Richard D. Alba

Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Since earning his PhD at Columbia University in 1974, he has been devoted to understanding how immigrant groups are changed by the society that receives them and how they in turn change it. For the United States, he has studied these processes as they occurred in the past (especially for Italian Americans) and also in the present, for the descendants of the post-1965 immigrants. He has also written about the social changes connected with immigration in western European countries like France and Germany. His books include: Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (1985); Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (1990); Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (with Victor Nee, 2003); Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America (2009); and Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe (with Nancy Foner, 2015).

His most recent book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (2020), critiques the distorted and divisive demographic determinism that foresees American society as becoming a collection of numerical minorities in the near future. Pointing to the surging numbers of youth growing up in mixed minority-white families, a 21st century phenomenon, Alba argues that they are indicative in fact of an expanding and inclusive mainstream. Today’s processes of mainstream expansion have some resemblances to those in the post-World War II era of the mass assimilation of the white ethnics. But there are also major differences, especially in the more modest magnitude of the current expansion. Alba calls for social policies to open up the mainstream more by correcting the restrictions created by intensifying economic inequality, shape-shifting racism, and the impaired legal status of many immigrant families.