Rubén G. Rumbaut is a prominent Cuban-American sociologist and a leading expert on immigration and refugee resettlement in the United States.
He is also formally affiliated with the departments of Education; Criminology, Law and Society; and Chicano-Latino Studies.
He was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City in 1997-98 and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2000-01.
For more than three decades, he has directed seminal comparative empirical studies of the adaptation of immigrants and refugees in the United States.
He directed (with Alejandro Portes) the landmark Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS),[2] begun in 1991; and, in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team, the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) study.
[4] He has traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia, and earlier to Sierra Leone, where he organized a field project on international health and economic development.
In the 1990s, he was academic advisor for a 10-part PBS television series, Americas, focusing on Latin American and Caribbean societies, as well as on Mexicans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans in the U.S.[5][6] In the 2000s, as a member of a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, he worked on two volumes on the Hispanic population of the United States: "Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies," and "Hispanics and the Future of America.
"[7] In substance, Professor Rumbaut is known as one of the original architects of the segmented-assimilation paradigm of immigrant incorporation.
Developed in the 1990s, the paradigm argues that the experiences of recent immigrant groups are more diverse than either the classic assimilation or ethnic disadvantage perspectives suggests.
The second is a process called selective acculturation, in which some groups try to inspire achievement in their children by referencing the traditional values of the home country, such as a dedication to education.
The third and most controversial pathway is known as downward mobility, in which members of the most disadvantaged groups face substantial structural barriers to advancement, such as poor urban schools and employment discrimination.
Children in these disadvantaged contexts may become racialized or turn to attitudes and behaviors considered oppositional to the mainstream, such as rejecting school or joining a street gang.
Among his books are the critically acclaimed Immigrant America: A Portrait (with Alejandro Portes; 3rd ed.
In 2014, he received the Distinguished Career Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on International Migration.
[13] In 2015, he was named Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and subsequently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He is the founding chair of the Section on International Migration of the American Sociological Association, and an elected member of the ASA's Council, the Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences, the Committee on International Migration of the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy,[14] and the Sociological Research Association.
[8] On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (with Rick Settersten and Frank Furstenberg).
[19] California's Immigrant Children: Theory, Research, and Implications for Educational Policy (with Wayne Cornelius).
[26] "Immigration Research in the United States: Social Origins and Future Orientations."
[31] Origins and Destinies: Immigration to the United States Since World War II.
[33] "Migration, Adaptation, and Mental Health: The Experience of Southeast Asian Refugees in the United States."