Feliciano examines how immigrants compare to those left behind in their origin countries, and how that selection affects the educational adaptation of children of immigrants in the United States. Her findings contradict the assumption that immigrants are negatively selected: nearly all immigrants are more educated than the populations in their home countries, but Asian immigrants are the most highly selected. This helps explain the Asian second generations' superior educational attainment as compared to Europeans, Afro-Caribbeans, or Latin Americans. The book challenges cultural explanations for ethnic differences by highlighting how inequalities in the relative pre-migration educational attainments of immigrants are reproduced among their children in the U.S.

The essays in this volume tackle the construction and significance of race and ethnicity as boundary-making processes among diverse immigrant populations in the United States. Race and ethnicity can both unite and divide. The individual scholars contributing to this volume model, deploy, and explain notions of 'borders' and 'boundaries' in various ways, but collectively they emphasize the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities that are shaped, negotiated, and contested in specific contexts and situations. Constructing Borders/Crossing Boundaries also captures the range of spaces in which ethnicity and race become salient-the university, the immigrant enclave, the detention center, the work place, the nightclub, and even the trans-Atlantic passage. This interdisciplinary work features essays on a diverse range of immigrant populations from past to present and will interest scholars from across disciplines.

The essays in this volume tackle the construction and significance of race and ethnicity as boundary-making processes among diverse immigrant populations in the United States. Race and ethnicity can both unite and divide. The individual scholars contributing to this volume model, deploy, and explain notions of "borders" and "boundaries" in various ways, but collectively they emphasize the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities that are shaped, negotiated, and contested in specific contexts and situations. Constructing Borders/Crossing Boundaries also captures the range of spaces in which ethnicity and race become salient-the university, the immigrant enclave, the detention center, the work place, the nightclub, and even the trans-Atlantic passage. This interdisciplinary work features essays on a diverse range of immigrant populations from past to present and will interest scholars from across disciplines.