From KPCC:
UC Irvine sociologist Rubén Rumbaut, a Cuban American who himself arrived in the United States as a child, wrote in 2004 that he first came cross the term "half-second" generation decades ago in an early twentieth-century volume on Polish immigrants, where it was used to describe foreign-born youths who came of age in the U.S. "It made an impression on me," Rumbaut told me by phone. "I came to this country on the eve of my twelfth birthday." Starting in 1969 and through the 1970s, he used the term "one-and-a-half generation" to describe similar youths in Cuban immigrant families. In the 1980s, while writing about Southeast Asian youths, he switched to the decimal version, "1.5 generation."

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