Spanish Legacies : The Coming of Age of the Second Generation Paperback / softback

Much like the United States, the countries of Western Europe have experienced massive immigration in the last three decades.

Spain, in particular, has been transformed from an immigrant-exporting country to one receiving hundreds of thousands of new immigrants.

Today, almost 13 percent of the country's population is foreign-born.

Spanish Legacies, written by internationally known experts on immigration, explores how the children of immigrants-the second generation-are coping with the challenges of adaptation to Spanish society, comparing their experiences with those of their peers in the United States.

Using a rich data set based on both survey and ethnographic material, Spanish Legacies describes the experiences of growing up by the large population of second-generation youths in Spain and the principal outcomes of the process-from national self-identification and experiences of discrimination to educational attainment and labor-market entry.

The study is based on a sample of almost 7,000 second-generation students who were interviewed in Madrid and Barcelona in 2008 and then followed and re-interviewed four years later. A survey of immigrant parents, a replacement sample for lost respondents in the second survey, and a survey of native-parentage students complement this rich data set.

Outcomes of the adaptation process in Spain are systematically presented in five chapters, introduced by real-life histories of selected respondents drawn by the study's ethnographic module.

Systematic comparisons with results from the United States show a number of surprising similarities in the adaptation of children of immigrants in both countries, as well as differences marked by contrasting experiences of discrimination, self-identities, and ambition.