Rubén G. Rumbaut

University of California, Irvine

Distinguished Professor of Sociology

Rubén G. Rumbaut is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also affiliated with its School of Education; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Throughout the 1980s he conducted several of the principal studies of the resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and of their children’s adaptations in U.S. public schools. Subsequent studies examined the educational achievement of immigrant students and language minorities in California. Since 1991 he has directed (with Alejandro Portes) the landmark Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which followed the trajectories into adulthood of thousands of youth representing dozens of different nationalities, primarily from Latin America and Asia. In the 2000s, he directed the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) study (in collaboration with a multidisciplinary UC team); and since the 2010s, "The Second Generation in Middle Adulthood" (in collaboration with Cynthia Feliciano), an in-depth follow-up of the CILS San Diego subsample nearly 25 years after the baseline surveys, with respondents who completed their adult transitions during and after the Great Recession. He is the author of more than two hundred scholarly papers on immigrants and refugees in the U.S., and coauthor or coeditor of nineteen books and special issues, including "Immigrant America: A Portrait" (new 5th edition, 2024; Spanish edition, 2010); and "Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation" (2001; Japanese edition, 2014; Spanish edition, 2011), which won the Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association and the Thomas and Znaniecki Award for best book in the immigration field, and was nominated for the Grawemeyer award in education. As a member of a panel of the National Academy of Sciences (with Marta Tienda et al.) he worked on two volumes on the Hispanic population of the United States, published in 2006 by the National Academies Press: "Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies," and "Hispanics and the Future of America." Among his other books are “On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy” (2005, with Richard Settersten and Frank Furstenberg); “Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America” (2001 with Portes); “Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives” (2000, with Nancy Foner and Steven J. Gold); “Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America” (1996, with Silvia Pedraza), and “California’s Immigrant Children: Theory, Research, and Implications for Educational Policy” (1995, with Wayne Cornelius).