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- Info
Reshuffling the social deck: from mass migration tothe transformation of the American ethnic hierarchy
| Author: |
Tyree, Andrea |
| Date: |
1995 |
| Periodical: |
In: Blau, Judith R.; Goodman, Norman, eds. Social Roles and Scoial Institutions: Essays in Honor of Rose Laub Coser. New brunswick, NJ |
| Abstract: |
The current socioeconomic hierarchy of white ethnic groups has been puzzling many of us. It is clear there has been a considerable reshuffling of the social deck during this century. I have argued here that one place to look for circumstances at force in that reshuffling is to principles underlying the occupational differentiation of those same white ethnic groups at the turn of the century. This analysis of the Dillingham Commission data is designed to provide us such a view, at least for first and second-generation men. The match between the present data and the past is not neat. For one thing, for 1900 we have omitted all native men of native parentage, men still likely to have had ethnic identities they could pass on to whatever descendants of theirs responded to the General Social Survey in recent years. For another, the 17 national origin groups recognized by the Dillingham Commission match only imperfectly the ethnic groups we have constructed for the more recent period. Nevertheless, attempting to match the two can be informative. Eleven turn of the century groups can be matched with eleven of the contemporary groups: five predominantly Protestant groups (the English and Welsh, Germans, Norwegians, Scots, and Swedes), five predominantly Catholic groups (the French, French Canadians, Irish, Italians, and Poles), and one group of Jews, taken to be best indicated at the turn of the century by Russians. We want to see how well we can predict the current socioeconomic position of these eleven groups. We know the social deck has been substantially reshuffled. We are asking here if some of the precursors of the reshuffling were already in place in the ethnic-occupational differentiation of the turn of the century. |
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