.S. native-parentage labor force continues to shrink, immigrants and their children are expected to account for most of the growth of the nation's labor force, with the fastest-growing occupations requiring college degrees. Rumbaut and Komaie stress that one key to the nation's future will be how it incorporates young adults of immigrant origin in its economy, polity, and society, especially how it enables these young adults to have access to, and to attain, postsecondary education and its manifold payoffs.

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Population, Communities, and the Environmenthypotheses can be generalized to other countries. The inclusion of the migration networks and the concept of structural imbalance between the sending and receiving countries as factors in understanding immigrant skill levels have made the analyses more comprehensive.The book is not without minor shortcomings. Immigration policies have not been highlighted in the analyses and discussion of results, even though previous studies have noted that immigration policies can have significant effects on the skill levels of immigrants. Given that there are differences in immigration policies among the three countries, some of the effects found in the analyses may only be the reflection of these differences. Besides, one might wonder why the analyses disproportionately focus on American data. I believe that more thorough analyses of Canadian and Australian data would further help us understand the dynamics within each country. In addition, I found that some important references on the topic with Canadian data are missing, such as Reitz's work on comparing immigrant qualities in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and Benjamin and Baker's (1994) economic analysis on immigrant performance in Canada. In other words, the great strength of the book is that it sets up a comparison, and its weakness is that the analysis does not fully utilize the potential of the comparison. In spite of these limitations, this book is still a valuable reference for scholars in the area of immigration who are interested in the differences in immigrant qualities in a country or among countries. The study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the topic.