ABSTRACT
Immigrants from Latin America and Asia since the 1960s have forced us to reconceptualize how we study race relations in the United States. The same is true for intermarriage. Interracial marriages have increased from 3.2 percent of all marriages in 1980 to 8.4 percent in 2010. If we look at just new marriages, intermarried couples increased from 6.7 percent in 1980 to 15 percent in 2010, representing a little more than one in every seven marriages (Wang 2012). While there are still important lessons to be learned from black–white intermarriages in the United States, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are changing the way we measure, conceptualize, theorize, and research intermarriage. Moreover, these intermarriages inform public policy decisions in profound ways. This chapter focuses on the ever-expanding role of “immigrant intermarriage,” which, broadly defined, includes any marriage in which an immigrant, or his or her child, marries someone from a different racial or ethnic group in the United States.
I first look at the major theoretical contributions that scholars have provided for understanding immigrant intermarriages: assimilation, social distance, color line, and panethnicity. Second, I examine the methodological considerations of studying these intermarriages, specifically the range of datasets as well as the different analytical techniques used. Third, I will highlight the key empirical findings of the most recent studies. Finally, I talk about future developments and directions in studies on immigrant intermarriage.
