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In From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders , Norma Fuentes-Mayorga compares the immigration and integration experiences of Dominican and Mexican women in New York City, a traditional destination for Dominicans but a relatively new one for Mexicans. Her book documents the significance of women-led migration within an increasingly racialized context and underscores the contributions women make to their communities of origin and of settlement. Fuentes-Mayorga’s research is timely, especially against the backdrop of policy debates about the future of family reunification laws and the unprecedented immigration of women and minors from Latin America, many of whom seek human rights protection or to reunite with families in the US. From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders provides a compelling look at the suffering of migrant mothers and the mourning of family separation, but also at the agency and contributions that women make with their imported human capital and remittances to the receiving and sending community. Ultimately the book contributes further understanding to the heterogeneity of Latin American immigration and highlights the social mobility of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous migrant women in New York. 

The effect of education on income has been debated in recent years. We use the China Health and Nutrition Survey database to research the relationship between education upward mobility and income upward mobility. We find education upward mobility has a positive effect on income upward mobility. The intergenerational psychological distance which is a measure of the difference between parents' and children's conceptualizations, parents' social capital, and children's gender all have effects on this relationship. To be specific, the positive effect is reinforced by a certain amount of intergenerational psychological distance, but is negated by an excessive amount of intergenerational psychological distance. Besides, education upward mobility actively increases the income upward mobility of rural-dwelling children whose parents lack social capital, i.e., education is a key factor that improves the income of children from rural families. In contrast, education upward mobility only actively increases the income upward mobility of urban-dwelling children whose parents have social capital. In addition, the positive effect of education on children's income is more evident in boys than in girls. These findings greatly advance our understanding of the beneficial effects of education on the income, and will assist improvements to be made in these areas.

In tracked and highly stratified educational systems, where educational reproduction is particularly strong, the chances of students to achieve more education than their parents did are truncated. Little is known, however, what may help students raised in lower-educated families to become upwardly mobile at the transition to upper-secondary education. In tracked educational systems, this transition is decisive for ultimate educational attainment across the life course. The study addresses this research gap by examining whether quality of social relationships (i.e., social capital) among students, parents, and teachers matters for student and teacher assessment of students’ agentic capabilities (i.e., work habits) at age 15. If so, the question is whether these assessments help students become enrolled in high-status upper-secondary school tracks at age 18, thus achieving educational upward mobility. The analyses are based on 401 students from two cohorts in the German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, interviewed at the ages of 15 (T1) and 18 (T2) (60.35% females, Mage 15 = 15.2, SDage 15 = 0.2; 58.35% older cohort), including data collected by questionnaire from primary caregivers and teachers at student age of 15. The students come from families where highest parental education attainment is below the high-status academic or vocational baccalaureate in upper-secondary education. They may thus experience the opportunity to gain access to these high-status tracks at the transition to upper-secondary education. A structural equation model reveals the role of student assessment of their agentic capabilities and teacher assessment of these competencies in mediating the relation of social capital accrued at home and at school to educational upward mobility. This novel evidence on mechanisms of social advancement may be prone to inform interventions helping students from less-educated families to succeed in tracked and stratified educational systems.

Employability may play an important role in the job seeking behavior and well-being among unemployed youth. To date, the literature has tended to study the indicators of employability individually, without considering the intertwinement among them. The present research ( N  = 447 unemployed youth [16 to 24 years] in Hong Kong) addressed this gap. We adopted latent profile analysis to examine eight employability indicators (proactivity, boundaryless mindset, identity awareness, career self-efficacy, education level, work experience, networking, and social support). Four employability profiles were identified: high employability, moderate employability, low social support, and low adaptability – career identity. These profiles differed in job search intensity and psychological health. Mediation analysis revealed that the impact of employability profiles was channeled through perceived upward mobility. Our latent profile approach has captured the reality of employability and thus provided a valid picture of its impact among unemployed youth. The observed mediating effect of perceived upward mobility illustrates what employability means in social identity terms. This study has contributed to the understanding of unemployed youth’s quality of life.

For a long time, social and public policies have presented upward social mobility as an unambiguously progressive process. However, there is a relatively new line of academic research that concerns the dilemmas, or ‘hidden costs’, of upward mobility. Still, apart from a few inspiring exceptions, there is a lack of empirical studies, especially in Hungary, that explore the personal experiences of the impact of moving class through educational mobility. Academic literature about stigmatised, disadvantaged minorities such as Afro-Americans and Mexicans in the U.S or the Roma in Europe suggests that the professional middle class of these groups – those who have demonstrated an exceptional range of intergenerational mobility – have adopted a distinctive upward mobility strategy to overcome the challenges that are unique to them. These challenges emerge from the difficulties of maintaining intra-class relations with poorer ‘co-ethnics’ (people from the communities they were brought up in), but also managing interethnic relations with the ‘white’ (non-Black in the U.S, non-Roma in East-Central Europe) majority. As part of this minority culture of mobility, the Roma, as with other stigmatised minority groups, create and join ethnic professional organisations to enable them to culturally navigate both worlds. Throughout this paper, we focus our attention on influential ethnic support groups or organisations and address the question what effect they have on the costs of upward mobility in the case of our Roma professional middle-class sample.

We make use of newly available data that include roughly 5 million linked household and population records from 1850 to 2015 to document long-term trends in intergenerational social mobility in the United States. Intergenerational mobility declined substantially over the past 150 y, but more slowly than previously thought. Intergenerational occupational rank–rank correlations increased from less than 0.17 to as high as 0.32, but most of this change occurred to Americans born before 1900. After controlling for the relatively high mobility of persons from farm origins, we find that intergenerational social mobility has been remarkably stable. In contrast with relative stability in rank-based measures of mobility, absolute mobility for the nonfarm population—the fraction of offspring whose occupational ranks are higher than those of their parents—increased for birth cohorts born prior to 1900 and has fallen for those born after 1940.

Using new cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect preferences for redistribution in France, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Americans are more optimistic than Europeans about social mobility. Our randomized treatment shows pessimistic information about mobility and increases support for redistribution, mostly for “equality of opportunity” policies. We find strong political polarization. Left-wing respondents are more pessimistic about mobility: their preferences for redistribution are correlated with their mobility perceptions; and they support more redistribution after seeing pessimistic information. None of this is true for right-wing respondents, possibly because they see the government as a “problem” and not as the “solution.”

In this paper, we study long-term trends in social mobility in the People’s Republic of China since its inception in 1949, with two operationalizations: 1) intergenerational occupational mobility and 2) intergenerational educational mobility. We draw on an accumulation of administrative and survey data and provide comparable estimates of these measures for birth cohorts born after 1945. To help interpret the results, we compare trends in China to those in the United States for the same birth cohorts. We find an increase in intergenerational occupational mobility in China due to its rapid industrialization in recent decades. Net of industrialization, however, intergenerational occupational mobility has been declining for recent cohorts. Intergenerational educational mobility in China shows a similar declining trend. In addition, mobility patterns have differed greatly by gender, with women in earlier cohorts and from a rural origin particularly disadvantaged. We attribute the general decline in social mobility to market forces that have taken hold since China’s economic reform that began in 1978. In contrast, social mobility by both measures has been relatively stable in the United States. However, while social mobility in China has trended downward, it is still higher than that in the United States, except for women’s educational mobility.

There is a need to transform Hong Kong’s economy from a service economy to a knowledge economy to address economic stratification and low economic upward mobility. This study used three samples of local employees for the years 1991, 2001, and 2011 to evaluate the effect of an economic environment marked by low private investment in scientific and technological innovation on the transformation of the economy and on opportunities for young adults to achieve economic upward mobility through education. The research goal was addressed by analyzing and comparing the effects of overeducation on wages in three different years. The results add a new perspective and demonstrate that Hong Kong essentially had a service-knowledge economy in those 3 years. They also indicate that although Hong Kong has made improvements in transforming knowledge into productivity between 1991 and 2011, it still has a long way to go to meet the requirements of a knowledge economy. The economic gap between occupations that are knowledge-intensive and those that are not has increased, and the economic situation of overeducated employees who fail to be employed in occupations appropriate for their education levels has worsened. The results have implications for local economic policymakers.

'Multigenerational mobility' refers to the associations in socio-economic status across three or more generations. This article begins by summarising the long-standing but recently growing empirical literature on multigenerational mobility. It then discusses multiple theoretical interpretations of the empirical patterns, including the one recently proposed in Gregory Clark's book The Son Also Rises.