ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the works of Robert Merton, Richard Cloward, and Lloyd Ohlin in outlining how ethnic minorities climb the ladder of success, and what role crime plays in this trek. Innovation constituted the primary response of the newcomers' paradoxical manner of "making it" yet further analysis beyond the Mertonian interpretation is needed to demonstrate how it functioned. Cloward and Ohlin's fruitful analysis of the forms that illegitimate means may take advances the work of Merton. Cloward and Ohlin extend this concept of illegitimate means to an explanation of delinquency. They argue that delinquency and crime result from the discrepancy between what lower-income youths desire and what is realistically available to them. Combined with the other routes of upward mobility, the professions provided a realistic avenue of movement from the bottom for those newcomers so inclined to use that route.
