Civic Bequests: Intergenerational Change in Political Attitudes and Political Behaviors Across Immigrant Generations.

The political incorporation of immigrants and their children has long been critical to the civic health of the United States. From the nation's first days, governments, civic institutions, and ethnic organizations have faced the political consequence of the nation's continuing commitment to large scale immigration: the need to ensure that immigrants and, more importantly, their children become regular participants in the nation's civic and political life. The consequences of failure are potentially quite high. If immigrants and their descendants come to be excluded as a class from equal participation in the democratic process, the nation will not meet its ideals of equal participation. Over time, the excluded could potentially use their exclusion as a tool for mobilizing and come to organize in opposition to U.S. political institutions. The relative success of the United States at meeting this responsibility to incorporate most immigrants and their descendants has long been a subject of scholarly attention and popular concern. While this rich immigrant tapestry may create opportunities and tensions for the United States, it undoubtedly offers the foundation for rich scholarly analysis of the cross-generational process of immigrant incorporation. In this paper, I review available models of the role of generation in immigrant political adaptation and test these models using data from a survey of immigrant mobility in the Los Angeles region conducted in 2004 (IIMMLA). In this paper, I measure political attitudinal change across generations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]