Congratulations to Assistant Professor Leafia Ye on receiving the 2024 ASA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship from the ASA section on Population, in recognition of her article “Latent Cumulative Disadvantage: US Immigrants’ Reversed Economic Assimilation in Later Life.” In the article, Dr. Ye develops a framework of Latent Cumulative (Dis)advantage to make sense of immigrants’ experiences of economic mobility in retirement. Using longitudinal data from the United States’ Health and Retirement Study, Prof. Ye finds that, in addition to a general decline in income among men after age 50, this decline is stronger among foreign-born men. This relationship can be explained by lower levels of lifetime earnings and worse job benefits among this group. Significantly, these findings have implications for policy planning, particularly as the population of immigrants in the United States is growing. Read the complete article in Social Forces.
Leafia Ye is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where she is also a faculty affiliate at the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Her areas of interest include immigrant integration and aging inequalities.