Immigrant America: A Portrait 9780520959156

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Immigrant America

Immigrant America A Portrait Fourth Edition Revised, Updated, and Expanded

Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut

U ni v ersi t y of C alifor ni a Pr ess

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its ­activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and ­institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Portes, Alejandro, 1944–   author.   Immigrant America : a portrait / Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut. — Fourth edition, revised, updated, and expanded.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-27402-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)   isbn 978-0-520-95915-6 (ebook)   1. Immigrants—United States—History.  2. United States—Emigration and immigration—History. 3.  Americanization—History.  I.  Rumbaut, Rubén G., author.  II. Title.  jv6450.p67 2014  304.8’73—dc23 2014018276 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

To Patricia and Irene

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Tables Preface to the Fourth Edition Preface to the Third Edition Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Acknowledgments for the Fourth Edition Acknowledgments for the Third Edition Acknowledgments for the Second Edition Acknowledgments for the First Edition 1. The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

ix xiii xvii xxi xxv xxvii xxxi xxxiii xxxvii xxxix 1

2. Theoretical Overview

48

3. Moving: Patterns of Immigrant Settlement and Spatial Mobility

80

4. Making It in America: Education, Occupation, and Entrepreneurship 112 5. From Immigrants to Ethnics: Identity, Citizenship, and Political Participation

161

6. Language: Diversity and Resilience

214

7. Growing Up American: The New Second Generation

258

8. Religion: The Enduring Presence

306

9. Conclusion: Immigration and Public Policy

371

Notes 395 References 419 Index 475

Illustrations

Plates follow pages 148 and 348 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Evolution of the foreign-born population of the United States  /  25 Changing labor markets  /  28 Deportations from the United States, 1965–​2009  /  33 The foreign-born population in the United States by county, 2000   /  88 The foreign-born in the United States as a percentage of total county population, 2000   /  89 States and metropolitan areas of immigrant concentration, 2010  /  90 Concentration and diversification, 2010  /  91 Annual incomes by nationality and different human capital and gender profiles  / 146 Monthly earnings by nationality and different human capital and gender profiles  / 147 Transnational connections of Chinese immigrant organizations  / 181 Population change by race/ethnicity in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas, 2000–​2010  / 206 Population by race/ethnicity  / 207 ix

x  |  Illustrations

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Percentage of persons who spoke a language other than English at home, by county, 2000  / 222 English fluency of immigrants by age at arrival, education, and decade of arrival, 2010  / 234 Language shift and bilingualism by generation  / 239 Dimensions of non-English language proficiency by generation  / 240 Language retention and acquisition among immigrant groups  / 245 Types of language adaptation and their social-psychological correlates  / 248 Regressions of annual earnings on levels of bilingualism among young adults in Southern California  / 251 Type of immigration, social context of settlement, and predicted community and linguistic outcomes  / 253 The racial identities of children of immigrants  / 274 Educational aspirations and expectations of children of immigrants, selected nationalities  / 276 Immigrant parents’ concern with negative influences on their children, 1996  / 278 Paths of mobility across generations  / 280 Determinants of educational attainment of children of immigrants in early adulthood, 2002–​2003  / 292 Determinants of occupational attainment of children of immigrants in early adulthood, 2002–​2003  / 293 Determinants of upward assimilation among children of immigration in early adulthood, 2002–​2003  / 293 Religion and immigrant incorporation: Interaction effects  / 312 Religiosity of forty-four selected countries and per capita gross domestic product  / 315 Frequency of religious attendance by birth cohort and nativity  / 317 Religious affiliation in the second generation  / 324 Religious attendance in the second generation  / 325 Downward assimilation by religion in the second generation  / 327 Downward assimilation by frequency of religious attendance  / 328

Illustrations  |  xi

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Religious affiliation and indicators of downward assimilation in the second generation  / 329 Frequency of religious attendance and indicators of downward assimilation in the second generation  / 329 Frequency of religious attendance and indicators of downward assimilation in Los Angeles  / 335 Religion and its types across generations  / 337 The immigration policy disconnect  / 377 Immigrant labor and the native class structure  / 380 Alternative political scenarios of immigration: A typology  / 382

Tables

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

Decennial immigration to the United States, 1880–​1919  /  4 Percentage of foreign-born among white male gainful workers, ten years of age or older, 1910  /  7 Mexican immigration to the United States, 1881–​1950  /  14 Proportion urban: White, native white, and foreign-born white / 16 Immigration and the American labor force, 1900–​1935  /  19 The Bracero Program and clandestine migrant apprehensions, 1946–​1972  /  20 A typology of contemporary immigrants to the United States / 30 The H-1B program, 2008–​2009  /  39 Top six states by size of the foreign-born population, 1990, 2000, and 2010; top ten states by percent growth of the foreign-born, 1990 to 2010  /  92 States of principal settlement of the ten largest foreign-born groups, 2010  /  93 Metropolitan destinations of the ten largest new legal immigrant groups, 2011  /  95 Metropolitan destinations of the five major refugee groups admitted in 1987, 1993, 2001, and 2010  /  99 Destinations of major immigrant nationalities obtaining legal permanent residence in selected years  /  102

xiii

xiv  |  Tables

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

Educational attainment of principal immigrant nationalities in 2010 / 114 Educational attainment of U.S. immigrants age twenty-five and older, 2010, by region of birth and last decade of arrival  /  117 Immigrant groups with highest proportions of college-educated persons in the United States in 2010 and characteristics of countries of origin  /  120 Labor-force participation and professional specialty occupations of selected immigrant groups, 2010  /  123 Principal countries of emigration by category of admission, 2010 / 125 Self-employment among selected immigrant groups, 2010  /  128 Minority firm ownership and indicators of firm performance, 2007 / 130 Median annual household incomes and poverty rates of principal immigrant nationalities and regions of origin, 2010 / 133 Determinants of adult immigrant economic outcomes  /  144 Naturalizations for selected countries and regions, 2002–​ 2011 / 184 Median years of U.S. residence, by year of naturalization and region of birth, 1995–​2011  /  187 Rates of U.S. naturalization for immigrants who arrived before 2005, by national origin, 2010  /  188 The Spanish-origin vote in the Southwest  /  195 Self-reported race of children of immigrants and their parents, by national origin groups, 1995–​1996  /  205 Types of immigrants in the United States and their political orientations / 208 Determinants of political transnationalism among Latin American immigrants  /  210 Language diversity in the United States, 1980 –​2010  /  220 Percentage of population who speak a non-English language at home, by states and metropolitan areas, in rank order, ca. 2010 / 224 Main languages spoken in the United States and nativity of speakers, ca. 2010  /  225 Language spoken at home and related social characteristics for the largest immigrant groups and the native-born, 2010  /  228

Tables  |  xv

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

English-speaking ability of immigrants from largest source countries, 2010  /  230 Ability to speak English “very well” by age at U.S. arrival, decade of arrival, and highest education attained, among selected immigrant groups who speak a language other than English at home, 2010  /  232 The new second generation at a glance, 2008  /  265 Human capital, modes of incorporation, present situation, and expectations of immigrant parents, 1995–​1996  /  267 The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study: First and follow-up student surveys  /  272 Fluent bilingualism as an indicator of selective acculturation in adolescence: Family and psychosocial effects  /  283 Effects of selected predictors on the early educational attainment of second-generation students  /  285 Assimilation outcomes across generations, ca. 2000  /  289 Adaptation outcomes of children of immigrants in early adulthood, 2003  /  291 Religious identification in the United States, 1972–​2002: Current religion by period, cohort, generation, and education / 316 Net relationships of religious affiliation and participation with major adaptation outcomes in the second generation  /  330

Preface to the Fourth Edition

This book, a study of the odysseys of millions of newcomers from all over the world to the United States, has itself been an odyssey. We began work on the first edition of Immigrant America, our portrait of a rapidly evolving and permanently unfinished reality, in the 1980s. Over the ensuing decades each new edition of this book—​as summed up in its prefaces of 1990, 1996, and 2006—​has sought to depict and explain major changes in the size, composition, and forms of U.S.-bound international migration flows; the immigrants’ patterns of settlement and modes of incorporation in the American economy, polity, and culture; and the societal reaction to these newcomers and their children. Each edition has seen the introduction of entirely new chapters—​on the second generation, religion, immigration policies—​and the revision, expansion, and thorough updating of all others, the book itself changing to reflect a world on the move. This fourth edition is no exception, although in two respects—​the addition of the opening chapters on history and theory—​it differs notably from its predecessors. We seek in these new chapters to fill a vacuum noted in the course of teaching the book at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Rather than beginning with vignettes and a typology of contemporary immigrants to illustrate the diversity of their class and national origins and their contexts of exit and reception, we start with an analysis of three distinct phases spanning the last 134 years: (1) the Great European Waves of the period from 1880 to 1930, which accomxvii

xviii   |   Preface to the Fourth Edition

panied the American industrial revolution and reached a historic zenith in 1910, when 14.7 percent of the total population was foreign-born, and ended with the triumph of restrictionist legislation; (2) a period of retrenchment from 1930 to 1970, which spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and its aftermath, reaching a historic nadir in 1970, when only 4.7 percent of the population was foreign-born; and (3) a period of rebound from 1970 to the present, which remains the focus of the book—​an era of economic restructuring, widening economic inequality, and the sharply increased migration of low-wage laborers, professionals, entrepreneurs, refugees, and asylees, combining to reach a foreign-born total of forty million by 2010. Migration during this new era grew by more than a million a year, ending with the Great Recession and unprecedented state persecution of millions of undocumented immigrants. This state policy included the creation of a vast network of immigrant detention centers and historic deportation levels, even as unauthorized migration decreased to net zero. One leitmotif of the book is the counterpoint between the widespread demand for immigrant labor by different sectors of the American economy and the activities of nativists and xenophobes across the three successive phases of U.S.-bound immigration. Indeed, throughout successive chapters we look to the historical record to place present concerns in a broader comparative context. History does not repeat itself, but it does echo. The second chapter adds a needed theoretical anchor for the rest of the book. To be sure, there is no comprehensive theory of international migration, but we systematically review a wide range of theories organized into four major categories: (1) those that seek to explain the determinants of the origins of migration, (2) those that examine its continuation and directionality, (3) those that address the problematics of migrant labor, and (4) those that focus on the patterns of migrant settlement and adaptation. We aim to show how these theoretical considerations, from classic studies to competing contemporary emphases, apply to the condition of different immigrant minorities and their descendants—​and we incorporate them in subsequent chapters as we examine their patterns of settlement (and the emergence of “new destinations”), economic and political adaptation, resilient and emergent ethnicities, language and religion, transnationalism and assimilation, and intra- and intergenerational change. Our final chapter aims to lay out the basis for a sound understanding of the origins of contemporary immigration and for viable policies regarding it. Here we dissect the disconnect between the public percep-

Preface to the Fourth Edition   |   xix

tion of immigration, as reflected at the surface level of policy debates and shifting currents of public opinion, and the underlying realities rooted in the political economy of the nation and in the historical linkages between the United States and immigrants’ countries of origin. Two prevailing ideologies toward immigrants that resonate with the general population—​to exclude them or assimilate them—​seldom succeed in their intended goals, leading instead to a host of policy contradictions and resulting in tensions and unintended consequences. The social sciences have not been very good at predicting specific major events—​the literature is littered with failed grand predictions—​but we can anticipate with reasonable confidence other phenomena, steady states, and trends, which we spell out in some detail. The importance of alternative outcomes will largely determine the extent to which the nation will be able to maintain its economic viability and political leadership in a changing global system. As long-term participant observers of immigration, we have seen changes cascade, not trickle, in each of the preceding decades. But while immigrant America continues to change, as does the world that spawns it, the goal that originally inspired this book, and the fruitful collaboration that has now spanned three decades, remains the same, and evergreen: to grasp the diversity and underlying structures of a new age of migration, to make reasoned sense of complex and controversial issues, and to make our living portrait of immigrant America accessible to both the specialist and a general public eager to cut through stereotype and cliché to learn about the newest members of American society.

Preface to the Third Edition

We began to write this book more than twenty years ago—​between the Mariel boat lift and the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, at a time of “compassion fatigue” and heightened concern over undocumented immigration from Mexico, in the heyday of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement and of less visible flows of tens of thousands of escapees from murderous wars in Central America who were not deemed bona fide political refugees in the context of the Cold War. Not long before, in 1970, the U.S. Census had found that the foreign-born accounted for only 4.7 percent of the total population—​the lowest proportion since 1850, when it first recorded the country of birth of U.S. residents. But in the preface to the first edition, we noted that after a lapse of half a century, this “permanently unfinished” society was being transformed yet again by immigration. We had already been systematically studying the phenomenon for years—​indeed, we had lived it—​but we could not foresee with precision just how “unfinished” a society it was, or how transformed it would become, or how dramatically the larger world would change. In this third edition, we bring this extraordinary story up-to-date. Immigration is a transformative force, producing profound and unanticipated social changes in both sending and receiving societies, in intergroup relations within receiving societies, and among the immigrants themselves and their descendants. Immigration is followed predictably not only by acculturative processes on the part of the immixxi

xxii  |  Preface to the Third Edition

grants but also by state policies that seek to control the flows and by varying degrees of nativism and xenophobia on the part of established residents, who may view the alien newcomers as cultural or economic threats. And immigration engenders ethnicity—​collectivities who perceive themselves and are perceived by others to differ in language, religion, “race,” national origin or ancestral homeland, cultural heritage, and memories of a shared historical past. As we show in this book, their modes of incorporation across generations may take a variety of forms—​some leading to greater homogenization and solidarity within the society (or within segments of the society), others to greater ethnic differentiation and heterogeneity. Each edition of Immigrant America has reported the results of the latest decennial census. In 1980, the foreign-born population totaled 14.1 million, or 6.2 percent of the national total; by 1990, it had grown to 19.8 million (7.9 percent); by 2000, to 31.1 million (11.1 percent); and as of this writing, to approximately 37 million (12.5 percent) and growing by more than a million per year. More immigrants came in the 1980s than in any previous decade but one—​1901–​1910, the peak years of mass migration from Europe when the foreign-born population reached 14.7 percent of the U.S. total; and more immigrants came in the 1990s than in any other decade—​a total that may be surpassed in the present decade, adding to the largest immigrant population in history. More consequential still, as we elaborate in these pages, is the commensurate growth of the second generation of their children born and raised in the United States, who are rapidly becoming a key segment of the American society and workforce in the twenty-first century. While the sheer numbers and rates of growth are impressive, the dynamics of immigration and incorporation processes and policies do not take place in a vacuum but must be understood in the complex contexts of global historical change. Ten years ago, in the preface to the second edition, we pointed to such large-scale changes and events as the end of the Cold War and the first Persian Gulf War; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Mexican economy; and the passage of new laws, multinational agreements, and the normalization of relations with the governments of Vietnam and Cambodia (but not with Cuba), among others. Since that time, the world has changed again, in ways that have profoundly affected the contexts of reception of newcomers to the United States—​particularly in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, heightened domestic security concerns, the passage of the PATRIOT Act (and pending legisla-

Preface to the Third Edition  |  xxiii

tion to further tighten immigration controls, declare English as the official national language, and even build a fence across the U.S.-Mexico border), and the reorganization of the U.S. immigration and naturalization bureaucracy within a new Department of Homeland Security. But we also discern the continuity of other patterns that give predictability and structure to immigration flows and adaptation processes, including the sustained demand for immigrant labor by U.S. employers, the enabling presence of social networks of family and friends, the strong tradition of American religious pluralism, and the overriding significance of historical ties between the United States and the countries that account by far for its principal immigrant communities today. In this third edition, we have transformed the book to take into account the profound changes in immigrant America over the past decade. Every chapter has been thoroughly revised, expanded, and updated to reflect the latest available national and regional information, including the 2000 U.S. Census and the most recent Current Population Surveys. We have added sections addressing such topics as patterns of incarceration and paradoxes of acculturation. Where appropriate, we make use of new survey data, including the results of the recently completed third wave of our Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which followed for more than ten years a panel representing scores of immigrant nationalities on both coasts of the United States from adolescence to early adulthood. We have added several new chapters, from an opening chapter that aims to humanize the object of our study through a set of engaging but factual stories; to a new and overdue chapter on religion and immigration, a central topic neglected by the research literature until recently; and a concluding chapter that examines the clash of dominant ideologies and public debates about immigrant exclusion and assimilation with the history and political economy of U.S. immigration, and that suggests alternative policies for both the first and second generations grounded on a firmer grasp of underlying realities. We seek to make reasoned sense of complex and often controversial issues and to make our portrait of immigrant America at the dawn of a new century accessible not just to specialists but to a general audience whose understanding of today’s immigrants can be clouded by media clichés, popular stereotypes, and a new climate of fear. As in the previous editions, the purpose of this book will be fulfilled if the reader finds here a stimulus to gain additional knowledge about the newest members of American society.

Preface to the Second Edition

Six years have passed since we completed, in January 1989, the manuscript for the first edition of Immigrant America. In that brief span, the world changed—​and so did immigrant America. The Cold War ended, yet refugee admissions increased significantly; a massive amnesty program for three million formerly unauthorized immigrants was implemented; the Immigration Act of 1990 increased regular immigrant visas by 40 percent over the levels reached in the 1980s; and despite a variety of official efforts to stem the flow, undocumented immigration has not only grown but diversified since 1989. From the collapse of the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s to the collapse of the Mexican economy at mid-decade; from the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990 and the 1993 North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement to the normalization of relations with the governments of Vietnam and Cambodia; from the ill-fated voyage of the Golden Venture, the smuggling ship carrying Chinese immigrants that ran aground off the coast of New York, to the interdiction of thirty thousand Cuban balseros in the Florida Straits and the reversal of a favorable thirty-year U.S. policy toward Cuban émigrés; from Tiananmen Square to the Persian Gulf War to the U.S. interventions in Somalia and Haiti; all of these are but bits and pieces of a larger set of forces that—​ alongside the sustained demand for immigrant labor by U.S. employers, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policies and public opinion, the enabling presence of social networks of family and friends—​have had substantial if often unintended repercussions for immigration flows and policies. xxv

xxvi   |   Preface to the Second Edition

The vertiginous pace of recent historical change requires that we bring our analysis up-to-date, a task that has become all the more compelling in view of the sharply politicized and increasingly acrimonious public debate on immigration issues in the 1990s. Indeed, the past several years have witnessed not only an acceleration of immigration flows into the United States—​the twenty million foreign-born persons counted by the 1990 U.S. Census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, and admissions during the 1990s appear certain to eclipse the record set in the first decade of this century—​but also an intensification of public alarm and nativist resistance to it, exacerbated by the prolonged recession of the early 1990s and capped by the passage in 1994 of Proposition 187 in California, home to fully a third of the nation’s immigrants. As a result, immigration has risen to the top of the policy agenda and become a salient campaign issue in the 1996 presidential elections. Accordingly, we have revised the text to reflect the latest available evidence, making extensive use of the wealth of new data from the 1990 census, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and other sources from a rapidly accumulating research literature through the mid-1990s. The result is a thorough updating of the book; most of the several dozen tables and figures in the first six chapters are new or have been wholly revised, as is their accompanying text. Moreover, two new chapters have been especially written for this second edition. Chapter 7 examines the new second generation of children of immigrants now coming of age in American cities, a vastly understudied topic that nonetheless is key to a serious understanding of the long-term consequences of contemporary immigration for American society. Chapter 8 concludes with an effort not only to critically assess the sometimes paradoxical effects of present policies but also to confront and to specify the policy implications of our own analysis, placing our findings in historical perspective and seeking to tease out the complex dynamics of U.S.-bound immigration. Throughout, we maintain our original analytical approach, focusing on immigration as a process, not an event, and on the diversity of today’s immigrants—​their social origins and contexts of exit and their adaptation experiences and contexts of incorporation. We noted in the preface to the first edition that we sought to grasp at once the diversity and the underlying structures of the new immigration, and to make it accessible to a broader audience whose understanding of today’s immigrants can be clouded by common media clichés and widespread stereotypes. That was and remains the aim of this book.

Preface to the First Edition

America, that “permanently unfinished” society, has become anew a nation of immigrants. Not since the peak years of immigration before World War I have so many newcomers sought to make their way in the United States. Each year during the 1980s, an average of six hundred thousand immigrants and refugees have been legally admitted into the country, and a sizable if uncertain number of others enter and remain without legal status, clandestinely crossing the border or overstaying their visas. The attraction of America, it seems, remains as strong as ever—​as does the accompanying ambivalence and even alarm many native-born Americans express toward the newest arrivals. Unlike the older flows, however, today’s immigrants are drawn not from Europe but overwhelmingly from the developing nations of the Third World, especially from Asia and Latin America. The heterogeneous composition of the earlier European waves pales in comparison to the current diversity. Today’s immigrants come in luxurious jetliners and in the trunks of cars, by boat, and on foot. Manual laborers and polished professionals, entrepreneurs and refugees, preliterate peasants and some of the most talented cosmopolitans on the planet—​all are helping reshape the fabric of American society. Immigrant America today differs from that at the turn of the century. The human drama of the story remains as riveting, but the cast of characters and their circumstances have changed in complex ways. The newcomers are different, reflecting in their motives and origins the forces xxvii

xxviii   |   Preface to the First Edition

that have forged a new world order in the second half of this century. And the America that receives them is not the same society that processed the “huddled masses” through Ellis Island, a stone’s throw away from the nation’s preeminent national monument to liberty and new beginnings. As a result, theories that sought to explain the assimilation of yesterday’s immigrants are hard put to illuminate the nature of contemporary immigration. Certainly much has been said and written about the newest inflows, in both the popular and the academic media, and nonspecialists are beginning to get glimpses of the extraordinary stories of ordinary immigrants in the contemporary American context. Missing still is an effort to pull together the many strands of our available knowledge about these matters, to grasp at once the diversity and the underlying structures of the new immigration, and to make it accessible to a general public. Such is the aim of this book. A subject as complex and controversial as recent immigration to the United States cannot, of course, be exhaustively considered within the scope of this or any other single volume. Nor is it our purpose to pre­ sent the results of original research, to assess systematically the myriad impacts of post–​World War II immigration on American institutions, or to cover in any significant depth the trajectories of each of the scores of national groups that are in the process of becoming, with or without hyphens, the newest members of American society. Instead, we have sought to comb through a vast literature and to offer a synthesis of its major aspects in a way that is both comprehensive and comprehensible. Throughout, our focus on today’s immigrants is on the diversity of their origins and contexts of exit and on the diversity of their adaptation experiences and contexts of incorporation. Although the emphasis is on contemporary trends, the discussion seeks to understand present realities in historical perspective and in the context of competing theories of immigrant adaptation. The book consists of seven chapters. “Who They Are and Why They Come” is the basic issue addressed in chapter 1, and a typology of contemporary immigrants that serves to organize the subsequent analysis of their processes of economic, political, social, cultural, and psychological adaptation is proposed. Chapter 2, “Moving,” examines their points of destination and patterns of settlement, and the formation and function of new ethnic communities in urban America. Chapter 3, “Making It in America,” looks at the incorporation of immigrants in the American economy and seeks to explain their differences in educa-

Preface to the First Edition   |   xxix

tion, occupation, entrepreneurship, and income within specific contexts of reception. That is, the economic adaptation of immigrants needs to be understood not merely in terms of their resources and skills but as it is shaped by specific government policies, labor market conditions, and the characteristics of ethnic communities. Chapter 4, “From Immigrants to Ethnics,” analyzes immigrant politics, including the underlying questions of identity, loyalty, and determinants of current patterns of naturalization among newcomers who are “in the society but not of it.” Chapter 5, “A Foreign World,” switches lenses to focus on the psychology of immigrant adaptation, looking at the emotional consequences of varying modes of migration and acculturation, the major determinants of immigrants’ psychological responses to their changed circumstances, and immigrant patterns of mental health and help seeking in different social settings. Chapter 6, “Learning the Ropes,” proceeds to a detailed discussion of English acquisition, the loss or maintenance of bilingualism across generations, and new data on the educational attainment of diverse groups of young immigrants in American public schools. The concluding chapter seeks to clarify the origins of that most controversial segment of today’s immigration—​the illegals—​and to assess how this inflow and its recorded counterpart are likely to affect the nation in years to come. This, then, is a portrait of immigrant America in the waning years of the twentieth century. Like any portrait, selective in its hues and brushstrokes, it is an interpretation of a subject too rich and elusive to be rendered in a single picture. Our goal has been not to reach exclusively colleagues and specialists but rather a broader audience whose understanding of today’s immigrants can be clouded by common media clichés and widespread stereotypes. If the reader finds in this book a challenge to these prevailing views and a stimulus to gain additional knowledge about the newest members of this society, its purpose will have been fulfilled.

Acknowledgments for the Fourth Edition

This fourth edition of Immigrant America is dedicated to our spouses, Patricia and Irene, without whose selfless support and encouragement, now counted in decades, the effort to transform this book would not have been possible. We owe a special debt of gratitude to our editor at the University of California Press, Naomi Schneider, who enthusiastically welcomed the idea to bring about this new edition. Naomi has been both our editor and friend for many years, and we are happy to have been able to deliver on her kind and timely invitation. From the first edition to the fourth this book has been graced by dozens of original photographs taken over the past thirty years by Steven J. Gold of Michigan State University. A prominent scholar of immigration and ethnicity, Steve is also among the preeminent visual sociologists of his generation, and his images vividly depict, in ways that words and figures cannot, the extraordinary diversity of this nation of immigrants. Several of the chapters in this new edition draw on primary data gathered from two large-scale surveys: the latest wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) and the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) study, both supported by major grants from the Russell Sage Foundation. We are deeply indebted to Eric Wanner, the former president of the Russell Sage Foundation, and to the foundation’s board, without whose support neither of these research projects would have been possible. xxxi

xxxii   |   Acknowledgments for the Fourth Edition

The work of updating several of the chapters with the latest available data was supported in part by Portes’s graduate assistant at the University of Miami, Adrienne Celaya, and by his secretary at the same institution, Mary Cano. In their respective spheres, both dedicated many hours to the complex tasks of updating and integrating the material going into this edition. Rumbaut also greatly appreciates the indispensable technical assistance provided at key junctures by Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. At Princeton, Portes depended on the talent, efficiency, and stamina of Christine Nanfra, whose tasks included typing and editing endless versions of each successive chapter and assembling the final manuscript for delivery to the University of California Press. Christine qualifies as a third (silent) coauthor of this book, for it was she who brought it to fruition through sustained dedication and unflagging support. Last, but not least, we owe a major debt to the readers of prior editions of this book, in particular the instructors and students who have used it in both graduate and undergraduate courses over the years. The encouragement of many of our colleagues and former students played a decisive role in nudging us along the arduous road to bring forth a new updated and expanded edition. We can only hope that its publication meets, at least in part, their high expectations. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut Princeton and Irvine October 2013

Acknowledgments for the Third Edition

As noted in the preface, successive editions of this book have dovetailed with each of the last three decades and the changes in immigration and global society that they have brought about. This third edition, appearing in the midst of the first decade of a new century and a new millennium, has had to address the multiple changes in the form and content of immigration brought about by sweeping transformations of the global system. Patient readers of this and prior acknowledgment pages will also note that each edition has been preceded and supported by major empirical projects: the first, by Portes’s study of Mariel Cuban and Haitian entrants in South Florida and by Rumbaut’s study of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees and their children in Southern California in the 1980s; the second, by the first two panels of Portes and Rumbaut’s Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), focused on the new second generation, which followed a sample on both coasts of the United States representing a number of different nationalities. This third edition is no exception, as it draws heavily on the third and final survey for the same study (CILS-III), completed after a decade-long span from the original one, at a time when our respondents had reached early adulthood. As with past editions, our debts of gratitude for the present one are mainly due to those who made this final study possible. We thank Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF), who embraced the idea of this new survey from the start, and to the RSF’s board, who xxxiii

xxxiv   |   Acknowledgments for the Third Edition

provided the funds to make it possible. After data collection for the CILS-III survey was completed, RSF first and then the National Science Foundation provided vital support for analyzing the data and bringing results to publication. These data provide the core of chapter 8, dealing with the new second generation (formerly chapter 7), are extensively used in chapter 9 on immigrant religion, and inform our final conclusions and policy recommendations. As with prior waves of the same study, the CILS-III survey was conducted in tandem in two regions of the country, South Florida and Southern California. The South Florida panel, centered in Miami, was directed by William Haller who, with skill and tenacity, led the effort to track and reinterview thousands of respondents to a successful conclusion. Haller was supported by a team of interviewers housed at the Institute for Public Opinion Research (IPOR) of Florida International University. We are indebted to IPOR’s director, Hugh Gladwin; its assistant director, Ann Goraczko; and their staff for the skill and perseverance in conducting fieldwork for the study. Patricia Fernández-Kelly led an ethnographic field team to Miami that carried out detailed interviews with fifty-five respondents stratified by age, socioeconomic status, and nationality. The team included Bill Haller, Lisa Konczal, and Salih Eissa. Materials from this ethnographic module are used extensively in chapters 8 and 9, and we draw on them for our final policy conclusions. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to Patricia and Bill without whose skills and commitment the extensive and demanding fieldwork for the study would not have been completed. The Southern California segment of the project, centered in San Diego, depended on the indispensable collaboration of a staff led by Linda and Norm Borgen. Their work in tracking, locating, and surveying respondents not only in Southern California but throughout the United States was exceptional, and it was followed by their conducting 134 indepth, open-ended interviews with a diverse subsample of CILS respondents. This last effort was supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. After completion of fieldwork, Golnaz Komaie, Charlie V. Morgan, Sheila J. Patel, and Karen J. Robinson at the University of California, Irvine, and Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., also provided valuable research assistance. The authors benefited from a summer fellowship at Oxford University in 2000 for Alejandro Portes, where the idea of going ahead with a new CILS survey began to take form; and from yearlong stays by

Acknowledgments for the Third Edition    |   xxxv

Rubén Rumbaut at the Russell Sage Foundation, where he was a visiting scholar in 1997–​1998, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2000–​2001. The latter fellowship was generously supported by the Hewlett Foundation. In addition to CILS-III, a revised chapter on linguistic acculturation and a new chapter on immigration and religion for the present edition incorporate data from the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) survey supported by another major grant from the Russell Sage Foundation. Rumbaut has served as principal investigator for this project, along with Frank Bean and a team of collaborators that includes Susan Brown, Leo Chávez, Louis DeSipio, Jennifer Lee, and Min Zhou. A number of colleagues have generously given of their time to read and comment on various chapters of this edition. We thank, in particular, Jen’nan Ghazal Read, Louis DeSipio, and Frank Bean at the University of California, Irvine; Min Zhou at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Patricia Fernández-Kelly, Douglas S. Massey, and Miguel Angel Centeno at Princeton University. As with prior editions, the photos included in the present one come from the archives of Steven J. Gold of Michigan State University. A prominent scholar of immigration and ethnicity, Steve has distinguished himself by combining his research and scholarship with a passion for photography. His keen sociological eye is revealed in these photos that, in manifold ways, put “faces” to the ideas and figures discussed in the text. The publication of this book by the University of California Press marks the continuation of a productive two-decade relationship sustained thanks to our longtime editor, Naomi Schneider. She has provided unfailing support to the idea of preparing this revised and expanded edition and has given us needed encouragement to overcome the obstacles and challenges in its path. A dear friend, Naomi has our gratitude for her faith in us and in this project. Last but not least, Barbara McCabe at Princeton University typed and organized successive drafts of each chapter, organized the bibliography, and readied the other ancillary materials required for bringing the book into production. Another dear friend and longtime collaborator, Barbara distinguishes herself for her efficiency, her serenity under stress, and the charm with which she discharges the most demanding duties. The book is dedicated to the memory of our immigrant mothers, Eulalia and Carmen, to whom the first two editions were dedicated

xxxvi   |   Acknowledgments for the Third Edition

while they were still with us. In these last lines, we wish to acknowledge as well our wives, Patricia and Irene, who, along the many years that it took to complete the empirical study and then the book, sustained us with their devotion and their strength. To them our love. Alejandro Portes Princeton University Rubén G. Rumbaut University of California, Irvine April 2006

Acknowledgments for the Second Edition

This new edition has relied extensively on original research carried out during the 1990s by the authors. In particular, since 1989 we have collaborated on a continuing study of children of immigrants in Southern California and South Florida—​the largest such survey to date—​results from which form the core of chapter 7. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation (889.503), the Spencer Foundation, and the National Science Foundation (SBR 9022555), which jointly made this study possible. We are very much indebted to the administrators, principals, and teachers and staff of scores of secondary schools in the San Diego Unified School District and the Dade County and Broward County school districts for their unstinting cooperation throughout the various phases of data collection. We are grateful as well for the generous assistance extended to us by the sociology departments of San Diego State University, Florida International University, Michigan State University, and the Johns Hopkins University, through which the study has been conducted. In San Diego, we have benefited from the extraordinary commitment and competence of our research staff, especially James Ainsworth, Linda Borgen, Norm Borgen, Kevin Keogan, and Laura Lagunas. We appreciate as well the work of a team of over two dozen interviewers fluent in Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, and other Asian languages representative of the immigrant families that have setxxxvii

xxxviii   |   Acknowledgments for the Second Edition

tled in the San Diego area. While the mix of languages is less diverse in South Florida, the effort and capabilities of our research staff there are no less noteworthy. Our colleague Lisandro Pérez, who directed fieldwork in that area from the start, deserves much credit for the success of this challenging research program. So does his Florida International University team of Liza Carbajo, Ana María Pérez, Victoria Ryan, and the trilingual team of interviewers who took the final stage of the survey to successful completion. At Johns Hopkins, Richard Schauffler, Dag MacLeod, and Tomás Rodríguez were responsible for data entry and editing and the management of data files. Their dedicated and professional work made possible the timely analysis of survey data for inclusion in this new edition. We also appreciate the comments on the new chapter 7 by Guillermina Jasso, Aristide Zolberg, Charles Tilly, Douglas Massey, and Patricia Fernández-Kelly. In addition, chapters 5 and 6 have been revised to reflect more recent research supported by grants awarded to Professor Rumbaut, respectively, by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bureau of Health Care Delivery, Division of Maternal and Child Health, for a study of infant health risks and outcomes among low-income immigrants, carried out in collaboration with Professor John R. Weeks of San Diego State University; and by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, for a study of school contexts and educational achievement among language-minority immigrant students in San Diego city schools. Their support is gratefully acknowledged. Additional original photography was contributed specifically for this new edition by Steven J. Gold, to whom we are once again greatly indebted. The images captured by his camera in communities throughout the country illustrate the diversity of immigrant America today. Finally, we owe a special debt of gratitude to our editors at the University of California Press, Naomi Schneider and William Murphy, who gave us unfailing support during the preparation of this new edition, and to Angie Decker at Johns Hopkins, who is really the key person without whose dedication and effort in assembling disparate text corrections, references, maps, and tables, the final manuscript could not have been produced. We can only hope that the contents of this new edition are up to the quality of her work.

Acknowledgments for the First Edition

In the years since we first conceived the idea of this book, many unexpected events have affected its progress. As often happens, its execution proved far more time-consuming and difficult than originally planned. However, we have had the support of many people and institutions along the way. In California, Chanthan S. Chea, Duong Phuc, Vu Thanh Thuy, and Prany Sananikone gave a first powerful impulse to the project by organizing field visits to the Vietnamese and Cambodian business communities of San Diego and Santa Ana. These experiences persuaded us that there was here an unwritten human story, different from that depicted in official statistics and media reports, that needed to be told. Tong Vang supplemented these visits with interviews and translations of views of Hmong refugees, some of which are included in chapter 5. Much of the writing took place while Portes conducted field surveys of recently arrived Mariel Cubans and Haitian refugees in South Florida. Data from these projects and qualitative observations garnered while conducting them have been extensively used in the book. For financial support to implement these surveys, we acknowledge the Sociology Program of the National Science Foundation (grant #SES-8215567), of the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-41502), and the Sloan Foundation (87–​4-15). In Miami, the president of Florida International University (FIU), Modesto Maidique; the dean of the Arts and Sciences School, James Mau; and the chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department, Lisandro Pérez, deserve our thanks for making available xxxix

xl   |   Acknowledgments for the First Edition

the facilities of the institution and for their unwavering support during the months of fieldwork. The close ties of this project with FIU also involved many members of its faculty, in particular Douglas Kincaid, Anthony Maingot, Mark Rosenberg, and Alex Stepick. Together with the previously cited officials, they helped us unravel the intricacies of ethnic relations in Miami and the distinct characteristics of its different foreign communities. Stepick and his wife, Carol Dutton Stepick, directed three successive surveys of post-1980 Haitian refugees. Their close ties with leaders of the Haitian community and their dedication and patience made possible the successive completion of each stage under unusually adverse conditions. The parallel Cuban surveys were led by Juan Clark of MiamiDade Community College. The expertise of Clark and his team of interviewers made it possible to gain access and obtain reliable data from a large sample of Mariel refugees, a group afflicted at that time by numerous difficulties of adaptation. We have also made extensive use of results from two large surveys of recently arrived Southeast Asian refugees conducted by Rumbaut in Southern California. For financial support, we acknowledge the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (#HD15699), the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (#100–​86–​0214), and the San Diego State University (SDSU) Foundation. Kenji Ima of SDSU was the co-investigator in one of these studies. Both owe much to the commitment and ability of a staff of Indochinese interviewers and translators recruited from the refugee communities of San Diego. Many colleagues have helped us by reading and commenting on various chapters. At Hopkins, we thank Andrew Cherlin, William Eaton, Patricia Fernández-Kelly, and Melvin Kohn for their valuable input. At SDSU, we acknowledge the advice of Richard L. Hough, John R. Weeks, and James L. Wood. Elsewhere, Charles Hirschman, Leif Jensen, Ivan Light, Silvia Pedraza-Bailey, Peter J. Rose, Rubén D. Rumbaut, Marta Tienda, and William A. Vega also read and commented on several parts of the manuscript. All have our deep appreciation but are exempted from any responsibility for the contents. Original photography was contributed specifically for this book by several individuals, adding a visual dimension to our portrait of immigrant America in ways that mere words cannot. We wish to thank Estela R. García and Luis E. Rumbaut for scenes of immigrant communities in Miami and Washington, D.C., Steven J. Gold for his photos of diverse immigrant groups in California and along the Mexican border, Erica

Acknowledgments for the First Edition    |   xli

Hagen for her portraits of Southeast Asians awaiting resettlement to the United States in various refugee camps in Thailand, and the San Diego Union and Michael Franklin for his photos of Mexican migrant farmworkers in Southern California. At the University of California Press, Naomi Schneider adopted the idea of the book as her own and has given it indispensable encouragement. We are thankful to her, as well as to the press’s reviewers, who provided numerous useful suggestions. Anna Stoll not only typed multiple versions of each chapter but coordinated the many tasks required by the supporting field projects and the various stages of the manuscript. Thanks to her diligence and competence, the idea of this book has become reality.

Chapter 1

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

Maricopa County, Arizona, was not a good place to be in the first years of the twenty-first century if you were foreign and of brown skin. A child of Italian immigrants retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration and then turned county sheriff unleashed a veritable campaign of terror against Latin American immigrants, aiming to make the county as inhospitable to them as possible. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was enthusiastically egged on by a white electorate composed largely of retirees from northern states who could not see any contradiction between their hiring of Mexicans and Guatemalans as nannies, maids, and gardeners and the persecution to which Sheriff Joe subjected them.1 Repeatedly elected by Maricopa citizens, Arpaio devised ever more refined ways of punishing Mexicans and Central Americans unlucky enough to find themselves in Phoenix, Tempe, or the rural areas of the county. Although not all of them came surreptitiously across the border, Arpaio and his men acted as if they all were illegal. Brown-skinned people in Maricopa were guilty until proven innocent. Finally, in December 2011, the Federal Justice Department released a report claiming that “Sheriff Joe Arpaio harasses, intimidates and terrorizes Latinos and immigrants, and he’s been doing it for years.”2 Sheriff Joe stated that he would not go down without a fight, but faced with the prospect of a massive federal lawsuit, his reign of terror may be coming to an end. The antics of Joe Arpaio in southern Arizona highlight a leitmotif found throughout the history of immigration to America. Although the 1

2   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

words at the base of the Statue of Liberty speak of an open country welcoming the poor and wretched of the earth, realities on the ground have been very different. As in Maricopa, foreigners who fuel the local economy with their labor, not only as urban servants but as hands in the fields, have been consistently persecuted by the authorities and denounced by nativists as a threat to the nation. As noted by a number of authors, this peculiar American waltz between labor demand and identity politics has repeated itself in every major period of immigration dating back to colonial days. As we will see, the contradiction between welcoming foreign workers and demonizing their languages and cultures has been more apparent than real, having played into the hands of a number of actors. Sheriff Arpaio’s repeated election in Maricopa happened for a reason, as he represented the linchpin of a de facto functional immigration policy. Unraveling these and other riddles of the peculiar relationship between immigration and the development of American society and economy is the goal of this book. We begin the story with the great waves of immigration accompanying the American industrial revolution.

The Great European Wave, 1880–​1 930 Political Economy As shown in table 1, more than twenty-three million immigrants came to the United States during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth. Certainly, not all of them stayed; many eventually returned home or even engaged in a back-and-forth movement depending on the ups and downs of labor demand on both sides of the ocean. As many as half of certain peasant-origin groups, such as the Southern Italian contadini, went back at some point, while more than 90 percent of eastern European Jews left their places of origin never to return.3 Be that as it may, the sediment that these human waves left over time was substantial enough to cause significant changes in the demography of the receiving nation. By 1910, the foreign-born accounted for 14.7 percent of the American population and for 22 percent of those living in urban places. As Simon Kuznets and Brinley Thomas showed in detail, the great waves of European immigration were, by and large, the product of the transatlantic political economy. If conceived as a system, this economy generated enormous synergy among its complementary parts. Beginning in England at the start of the nineteenth century, the advance

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   3

of European industrialization continuously uprooted peasant masses whose economic livelihood was rendered precarious by advances in capital-intensive agriculture and whose only alternative was migration, either to industrializing cities or abroad. As Kuznets states: The shift from Great Britain and Ireland to Germany and the Scandinavian countries, and then to Italy and Eastern Europe, follows the trail of the industrial revolution in Europe. It at least suggests that immigration to the United States provided a welcome alternative to population groups displaced by revolutionary changes in agriculture and industry; and thus facilitated, in no small measure, the course of industrialization in the European countries. This migration may thus be viewed as an adjustment of population to resources, that in its magnitude and the extent to which it adapted itself to purely economic needs has few parallels in history.4

On the other side of the Atlantic the European waves were not well received by everyone, but they were welcomed by a politically decisive class, namely, capitalists bent on breaking the hold of independent craftsmen and skilled workers so as to meet the demand of a vast market for cheap manufactures. This was no easy feat. As Rosenblum notes, Tocquevillean democracy in America was grounded on independent small producers whose determination to avoid lifelong wage slavery led to a proliferation of enterprises whose craftsmen-owners freely and personally interacted with their journeymen. These, in turn, planned to found their own enterprises in due time.5 This tradition went hand in hand with the settlement of a vast frontier by independent farmers, whose demand for agricultural implements and manufactured goods created a comfortable synergy with the products of small-scale industrial shops. The challenge for the rising class of capitalist manufacturers was how to break this synergy so that markets could be expanded at home and abroad. As Brinley Thomas demonstrated, immigration prior to the 1870s preceded indicators of economic development such as railway construction and demand for bituminous coal: “That was the pioneering phase when a comparatively small nation was engaged in subduing a continent and the rate of expansion was conditioned by the arrival of new labor. . . . Moreover, the railways could not have been built without the gangs of laborers, many of them Irish, recruited in the East and transported to the construction camps.”6 After 1870, however, the causal correlation reversed itself, and indicators of economic development started to precede mass migration. This is the moment when the “pull” of American wages, advertised by paid recruiters sent to Europe, began to make its mark among Italian

810,900

Kingdomb

German Empire

267,660

3,995

15,186

Italy

Spain

Portugal

Greece

1,807

1,380

Turkey in Europe

Southern Europe

5,842

182,698

—

314,787

42,910

152,604

1,445,181

Romania

Russiag

Eastern Europe

Othere

Austria-Hungary

Poland

Central Europe

Otherd

48,193

671,783

Scandinaviac

France

674,061

Ireland

United

5,248,568

Total immigration

N

0.3

0.1

5.1 25,874

9,189

603,761

12,732

3,547

—f —f

6,808

450,101

52

534,059

107,793

86,011

579,072

35,616

390,729

405,710

0.1

3.5

—

6.0

0.8

2.9

27.5

0.9

12.7

12.8

328,759

3,694,294

100.0a 15.5

N

%

0.7

0.2

16.3

0.3

0.1

0.2

12.7

—f

14.5

2.9

2.3

15.7

1.0

10.5

11.0

8.9

100.0

1890–1899 %

1880–1889

Table 1.   Decennial Immigration to the United States, 1880–1919

1.4

4.0

0.4

5.9

4.2

5.7

100.0

%

65,154

24,818

1,930,475

145,402

61,856

57,322

1,501,301

34,651

2,001,376

0.8

0.3

23.5

1.8

0.8

0.7

18.3

0.4

24.4

Not returned separately

112,433

328,722

67,735

488,208

344,940

469,578

8,202,388

N

1900–1909

1.6

2.7

1.0

3.8

2.6

5.8

100.0

%

82,489

53,262

1,229,916

198,108

71,179

13,566

1,106,998

27,180

1,154,727

1.3

0.8

19.4

3.1

1.1

0.2

17.4

0.4

18.2

Not returned separately

101,478

174,227

60,335

238,275

166,445

371,878

6,347,380

N

1910–1919

0.1

0.1

—f

0.5

40,943

11,191

2,038

31,480

734i

0.5

0.1

0.1

0.9

—f

0.1

0.9

0.6

22,011

100,960

31,188

123,650

171,837

66,143

Source: Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, 1920, 324–25; cited in Kraut, The Huddled Masses, 21. aTotals are rounded to nearest percent as in census report. bEngland, Scotland, Wales. cNorway, Sweden, Denmark. dNetherlands, Belgium, Switzerland. eBulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro. fLess than one-tenth of one percent. gIncludes Finland and boundaries prior to 1919. hIncludes Canada. iImmigrants from British North America and Mexico not reported from 1886 to 1893. jIncludes Jamaica. kIncludes Tasmania and New Zealand.

7,271

6,643

Other

2,233

27,323

2,405

3,098i

—f

33,775

23,963

9.4

1.3

68,673

492,865

—f

1,098

Australiak

Other Countries

Central and South America

West Indiesj

Mexico

British North Americah

America

Other

Turkey in Asia

Asia

0.3

1.2

0.4

1.5

2.1

0.8

10,414

11,280

55,630

120,860

185,334

708,715

109,019

89,568

0.2

0.2

0.9

1.9

2.9

11.2

1.7

1.4

6   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

and eastern European peasants whose economic existence was rendered increasingly precarious by industrialization in their own countries. As table 1 also shows, southern and central Europeans progressively displaced migrants from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia, as major sources of U.S.-bound migration. Their massive arrival led to a radical transformation in the composition of the American working class, from independent and quasi-independent craftsmen and journeymen to unskilled workers. Naturally, the native working class vigorously, and often violently, resisted the changes engineered by industrial capitalists. Better than any other movement, the Knights of Labor exemplified this resistance. The phenomenal rise in the membership of this order and the bitter struggles that ensued coincided with a rise in factory production that became generalized by the 1880s. The Knights grew in membership from about 104,000 in July 1885 to more than 702,000 one year later: “The idea of solidarity of labor ceased to be merely verbal, and took on flesh and life; general strikes, nation-wide boycotts, and nation-wide political movements were the order of the day. Although the upheaval came with the depression, it was the product of permanent and far reaching changes which had taken place during the seventies and the early eighties.”7 The Knights were, in the end, unsuccessful. The master-journeyman relation was gone forever and, with it, the social basis for democratic equality and self-reliant individualism that were founding elements of the American republic. European migration did not change the fundamental pillars of American society—​its elites, its class structure, or its constitutional order; what it accomplished was to alter the demographic composition of the population and, along with it, the character of the American working class. Henceforth, workers became dependent on trade unions rather than independent ownership as their sole basis for having a “voice” in their nation’s political process.8 European migration accelerated to such an extent that it made the causal order between capitalist development and population displacement uncertain. While originally promoted by capitalist firms through deliberate recruitment to staff the incipient factory system, the movement produced such an abundance of cheap unskilled labor as to trigger new waves of technological innovation to take advantage of it, in the process burying forever the independent artisan class. As Thomas concluded: “The massive inflow into the United States of cheap labour from Southern and Eastern Europe coincided with technical innovations calling for a ‘widening’ of the capital structure. The changing tech-

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   7 Table 2  Percentage of Foreign-Born among White Male Gainful Workers, Ten Years of Age or Older, 1910 Occupation

Percentage

Total

24.7

Professional, technical, and kindred workers

15.6

Farmers and farm managers

12.8

Managers, officials, and proprietors, except farm

26.4

Clerical and kindred workers

10.9

Sales workers

18.0

Craftsmen, foremen, and kindred workers

29.6

Operatives and kindred workers

38.0

Service workers, including private household

36.8

Farm laborers and foremen Laborers, except farm and mine

8.4

45.0

Source: Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children: 1850–1950, 202; cited in Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers, 77.

nique in the expanding industries entailed minute subdivision of operations and a wide adoption of automatic machines worked by unskilled, often illiterate men, women, and children. After 1900, the new supply of manpower was so abundant that firms using the new techniques must have driven out of the market many old firms committed to processes depending on human skill.”9 As shown in table 2, male immigrants around 1910 were overwhelmingly concentrated in the bottom rungs of the occupational ladder. While illiterate or poorly educated first-generation migrants were pretty much stuck at the bottom of that ladder, prospects for the better educated and, especially, for the children born in America were much brighter. As it kept growing, the new industrial economy generated multiple economic opportunities accessible to those with a modicum of education. A universal public-education system opened the doors for such positions to second-generation youths. Naturally, it was the children of earlier immigrant waves—​primarily the British, German, Scandinavian, and Irish—​ who benefited most from such circumstances. They needed a continuous supply of unskilled Italians, Poles, and other eastern European workers to keep fueling a mass industrial economy that was propelling them to positions of ever greater wealth and prosperity.10 This is a fundamental reason why nativist reactions against the southern and eastern

8   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

European waves and the consequent identity politics were kept in abeyance until the third decade of the twentieth century. Identity Politics Despite the extraordinary synergies in the transatlantic political economy between Europe and North America, the mass of peasant immigration from Catholic countries of the European periphery could not but awaken sentiments of rejection and hostility among the native-born. Such sentiments and the resulting anti-immigrant mobilizations accumulated over time as the mass of foreigners extended throughout the national territory and as the economic “mobility machine” fueled by their labor slowed down in the wake of World War I. In chapter 5 we will examine in detail the interplay between nativist discrimination and identity politics during this period. The main point here is that the interplay between the economic basis of immigration and the cultural reaction to it was definitely evident during those years. Anti-immigrant sentiment was fueled by a conjunction of groups that saw the relentless flow of foreigners as a direct threat. First, skilled native workers and their organizations were pushed aside by the onslaught of unskilled migrant labor. While the Knights of Labor put forward an ideology of universal brotherhood among all workers and of radical transformation of the capitalist factory system, realities on the ground continuously undermined that ideology and put the confrontation between skilled natives and illiterate foreign peasants into sharp focus.11 Second, there was a general malaise among the native population at being surrounded by a sea of foreign faces, accents, and religious practices and at finding themselves increasingly cast as “outsiders in their own land.” Nativist reactions took multiple forms, from violent attacks and lynching of foreigners to organized campaigns to Americanize them as quickly as possible. In March 1911 the White League, a New Orleans organization akin to the Ku Klux Klan, lynched eleven Italian immigrants accused of conspiring to murder the city’s police chief. Six were about to be released after being found not guilty. Their dark Mediterranean features undoubtedly contributed to their instant indictment by the mob. Commenting on the incident, the Harvard intellectual Henry Cabot Lodge characterized it not as a mere riot but as a form of revenge, “which is a kind of wild justice.” He characterized the earlier acquittals as “gross miscarriages of justice,” since the Italians were undoubtedly active in the Mafia.12

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   9

Cabot Lodge’s stance reflected the third set of forces in favor of nativist radicalism: the concern among American intellectuals that so many foreigners would dilute the moral fiber of the nation and the integrity of its institutions. In an academic environment dominated by the social Darwinist evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and the “science” of eugenics, the intellectual and moral inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans was taken for granted and their capacity for eventual assimilation into American culture widely questioned. The statistician Richard Mayo Smith warned that “the thing we have to fear most is the political danger of the infusion of so much alien blood into our social body that we shall lose the capacity and power of self-government.”13 Similarly, in his 1926 volume Intelligence and Immigration psychologist Clifford Kirkpatrick argued against expecting much progress among immigrants through the reform of school programs because “definite limits are set by heredity, and immigrants of low innate ability cannot by any amount of Americanization be made into intelligent American citizens capable of appropriating and advancing a complex culture.”14 Under the intellectual zeitgeist of the time and the leadership of such public thinkers, the restrictionist movement gathered momentum. The movement was reinforced by three major forces in the economic infrastructure. First, as noted by Thomas, the progressive closure of the frontier and the slowing down of the industrialization process began to limit the “economic engine” propelling native workers and members of the second generation on the backs of foreign labor. The mass of newcomers progressively ceased to be the backbone of a segmented labor market and became a source of direct competition for natives.15 Second, the minority of educated immigrants with union and party experience in Europe and the Americanized second generation mobilized against capitalist exploitation, becoming, in many regions, the backbone of the union movement. The enthusiasm of industrialists for foreign labor cooled significantly when confronted with such unexpected resistance. Immigrants with industrial backgrounds were those who contributed primarily to the first radical cohorts in America: “The spirit of a disciplined, intelligent, and aggressive socialist army was typified by the organized working-class movement of Germany. The leaders of this mighty force were deeply respected at home and abroad. It was men trained in such a movement who tried to build up a duplicate in the United States.”16 Events back home also contributed to the radicalization of certain immigrant nationalities, such as Russian Jews and Slavs. As Fine noted,

10   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

“almost two-thirds of the members of the Workers’ (Communist) Party were born in countries which were either part of the old Russian empire or inhabited by Slavs.”17 The horrors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York stimulated labor militance in the needle trades. As a result, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, each of which had a largely Jewish, Italian, and Polish membership, developed into two of the strongest labor unions in the United States.18 Thus, the fundamental function of immigrant labor to American industrialism, which included not only supplementing a scarce domestic labor force but disciplining it through strike-breaking and the acceptance of poor working conditions, gradually weakened. The stage was set for the search by capitalist firms of a new source of pliable labor to replace increasingly militant immigrants and their descendants. The identification of this alternative labor source represented the third economic force buttressing the restrictionist movement that finally triumphed in the mid-1920s. As we will see in the next chapter, the activation of the massive black labor reserves in the American South provided the impulse for the emergence of a split labor market in industry, marked by major differences in pay and work conditions between white and black workers. Descendants of former slaves, previously confined to a stagnant agricultural life in the South, were actively recruited by the likes of the Ford Motor Company as early as 1916. The recruitment process was similar to that previously used among southern Italian and eastern European peasants, and the purpose was the same—​to supply large manufacturing industries in the American Northeast and Midwest with an abundant, cheap, and unorganized labor source. Because this source was also unskilled, the policy of encouraging southern black migration was accompanied by the acceleration of capital-intensive techniques in manufacturing. With this strategy capitalist firms attempted, and largely succeeded, in breaking the power of the trade unions. From 1920 to 1929 union membership dropped by almost two million. In 1933 it stood at fewer than three million, a precipitous decline from the peak years before World War I.19 The final victory of radical nativism with the enactment of restrictive legislation by the U.S. Congress in 1924 was, to a large extent, the outcome of the withdrawal of support for immigration by forces in the American economy that had previously supported it. First, natives and members of the second generation shifted attitudes, regarding further immigration as an obstacle and not as a propeller of their own upward

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   11

mobility. Second, the pivotal capitalist class lost enthusiasm for the foreign labor supply as it became progressively organized. This withdrawal of support accelerated when firms found in southern black peasants a new major source to replace and, if necessary, discipline an increasingly restless white labor force. Political Economy and Identity in the West The size of European immigration after 1890 and the attention bestowed on it by politicians, academics, and the public at large commonly blocked from view what was happening at the other end of the land. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexico ceded to its northern neighbor almost half of its territory after its defeat in the Mexican-American War. The physical size of the new acquisition was enormous, comprising the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The need to integrate these territories into the economy of the nation and the vast opportunities it created generated a strong demand for new labor, to be sourced from west and south. Gold came first. The California Gold Rush of 1848 to 1855 saw adventurers of every stripe attempt the difficult journey west, going as far as the Magellan Strait at the tip of South America to reach the new promised land. The need for labor in the mines led to the first transpacific recruitment system, with paid contractors sent to southern China, in particular the greater Pearl River Delta region around present-day Jiangmen, in search of contract workers. The system was largely responsible for the first appearance of Chinese migrants on American shores.20 The great difficulties of reaching the Pacific Coast and the need to integrate the vast new territories provided the necessary impetus for transcontinental railroad construction in the subsequent decades. Two great railroad companies—​the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific—​stood in need of massive supplies of labor that could not be sourced from the east, especially after the tracks left Iowa and Nebraska to start climbing the Rocky Mountains. Labor for this enormous enterprise came ­primarily from southern China through a massive expansion of the recruitment system. The two railroad companies, racing east from Sacramento, California, and west from Omaha, Nebraska, finally met in Promontory, Utah, in 1869.21 Chinese workers whose hands had built mile after mile of track suddenly became redundant. A few returned home, but most stayed because

12   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

they had not accumulated enough money to pay the costs of the return passage and buy land. They first turned to California agriculture, but their appearance in the fields triggered a furious reaction among natives who regarded the Chinese as semihuman. Chinese immigration was described as “a more abominable traffic than the African slave trade” and the immigrants themselves were depicted as “half civilized beings who spread filth, depravity, and epidemic.”22 The weak Qing Dynasty could do little for its nationals abroad, and the rising xenophobia in California and elsewhere culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively ended this labor flow. Chinese laborers were pushed out of California farms and ranches and forced to find refuge in tightly knit urban communities that formed the precursors of today’s Chinatowns. Hand laundries and cheap restaurants became the means of survival for this confined “bachelors society” where the ratio of men to women reached a remarkable 26:1 in the 1930s.23 With Chinese laborers out of the land and California agriculture in full bloom, a new source of field labor had to be found. For some time after the mid-1880s, the Hawaii sugar industry had sourced its demand for cane cutters in Japan. The flow now reached the mainland, where the renowned discipline and frugality of Japanese workers made them welcome by California ranchers and farmers, at least for a while. Trouble started to brew when landowners realized that the Japanese coupled these virtues with a strong desire to buy land and farm on their own. In 1900, for example, forty Japanese farmers owned fewer than five thousand acres of California’s land. By 1909, however, about six thousand Japanese were farming under all sorts of tenancy, controlling more than 210,000 acres.24 As Ivan Light has pointed out, “So long as the Japanese remained willing to perform agricultural labor at low wages, they remained popular with California ranchers. But even before 1910, the Japanese farmhands began to demand higher wages . . . worse, many Japanese began to lease and buy agricultural land for farming on their own account. This enterprise had the two-fold result of creating Japanese competition in the produce field and decreasing the number of Japanese farmlands available.”25 Faced with such “unfair” competition, ranchers turned to the eversympathetic state legislature. In 1913 the first Alien Land Law was passed, restricting the free acquisition of land by the Japanese. This legal instrument was perfected in 1920 when Japanese nationals were forbidden to lease agricultural land or to act as guardians of native-

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   13

born minors in matters of property. Driven from the land, the Japanese had no choice but to move into cities, just as the Chinese had done before. They did not huddle, however, in the same restricted areas but fanned out in diverse forms of self-employment. By 1919, almost half of the hotels in Seattle and 25 percent of the grocery stores were owned by Japanese migrants. Of Japanese men in Los Angeles, 40 percent were self-employed, operating dry-cleaning establishments, fisheries, and lunch counters. A large percentage of Japanese urban businesses were produce stands that marketed the production of the remaining Japanese farms.26 The anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobic measures pushed by nativists in the West thus ended up depriving its farms and other businesses of any source of Asian labor, while turning those migrants who stayed into urban entrepreneurs. Farms, ranches, and cities kept growing, however, and the question was what new labor flow could be engineered to replace the departed Chinese and Japanese. Western businessmen borrowed a page from their eastern counterparts by turning south. While northeastern industrialists tapped the large black labor reserves in the former Confederacy, California and Texas ranchers went to Mexico. In both cases the method was the same: deliberate recruitment through economic incentives. By 1916 the Los Angeles Times reported that five or six weekly trains full of Mexican workers hired by the agents were being run from Laredo. According to Mario García, the competition in El Paso became so aggressive that recruiting agencies stationed their Mexican employees at the Santa Fe Bridge, where they literally pounced on the immigrants as they crossed the border.27 As seen in table 3, Mexican immigration surged after 1910 as a consequence of these developments—​a flow that was intensified by the turmoil of the decadelong Mexican Revolution. Free access to Mexican labor conflicted, however, with the increasing exclusionary mood back east. The history of immigrant regulation from the end of World War I to the Great Depression is a case study of governmental efforts to reconcile seemingly incompatible demands through legislative compromise and administrative regulation. Direct attempts by western ranchers and growers to beat back restrictionism at the federal level were defeated. In 1918, however, an exception to the ban on illiterates was granted by Congress in favor of immigrants from Mexico and Canada. The 1924 National Origins Act again exempted Mexico and other Western Hemisphere countries from the quota imposed on the Europeans. In 1929 a Supreme Court decision upheld an earlier administrative decree

14   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration Table 3  Mexican Immigration to the United States, 1881–1950 N (000s)

% of total immigration

1881–1890

2

.04

1891–1900

1

.02

1901–1910

50

.60

1911–1920

219

3.80

1921–1930

459

11.20

1931–1940

22

4.20

1941–1950

61

5.90

Decade

Source: Portes and Bach, Latin Journey, 79. Table compiled from annual reports of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

declaring workers who commuted between residences in Mexico and jobs in the United States to be legal immigrants.28 In effect, through various loopholes and administrative devices, the federal government endeavored to keep the “back door” of immigration open to Western capital, while closing it to new southern and eastern European migrants. For reasons we have already seen, Europeans had ceased to be a preferred source of unskilled industrial labor, but while their replacements could be sourced from domestic labor reserves, the same was not the case in the West. There, foreign workers, this time from south of the border, continued to be in high demand for many years as the human instruments to fuel an expanding economy. Mexican migration possessed another convenient feature: its cyclical character. Because the border and their home communities were relatively close, Mexican migrants found reverse migration a much easier enterprise than did Europeans or Asians. Indeed, the normative behavior among Mexican male workers was to go home after the harvest or after their contract with railroad companies had expired. This practice, together with the predominantly nonurban destinations of the Mexican labor flow, reduced its visibility, making it a less tempting target for nativist movements of the time than the Italians and Poles. That honeymoon period was short-lived, however, as we will see shortly. While the history of U.S.-bound immigration before the 1930s evidenced few parallels between the eastern and western regions, a decisive feature was common to both: the conflicting interplay between political

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   15

economy and identity politics. Growing industrial and agricultural economies consistently demanded and received immigrant labor flows, while the presence of many foreigners inevitably triggered a nativist backlash. That reaction was prompted by the perception of immigrants as labormarket competitors and as sources of social and cultural fragmentation, as well as by the behavior of some foreign groups that sought to assert their labor rights and their rights to self-employment in America. When that happened, the protective hand of the employer class quickly withdrew, leaving the newcomers to their own fate. Early Twentieth-Century Migration and Social Change The literature on international migration generally makes a great deal over the changes that such flows wreak in the host societies, often proclaiming that they “transform the mainstream.”29 These assertions confuse impressions at the surface of social life with actual changes in the culture and social structure of the receiving society. While major immigration movements, such as the great transatlantic and transpacific waves before and at the start of the twentieth century, can have great impact on the demographic composition of the population, it is an open question whether such changes also lead to transformations in more fundamental elements of the host nations. In the case of the United States it is clear that, despite much handwringing by nativists of the time, the value system, the constitutional order, and the class structure of American society remained largely intact. Native white elites kept firm control on the levers of economic and political power, and existing institutions, such as the court system and the schools, proved resilient enough to withstand the foreign onslaught and to gradually integrate newcomers into the citizenry. It is a commonplace that assimilation is a two-way street, with both the host society and foreign groups influencing each other. In the American case, however, the process was definitely one-sided, as existing institutions held the upper hand. Eventually, children and grandchildren of immigrants began ascending the ladder of the American economy and the status system, but to do so, they had first to become thoroughly acculturated, learning fluent English and accepting the existing value system and normative order. It is important at this point to distinguish between the structural significance and the change potential of migrant flows. There is no question that the great early twentieth-century migrations had enormous struc-

16   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration Table 4  Proportion Urban: White, Native White, and Foreign-Born White Year

White (%)

Native white (%)

Foreign-born white (%)

1940

57.5

55.1

80.0

1930

57.6

54.5

79.2

1920

53.4

49.6

75.5

1910

48.2

43.6

71.4

1900

42.4

38.1

66.0

1890

37.5

32.9

60.7

1870

28.0

23.1

53.4

Source: Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers, Table 6.2.

tural importance for the American economy. They were the sine qua non for the industrial revolution of the time, and this was, from the point of view of white American elites, almost their sole raison d’être. That effect did not so much change American society as reinforce its existing structures of wealth and power. The actual social transformations wrought in the fabric of society by these flows came largely as unanticipated consequences of their numbers and their cultural backgrounds. As shown in table 4, places of destination of Europeans were overwhelmingly urban. Foreigners lived in cities at far higher rates than natives did, triggering a veritable urban explosion. The overall effect was to shift the social and political center of gravity of the nation from the countryside to the cities, especially those in the Northeast and Midwest.30 Thanks to the great European waves, the United States became an overwhelmingly urban country. Aside from its social and cultural ramifications, this transformation had an important political consequence. Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are apportioned on the basis of number of persons in each district and state rather than the number of citizens. As Tienda puts it: “The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that: ‘Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole numbers of persons in each state.’ . . . That all persons residing in the United States are counted, but only citizens are permitted to vote in national elections, presumes that the right to representation is more fundamental than the right to exercise the franchise.”31 The six major immigrant-receiving states gained sixteen seats in the

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   17

House between 1900 and 1910, signaling a significant shift in political influence that directly threatened mostly rural states. Not surprisingly, representatives of those states strongly supported a restrictionist stance, adding their voices to the chorus of those endorsing the conclusions of the 1911 Dillingham Commission Report to Congress to the effect that “immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are intellectually inferior and unworthy of naturalization.”32 Despite these voices, the balance of votes in the House did shift in favor of increasingly urbanized and immigrant-receiving states. While the House of Representatives is certainly not the only locus of national political power, it is an important one. Hence, the combination of sheer numbers with U.S. constitutional provisions led to a direct transformation of immigrant settlement patterns into political influence. That influence was not exercised by the immigrants themselves but by native politicians in the migrant-receiving states. As we will see in chapter 5, it would take some time for the children and grandchildren of migrants to come into their own in the American political process. Immigration’s other major effect was to transform the cultural landscape through the massive arrival of believers in other creeds. Over time, European immigrants and their descendants gave up their languages, and many elements of their culture, but not their religions. As a consequence, an overwhelmingly Protestant nation was forced to accommodate the institutionalization of the Catholic faith, brought by Irish immigrants and consolidated with the arrival of millions of Italians and Poles, and, subsequently, the proliferation of synagogues in the wake of massive eastern European Jewish immigration. Thus, a predominant Protestant culture became first “Christian” and then “Judeo-Christian,” signaling the institutionalization of these immigrant faiths. In chapter 8 we will examine the manifold effects of religion on the social and economic adaptation of newcomers. At present, the important point is that this transformation both demonstrated and reinforced the strength of the country’s institutional framework, while leading to significant changes in its culture. In effect, the arrival of millions of Irish and Italian Catholics first and eastern European Jews later pitted the strong desire of the Protestant majority to keep the nation culturally and religiously homogenous against the separation of church and state and the right to religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution. The legal framework prevailed, and the result was a vast transformation in the American cultural landscape, as the influence of Catholic churches

18   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

and Jewish synagogues went well beyond their weekly services. For Jews, in particular, accustomed to systematic persecution in Russia and elsewhere in Europe, the American constitutional order was a priceless gift: “For the orthodox, the good life consisted of being able to live and worship in a manner consistent with Mosaic Law and religious traditions. Not all east-European Jews were equally religious, but most were imbued with the Jewish cultural respect for intellectual pursuits.”33 It is a matter of debate whether the consolidation of other faiths altered, in a fundamental way, the American value system. While Protestant hegemony certainly suffered, it can be argued that, at a deeper level, the system was strengthened. The victory of the legal framework over provincial fears of cultural disintegration reinforced the basic institutional pillars of the nation. In reciprocity Catholics and Jews responded by “Americanizing” their religious practices, making them increasingly compatible with core American values.

Retrenchment, 1930–​1 970 The historical replacement of European by southern black migrants in the East and of Asians by Mexicans in the West continued during the 1920s, although some Italians, Poles, and others kept coming, since the 1924 National Origins Act took time to be implemented. The delays were due to endless wrangling in Congress about which census year to use as the basis for determining the annual admittance quota of 2 to 3 percent of the resident immigrant nationality already in the country. Pushing back the census year to 1890 or even 1880 facilitated future admissions from northern Europe and concomitantly limited those from the South. In the end the annual quota of immigrants who could be admitted from any country was set at 2 percent, and the selected census year was 1920, which would have allowed a greater number of Italians and other southeastern Europeans to come had it not been for the intervention of a major economic downturn.34 In 1929 the American national product had come close to $90 billion; by 1932 it was cut to $42 billion and, by the following year, to a miserable $39 billion. Residential construction fell by 95 percent; eighty-five thousand businesses failed; and the national volume of salaries dwindled by 40 percent. The nation lay prostrate.35 Worse, the government had no clue about what to do at the time that “Hoovervilles” of impoverished families rapidly dotted the land. The Great Depression proved to be the greatest immigrant-control measure of all times, since

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   19 Table 5  Immigration and the American Labor Force, 1900–1935 Year

Immigrant arrivals, age 16–44 (000s)

% of labor force

1900

370

1.3

1901

396

1.4

1902

539

1.9

1903

714

2.6

1904

657

2.4

1905

855

3.1

1906

914

3.3

1907

1,101

4.0

1908

631

2.3

1909

625

2.3

1910

868

2.6

1911

715

2.1

1912

678

2.0

1913

986

2.9

1914

982

2.9

1928

231

0.6

1929

208

0.5

1930

177

0.4

1931

67

0.1

1932

22

0.0

1933

15

0.0

1934

19

0.0

1935

22

0.0

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, 55–73.

no matter what the quota was, foreigners had no incentive to come and join the masses of unemployed Americans. As shown in table 5, while immigrant arrivals, aged sixteen to forty-four, surpassed one million and reached 4 percent of the adult labor force in 1907, by 1932 only twentytwo thousand newcomers arrived, not even reaching 0.1 percent of the domestic labor force. One of the most telling features of this period was the attempt by the federal government to reduce unemployment by deporting foreign

Table 6  The Bracero Program and Clandestine Migrant Apprehensions, 1946–1972 Year

Apprehensions Braceros (000s) (deported aliens) (000s)

1946

32

1947

20

1948

35

1949

107

1950

68

1951

192

1952

234

1953

179

1954

214

1955

338

1956

417

1957

450

1958

419

1959

448

1960

427

71

1961

294

89

1962

283

93

1963

195

89

1964

182

87

1965

104

110

1966

9

139

1967

8

162

1968

6

212

1969

—

284

1970

—

345

1971

—

420

1972

—

506

Sources: Grebler, Moore, and Guzman, The MexicanAmerican People, 68; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Annual Reports.

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   21

workers. Most European immigrants were legally in the country and could not be sent back. The repatriation and deportation campaign thus focused on Mexicans, of whom close to half a million were sent back. As Grebler put it, “Only a few years earlier, many of those now ejected had been actively recruited by American enterprises.”36 In Texas the Mexican-born population dropped nearly 40 percent between 1930 and 1940. A distinct feature of this campaign was that many U.S.-born Mexican Americans were sent to Mexico along with the immigrants.37 Prefiguring the stance of Sheriff Arpaio in today’s Arizona, being brownskinned and mestizo-looking was sufficient reason for federal officials to put you aboard a bus bound for Mexico. The campaign made no dent in the country’s economic situation, which continued to worsen. It was only after massive deficit spending and a deliberate program of job creation by the Roosevelt administration that things started to take a turn for the better. World War II represented a quantum leap in this policy as federal spending reached a then monumental $103 billion per year, while unemployment dropped to near zero.38 By the early 1940s, American agriculture found itself again short of hands, a situation that led the U.S. government to reverse itself and tap the ever-available Mexican labor reserve. In 1942 an agreement was signed by both governments, leading to the initiation of the Bracero Program, under which tens of thousands of Mexican contract workers went to work for American farms and ranches, reproducing the pre-Depression labor scene. From the viewpoint of their employees, braceros (physical laborers) proved so pliable and productive that they insisted on the continuation of the program after the war’s end. As seen in table 6, from a modest start in the post–​World War II years the program reached almost half a million workers over the next decade. By the time it ended in 1964, some twenty-eight states had received several million braceros—​one of the largest state-managed labor migrations in history. Tellingly, during the twenty-two years of the Bracero Program, no farm labor union ever succeeded in organizing or carrying out a strike.39 The period of immigration retrenchment, marked by the Great Depression and World War II, had a series of important and unanticipated consequences. The suffering of the 1930s was shared by the children of natives and immigrants alike, forging new social and cultural bonds out of common adversity. These bonds were much strengthened when youths of all ethnic origins found themselves in the trenches. Fighting platoons had no time for discrimination so that men whose parents had been at each other’s throats because of racial or ethnic dif-

22   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

ferences came into close and prolonged contact. As an outgrowth of the war, prejudice and hostility against the children of Europeans became largely a thing of the past. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the “GI Bill,” completed the process by giving these newly empowered Americans a helping hand into the middle class.40 The effects on individual mobility facilitated by the GI Bill were most notably seen among white veterans, although not among blacks in the South. As so often happens in retrospective narratives, necessities were built out of contingencies, with later authors speaking of an “inevitable” process of assimilation under which natives and immigrants melted into a single whole. Others would suggest a “designer” nation forged by the far-seeing policies of its leaders. In fact, nothing of the sort happened. The process by which the great European and, to a lesser extent, Asian migrations at the turn of the twentieth century became part of the American mainstream was due to a series of unforeseen and, with the wisdom of retrospect, rather fortunate accidents. World War II represented not only a massive Keynesian stimulus program for the American economy but also a giant melting machine out of which the pluribus finally turned into the unum. There were important exceptions to this pattern. While Mexican Americans had enlisted by the thousands and had fought and died in the war, they were not beneficiaries of the melting machine, at least not to the extent of other ethnic minorities. On their return from the lines, they still found themselves confined to the barrios and victimized by white discrimination and prejudice. Their collective position in the American hierarchies of status and wealth barely budged, despite their enormous sacrifice. Part of the reason for this outcome was the minority’s role as the backbone of the unskilled labor market in western states. This position in the social order, shared with southern blacks back east, was too entrenched to be changed even by a global war.41 A second, and decisive, reason was that the Bracero Program ensured the continuity of the migration from south of the border, thus renewing and strengthening the bonds of the Mexican American population with its country of origin. This did not happen to the children of Europeans and Asians for whom the cutoff of migration in the 1920s inexorably weakened cultural and linguistic ties, forcing them to become American in one form or another. From the “longtime Californ,” as Chinese Americans branded themselves, to the newly minted Italian American and Jewish American ward politicians in the East, the process of adapting to and pushing ahead within the American institutional system was

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   23

well advanced by the late 1930s. The war gave it the final impetus. Blacks and Mexicans were left behind as “unmeltable,” the latter further handicapped by their inability to shed their foreignness in the face of a ceaseless migrant flow.42

Rebound: 1970–​2 010 The 1960s were a period of prosperity and atonement in America. The failure of the post–​World War II years to integrate African Americans and Mexican Americans into the social and economic mainstream finally came back with a vengeance. In the midst of economic prosperity and global hegemony, the relegation of one-fifth of the American population to a caste-like status could no longer continue. The urban riots and the parallel civil rights movement wrought major changes in the nation’s institutional framework. Predictably, black mobilizations in the Southeast and riots in cities everywhere were accompanied by parallel protests in the Southwest by its large Mexican American population. Both groups reacted to the patent injustice of being used as the backbone of the low-wage labor market and as foot soldiers in the nation’s wars without ever being granted access to its opportunities. Fortunately, the nation’s political leaders at the time recognized this and took a series of measures to remedy the situation. Civil rights legislation and the War on Poverty, launched by President Lyndon Johnson, followed in short order. Embedded in the new national mood to atone for past racial injustices was the initiative to eliminate the last vestiges of the racist provisions of the 1924 National Origins Act. Thereafter, access to the United States would be based on two fundamental criteria: family reunification and occupational merit. National origin would not enter the picture, except for a per-country limit set on a universalistic basis. In 1952, provisions to exclude Asians had been repealed in a bill passed over President Truman’s veto. The 1965 amendments completed the task. These events opened the door to immigration from all countries, setting a cap of 20,000 per country and a global limit of 290,000.43 Children under twenty-one years of age, spouses, and parents of U.S. citizens were exempt from those numerical limits. In the floor debates over the new legislation, cosponsor Emanuel Celler (D–​New York) argued that few Asians and Africans would actually come since they had no families to reunite with. President Johnson reassured critics of the bill’s benign consequences: “This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of mil-

24   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

lions,” he declared. Secretary of State Dean Rusk anticipated only eight thousand immigrants from India over five years and few thereafter. Senator Edward Kennedy argued that the ethnic mix of the country would not be altered.44 Subsequent history was to prove these predictions deeply wrong. A year before this legislation was passed and in the same mood of atonement, the bracero agreement with Mexico was repealed. Opponents argued that the program subjected Mexican workers to systematic exploitation by unscrupulous American employers and corrupt Mexican officials. Its elimination would also create new employment opportunities for native workers.45 The lofty spirit in which these pieces of legislation were crafted did not envision what their actual consequences would be. Denied access to braceros, U.S. ranchers and farmers did not hire native workers but turned to the same Mexican workers now rebaptized as clandestine migrants. As also shown in table 6, apprehensions of “illegal aliens” at the border shot up with the end of the Bracero Program, rising year by year and reaching more than half a million by 1972. A second unexpected consequence of the 1965 act was that it provided a new avenue for unauthorized migrants to legalize their situation. Clandestine Mexican workers who wanted to stay on this side of the border could now make use of various legal means, paramount among them marriage to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. A study of Mexican migration conducted in the early 1970s found that, by 1973, 70 percent of legal Mexican migrants had already lived in the United States for one year or more: “Clearly, most of the men in this sample did not face legal entry into the United States as strangers or newcomers. Instead the vast majority were ‘return immigrants’ coming back to places and people that had long before become established parts of their lives.”46 A third consequence of the 1965 act was to open the professional labor market to foreigners. As Representative Celler would have it, few Africans and Asians had families to reunite with, but they had occupational qualifications, and Asians, in particular, took full advantage of the meritocratic provisions of the new system. As we will see, a major consequence was to bifurcate the immigration stream into flows targeting different segments of the American labor market. Thereafter, both the composition of the foreign population in America and its impact on the receiving society and economy would become far more nuanced and complex.

45 40

14.7%

Number in millions Number in millions

8.8% 6.9%

13.5

13.9

5.4%

14.2

4.7% 11.68.8% 10.3

10.3

5 20

10

6.2%

11.6%

15 30

9.7

1910

1920

13.5

13.9

1930 14.2

1940 11.6

10.3

10.3

1970 4.7%

9.7

40.0

1980 14.1

19.8 1990

8% 2%

2000

2010

6% 0% 4%

9.6 2%

5 0

12% 6% 10% 4%

31.1 7.9%

6.2%

1960 1950 5.4% Year

19.8 11.1%

14.1

9.6

6.9% 1900

12.9% 14% 8%

7.9%

13.2%

13.6%

10%

31.1

14.7%

20 35

0 15

12%

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   25 11.1%

30 45

10 25

40.0

11.6%

35

25 40

12.9% 14%

13.2%

13.6%

1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

31.1

31.5

33

33.5

2000 31.1

2001 31.5

2002 33

2003 33.5

1950 1960 Year

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

35.7

37.5

38.1

38

38.5

40

34.3

2004 34.3

37.5 35.7 2006 2005 Year

38.1 2007

38 2008

38.5 2009

2010

0%

40

F igu r e 1. The evolution of the foreign-born population of the United States. Top: Number and percentage. Sources: Decennial census for 1900 to 2000; and U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010. Bottom: Total immigrant population, 2000–​2010 (millions). Sources: 2000 decennial census; and U.S. Census 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2001–​10. Year

Industrial Restructuring and the Hourglass As in the 1920s, it took time for the new Immigration Act of 1965 to be implemented. Immigration continued at low levels during the 1960s so that, as shown in figure 1, the foreign-born population reached its lowest absolute and relative numbers in 1970. It was only after that year that the momentous effect of the reform was to be felt. Framers of the 1965 amendments could not possibly have foreseen it, but the new system paved the way for a segmentation of future immigration flows reflecting the bifurcation of the American economy and labor markets in the decades to come.

26   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

As seen previously, the United Sates generated a vast demand for industrial labor during the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, this was the reason why European immigrants, first, and southern black migrants, second, were recruited and came in such vast numbers to northern American cities. The availability of industrial jobs and the existence of a ladder of occupations within industrial employment created the possibility of gradual mobility for the European second generation without need for an advanced education. This continued labor demand was behind the rise of stable working-class communities, where supervisory and other preferred industrial jobs afforded a reasonable living standard for European ethnics. As has also been seen, their gradual mobility into the higher tiers of blue-collar employment and then into the white-collar middle class furnished the empirical basis for subsequent theories of assimilation. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating thereafter, the structure of the American labor market started to change under the twin influences of technological innovation and foreign competition in industrial goods. The advent of Japan as a major industrial competitor took American companies by surprise, accustomed as they were, to lacking any real foreign rivals in the post–​World War II era. As two prominent students of American deindustrialization concluded: “What caused the profit squeeze was mainly the sudden emergence of heightened international competition—​a competition to which U.S. business leaders were initially blind. . . . In the manufacturing sector a trickle of imports turned into a torrent. The value of manufactured imports relative to domestic production skyrocketed—​from less than 14 percent in 1969 to nearly triple that, 38 percent, only ten years later.” 47 Caught in this bind, many companies resorted to the “spatial fix” of moving production facilities abroad in order to reduce labor costs. Technological innovations made the process easier by lowering transportation barriers and making possible instant communication between corporate headquarters and production plants located abroad. The garment industry represents a prime example of this process of restructuring. While fashion design and marketing strategies remained centralized in the companies’ American headquarters, actual production migrated, for the most part, to industrial zones in the less-developed world.48 Industrial restructuring and corporate downsizing brought about the gradual disappearance of the jobs that had provided the basis for the economic ascent of the European second generation. Between 1950 and

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   27

1996, American manufacturing employment plummeted, from more than 33 percent of the labor force to less than 15 percent. The slack was taken up by service employment, which skyrocketed from 12 percent to almost 33 percent of all workers. Service employment is, however, bifurcated between menial and casual low-wage jobs commonly associated with personal services and the rapid growth of occupations requiring advanced technical and professional skills. These highly paid service jobs are generated by knowledge-based industries linked to new information technologies and those associated with the command and control functions of a restructured capitalist economy.49 The growth of employment in these two polar service sectors is one of the factors that stalled the gradual trend toward economic equality in the United States and then reversed it during the following decades. Between 1960 and 1990 the income of the top decile of American families increased in constant (1986) dollars from $40,789 to $60,996. In contrast, the income of the bottom decile barely budged, from $6,309 to $8,637. The income of the bottom half of families, which in 1960 represented about 50 percent of the income of those in the top decile, declined by almost 10 percent relative to this wealthiest group in the following thirty years. By 2000 the median net worth of American households had climbed to about $80,000. However, almost half of households (44 percent) did not reach $25,000, and exactly a third had annual incomes below this figure. More than half of American families (57 percent) did not own any equities at all, falling further behind in terms of economic power.50 The trend continued during the first decade of the twenty-first century, with gaps in household wealth (net worth) becoming wider still. By 2009, the net worth of black and Hispanic households (which among homeowners is largely based on their home equity) was largely wiped out in the wake of the collapse of housing prices and a deep recession. Net worth among Hispanics dropped to a miniscule $6,300, and the average wealth of white households was twenty times that of Hispanic households—​the widest wealth gap in twenty-five years. Economic inequality—​as measured by the Gini index and related indicators—​reached Third World levels by 2010.51 In this changed market, high demand exists, at the low end, for unskilled and menial service workers and, at the high end, for professionals and technicians—​with diminishing opportunities for wellpaid employment in between. Figure 2 illustrates this changed situation. Contemporary immigration has responded to this new “hourglass” economy by bifurcating, in turn, into major occupational categories. As

Professional and managerial Administrative and technical Supervisory and lower white-collar Skilled and semi-skilled

Unskilled industrial occupations

The Industrial Labor Market, 1900–1960

Professional, managerial and technical occupations

Petty entrepreneurs and lower white-collar

Unskilled and semi-skilled occupations

The Post-industrial Labor Market, 1970–2010 F igu r e 2. Changing labor markets.

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   29

we have seen, the end of the Bracero Program rechanneled the low-skill agricultural flow from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean into the category of “illegal aliens.” Simultaneously, the occupational preference provisions of the 1965 Immigration Act paved the way for major professional and technical flows originating primarily in Asia. Subsequent legislation added flexibility and volume to this form of immigration. The increasing heterogeneity of the contemporary foreignborn population in the wake of these legal and labor-market changes requires additional emphasis as a counterpart of the common popular description of immigration as a homogeneous phenomenon. Immigrants and Their Types There are two main dimensions within which contemporary immigrants to the United States differ. The first is their personal resources, in terms of material and human capital, and the second is their classification by the government. The first dimension ranges from foreigners who arrive with investment capital or are endowed with high educational credentials to those who have only their labor to sell. The second dimension ranges from migrants who arrive legally and receive governmental resettlement assistance to those who are categorized as illegals and are persecuted accordingly. At present, only persons granted refugee status or admitted as legal asylees receive any form of official resettlement assistance in the United States. Most legal immigrants are admitted into the country but receive no help. Since 1996 they have also been barred from welfare programs such as SSI (Supplemental Security Income) or Medicaid, to which citizens are entitled. Cross-classifying these dimensions produces the typology presented in table 7. Representative nationalities are included in each cell, with the caution that migrants from a particular country may be represented in more than one. The following description follows the vertical axis, based on human capital skills, noting the relative legal standing of each distinct type. A final section discusses the special case of refugees and asylees. Labor Migrants The movement of foreign workers in search of menial and generally low-paying jobs has represented the bulk of immigration, both legal and undocumented, in recent years. These workers are destined to occupy jobs at the bottom of the labor market “hourglass.” The Immigration

Unskilled/semiskilled laborers

Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian laborers

H-2 West Indian cane cutters; Mexicans and Central Americans admitted with H-2A visas

Mexicans and Central Americans legalized under amnesty provisions of the 1986 Immigration Act

Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Somali refugees; Central American asylees

Legal status

Unauthorized

Legal, temporary

Legal, permanent

Refugees, asylees

Pre-1980 Cuban; post-1990 Russian, Ukrainian, and Iranian professional refugees

Argentine, Chinese, Filipino, Indian physicians, engineers, and nurses admitted under occupational preferences of the 1965 and 1990 Immigration acts

Chinese, Indian, and Korean software engineers and technicians admitted with temporary H-1B visas

Chinese, Dominican, Indian physicians and dentists practicing without legal permits

Skilled workers and professionals

Human capital

Table 7  A Typology of Contemporary Immigrants to the United States

Cuban and Vietnamese owners of legal firms in ethnic enclaves and in the general market

Chinese, Dominican, Korean owners of legal firms in ethnic enclaves and lowincome urban areas

Chinese, Indian, Mexican operators of informal businesses in ethnic enclaves and ethnic neighborhoods

Entrepreneurs

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   31

Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 aimed primarily at discouraging the surreptitious component of this flow, while compensating employers by liberalizing access to legal temporary workers. A decade later, Proposition 187, an initiative passed by California’s electorate in 1994, sought to discourage undocumented immigration by barring illegal aliens from access to public services. We discuss the intent and effectiveness of these two measures in the final chapter. For the moment it suffices to note the principal ways physical-labor immigration has materialized in recent years. First, migrants can cross the border on foot or with the help of a smuggler, or they may overstay a U.S. tourist visa. In official parlance illegal border crossers have been labeled EWIs (entry without inspection); those who stay longer than permitted are labeled visa abusers or overstayers. In 2010 the Department of Homeland Security apprehended 516,992 foreigners, of whom 463,382 were EWIs apprehended at the southern border. The overwhelming majority of these were Mexicans. What is important here is that the total apprehension figure for 2010 was less than one-third that reported a decade earlier (1.8 million), a fact that we discuss below.52 A second channel of entry is to come legally by using one of the family-reunification preferences of the immigration law (left untouched, for the most part, by the 1986 reform and reaffirmed by the Immigration Act of 1990). This avenue is open primarily to immigrants who have first entered the United States without legal papers or for temporary periods and who have subsequently married a U.S. citizen or legal resident. As seen previously, one of the principal consequences of the 1965 Immigration Act was to provide this avenue of legalization to unauthorized migrants. Spouses of U.S. citizens are given priority because they are exempted from global quota limits. Year after year, the vast majority of legal Mexican migrants have arrived under family reunification preferences. In 2002, for example, out of a total of 219,380 Mexicans admitted for legal residence, 58,602 (26.7 percent) came under the worldwide quota as family-sponsored entries, and an additional 150,963 (68.8 percent) arrived outside quota limits as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens.53 In 2010 total legal Mexican migration had dropped to 139,120, but out of these, 24.5 percent arrived under the quota as family preferences and 63.7 percent as quota-exempt immediate relatives.54 As we noted previously, these were mostly returnees with prior lengthy residences in the United States. The last avenue for labor migrants is to come as contract laborers.

32   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

There is a provision in the 1965 Immigration Act for the importation of temporary foreign laborers when a supply of “willing and able” domestic workers cannot be found. This provision was maintained and actually liberalized by the 1986 reform. In both cases the Secretary of Labor has to certify that a labor shortage exists before foreign workers are granted a visa. Because the procedure is cumbersome, few employers sought labor in this manner in the past. An exception is the sugar industry in Florida, for which “H-2” workers, as they were labeled, were the mainstay of its cane-cutting labor force for many years. Most of these contract workers came from the West Indies.55 The 1990 Immigration Act stipulated a cap of sixty-six thousand temporary H-2 workers per year. However, the demand for farmworkers increased to such an extent as to encourage many employers to dispense with the difficult petitioning procedure. In recent years, however, the supply of Mexican workers willing to cross the border clandestinely has diminished significantly because of the rising costs and perils of the journey and the drop in construction and urban employment opportunities in the wake of the 2007–​9 recession. Demand for agricultural workers has remained steady, however, and, in response, the federal government has been compelled to expand the H-2 program. The number of seasonal agricultural workers (H-2A visas) thus grew from 46,433 in 2006 to three times that figure just three years later. According to Massey, the number of temporary legal workers from Mexico reached 361,000 in 2008, rivaling numbers last seen during the Bracero Program.56 The principal magnet drawing foreign manual workers to the United States is undoubtedly the level of North American wages relative to those left behind. Despite its rapid depreciation in real terms, the U.S. minimum wage continues to be six to seven times that prevailing in Mexico, which is, in turn, higher than most in Central America. The actual wages many U.S. employers pay their foreign workers exceed the legal minimum and are significantly higher than those available for skilled and even white-collar work in Mexico and other sources of this type of immigration. This is why many foreign workers are willing to accept harsh labor conditions. To them the trek to the United States and the economic opportunities associated with it often represent the difference between stagnation or permanent poverty in their home countries and attainment of their individual and family economic goals. The demand for physical labor in the bottom tier of the labor market originates not only in agriculture but in a number of other labor-inten-

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   33 400,000 350,000

Mexicans Total

Number of deportations

300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000

Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act USA Patriot Act

50,000 0 1965 1967 1969 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 Year

F igu r e 3. Deportations from the United States, 1965–​2009. Source: Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences.”

sive industries, including construction, restaurants, landscaping, and other services. As target earners, migrants are ideally suited for jobs that native workers do not want. Employers additionally favor this source of labor because they do not have to pay for costs of transportation or the risk of the journey, which are assumed by the migrants themselves. Beginning in 2008, and in response to a wave of nativist agitation for “securing the border,” the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency of the Department of Homeland Security launched a nationwide campaign of deportation against unauthorized workers. Borrowing a page from Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona, ICE proceeded to imprison and deport tens of thousands of migrant workers, regardless of whether or not they had committed any crimes or whether they had families and U.S.-born children. As a result, and as seen in figure 3, the rate of deportation shot up, reaching nearly four hundred thousand in 2009 and again in 2010. This campaign amounted to a veritable war waged by the United States against its poorer immigrants. The outcome was not long in coming: added to the rapid decline in job opportunities in the wake of the 2007–​9 recession, the response of would-be migrants in Mexico and Central America was to desist from their plans. Unauthorized apprehensions plummeted at the southern border to figures not seen in decades.57 This rapid decline in the clandestine migrant flow may have been the aim of nativist agitators, but it spelled disaster for hundreds of businesses, especially those in agriculture. As prefigured by the experience of Arizona, established migrants left the areas of harsher enforcement,

34   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

and new workers did not arrive. Crops rotted in the fields, and urban restaurants, landscaping services, and other would-be employers found themselves unable to source their needs for physical laborers. As Tom Nassif, president of Western Growers in California, put it: “Given the fact that 70 to 80 percent of our work force is improperly documented, ICE audits can eliminate that percentage of our productive capacity. You cannot stay in business.”58 The Wall Street Journal concluded, “This campaign is doing great harm to U.S. agriculture as farmers are unable to find enough workers to harvest their crops.”59 In response to this perfectly foreseeable outcome of the country’s war on its immigrants, the Obama administration was compelled to reverse itself in late 2011. The ICE campaign was partially halted, with the Secretary of Homeland Security declaring that, thereafter, only aliens with a criminal record would be deported, and cases would be reviewed “one by one.” At the same time, and as seen previously, the H-2 program was expanded rapidly. Its growth and greater flexibility amounted to an unheralded new temporary labor program in favor of American growers.60 As of this writing, the Obama administration’s declared intent to limit deportations to “criminal aliens” has not been translated into practice—​with ICE deporting another four hundred thousand persons in 2011 and adding even more officials to its campaign. The result is a contradictory situation in which the same type of migrant now welcomed through the expanded H-2 program continues to be deported, at considerable expense, by another agency of the same government. This situation is unsustainable in the long run. Not surprisingly, manual labor immigrants are found at the bottom echelons of the economic hierarchy. They earn the lowest wages, typically live below the poverty line, and are commonly uninsured. Census statistics show that immigrant nationalities that are composed primarily of this type of migrant are in a much inferior economic situation relative to the native-born. Thus, for example, the poverty rate among the U.S. native-born population in 2010 was 14.4 percent, but among Mexican immigrants it reached 28.9 percent, among Guatemalans 27 percent, and among Dominicans 26.1 percent. While 13.8 percent of the native-born population was without health insurance, 57.8 percent of Mexicans, 53.6 percent of Salvadorans, and 62.8 percent of Guatemalans lacked such coverage.61 Willingness to work for low wages and few benefits, together with diligence and motivation, makes these workers desirable to American

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   35

employers in numerous sectors of the economy. This flow does not represent an “alien invasion” because an invasion implies moving into someone else’s territory against that person’s will. In this instance the movement is greatly welcomed, if not by everyone, at least by a very influential group—​namely, the small, medium, and large enterprises in agriculture, services, and industry that have come to rely on this source of labor. The match between the goals and economic aspirations of migrant workers and the needs and interests of the firms that hire them are the key factors sustaining the flow year after year. The recent misguided campaign to deport unauthorized migrant workers and the subsequent reversal by the federal government to address the predictable consequences of its own campaign demonstrates, above all else, the strength of this match. Professional Immigrants A preference category of the U.S. visa allocation system is reserved for “priority workers, professionals with advanced degrees, or aliens of exceptional ability.” Prior to 1990 this category provided the main entry channel for the second type of immigration. Unlike the first, the vast majority of its members come legally and are not destined for the bottom rungs of the American labor market. Labeled “brain drain” in the countries of origin, this flow has represented a significant gain of highly trained personnel for the United States. In 2002, a total of 34,452 “persons of extraordinary ability,” “outstanding researchers,” “executives,” and their kin, plus an additional 44,468 professionals holding advanced degrees, and their families, were admitted for permanent residence.62 By 2010, and despite the recent economic recession, the numbers actually increased to 41,055 “aliens of extraordinary ability” and other priority workers and 53,946 professionals with advanced degrees and their families. The number of professionals with advanced degrees jumped further, to 66,831 in 2011. Although in relative terms employment-related immigration has only represented about 13 percent of the legal total since 2000 (14 percent in 2010), it has been the main conduit for the addition of permanent highly trained personnel to the American labor force. Their entry helps to explain why more than 25 percent of the foreign-born population are college graduates or higher and why about 25 percent of immigrant workers are in managerial and professional specialty occupations.63 Foreign professionals seldom migrate because of lack of employ-

36   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

ment back home. The reason is that they not only come from higher educational strata but that they are probably among the best in their respective professions, which is indicated by their ability to pass difficult entrance tests, such as the qualifying examinations for foreign physicians. The gap that makes the difference in their decision to migrate is generally not the invidious comparison between prospective U.S. salaries and what they earn at home. Instead, it is the relative gap between available salaries and work conditions in their own countries and those that are normatively regarded as acceptable for people with their level of education. Professionals who earn enough at home to sustain a middle-class standard of living and who are reasonably satisfied with their chances for advancement seldom migrate. Those threatened with early obsolescence or who cannot make ends meet with their home country salaries start looking for opportunities abroad. A fertile ground for this type of migration is countries in which university students are trained in advanced Western-style professional practices but then find the prospects and means to implement their training blocked because of poor employment opportunities or lack of suitable technological facilities.64 Because they do not come to escape poverty but to improve their careers and life chances, immigrant professionals seldom accept menial jobs in the United States. However, they tend to enter at the bottom of their respective occupational ladders and to progress from there according to individual skills. This is why, for example, foreign-born doctors and nurses are so often found in public hospitals throughout the country. An important feature of this type of immigration is its inconspicuousness. Although there are about two million Filipinos and a comparable number of Indians now living in the United States, we seldom hear reference to a Filipino or an Indian immigration “problem.” The reason is that professionals and technicians, heavily represented among these nationalities, seldom cluster in highly visible ethnic communities. Instead, they tend to disperse across the land, following their respective careers.65 Professional immigrants are among the most rapidly assimilated linguistically and culturally. Reasons are, first, their educational and occupational success and, second, the absence of strong ethnic communities to support their culture of origin. Yet “assimilation” does not mean severing relations with the home country. On the contrary, because successful professional immigrants have the means to do so, they frequently attempt to bridge the gap between past and present through periodic

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   37

visits back home and the maintenance of active ties with family, friends, and colleagues there. During the first generation at least, these “transnational” activities allow immigrant professionals to juggle two social worlds and often make a significant contribution to the development of their respective fields in their own countries.66 As we will see in the next chapter, these activities also bypass the dilemma between ethnic resilience and assimilation, creating a viable path between both adaptation alternatives. During the first decade of the new millennium several important exceptions emerged to this general pattern. First, some refugee groups—​ such as Iranians, Iraqis, and those arriving from the Soviet Union—​ include high proportions of educated, professional individuals. They must be added to the numbers coming under regular occupational preferences since they also contribute to the pool of highly skilled talent in the U.S. labor market. Unlike regular immigrants, however, refugees and asylees are politically opposed to the regime back home and commonly barred from returning. Hence, their capacity to engage in transnational activities and their potential contributions to home-country development are far more restricted. In this case their departure amounts to a true “brain drain” for the countries they left behind. At the opposite extreme, in terms of temporality of migration we find professional and technical specialty workers arriving under the new H-1B program. This category, created by the 1990 Immigration Act and subsequently expanded, has become the principal conduit for the arrival of tens of thousands of foreign engineers, computer programmers, and medical personnel in recent years. Under the H-1B program, U.S. employers can sponsor professional immigrants for a three-year period that can be extended to a maximum of six years. In regional terms Asia and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Europe and South America have been the principal sources of this new high-skilled inflow. The numerical ceiling for petitions for this type of visa was originally set at 65,000 in 1990; it was increased to 115,000 in 1998 and then to 195,000 under the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-first Century Act (AC 21) in 2002. The actual number of beneficiaries in 2002 was 197,357. In the same year the total number of “temporary workers and trainees” reached 582,250.67 Although the cap on H-1B visas reverted to sixty-five thousand in 2004, actual admissions under the program continued to be much higher because beneficiaries going to work for nonprofit colleges and universities or government agencies and renewals do not count against

38   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

the cap. Thus, in 2006, just prior to the onset of the Great Recession, 270,981 H-1B petitions were approved by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Reflecting the subsequent decline in economic activity, the number of approved petitions was 214,271 in 2009, a 20 percent drop. This was the first year during the decade in which H-1B admissions numbered fewer than 250,000.68 This high figure reflects the hunger for trained labor in the high-tech and other expanding sectors of the American economy. Increasingly, this demand is being channeled through the new temporary entry program rather than through the more traditional occupational preference categories. As shown in table 8, in 2009 almost 42 percent of H-1B workers (88,961) were in computer-related fields, with an additional 11.8 percent (25,578) in architecture, engineering, and surveying. Ninetynine percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 59 percent held a professional or postgraduate degree. As also shown in table 8, India has pride of place as a source of this type of labor. This is because graduates of Indian technical and engineering schools couple rigorous academic training with fluency in English. More than half of H-1B workers in 2008 came from India, with an additional 15 percent from China, the Philippines, and Korea. Of the top five sending countries, only one was not in Asia. Annual median income for these foreign workers in 2009 was $64,000, which, despite the economic downturn, represented an increase of $4,000 over prior years.69 Although reasonable, this level of compensation is not particularly high for university-trained workers. Indeed one of the major advantages for firms hiring H-1B workers is the contribution that they make to keep salaries down for professional and technical occupations in high demand. The other major advantage is the temporary character of foreign workers’ visas that translates into greater vulnerability vis-à-vis their employers. Paralleling the situation of agricultural laborers during the Bracero Program, H-1B visa holders are generally tied to the firm that brought them to the United States and, hence, are at the mercy of its decision to continue to employ them or not. Finally, as shown in table 7, there are some foreign professionals who are in the country illegally or who have not managed to meet the high accreditation requirements of their respective fields. Doctors, dentists, and other professionals in this situation may choose, as an alternative to unskilled manual work, to practice without licenses. Their clients are almost always other immigrants, mostly from the same country, who trust these professionals and find them a preferable, low-cost option

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   39 Table 8  The H-1B Program, 2008–2009 Approved petitions 2008 #

2009 %

#

%

A. By country of birth India

149,629

China

24,174

54.2 109,059 8.8

20,855

48.1 9.7

Canada

10,681

3.9

9,605

4.5

Philippines

9,606

3.5

8,682

4.1

Korea

6,988

2.5

6,968

3.3

United Kingdom

4,494

1.6

4,180

2.0

Japan

4,321

1.6

3,825

1.8

66,024

23.9

56,782

26.5

All others B. By level of education Less than a bachelor’s degree

1.0

1.0

Bachelor’s degree

43.0

40.0

Master’s degree

41.0

40.0

Doctoral degree

11.0

13.0

4.0

6.0

Professional degree

C. By occupation and income Computer-related occupations

#

%

88,961

41.6

Mean Median salary salary ($000s) ($000s) 67

60

Architecture, engineering, surveying

25,578

11.8

71

67

Education-related occupations

24,711

11.6

53

45

Administrative occupations

21,192

9.9

58

50

Medicine and health

17,621

8.2

76

54

All other

36,112

16.9

66

55

Source: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers, 2009 Annual Report.

to regular health care. Unauthorized medical, dental, and other professional practices are thus localized in immigrant enclaves and other areas of high ethnic concentration.70 Despite these different situations, foreign professionals have generally done very well occupationally and economically in the United

40   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

States. India and the Philippines have been prime sources of this type of migrant under both permanent and temporary legal entry programs. In 2010 the Filipino population of the United States had mean household earnings of $90,315, while Asian Indians reached $116,186. Both figures significantly exceeded the national average of $69,506 in that year. While median earnings for all male workers were $46,500, those for Chinese males were $53,751 and for Asian Indians $77,484.71 Immigrant Entrepreneurs Near downtown Los Angeles there is an area approximately a mile long where all commercial signs suddenly change from English to strange pictorial characters. Koreatown, as the area is known, contains the predictable number of ethnic restaurants and markets; it also contains a number of banks, import-export houses, industries, and real estate offices. Signs reading “English spoken here” assure visitors that their links with the outside world have not been totally severed. In Los Angeles the propensity for self-employment is three times greater among Koreans than among the population as a whole. Grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations, liquor stores, and real estate offices are typical Korean businesses. They also tend to remain within the community because the more successful immigrants sell their earlier businesses to new arrivals.72 A similar urban landscape is found near downtown Miami. Little Havana extends in a narrow strip for about five miles, eventually merging with the southwest suburbs of the city. Cuban-owned firms in the Miami metropolitan area increased from 919 in 1967 to 8,000 in 1976 and approximately 28,000 in 1990. By 2007 they had reached more than a quarter of a million nationwide, with the principal concentration in metropolitan Miami/Ft. Lauderdale. Most are small, averaging 7.7 employees at the latest count, but they also include factories employing hundreds of workers. Cuban firms are found in light and heavy manufacturing, construction, commerce, finance, and insurance. An estimated 60 percent of all residential construction in the metropolitan area is now done by these firms.73 Areas of concentrated immigrant entrepreneurship are known as ethnic enclaves. Their emergence has depended on three conditions: first, the presence of a number of immigrants with substantial business expertise acquired in their home countries; second, access to sources of capital; and third, access to labor. The requisite labor is not too difficult to obtain because it can be initially drawn from family members and, sub-

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   41

sequently, from more recent immigrant arrivals. Sources of capital are often not a major obstacle, either, because the sums required initially are small. When immigrants do not bring them from abroad, they can accumulate them through individual savings or obtain them from pooled resources in the community. In some instances would-be entrepreneurs have access to financial institutions owned or managed by conationals. Thus, the first requisite is the critical one. The presence of a number of immigrants skilled in what sociologist Franklin Fraizer called “the art of buying and selling” can usually overcome other obstacles to entrepreneurship.74 Conversely, their absence tends to confine an immigrant group to wage or salaried work, even when enough capital and labor are available. Entrepreneurial minorities have been the exception in both early twentieth-century and contemporary immigrations. Their significance lies in that they create an avenue for economic mobility unavailable to other groups. This avenue is open not only to the original entrepreneurs but to later arrivals as well. The reason is that relations between immigrant employers and their coethnic employees tend to go beyond a purely contractual bond. When immigrant enterprises expand, they tend to hire their own for supervisory positions. Today, Koreans hire and promote Koreans in New York and Los Angeles, and Cubans do the same for other Cubans in Miami, just as sixty years ago the Russian Jews of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Japanese of San Francisco and Los Angeles hired and supported those from their own communities.75 An ethnic enclave is not, however, the only manifestation of immigrant entrepreneurship. In cities where the concentration of these immigrants is less dense, they tend to take over businesses catering to lowincome groups, often in the inner cities. In this role as “middleman minorities,” entrepreneurial immigrants are less visible because they tend to be dispersed over the area occupied by the populations they serve. Koreatown in Los Angeles is not, for example, the only manifestation of entrepreneurship among this immigrant group. Koreans are also present in significant numbers in New York City, where they have gained increasing control of the produce market, and in cities like Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, where they have progressively replaced Italians and Jews as the principal merchants in low-income inner-city areas. Indian immigrants, particularly from the state of Gujarat, have carved a unique intermediate niche for themselves as owners and operators of low- and mid-budget motels nationwide.76 The emergence of ethnic enclaves and other forms of immigrant entre-

42   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

preneurship has been generally fortuitous. While the 1990 Immigration Act includes a preference category for “employment creating” investors and allows up to ten thousand immigrant visas a year for such investors, few foreigners have made use of this option. This is, in part, a consequence of the high capital requirements to qualify. In the late 1990s this preference attracted barely one thousand new immigrants per year. By 2010 the situation had not changed, with just 1,745 new arrivals under this category.77 No explicit entry preference exists for small entrepreneurs with little or no capital, and none is likely to be implemented in the future. In general, entrepreneurial minorities come under preferences designated for other purposes. Koreans and Chinese, two of the most successful business-oriented groups, have made good use of the employment-based preference categories for professionals and skilled workers and, subsequently, of the family reunification provisions of the 1965 and 1990 immigration laws. Cubans usually came as political refugees and were initially dispersed throughout the country. It took this group more than a decade after arrival to regroup in certain geographic locations, primarily South Florida, and then begin the push toward entrepreneurship.78 More recent refugee groups such as the Vietnamese and Russians have also followed the entrepreneurial path, creating new enclaves on both coasts. The principal Vietnamese concentration is in Orange County, California, around the town of Westminster. The main Russian enclave is found in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Research on the Vietnamese in California has found the same pattern of economic success of ethnic entrepreneurs reported among other groups.79 Finally, even some unauthorized immigrants have gone into business on their own, attempting to escape low-wage work by setting themselves up as independent mechanics, gardeners, handymen, and house cleaners. Naturally, entrepreneurship cannot be expected to yield the same benefits for these migrants that it does for those enjoying legal status. Their businesses are generally small and informal. Paradoxically, the stepped-up efforts to penalize employers of undocumented labor under the ICE campaign of deportation are likely to have stimulated the growth of informal businesses among the undocumented. From house cleaning and repairs to restaurants and food stands catering to other immigrants, informal enterprises may offer to unauthorized migrants a more attractive option than increasingly precarious wage employment. Recent research has shown that a high proportion of successful migrant firms depend for their operation on transnational ties, primarily

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   43

with the owners’ home country. They commonly import goods for sale in the immigrant community or in the open market, export high-tech U.S. goods to the home nation, and draw on contacts there for sources of capital and labor. A recent study of entrepreneurial activities among Latin American immigrants in the United States found that as much as 58 percent of firms in these communities relied for their continued viability and growth on these transnational ties. Specific studies of highly entrepreneurial communities such as the Chinese and Koreans have documented the same patterns.80 We will return to the consequences of ethnic enterprises and transnationalism when we examine immigrants’ economic and political adaptation in chapters 4 and 5. Refugees and Asylees The Refugee Act of 1980, signed into law by President Carter, aimed at eliminating the former practice of granting asylum only to escapees from communist-controlled nations. Instead, it sought to bring U.S. policy in line with international practice, which defines as a refugee anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution or physical harm, regardless of the political bent of his or her country’s regime. In practice, however, the United States continued during the two Reagan administrations to grant refugee status to escapees from communism, primarily from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, while making it difficult for others fleeing right-wing regimes, such as those of Guatemala and El Salvador. Being granted asylum or refugee status has significant advantages over other immigration channels. The central difference is that while refugees have legal standing, the right to work, and can benefit from the welfare provisions of the 1980 act, those denied asylum have none of these privileges and, if they stay, are classified as illegal aliens.81 Being a refugee is, therefore, not a matter of personal choice but a governmental decision based on a combination of legal guidelines and political expediency. Depending on the relationship between the United States and the country of origin and the geopolitical context of the time, a particular flow of people may be classified as a political exodus or as an illegal group of economically motivated immigrants. Given past policy, it is not surprising that there are few refugees from rightist regimes, no matter how repressive, living legally in the country. Major refugee groups have arrived, instead, after the Soviet army’s occupation of Eastern Europe, after the rise to power of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and after the takeover by communist insurgents of three Southeast Asian countries.

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The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union brought about a more diversified and less ideological orientation to U.S. refugee policy. Although it is still driven by geopolitical interests and expediency, there is more room at present for broader humanitarian considerations. Thus, the national origins of the current refugee flow have become more diversified and include countries that are not necessarily adversarial to the United States. Still, the number of refugees pales in comparison to that of regular immigrants and, especially, to the growing category of temporary workers. In 2001 a total of 68,925 refugees arrived in the United States, compared to 1,064,318 admitted for legal permanent residence (of which 411,059 were new arrivals). In 2002—​reflecting the impact of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—​the number of refugee petitions approved and actual refugee arrivals plunged: refugee admissions in 2002 numbered only 26,785, a 61 percent decline from the prior year.82 The numbers trended upward in subsequent years, reaching 73,293 in 2010. The complex geopolitical realities of the postSoviet era are reflected in the very diverse origins of the contemporary refugee population. Major contributors to this flow in 2010 included Iraq (18,016), Burma (16,693), Bhutan (12,363), Somalia (4,844), and Cuba (4,818).83 The legal difference between a refugee and an asylee hinges on the physical location of the person. Both types are recognized by the government as having a well-founded fear of persecution, but whereas the first still lives abroad and must be transported to the United States, the second is already within U.S. territory. This difference is important because it makes the refugee flows conform more closely to the government’s overall foreign policy, while would-be asylees confront authorities with a fait accompli to be handled on the spot. Thus, prior to 1990, refugees were mostly opponents and victims of communism in the Soviet Union and its allies, including Cuba and Vietnam. In the early 1990s they came primarily from Russia and the successor states of the former Soviet Union, as U.S. refugee policy was used to stabilize and ease economic conditions for the fragile new governments in these countries. By the late 1990s the refugee flow had diversified to include significant numbers from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Iran, and Iraq.84 Asylee applications during the 1990s were, by contrast, dominated by migrants from Central America—​ primarily El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. These were movements that originated in violent civil wars in these countries, pushing large numbers to move

The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   45

abroad and eventually seek entry into the United States. Their wishes did not accord, however, with the interests of the U.S. government at the time, which routinely denied their requests. The end of the civil wars and return of political democracy in all three countries was followed by urgent entreaties by the new governments to U.S. authorities to grant the asylum requests of their conationals. While reasons for asylum had been largely removed by the end of the armed conflicts, the new Central American leaders argued that their economies desperately needed the remittances sent by their migrants, living and working in the United States as unauthorized aliens. The American government responded to these requests by granting temporary protected status (TPS) to Salvadorans and other Central Americans whose asylum petitions had been denied. This concession was renewed on a yearly basis, and, over time, many of these migrants managed to regularize their status. By 2010 asylee admissions had dwindled to just 21,113. The only significant number of asylees during that year came from the People’s Republic of China (6,683).85 As shown in table 7, refugees and asylees vary greatly in terms of human capital endowments. Some, like the pre-1980 waves of Cuban exiles and recent Iranian, Iraqi, and Russian refugees, are well-educated, and many possess professional and entrepreneurial skills. At the other end are groups like Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Somali refugees or would-be Guatemalans and Salvadoran asylees, composed primarily of small farmers and rural laborers with little formal education. In every case the distinct advantages conferred by refugees or asylee status include not only the right to stay and work but a package of generous resettlement and welfare assistance, health benefits, and the right to adjust to permanent legal residence in one year. None of these benefits is available to regular immigrants, much less those with irregular status. Refugee professionals and entrepreneurs have generally made good use of these privileges to reestablish themselves and prosper in their respective lines of work. Refugee groups arriving with little or no human capital have at least managed to survive under the welfare provisions of the resettlement program. Although, as we will see, the acculturation and entry into the labor market of some of these groups may have been delayed by access to these benefits, they gave them the opportunity to rebuild their families and communities. This opportunity created, in turn, a key source of social capital for them and their children to cope with their new environment.

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Overview In 2010 about two hundred foreign countries and possessions sent immigrants to the United States. Aside from basic statistical data supplied by the Department of Homeland Security and the Census Bureau, little is known about most of these groups. Tracing their individual evolution and patterns of adaptation is well beyond the scope of this book. Instead, we delineate the basic contours of contemporary immigration by focusing on major aspects of the adaptation experience. The emphasis throughout is on diversity, both in the immigrants’ origins and in their modes of incorporation into American society. The typology outlined in this chapter will serve as our basic organizing tool as we follow immigrants through their locations in space, their strategies for economic mobility, their efforts at learning a new language and culture, their decision to acquire U.S. citizenship, and their struggles to raise their children successfully in the new land. The counterpoint between the widespread demand for immigrant labor by different sectors of the American economy and the activities of nativists and xenophobes along the three successive phases of U.S.bound immigration will also be a leitmotif of the following analysis. The emblematic figure of Sheriff Joe Arpaio represents the latest incarnation of a long history of intolerance toward newcomers despite the multiple contributions that their presence has made in the long run. Similarly, the progressive bifurcation of the economy and increasing inequality within the immigrant population in the postindustrial era provide a necessary lens for understanding its diverse patterns of adaptation today. We reserve the analysis of immigration policies and reform for the final chapter but can anticipate that it will be framed by a vision of immigration as positive, as a whole, for the nation. There are exceptions to be sure, but a persuasive case can be made that the United States would not be the strong, vibrant nation that it is without the work and talent of millions of immigrants. At present they fill the diverse labor needs of a vast economy, rejuvenate the population, and add energy and diversity to the culture. Without this continuing flow the United States would come to resemble the situation of other rich, but demographically stagnant, nations whose growing elderly populations loom as a major problem for the future. To the extent that working-age immigrants continue to replenish the creative energies and capacity for innovation of the country, the United States will be able to avoid this fate.

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As we pen these lines, a rising chorus of restrictionists and opponents of immigration threaten to push the country in the opposite direction. The importance of these alternative outcomes can be scarcely exaggerated. They will largely determine the extent to which the nation will be able to maintain its economic viability and political leadership in a changing global system.

Chapter 2

Theoretical Overview

There is no comprehensive theory of international migration. Those that exist tend to focus on manual labor migrants and then extend, haphazardly, to the origins and patterns of settlement of professional migrants, entrepreneurs, and refugees. Existing theories can be organized into four categories: (1) determinants of the origins of migration; (2) determinants of its continuation and directionality; (3) uses of migrant labor; and (4) patterns of migrant settlement and adaptation. In this chapter we review and evaluate these theories and note their applicability to the different types of migrant described in the prior chapter.

The Origins of Migration Push-Pull The most widely held approach to the causes of migration is that of push-pull theories. Generally, these consist of a compilation of economic, social, and political factors deemed to force individuals to leave their native region or country and of a similar list of factors impelling them toward another. This approach is employed mutatis mutandis to explain movements other than physical-labor migrations. Thus, refugee flows are frequently contrasted with labor migrations by noting the greater importance of “push” factors in the former.1 Students of professional emigration have compiled polar lists of incentives, often termed differentials of advantage, to explain the causes of the brain drain from certain countries.2 48

Theoretical Overview  |  49

These theories of migration also emphasize the gap in wage incentives between sending and receiving regions. The notion of unlimited supplies of labor, employed in analyses of both internal and international migrations, is based on the existence of a permanent large differential in favor of receiving areas. A well-known study of international migration notes, for example, that “unlimited supply,” demonstrated by the ease with which new labor flows are initiated when older ones are cut off, is attributed to vast income advantages of advanced countries over peripheral ones.3 The existence of an unlimited labor supply suggests that the initiation of migrant flows depends almost exclusively on labor demand in receiving areas. When such demand exists, migration takes place. Thus, these theories shift emphasis from “push” factors to the “pull” exercised by receiving economies. This position is a common one among analysts of immigration to the United States. In a study published in 1926, H. Jerome declared that “the ‘pull’ was stronger than the ‘push’ since the size of the flow was almost always governed by labor conditions in the United States.”4 The same position was taken by Brinley Thomas in his study of transatlantic migration. For Thomas overseas migration from Europe in the nineteenth century was accompanied by substantial flows of capital in the same direction. A positive lagged correlation existed between the two movements: capital investments in North America gave rise to labor demand, which in turn stimulated migration from the old countries.5 Several problems exist with these theories. Lists of push-and-pull factors are drawn almost invariably post-factum to explain existing flows. Seldom are they used to predict the beginnings of such movements. The limitations of these theories boil down, ultimately, to their inability to explain why sizable migrations occur from certain countries and regions whereas others in similar or even worse conditions fail to generate them. Studies of undocumented labor migration from Mexico to the United States indicate, for example, that the bulk of this flow originated, until recently, in a few Mexican states that are neither the most impoverished nor necessarily the closest to the U.S. border. Mexican immigrants also come from the urban working class rather than from the most impoverished sectors of the peasantry, where the gap with U.S. wages is presumably largest.6 Similarly, analyses of professional emigration from Third World countries reveal that differentials of advantage measured in either economic or social terms are poor predictors of the origins of such flows. Professional migration tends to originate in mid-income countries rather

50  |  Theoretical Overview

than the poorest ones, where wage differentials are greatest. In addition, only a minority of professionals actually emigrate from the sending countries, a fact that the theory cannot successfully explain since all such individuals are presumably subject to the same “push” pressures.7 Modern history is replete with instances in which the “pull” of higher wages has failed to attract migration from less developed regions. When labor has been needed, it has had to be coerced out of such places, as in the forced employment of native peoples from Africa and the Americas in mines and plantations. The failure of push-pull theories to explain migration flows adequately has led some scholars to propose an alternative interpretation, based on deliberate labor recruitment, according to which differentials of advantage between sending and receiving regions determine only the potentiality for migration. Actual flows begin with planned recruitment by the labor-scarce (and generally more advanced) country. Recruiters inform prospective migrants of the opportunities and advantages to be gained by the movement and facilitate it by providing free transportation and other inducements. Thus, the vaunted “pull” of American wages had to be actualized in the early years of European migration by organized recruitment. In the 1820s and 1830s, American migration agents were sent to Ireland and the Continent to apprise people of “the better meals and higher wages” available for work in the Hudson and other canal companies.8 Similarly, labor migration from Mexico, later attributed to the vast wage differences between that country and the United States, was initiated by recruiters sent by railroad companies into the interior of the country. Studies of Puerto Rican migration to New England also indicate that this apparently spontaneous flow started with the recruiting activities of large manufacturing concerns among the rural population of the islands.9 Macro- and Microeconomic Theories Closely related to push-pull theories are those proposed by orthodox economists who analyze migration as an equilibrium-restoring mechanism between labor-abundant but capital-poor countries and regions and those in the opposite situation. As famously proposed by Sir Arthur Lewis, areas where the marginal productivity of workers is near zero benefit from out-migration to areas where they can find gainful employment. The flow is expected to continue until wage rates in sending regions rise to a level comparable to receiving ones, at which point it

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ceases.10 Flows of both unskilled labor and highly skilled professionals follow the same equilibrium-restoring logic. The theory focuses exclusively on labor-market imbalances and does not address politically induced refugee flows. Paralleling this macroeconomic approach, there is a microtheory of individual decision making based on cost-benefit analysis. According to it, individuals move to places where they can maximize returns on their human capital, adjusted for the costs of the journey.11 Borjas elaborated a detailed model of this kind where “expected earnings” at places of destination, computed as those corresponding to the actor’s skills multiplied by the probability of employment there, are subtracted from expected earnings at home plus the costs of the journey. If the balance is positive for some defined period, the rational actor migrates; if not, he or she stays.12 Economic theories suffer from the same empirical shortcomings as push-pull ones, namely, that countries and regions in the less developed world featuring comparable levels of underemployment and poverty produce very different migration streams. Some are sources of sizable flows while, in others, the population stays put. Since all such areas are subject to the same equilibrium-restoring pressures, the theory leaves unexplained why these empirical differences exist. Similarly, at the individual level it is unclear why rational actors subject to the same costbenefit calculations in a potential migrant population exhibit different behavior. Some leave, but many others do not. Only a minority of Global South professionals and highly skilled workers actually become migrants, despite all being subjected to the same, presumably decisive, migration pressures.13 World-System and Dependency Theories At the opposite end of the ideological continuum are a set of structural theories that view migration flows as a reflection of the ever-growing articulation of the global capitalist economy and its changing labor needs. From this perspective the central difficulty with push-pull, economistic, and labor-recruitment theories is not that they fail to identify important forces but that they do not take into account the changing historical context in which they operate. For each of these theories migration occurs between two distinct, autonomous social units: that which expels labor and that which receives it. The possibility that such flows may actually be internal to a broader system to which both units belong

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is not contemplated. An alternative conceptualization of the origins of migration requires a grasp of the character of this changing global system and of the mode of incorporation of different areas into it. A point of departure for this alternative approach is the fairly obvious observation that the pull of high wages has meant nothing in areas external to the international capitalist economy, since such areas have possessed their own internal economic logic and integration. Hence, when dominant countries wanted to put the population of these outlying regions to work in mines or plantations, force, not economic incentives, had to be used. Labor recruitment worked only when the target population was sufficiently integrated into the capitalist system to apprehend the significance of the inducements offered in relation to their economic conditions. More recently, networks of trade and information across the world, the homogenization of culture, and the extension of consumption expectations even to remote areas have resulted in the “inexhaustible supplies of labor” described in the economic literature. Countries at the center of the system are today in the enviable position of requiring neither force nor recruitment efforts to meet labor demands but simply regulating a permanently available supply at their doorstep. The gradual articulation of an international economic system has resulted in changing forces underlying labor migrations. The effects of this articulation on such flows have not been limited to the diffusion of new life standards and expectations. More generally, the penetration of peripheral regions by capitalist firms has produced imbalances in those regions’ internal social and economic structures. Though first induced from the outside, such imbalances become internal to the incorporated societies and lead in time to migratory pressures. As Massey et al. put it: “In essence, world-systems theory argues that the penetration of capitalist economic relations into non-capitalist and pre-capitalist societies creates a mobile population that is prone to migrate. . . . International migration emerges as a natural outgrowth of disruptions and dislocations that inevitably occur in the process of capitalist development.”14 Hence the pull from advanced economies is based not primarily on invidious comparisons of advantage with the outside world but on the solution that migration represents to otherwise insoluble problems internal to the sending countries. Studies of both manual laborer and professional flows indicate that immigrants leave their countries not merely to increase their earnings by a certain amount but to solve problems rooted in their own national situations. For immigrants these prob-

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lems appear as internal ones, but in reality they have been induced by the expansion of a global capitalist system.15 The unbalancing of peripheral areas by this system ranges from the outright imposition of hut taxes on the native African populations to create a need for ready cash in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the maintenance of wage scales bearing little relation to costs of modern-style consumption in contemporary less developed nations. It includes, as well, the training of Third World professionals for career expectations compatible with the advanced countries but divorced from actual conditions in their own labor markets, a process we examined in chapter 1. Labor recruitment was a device used at certain periods in the expansion of the capitalist world economy to make certain target populations aware of the advantages of out-migration. The pull of the advanced economies, insufficient to provoke migrant flows at that time, is today more than enough to permit routine control of an “inexhaustible supply.” The changing character of “push and pull,” the obsolescence of labor recruitment, and the “spontaneous” origins of recent migrant flows are all consequences of the development over time of the international capitalist economy and of the shifting modes of incorporation of countries into it.16 These relational dynamics within a global order offer the most adequate macrohistorical explanation for the origins of international migration. The “New Economics” of Migration Structural-historical and world-systems theories are able to account for why migration flows originate in certain areas of the planet, depending on the level of colonial and semicolonial penetration to which they have been subjected. These theories are less successful in accounting for why some communities and individuals in specific labor-exporting countries are more susceptible to these pressures than others. For this task a more empirically grounded theory is necessary. The “new economics of migration” was formulated to fill this gap. According to it, labor migration is not an individual, but a family, strategy to address the economic uncertainties created by imperfectly developed markets in areas affected by the penetration of capitalist corporations and other institutions.17 In rural communities of the less developed world, families have none or extremely limited access to credit markets to finance investments, future markets to ensure crops, or state programs to alleviate spells of

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unemployment. Their solution is to send some family members, commonly young sons and daughters, to urban areas in the same country or abroad. Families plan diverse migration strategies to address various uncertainties. The remittances that their young abroad generate can provide the necessary capital for needed investments and a reserve for economic contingences, such as crop failures or loss of wage employment at home: “In most developed countries, consumers have instantaneous access to credit through universal bank cards such as MasterCard and Visa. As markets expand into domains formerly governed by nonmarket mechanisms, consumers in developing countries often find themselves filled with a range of material aspirations acquired from the mass media, but without access to the credit mechanisms that make mass consumption possible. . . . Nascent demand for consumer goods creates another motivation for migration abroad.”18 A related mechanism highlighted by the “new economics” is relative deprivation among nonmigrant families when witnessing the significant improvements in the material situation of families with members abroad. Thus, even when no migration pressures existed before, the need to “keep up” with the rising migrant-fueled standards of consumption among members of the community spurs other families to adopt the same strategy. As we saw in the first chapter, relative deprivation is also a powerful mechanism underlying professional out-migration as underemployed but highly skilled workers compare their own economic and work lot with more fortunate peers at home and abroad.19 World-systems and the “new economics” approaches complement each other nicely, the first accounting for the broad macrohistorical context producing major labor and professional flows and, the second, identifying the microdynamics that propel specific families in migrantsending nations to adopt this strategy as a solution to the disruptions of imperfect capitalist development.

Stability of Migration A second aspect discussed by current theories of migration concerns the directionality of these flows and their stability over time. Orthodox economic analyses tend to view migration in fairly simple terms: people leave their home country in response to economic or political conditions, move to another with the hope of a better life, and struggle for years or generations to attain equality within the new society. Once initiated, the movement can be expected to continue as long as push-

Theoretical Overview  |  55

and-pull factors remain and as long as the receiving nation permits it. Massive returns of immigrants to their home country only occur under conditions of deliberate repatriation or severe economic recession. Classic studies of immigration to the United States such as those by Handlin, Thomas and Znaniecki, Child, Wittke, and others generally assumed this basic process and proceeded to analyze the mechanisms for survival among different groups.20 Such studies were concerned with European immigrants—​the successive flows of Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, and Scandinavians—coming to meet labor demand in an expanding economy. While some references were made to returns to the home country, these reverse flows were generally attributed to individual circumstances or to periodic recessions in the United States. The experience of massive immigration from peripheral to advanced countries in the post–​World War II period has given rise to a different theoretical emphasis. A large proportion of labor migrations in this period has taken place under “guest worker” arrangements or as a surreptitious movement. These immigrants have been labeled target earners, since they are assumed to be motivated by the accumulation of money with which to fulfill goals in the home country. It has been noted that a very high proportion of their earnings are sent home as remittances, either to subsidize consumption needs or for investment.21 This “economic man” characterization was accompanied by an emphasis on these immigrants’ lack of integration and their general indifference to the institutions of the host society: immigrants seldom speak the language of the receiving country and seldom take part in its associations or in intimate relationships with members of the majority. This divorce from the surrounding society enables them to concentrate exclusively on monetary rewards and to perform jobs that they would reject in their own country. This theory has accorded central importance to the phenomenon of return migration. Unlike earlier analyses, it views return to the home country as part of the normal, patterned sequence of labor displacements. While it acknowledges the settlement of vast numbers of European immigrants in the United States at an earlier period, it contends that permanence in the receiving country is not at present a sign of immigrant success: “It is absolutely essential to dispel the notion that seems to emerge in naive versions of this idea of settlement as success that the essential aspect of success is income. Migrants tend to be target earners, and the effect of rising incomes, all other things being equal, is to increase the rate at which they return home. This late effect occurs

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because, in terms of the original motivations of migrants, settlement is the product of failure.”22 This ebb-and-flow characterization of immigration advances our understanding in comparison with earlier descriptions of a simple unidirectional movement. The emphasis on return migration also agrees with some aspects of contemporary labor flows to the United States, as described by recent studies. Still, this alternative theory also runs into difficulties. First, there is evidence that many immigrants do stay in the host country precisely because they have been economically successful. Second, the movement in many cases does not involve a single coming and going but a series of displacements, frequently involving a seasonal pattern.23 More generally, this new theory, like earlier ones, is based on the perspective of the receiving country and, hence, fails to capture the process in its totality. It does not take into account, for instance, the actual nature of “return” migration, which may be either to the places of origin or to others. Similarly, it does not consider common patterns in which individuals alternate between internal and international migration or in which households “assign” some members to travel abroad and some to journey to cities within the country. These omissions stem from the fact that this theory conceives of international migration as a process occurring between two separate national units. An alternative conceptualization would again be based on a definition of the flow as internal to the same global economic system. Migration has a dual economic function: from the standpoint of capital it is the means to fulfill labor demand at different points of the system; from the standpoint of labor it is the means to take advantage of opportunities distributed unequally in space.24 The complexity of international labor flows is a function not only of the shifting locations of opportunities but of the fact that those locations sought by individuals and families change over time. Opportunities for wage earnings are often better in national and international capitalist centers, while those for investment in land or small enterprises are often better in the places of origin. The progressive articulation of a global economic order allows individuals and families in remote areas to gain access to a much broader range of economic opportunities and to “map” their use. Villages in the interior of Mexico today maintain regular contact with ethnic communities in Chicago. Remote towns in the mountains of the Dominican Republic are accurately informed about labor market conditions in Queens and Manhattan.25

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The more recent theory of migrant transnationalism has been developed precisely to emphasize the resilient relations of migrants with their places of origin and the complexity that these relations acquire over time. These “multistranded” relationships lead a number of immigrants into dual lives—​traveling back home, sending remittances and making investments there, and maintaining dual residences.26 Immigrants frequently create organizations to formalize and stabilize such contacts. These range from “hometown committees” formed by humble migrants from rural areas to formal professional and alumni associations created by the highly skilled. Recent research on transnational organizations has unveiled the important findings that migrant involvement in them does not decline over time and actually increases with education, income, length of residence, and security of legal status.27 We will have more to say on the subject later on, but for the moment the crucial idea is that immigration theory has left behind the image of these flows as unidirectional escapes from misery and want and the parallel idea of their occurrence among self-contained nation-states. The progressive articulation of a global capitalist economy and the complexity of common people’s adaptations to it is more properly captured by the transnational perspective. A related question is the perpetuation of migrant flows over time. Regardless of the impulses and motivations that give rise to migration in the first place, they commonly do not suffice to account for the sustainability of such movements. To accomplish this, one must introduce the concept of social networks. As Massey et al. put it: “Migrant networks are sets of interpersonal ties that connect migrants, former migrants, and non-migrants in origins and destination areas through ties of kinship, friendship, and shared community origins. They increase the likelihood of international movements because they lower the cost and risk of such movements.”28 Social scientists have long recognized the importance of networks in the buildup of migration systems. This recognition goes as far back as such classics as Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Tilly conceptualizes migration as a process of networkbuilding that depends on and, in turn, reinforces social relationships across space.29 The microstructures thus created not only permit the survival of immigrants but also constitute a significant undercurrent running counter to dominant economic trends. This alternative perspective helps explain a phenomenon that escapes earlier theories, namely, the resilience of migrant flows even after origi-

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nal push-and-pull forces have disappeared or after original opportunities for target earning have been removed. The fact that migrant flows do not respond automatically to such changes is related to their organization through social networks. Once in place, these structures stabilize such movements by adapting to shifting economic conditions and by generating new opportunities apart from the original incentives. While not indifferent to the broader context, the network structures of migration have frequently led to outcomes quite different from those anticipated by conventional economic hypotheses. It is commonly recognized that pioneer migrants face the highest costs because they confront the risks of the journey unaided. Once several such trips have been successfully completed, however, the costs of migration are significantly lowered for future migrants, who can draw on the pioneers’ knowledge and experience. The ability to obtain such information and assistance constitutes the would-be migrants’ “social capital.”30 The pool of such capital increases with each additional journey, leading to the emergence of veritable migration systems. These systems can become self-perpetuating even after the disappearance of the original incentives for migration because of the emergence of secondary considerations, such as family events and obligations. The durability of migration systems is not open-ended, however, since they can be terminated by external circumstances. One such circumstance is the literal emptying of places of origin, aside from the old and the infirm; another is a glut of migrants in places of destination, reducing chances for employment and taxing the ability of settled migrants to assist newcomers. As de Haas has emphasized, the operation of such forces leads to the slowing down of migration systems in such a way that the effect of social networks over time can be charted as an S-asymptote—​increasing sharply in the early years before reaching a plateau and then declining rapidly.31 Other forces may also bring migration systems to an end. They include fertility decline and sustained economic development in areas of out-migration, as well as the investments and philanthropic initiatives of transnational migrant organizations that may significantly improve living conditions there. Paradoxically, social networks that, at an earlier stage, underlie the emergence of migration systems may, at a later time, undermine them through the developmental activities of expatriates. Severe economic recessions in places of destination and the information about them conveyed through social networks can also bring to a halt ongoing migrant flows. Something to that effect happened to U.S.-

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bound migration from Mexico and Latin American migration to Spain in the wake of the economic downturn beginning in 2008.32

The Uses of Labor Migration Most contemporary theorizing on international migration has focused neither on its origins nor on its directionality and stability over time. Instead, these theories have dealt with the two remaining aspects: uses of migration for the receiving economy and the adaptation of immigrants. The different theoretical positions on these issues are both more complex and more controversial than those reviewed above, since each lays claim to a supporting empirical literature. The orthodox neoclassical economic perspective views immigrant labor as a supplement to a scarce domestic labor force. Immigrants are recruited to fill jobs in an expanding economy that has run out of hands in its own population. This is the type of situation assumed since the time of classical political economy. John Stuart Mill, for example, defended labor emigration in those terms. He noted, however, that such labor could be profitably utilized by capital in the new countries only if immigrants were prevented from gaining access to land. In the latter case immigrants would work only for themselves, denying their labor to employers. In the last chapter of Principles of Political Economy Mill had no qualms about abandoning laissez faire doctrines to advocate government sponsorship of emigration. Only state power could prevent migrants from turning into self-employed colonists of little or no use to capital.33 The situation Mill studied was obviously one in which land was plentiful. The actual mechanism by which labor scarcity and demand for new labor were created in nineteenth-century America has been described at length by Lebergott. The supply of cheap land then appeared inexhaustible. The availability of the western frontier enabled domestic workers to invest directly in land, abandoning wage labor for agricultural selfemployment. The same could be done by immigrants after a few years: “In 1820, when lands were worth $50 per acre in Massachusetts and one dollar in Ohio, the New England farmer improved his condition by emigrating to Ohio, and when in 1840 the best lands of Ohio were worth $50 per acre and those of Illinois one dollar and a quarter he could again move with profit to Illinois; and again, in 1850 from lands worth $50 in Illinois to the cheap lands of Minnesota and Kansas.”34 Westward emigration by natives and older immigrants maintained

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a downward pressure on the labor supply, helping to keep wages high and attracting new immigrant flows. But why didn’t new immigrants take immediate advantage of frontier lands? The answer was the combined lack of capital and lack of experience in the new country. They concentrated in eastern cities, and only after accumulating sufficient savings and experience did some trek westward. This pattern explains both the attractiveness of immigrant labor to eastern employers and the rapid fluctuations of the flow corresponding to the ups and downs of American labor demand.35 Orthodox economic theory explains the gravitation of immigrants toward the worst jobs as a natural consequence of an expanding economy. In this view native workers move upward toward better paid, more prestigious, or more autonomous positions. In the United States the existence of a frontier played a central role in maintaining an “open” economic structure and abundant opportunities for advancement. This situation can occur, at least in theory, even in the absence of cheap land through the expansion of an industrial economy. Because labor scarcity occurs at the bottom, wages for unskilled and semiskilled workers tend to rise as a result of employer competition. The dual consequences are the attraction of prospective immigrants and the need for employers to seek new sources of labor as means of controlling or reducing wages. Both trends encourage further immigration. As target earners, immigrant workers possess an additional desirable characteristic, namely, their disregard, at least initially, of status considerations. For native workers wages signal a position in the occupational status system so that they shy away from the lowest-paid menial jobs. Raising wage levels at the bottom to attract native workers triggers structural inflation, as higher-status workers then demand higher pay in order to preserve their relative standing. An abundance of unskilled, cheaply paid foreign labor helps neutralize this danger.36 For orthodox economic theory, immigrant workers are not qualitatively different from native ones except that they are new entrants in the labor force and have less experience and perhaps less education. With time, immigrants acquire the experience and qualifications to move upward as well, leaving the bottom of the occupational structure to new labor flows. The process helps maintain three moving equilibria over time: (1) between labor scarcity in some countries and labor abundance in others; (2) between the needs of employers and the needs and skills of workers; and (3) between workers’ aspirations and mobility opportunities in the economic structure.

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A second, and very different, theoretical perspective has focused on the experience of those immigrant groups who have not come of their own free will but who have been made to work under conditions of slavery, servitude, or peonage. These colonized minorities also meet a labor demand but one qualitatively distinct from that described by orthodox theory. They occupy positions at the bottom of the occupational structure—​not, however, positions vacated by domestic workers but rather ones requiring a particular class of worker since no free domestic labor can be found to perform them. In his classic analysis of plantation economies, Edgar Thompson noted the gradual development of this institution and its shift from white indentured servants to black slave workers. In areas of open resources, where land was far more abundant than labor, it was easier to recruit a workforce than to keep it. Indentured servants were not motivated to work for planters, since they were paid in advance, but they were highly motivated to escape and work for themselves. Natives were also difficult to control. In the land of their birth, they would rebel or escape to remote places rather than submit to the planter’s yoke. It thus became necessary to locate a labor force fit for the hard labor but so alien that it would become entirely dependent on the planter’s providence. For such workers the plantation would not be a workplace but a “total institution,” where laborers spent their entire lives and without which they would lack the means of survival. Thus, the choice of African slaves and the transformation of plantations into social and political, as well as economic, organizations evolved together. Not until these developments had taken place did a racial ideology emerge as a means of legitimizing them.37 The incorporation of a colonized minority to a host economy has been marked in general by two central features. First, the group is employed in nonurban extractive tasks, primarily mining and agriculture. Second, production is organized along precapitalist lines, where labor is subject, under various legal arrangements, to the will of employers. The existence of labor under these circumstances gives rise, in turn, to ideologies that justify the situation in terms of racial or cultural differences and the need to educate and control the subordinate group. For Blauner the colonization process is marked by five major events: “First, colonization begins with a forced, involuntary entrance into the dominant society. Second, the colonizing power acts on a policy to constrain, transform, or destroy the indigenous culture. Third, representatives of the dominant power administer the law and control the govern-

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ment bureaucracy. Fourth, there is a separation of labor status between the colonizers and the colonized. Fifth, racism develops as a principle through which people are seen as biologically inferior in order to justify their exploitation.”38 The shift from precapitalist unfree arrangements to fully capitalist relations of production is experienced only in partial form by colonized minorities. Though, in theory, these minorities come eventually to join the “free” labor force, they are still relegated to the worst menial jobs. This situation is strikingly different from that portrayed by orthodox theory: when employed as wage labor, colonized minorities are not simply “new” entrants in the workforce capable of moving upward after a period of time. For colonized minorities that mobility is blocked by a variety of legal and informal mechanisms. Racial and cultural ideologies legitimize both their condition and the deliberate closure of opportunities to move out of it. No colonized minorities exist at present in the United States, but the legacy of slavery and, to a lesser extent, the colonization of the Mexican population of the Southwest left major historical traces that last to our day. As we saw in chapter 1, the condition of these groups—​generations after their formal release from colonial bonds and the end of legal discrimination—​remains quite problematic and challenging. This is what these theories attempt to capture. The central feature of the colonial perspective on immigration is that it regards the use of this labor force as useful for the dominant racial group as a whole. The different classes of the dominant group benefit from the colonial situation in different ways. Employers gain because they have at their disposal a cheap and exploitable labor source to which they can dictate their own terms. Dominant-group workers also benefit in various ways. First, they gain symbolically from the existence of an inferior group with which they can compare their own lot. This allows them to entertain feelings of superiority and to identify vicariously with the dominant classes. Second, they stand to gain materially through three mechanisms: (1) the exclusion of the colonized from competition for the better-paid physical and supervisory jobs; (2) the lowering of the cost of goods and services produced with colonized labor that cheapens their own consumption; and (3) the redistribution of part of the surplus extracted from that labor by the employer class in the form of higher wages and other benefits for workers of the racially dominant group. This group thus endeavors to stabilize its monopoly of economic and social advantages through mechanisms that reserve the best positions for its members. In the United States, the formal end of slavery was

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accompanied by the creation of the Jim Crow legal system to perpetuate the condition of the colonized; a set of similar practices emerged in the Southwest to preserve the subordinate status of immigrants and their descendants.39 A third perspective on the uses of migrant labor also stresses the significance of racial and cultural differences and a racist ideology but interprets the effects differently. Employing migrants from culturally and racially distinct origins is identified here as a common strategy used by the employer class against organizations of domestic workers. Hence, the benefits brought about by a subordinate minority in the labor market accrue not to all members of the dominant racial or ethnic group but only to members of the employer class. Such benefits are extracted precisely against the interests of the domestic proletariat, which is pitted against the new source of labor. Immigrant workers, whether free or coerced, are generally in a weaker position to resist employer dictates than domestic ones. First, immigrants lack familiarity with economic and social conditions in places of destination, and they do not have the means to resist exploitation. Second, they are separated from the domestic working class by linguistic and cultural barriers and by the all-too-common prejudices among that class. Third, conditions in places of origin are frequently so desperate that immigrants willingly accept whatever kind of compensation is given them. Fourth, an immigrant labor force is usually brought under legal constraints that place it from the start in a vulnerable position. While the character of these arrangements varies with the country or period, their common effect is to render immigrants subject to ready exclusion or deportation. Organizational efforts or protests among immigrants can thus be defined as a police matter rather than one involving legitimate class revindications.40 This theory of labor immigration does not necessarily contradict the colonialist one since each applies to different historical periods. However, this last perspective calls attention to an important outcome neglected by most analysts of colonialism: a division of labor that works to the direct advantage of certain classes within the racially dominant group and to the direct disadvantage of others. In this model ideology is employed less to legitimize the privileges of a race or cultural group over another than to sustain the separation between two segments of the working class and to fragment organizations based on class solidarity. The widespread racism among native workers is thus, ultimately, an ideology directed against themselves.

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This analysis directly contradicts predictions stemming from the orthodox economic perspective on labor immigration. If foreign labor is imported to serve exclusively as a supplement to the domestic labor force, a strong inverse correlation should obtain between domestic levels of unemployment and size of the immigrant flow: periods of economic recession that bring about higher unemployment should produce, within a relatively short time, a decrease in immigration. In contrast, if the function of immigration is not solely to supplement the domestic labor force but to discipline it, the result would be quite different. In this case there should be a positive correlation over time between levels of unemployment and immigration. An organized and militant labor force becomes “useless” to capitalist firms, which then opt in favor of hiring immigrant workers over domestic ones. The presence of this new preferred source of labor has the effect of accelerating the displacement of domestic workers, thus leading to higher levels of unemployment. As we saw in chapter 1, this was the motivation that undergirded the shift by industrial employers in the Northeast and Midwest from white European to southern black labor starting in the mid-1910s. This historical experience was given theoretical form by Edna Bonacich. She labels her thesis “a split labor market interpretation.” During the decades following World War I, southern black migrants constituted a “preferred” labor force because of their willingness to work at menial jobs for low wages, their lack of organizational experience, and their deferential attitude toward bosses. The strategy through which capitalists targeted this migrant labor force against the organizational efforts of white workers took three forms: (1) strikebreaking, (2) replacement of white workers with lower-paid black labor, and (3) a policy of paternalism toward black workers and organizations that cemented their alliance with employers against all-white unions.41 As we also saw in chapter 1, European workers had been used before blacks to fill a similar role. In 1832 the directors of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, confronted with demands for higher wages, found that “against this evil the only effective remedy was the introduction of additional miners from abroad.” Immigrant labor was imported as promptly as possible and to such an extent that a recurrence of the “evil” was not experienced for some time. More recently, Galarza described a similar process involving the use of Mexican immigrant labor against organizational efforts of domestic farmworkers, most of them Mexican Americans in California and throughout the Southwest.42 In this manner the role of southern black and Mexican workers shifted from that

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of colonized minorities to that of being the core of a split labor market developed against the organizational efforts of the native working class in the first half of the twentieth century. The fourth perspective on immigrant labor combines elements of the preceding two, though it focuses primarily on the post–​World War II situation. Different versions of this perspective exist, but the most coherent one is that based on an analysis of the increasing segmentation of social relationships of production under advanced capitalism. The core of this “dual economy” thesis is the observation that advanced economies generate an oligopolistic segment in which control of the different facets of production and commercialization is far more extensive than among earlier capitalist firms. The emergence of oligopolies in different segments of the economy is a process common to all industrialized capitalist countries. These firms are said to control a significant portion of their respective markets, rely on capital-intensive technology to enhance productivity, and are able to pass on part or all of the increases in the wage bill to consumers through their control of markets. Their social relationships of production have several distinct characteristics determined both by requirements of firms and by past struggles between management and labor for control of the production process.43 A prime goal of corporations in this oligopolistic sector is stability in labor relations, and the main strategy to accomplish it is bureaucratization of the production process and the creation of so-called internal markets. Bureaucratization means the substitution of a system of control based on direct personal command by one based on adherence to impersonal rules. Internal markets means the division of work into finely graded job ladders. Hiring is generally at the bottom, and access to higher positions is usually through internal promotion rather than external recruitment. Stability is promoted by the fact that workers do not confront the arbitrary orders of a boss or managerial superior but rather a set of explicitly laid-out rules. More important, job ladders offer incentives to remain with a particular firm, since seniority and training are rewarded with increases in pay and status. Oligopolistic corporations are able to create internal markets because of their size and because they can compensate for increases in labor costs with increases in productivity, higher prices for the final product, or both. Wages in this sector of the economy are thus higher and fringe benefits and work conditions more desirable.44 A second segment of the economy is formed by those smaller com-

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petitive enterprises that more faithfully reflect the structural conditions under early industrial capitalism. Such firms operate in an environment of considerable economic uncertainty. Their markets are usually local and regional, they do not generate their own technology, and they often depend on labor-intensive processes of production. Firms in this sector do not have internal markets. Because they also lack a monopoly position, they face greater difficulties in passing on increases in their wage bill. The conditions of production in this sector thus lead to a strong downward pressure on wages. Control over workers cannot depend on the incentives attached to job ladders or be based on impersonal rules. Instead, discipline is imposed directly, and it is often harsh. Firing is a permanent threat and a common practice, since most labor employed by these firms can be replaced. Wages are not only lower than in the oligopolistic sector, but their distribution is flat over time. For workers in the secondary sector, seniority is not a guarantee of higher-income or job security. High labor turnover in these firms is a joint consequence of employer dismissals and of worker dissatisfaction. The viability of these relationships of production depends on the presence of a labor force that is both abundant and powerless. Otherwise, labor costs would go up, and the existence of firms, as presently structured, would be threatened.45 Differences in conditions of employment in a dual economy do not depend primarily on the requirements of the job or on the qualifications of the worker. Advantages in income and security enjoyed by those in the oligopolistic sector are the direct outcome of earlier class struggles that resulted in an eventual accommodation: organized labor gained advantages and security, while firms gained control over the work process in a manner that promoted stability and minimized disturbances in production. Hence, it is perfectly possible that jobs with equal requirements are unequally rewarded depending on the segment of the economy in which they are situated. Entrance into the oligopolistic labor market is primarily a function of the requirements of firms and not the qualifications of workers. As part of its control over the work process, management has systematically opted for capital-intensive technology that reduces expensive labor costs. The supply of qualified workers for available positions in the oligopolistic sector thus consistently exceeds demand. Hence, it is perfectly possible that individuals with equal qualification are rewarded unequally depending on the segment of the economy in which they are employed. The class struggles that led to the bifurcation of relationships of pro-

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duction into a dual labor market in the United States were conducted when most workers were white. They involved both white Americans and older European immigrants. The final consolidation of a protected, unionized labor force in this segment of the economy took place only after the New Deal and World War II. Subsequent entrants into the labor market confronted a situation of progressive closure of oligopolistic corporations and employment restricted to the competitive sector. These new entrants were, for the most part, unorganized and therefore vulnerable. They included white women, white teenagers, and white rural migrants, as well as black and Puerto Rican migrants and immigrants.46 Hence, the same minorities that had previously served as the mainstay of colonial and split-labor regimes now found themselves confined to the secondary sector of the dual labor market. Students of immigration in the United States noted the increasing reliance of competitive firms on immigrants, primarily unauthorized ones, as a source of labor. This process accelerated in the mid-1960s (coinciding with the end of the Bracero Program) and reached both numerical importance and notoriety during the 1970s. It coincided with the exhaustion of certain other labor sources—​teenagers and rural migrants—​and the increasing resistance of women to accept conditions of employment in these firms. The analysis offered by dual-economy theory and its predictions concerning labor immigration are more complex than both the colonialist and split-labor-market theories. This complexity is not necessarily a function of shortcomings in the other perspectives but derives from an emphasis on the more recent transformation of advanced economies. The dual-economy thesis agrees with notions advanced by the two preceding perspectives but in a modified form. It agrees with colonialist theory in that the incorporation of a subordinate racial or cultural minority into the labor market can benefit both employers and workers among the dominant group. This prediction is valid if we limit the definition of domestic labor to those in the primary market. Workers in this sector benefit from the labor of subordinate immigrant groups for all the reasons advanced by colonialist theory: lower costs of goods and services, the possibility of sharing in the surplus extracted from immigrants, and the symbolic rewards of a superior status. The dual-economy analysis also agrees with split-labor-market theory in its characterization of immigrants as a “preferred” labor force used against the organizational efforts of domestic workers. This prediction is valid if we limit the definition of domestic labor to those in

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the competitive sector. The increase in illegal immigration during the last decades of the twentieth century and its employment by competitive firms were strategies intended to discourage the resistance of the domestic-minority workforce to accept low wages and harsh treatment and its effort to improve its lot. The situation in this case is somewhat different from that described by Bonacich because it does not pit vulnerable immigrant labor against a unionized working class in the forward sectors of the economy. Instead, immigrants were used to undercut domestic workers who were themselves weak and frequently unorganized and who were employed by the most technologically backward firms. Oligopolistic labor, most of it white, was largely insulated from the competition of unauthorized foreign workers and could actually profit from their presence. The rapid deindustrialization of the American economy, described in the first chapter, has significantly altered the portrait of the labor market and the uses of migrant labor outlined by dual-economy theory. Large swathes of what had been previously portrayed as the primary labor market disappeared, as formerly oligopolistic firms were forced to cope with increasing foreign competition. They did so by ditching the “historic pact” with organized labor in the post–​World War II era. The process of industrial restructuring in effect did away with much of American industry through massive plant closures and relocation of production facilities abroad. Predictably, vast segments of the formerly protected primary workforce just melted away. The new service economy that replaced the old industrial system and the accompanying “hourglass” labor market depicted in figure 2 have had predictable effects in the uses of migrant labor. Industrial restructuring and labor flexibility opened the top of the hourglass market to highly qualified foreign workers. As we saw in chapter 1, the H-1B program was explicitly designed to facilitate their arrival. Menial jobs in services and agriculture at the bottom of the hourglass continued to attract unskilled workers from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. They actually became the preferred labor source for this sector because of their vulnerability and willingness to perform harsh jobs for low pay.47 In the absence of legal channels for entry, the bulk of this immigration arrived clandestinely. More recently, as we saw in chapter 1, the H-2A program has been significantly expanded to attract migrant workers needed in U.S. agriculture and services but who are increasingly unwilling to brave the risks and the costs of a clandestine journey.

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The expansion of this program contains the seeds of a temporary labor system to address the needs of labor-intensive firms on a regular basis.

The Entrepreneurial Path Theories of the uses of migrant labor have covered in detail different aspects of the historical experience of migrant workers. These theories have neglected, however, an important alternative to wage work, namely, self-employment. Since the late nineteenth century, students of immigration have noted the high propensity of migrants to go into small business. In chapter 1 we saw that entrepreneurs represent one of the main types of contemporary immigrants to the United States, and we explored some of the consequences of this alternative path. Several theories have been advanced to explain the phenomenon of immigrant entrepreneurship. The best known is probably Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich’s theory of minority disadvantage. As immigrants find themselves handicapped by generalized discrimination and lack of knowledge of the host language and culture, they turn to small business as an alternative means of economic survival. The early experience of Chinatowns in California and Japanese small businesses throughout the West Coast, related in chapter 1, provide evidence in support of this theory.48 But important anomalies do exist. Other equally discriminated foreign groups have been unable to reproduce the dense entrepreneurial networks created by Jewish and Japanese immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century or by Koreans, Cubans, and Chinese in its last decades. Further, independent entrepreneurship has turned out to be not merely a survival alternative but a path toward rapid economic mobility in many instances. The creation of business enclaves by Russian Jews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and by the Japanese in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle allowed these groups to ascend rapidly on the economic ladder, leaving other immigrant minorities composed mainly of wageworkers behind. The more recently established Cuban enclave of Miami, Koreatown of Los Angeles, the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco, and the Little Saigon area of Orange County have yielded, by and large, similar results.49 The concepts of social networks and social capital, discussed earlier in connection with the origins of immigrant flows, can be invoked again for the explanation of these economic phenomena. It is clear that entrepreneurially oriented foreign groups make use of intraethnic net-

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works and cultural solidarity to compensate for the barriers posed by discrimination and lack of business contacts in the outside world. As will be illustrated in greater detail in chapter 4, the ethnic community can become in these circumstances a source of capital, labor, and market information supporting business success. In a sense immigrant entrepreneurs compensate for their lack of financial capital with the extensive social capital created by ethnic solidarity.50 Yet this theory also falls short because social networks and solidarity are common among all minority groups, immigrant or otherwise, but only a few of them have managed to create viable economic enclaves. An extensive literature on African American inner cities, for example, has demonstrated the existence and vital role of social networks and social capital as means for personal and family survival. But the operation of these mechanisms never managed to lift these areas out of a situation of permanent poverty and social marginalization. The areas where these groups concentrate, as those created by most immigrant minorities, develop into ethnic neighborhoods, not economic enclaves.51 The key element for collective business advancement lies in the presence of a critical mass of migrants with business expertise acquired in their country of origin and brought along into the host society. As we saw in chapter 1, every experience where entrepreneurship has led to the emergence of a viable enclave has been marked by the presence of individuals skilled in industrial and commercial trades.52 Broad human capital resulting from a general liberal education does not suffice; instead, the key factor has been specific expertise in organizing and operating different types of firms. When a class of such persons exists in an ethnic community, businesses emerge in sufficient numbers to provide an alternative path to wage employment in the outside economy. In time, managerial and investment knowledge disseminate from the early entrepreneurs to their coethnic workers, providing a platform for sustained economic mobility. Zhou concludes her well-known review of ethnic enterprise in the United States on the following note: “The central idea of the enclave economy concept is that the enclave is more than just a shelter for the disadvantaged who are forced to take on either selfemployment or marginal work in small businesses. Rather, the ethnic enclave possesses the potential to develop a distinct structure of economic opportunities as an effective alternative path to social mobility.”53 As we will see in chapter 7, this path also has significant effects for the educational and occupational achievement of the offspring of these immigrants—​the second generation. Although the enclave path is excep-

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tional, it possesses significant theoretical implications as a means to escape the secondary labor market and the bottom tier of the present economic “hourglass.”

Immigrant Adaptation The last set of theories deals with the social relationships between immigrants and members of the native majority and their cultural interactions. Different perspectives on immigrant adaptation correspond to different theories on the uses of immigrant labor. Thus, the theory that views immigrants essentially as a supplement to the domestic labor force is complemented by a first perspective on adaptation in terms of social and cultural assimilation. The assimilationist school, as these writings are collectively known, comprises most of the classic studies of immigrants in the United States. These include the work of such sociologists and historians as Handlin on the urban Irish, Child on second-generation Italians, Wittke on the Germans, and Blegen on the Norwegians. It also includes an array of subsequent scholars, from Milton Gordon to Thomas Sowell.54 The assimilationist perspective defines the situation of immigrants as involving a clash between conflicting cultural values and norms. The native majority represents the “core,” while immigrants are the “periphery.” Assimilation occurs by the diffusion of values and norms from core to periphery. By osmosis, as it were, these new cultural forms are gradually absorbed by immigrants, bringing them closer to the majority. The process, sometimes called acculturation, is generally seen as irreversible though it may take different lengths of time for different groups.55 In the most extensive treatise on assimilation, Milton Gordon defines acculturation as a precondition for other forms of assimilation. Next in line comes structural assimilation, or extensive participation of immigrants in primary groups of the core society. This is followed, in a loose sequence, by amalgamation, or intermarriage, between immigrants and natives and by identificational assimilation or the development of a common national identity based on the symbols of the core group. Attitudinal assimilation reflects the absence of prejudice toward immigrants, while behavioral assimilation represents the absence of discrimination. According to Gordon, there is no necessary linear relationship between different types of assimilation past the stage of acculturation. Learning the norms and values of the society may lead to a reduction of prejudice and discrimination, with minority and majority choosing

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to remain apart in terms of social interaction. Identificational assimilation might occur in the absence of amalgamation and even of extensive structural assimilation. Nevertheless, it is the latter process—​extensive primary-level interaction between immigrants and members of the native majority—​that Gordon defines as central to assimilation.56 This view is shared by other sociologists of the same school, such as Warner and Srole. For them assimilation is a linear process, but the speed at which immigrants gain access to closer interaction with members of the core group is affected by three variables: race, religion, and language. The more similar an immigrant group is to the white, Protestant, English-speaking majority, the faster it will be assimilated. The process may take many generations for immigrants different from the majority in all three variables. For Warner and Srole race is the primary criterion, and nonwhite groups are those whose assimilation is the most difficult.57 Gordon examines three alternative ideological tendencies, or viewpoints, on assimilation: Anglo conformity, the melting pot, and cultural pluralism. As the label indicates, Anglo conformity refers to the complete surrender of immigrants’ symbols and values and their absorption by the core culture. The process culminates in identificational assimilation, though it may not lead to structural assimilation or to the total elimination of discrimination and prejudice. The melting-pot thesis holds that assimilation results in a blend of the values, norms, lifestyles, and institutions of the different groups, both core and peripheral. This is manifested, for example, in the incorporation of multiple foreign cuisines into “American” food, in the adoption into English of a number of foreign expressions, and in the integration of symbols and festivities brought by different immigrant groups into American culture. Cultural pluralism refers to a situation in which immigrants are able to retain their own culture, modified by contact with the core group but still preserving its distinct character. Under pluralism these differences do not result in prejudice and discrimination: each group is allowed to function in a plane of relative equality, with limited structural assimilation and amalgamation among them. While cultural pluralism is the option favored by most immigrants, Gordon asserts that it has never really existed in the United States. In his view the acculturation process has led to outcomes best reflected in the Anglo-conformity thesis: basic values, norms, and symbols taught to immigrants and fully absorbed by their children correspond to those of the dominant American culture.58 Other assimilationists, such as Sowell,

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argue that the more benevolent melting-pot imagery is actually more empirically accurate. American society and culture are a distillate of many national contributions, of which the Anglo-Protestant tradition is the most significant but by no means the only one. Sowell asserts that “the American culture is built on the food, the language, the attitudes, and the skills from numerous groups. . . . Features of American culture . . . are a common heritage, despite ethnic diversities that still exist. Budweiser is drunk in Harlem, Jews eat pizza, and Chinese restaurants are patronized by customers who are obviously not Chinese.”59 While rejecting such statements as superficial, other writers believe, nonetheless, that the melting-pot concept is useful as a description of more fundamental processes: rebuffed in their attempts to translate acculturation into structural assimilation, second- and third-generation “immigrants” have developed their own melting pots segmented along religious lines. Kennedy and, subsequently, Herberg elaborated the notion of a triple melting pot, in which primary-level relations and intermarriages occur within broad groupings defined by religion: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. While ethnic identities might persist within each of these broad segments, the general tendency is toward the emergence of an undifferentiated “American” population within each of them.60 Gordon endorsed this typology, concluding that Anglo conformity in the culture and segmented melting pots in the social structure are the basic tendencies of immigrant assimilation in the United States. Other authors, particularly Glazer and Moynihan, have added to this triple melting pot a fourth segment separated from the others not by religious but racial lines. Blacks and perhaps other nonwhites do not readily “melt” into the broader society or any of its subsegments, although they have also been acculturated in the dominant values.61 Despite the many qualifications and typologies that pervade the assimilationist literature, its basic insight is that contact between a foreign minority and an established majority will lead, through a series of stages, to an eventual merging of values, symbols, and identities. This integration into a single society and culture, or perhaps into several subsegments, is held to be a good thing. For the majority this merging represents a guarantee of social stability and the enrichment provided by selective elements of foreign cultures. For the minority it offers the possibility of accessing positions of higher prestige and power and the promise of a better future for their children. The assimilationist model reflects a view of society as a consensual structure. Social change consists of attempts to restore equilibrium dis-

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rupted by external forces. The massive arrival of individuals with foreign languages and cultures represents such a disruption. Assimilation is the process by which equilibrium is restored. As immigrants learn the new culture and language, they shed traditional preconceptions and early feelings of alienation. As they come to know and understand members of the majority, they adopt a more positive attitude toward them. This process of apprenticeship is rewarded, in turn, by greater openness of the host society and greater opportunities for economic and social advancement.62 The internal colonialist, split-labor-market, and dual-economy perspectives on uses of migrant labor correspond to a very different analysis of immigrant adaptation. From these alternative viewpoints greater knowledge of the core language and culture by new immigrants and greater familiarity with members of the dominant group do not necessarily lead to more positive attitudes and more rapid assimilation. Such conditions can lead to precisely the opposite, as immigrants learn their true economic position and are exposed to racist ideologies directed against them as instruments of domination. This perspective on immigrant adaptation emphasizes ethnic resilience as an instrument of resistance by oppressed minorities. Studies of ethnicity typically begin by noting the persistence of distinct cultural traits among groups formed by immigration despite extensive periods of time in the host society. This situation can only be explained, from an assimilationist perspective, by the insufficient diffusion of the culture of the core to peripheral groups. This kind of explanation runs contrary, however, to the actual experience of many immigrant groups who have been in the receiving country for several generations. These groups have learned American English, are thoroughly familiar with the values and lifestyles of the majority, and are completely integrated into the economic structure. Still, they have not abandoned their distinct cultural traits and self-identities and often resist further assimilation.63 At this point the ethnic resilience literature splits into two currents. One notes the functional advantages of ethnicity, ranging from the moral and material support provided by ethnic networks to political gains made through ethnic bloc voting. It “pays” to preserve ethnic solidarity, which is often the only edge that immigrants and their descendants have for advancement in the broader society. This line of argument is associated in the United States with the works of Greeley, Suttles, and Glazer and Moynihan. Research supporting this position has dealt primarily with the experience of “white ethnics,” the descen-

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dants of European immigrant groups, though it has been extended to nonwhite minorities.64 Glazer and Moynihan concluded poignantly that “the point of the melting pot is that it did not happen.”65 For Greeley ethnic resilience is not a cultural “lag” from premodern times but rather the communal basis on which modern social structures rest. Far from constituting a “social problem,” ethnic bonds represent one of the few sources of emotional support and social solidarity left in the modern urban context: “The ethnic groups . . . came into existence so that the primordial ties of the peasant commune could somehow or other be salvaged. . . . But because the primordial ties have been transmitted does not mean that they have been eliminated. . . . They are every bit as decisive for human relationships as they were in the past.”66 The positive consequences of ethnic resilience and solidarity receive additional support from the literature on ethnic enclaves and other forms of immigrant entrepreneurship. As we have seen, this economic path could not exist without the social capital flowing from social networks and ethnic solidarity. From this standpoint rapid acculturation and structural assimilation, as advocated by Gordon, Warner and Srole, and other authors of the same school, is not necessarily a boon to the mobility chances of immigrants and their offspring because it weakens the bonds that undergird coethnic social capital. Instead, selective acculturation that combines instrumental learning of the host languages and culture with retention of cultural traditions brought from the home country offers the most effective path for entrepreneurially oriented immigrants.67 A second current of the ethnic resilience literature generally agrees with these statements but focuses on the origins of ethnic solidarity for oppressed minorities. It emphasizes the experience of immigrant groups that, though thoroughly acculturated to dominant values and norms, have been rebuffed in their attempts to seek entry into the mainstream. As we have seen, assimilation theories have also noted these experiences but do not draw from them any implications beyond the “triple segmentation” of the melting pot. In this second current of the ethnic resilience model, this rejection is a necessary consequence of the subordinate position of certain immigrant minorities in the labor market and of the ideologies employed to legitimize it. Blacks and Mexicans, like Chinese and Japanese, or Poles and Italians before them, have been kept “in their place” because they have formed, each in their time, the mainstay of a segmented labor market.68

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As colonized minorities or fresh labor supplies for the secondary sector, they constituted an indispensable component of the economic structure. Granting such groups admittance into mainstream society on the basis of merit would jeopardize their utility to employers and to the entire ethnically dominant group. Learning the “right” values and behavioral patterns is, therefore, not enough for these minorities to gain access to the core society.69 The rejection experienced by immigrants and their descendants in their attempts to become fully assimilated constitutes a central element in the reconstruction of ethnic culture. As several authors have noted, this culture is not a mere continuation of that brought by the original immigrants but is a distinct emergent product. It is forged in the interaction of the group with the dominant majority, incorporating some aspects of the core culture and privileging those from the past that appear most suited in the struggle for dignity and economic ascent. “Nationalities” may thus emerge among immigrants who shared only the most tenuous linkages to the old country. They are brought together by the imputation of a common ethnicity by the core society and its use to justify their exploitation.70 The central insight of the ethnic-resilience perspective is that the same racial ideology employed to justify the subordination of colonized and other groups can be eventually turned around as an instrument of solidarity. As they discover assimilation to be a deceptive path, minorities come to rely on in-group cohesiveness and cultural reassertion as the only effective means to break out of their situation. The emergence of ethnicity as the central identity among these minorities is aided by their common fate both inside and outside the workplace. They tend to work in the same industries and jobs and to live in the same areas. In both spheres they suffer the pervasive effects of discrimination. This unity of work and life, of production and consumption, greatly facilitates intragroup interaction. For this reason, when discontent finally turns into political mobilization, the rallying symbols for these groups are those of race and culture rather than those of a universal proletarian class.71 The critiques advanced by the various strands of ethnic-resilience theory severely weakened the assimilationist perspective, confining it to near oblivion. Recently, there has been an attempt to revive assimilation as a “master concept” by grounding it not on the work of Gordon or Warner and Srole but on the earlier Chicago School. This attempt, led by sociologists Richard Alba and Victor Nee, asserts that cultural and linguistic assimilation has been the dominant experience of immi-

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grant groups in the United States, leading to their incorporation into the social mainstream that is, in turn, modified by them. To buttress their case, Alba and Nee revisit the history of European immigrant groups and their descendants, as they gradually abandoned their language and culture to join a broadly encompassing American society. For these authors assimilation is “something that happens” to people as they engage in other pursuits. Following the lead of Robert Park and other classic authors of the Chicago School, the new assimilationism accepts that the process can take many different forms and even not take place at all. The thrust of the argument, however, is that, on the whole, cultural and social assimilation to the American mainstream has been the dominant or “canonical” path.72 On the opposite side other authors have reinforced ethnic-resilience theory by documenting the experience of groups that, though thoroughly acculturated, have remained confined to a subordinate economic and occupational status for generations. Based on a detailed study of Mexican Americans across generations, Telles and Ortiz advanced a racialization thesis that reproduces, in all its essentials, the earlier ethnic-resilience argument: Mexican American youths are racialized by the dominant white society that associates their phenotypical traits with an inferior educational potential and a subordinate status in the labor market. Mexican American youths react by rejecting the conventional path of social mobility through education and rallying around the symbols of an injured common ethnicity.73 Ultimately, the controversy between these opposite perspectives revolves around a differential emphasis on cultural versus structural indicators of assimilation. The basic emphasis of Alba and Nee’s neoassimilationism revolves around the overwhelming evidence of acculturation, linguistic and otherwise, among descendants of immigrant groups. They are less mindful that this process may not necessarily translate into structural mobility in the hierarchies of wealth and power. Thus, despite being thoroughly acculturated, minorities—​such as descendants of earlier Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Caribbean migrants—​are still confined to an inferior socioeconomic position and continue to be racialized by a predominantly white mainstream.74 The experiences of successful immigrant groups, including those that have developed economic enclaves, also weaken the neoassimilationist model because they show the importance of ethnic resilience for structural mobility. For these successful groups, coethnic solidarity has not been so much a reaction to outside discrimination as a proactive

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means to carve a viable economic niche. For Alba and Nee the American “mainstream” can encompass all these options, both positive and negative, but from the immigrants’ point of view it makes a great deal of difference what paths of assimilation they and their offspring follow. Those able to move upward educationally and occupationally readily join the middle class, while racialized minorities are confined to an inferior socioeconomic status for generations. The contrasting experiences of children of professional and entrepreneurial groups in the past and present and of descendants of colonized minorities provide additional support for this critical perspective.75

Conclusion: Transnationalism and Assimilation The transnational model, described previously as the latest approach to the directionality of migrant movements, also bears on immigrant adaptation. To the extent that immigrants adopt a pattern of back-and-forth movement across international borders, the question of assimilation versus ethnic resilience is cast in a new light. In principle transnationalism may be seen as retarding assimilation, to the extent that it keeps alive contacts and memories of the old country. Interestingly, however, the reality is more complex: research on the topic has shown that active participants in transnational activities and organizations are usually the more established and better educated immigrants.76 These are precisely the candidates for a more rapid and more successful integration into the host society. The process at play seems to be one in which newly arrived migrants concentrate on carving a niche for themselves, without taking much time to look back at events in their places of origin. It is only when they have become relatively secure and have reached a measure of occupational success that they can consider engaging in regular transnational activities or joining transnational organizations. These findings redefine, among other things, the meaning of citizenship acquisition. From the assimilation perspective, acquiring the citizenship of the host nation represents a decisive step in the process of acculturation and integration. From the transnational model, however, the greater legal security stemming from citizenship acquisition functions to facilitate further crossborder travel and contacts abroad.77 Transnationalism highlights the possibility that preserving ties to the home culture and language may be compatible with acculturation.

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Indeed, economically successful immigrants have commonly practiced this mix of the old and new. The practice of selective acculturation has not been inimical to their structural economic advancement but has generally supported it. For first-generation immigrants regular contact with their places of origin often translates into the possibility of accessing unique economic resources. As recent studies have shown, most successful businesses established by immigrants include a transnational component.78 This novel perspective suggests that the opposition between assimilation and ethnic resilience that has dominated scholarly debates in the past may be overdone. Under certain conditions ethnic resilience in the first and second generations can lead to successful assimilation. When this happens, the likely consequence is the loss of salience of ethnic markers in future generations, precisely the opposite outcome of reactive ethnicity among permanently subordinate minorities. It will be clear, then, that transnationalism and its conceptual cousin, selective acculturation, are not the same as multiculturalism if the latter is understood as the preservation of culturally distinct and institutionally complete communities across generations. On the contrary, transnationalism offers a viable bridge and platform for successful integration. The fate of immigrant groups that have been unable to make use of the resources offered by this path stands in stark contrast, showing the dangers of premature assimilation without the means for educational and economic advancement. In the following chapters we elaborate on these theoretical considerations by showing how they apply to the condition of different immigrant minorities and their descendants in today’s America.

Chapter 3

Moving Patterns of Immigrant Settlement and Spatial Mobility

In the aftermath of World War I the National Research Council initiated a series of “scientific studies of the causes and effects of migration.” One of these investigations, published in 1926 as Migration and Business Cycles, focused on “the shortage and surplus of labor in the United States in its relation to immigration and emigration.” Its author, the economist Harry Jerome, concluded that the inflow of population was “on the whole dominated by conditions in the United States. The ‘pull’ is stronger than the ‘push’.”1 By that time, the gradual integration of the world economy had advanced sufficiently to make many Europeans aware of economic opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic, so deliberate recruitment became unnecessary. The question remains, however, about the destination of these flows. Labor economists frequently write as if immigrants have perfect information about labor-market conditions in the receiving country and adjust their locational decisions accordingly. The reality is very different because a number of factors other than wage differentials impinge on the actual destination of migrant flows. This chapter examines the locational distribution of immigrant groups with an emphasis both on diversity among nationalities and types of migration and on the unequal distribution of the foreign-born population in space. Although our main interest is on contemporary trends, we must go back in time, because the roots of the locational patterns of immigrants arriving today are often found in events that took place earlier in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 80

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The Pioneers The settlement decisions of contemporary immigrants are decisively affected by the ethnic concentrations established by their compatriots in the past. Because earlier flows consisted overwhelmingly of physical laborers, it is important to examine first how these foreign workingclass communities came to settle where they did. A first significant factor was geographical propinquity. It is not by chance that the bulk of European immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century settled along the mid- and north-Atlantic seaboard while their Asian counterparts settled in California and other Pacific states. It is also not surprising that the bulk of early Mexican immigration concentrated in the Southwest, especially along the border. For immigrant workers, proximity to the homeland has two important economic consequences: first, for those who come on their own, it reduces the costs of the journey; second, for everyone, it reduces the costs of return, which most labor migrants plan to undertake at some point. In those cases where migration occurs along a land border, as with Mexicans, proximity to the sending area also provides a familiar physical and climatic environment. The impact of propinquity is most vividly reflected in those immigrant communities established right by the waterside, at points of debarkation in port cities of both coasts. The Little Italys huddled close to the water in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities offer living testimony of a type of immigration that, having reached U.S. shores, would go no farther.2 This is not the whole story, however, because many other groups pushed inland. For foreign laborers, the decisive factor for the latter type of settlement was recruitment either in the home country or at ports of entry. The concentration of some central and eastern European peoples in the Midwest reflects the development of heavy industry in this area more than a century ago—​first steel and later auto making. This concentration was coupled with the minimal skills required for most new industrial jobs, which made recruiting cheap immigrant labor attractive to employers. Consequences of this recruitment pattern have long endured. While only 4 percent of the foreign-born population of the United States in 2000 lived in Ohio, it was the home state of 15 percent of the nation’s Croatians, 14 percent of the Hungarians, 15 percent of the Serbs, 22 percent of the Slovaks, and 45 percent of the Slovenians, whose ancestors had come a century earlier.3

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Similarly, during the nineteenth century, labor recruitment by the Hudson and other canal companies moved contingents of Irish and Italian workers inland along the routes followed by canal construction. In the West, Chinese coolie workers also moved inland after mass recruitment by the railway companies.4 The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific also recruited Mexicans, trainloads of whom were dispatched from El Paso and other border cities. At about the same time, Finnish workers made their appearance in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Michigan Peninsula—​hired by the copper mine and timber companies.5 Not every group arriving during the nineteenth century consisted exclusively of wageworkers, however. Those coming before the Civil War in particular were often able to take advantage of cheap land in the West to go into business for themselves. This was especially the case for German settlers, who had been arriving since before the Revolutionary War. Germans were able to push inland toward the sparsely settled lands of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and beyond. In their wake the landscape of the Midwest became dotted with rural farm enclaves in which the settlers’ language and customs dominated.6 The influence of what were, in fact, the entrepreneurial migrations of its day have also lasted to the present. Descendants of the original settlers and those coming later in the nineteenth century represent today the paramount ethnic concentrations throughout the Midwest. In 2009, of the sixty-six million people who resided in the Midwest (one in five Americans), twenty million reported a primary German ancestry (two of every five German Americans in the country). In the states of Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa, between 35 and 45 percent of the population reported German ancestry in 2009, figures that quintuple those corresponding to the English.7 German Americans have been by far the dominant ethnic group in cities like Milwaukee (45 percent), Cincinnati (39 percent), St. Louis (36 percent), and Indianapolis (27 percent).8 Early Scandinavian and Czech immigrants followed a similar pattern of independent Midwest farm settlement. Scandinavian enclaves in the northern midwestern region, especially in Minnesota and the Dakotas, attracted immigrants from the same nationalities throughout the twentieth century. The 2000 census found that the descendants of Norwegian immigrants represented the second-largest ancestry group in North Dakota (where more than 30 percent of the population was of Norwegian ancestry), Minnesota (more than 17 percent), and South

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Dakota (more than 15 percent). Of the approximately nine million persons of Norwegian and Swedish ancestry in the United States in 2009, 45 percent resided in midwestern states—​as did a similar proportion of those of Finnish ancestry and a third of Danish Americans.9 Czech farming made its appearance in Wisconsin around the mid-1800s; from Racine and earlier farming enclaves Czechs pushed inland toward the Nebraska frontier and then to Oklahoma and Texas. As late as 1990, Czech ancestry still accounted for about 25 percent of the populations of several rural counties in these states.10 Remarkably, of the 1.6 million persons who reported a primary Czech ancestry in 2009, 45 percent remained concentrated in the Midwest.11 In the Far West, Japanese immigrants attempted to follow the same path by buying land and engaging in independent farming during the early 1900s. In their case, however, land was neither plentiful nor empty. As we saw in chapter 1, Japanese farmers faced the united opposition of domestic growers, who had welcomed their arrival as laborers but resisted violently their shift into self-employment.12 As a consequence of these restrictions, and of a low level of immigration after the liberalization of U.S. laws in 1965, Japanese Americans, although a highly successful group, have declined from a high of 850,000 in 1990 to slightly more than 750,000 in 2010 (another half a million, however, report mixed Japanese ethnicity, reflecting high levels of intermarriage). With the notable exception of Hawaii, the Japanese today represent a minuscule proportion of the population of the states where they concentrate.13 Pioneer migrants—​whether settling close to places of arrival, following labor recruiters inland, or charting an independent course through farming and urban trade in different locations—​had a decisive influence on later migrants. Once a group settled in a certain place, the destination of later cohorts from the same country often became a foregone conclusion. Migration is a network-driven process, and the operation of kin and friendship ties is nowhere more effective than in guiding new arrivals toward preexisting ethnic communities. This process may continue indefinitely and accounts for the high concentration of most foreign groups in certain regions of the country and their near absence from others.

Following in the Footsteps At the time of the Mexican Revolution, in the early 1900s, large contingents of Mexican refugees migrated northward to find employment

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in the slaughterhouses of Chicago, the breweries of Milwaukee, and the steel mills of Gary, Indiana. Communities established then continue to serve as magnets for Mexican migrants today. Despite the distance and the different climatic conditions, remote villages in the interior of Mexico continued sending their sons, year after year, for a stint of work in the cities of the Midwest.14 The same pattern is found in the East, where small Jamaican, Dominican, and Haitian colonies in New York City provided the nucleus for mass labor migration in recent decades. Again, distance and a colder climate were no obstacle for these Caribbean migrants to follow their predecessors. Out West, most contemporary Asian and Pacific Islander migrations, such as the Japanese and the Filipinos, continue to be overwhelmingly concentrated in their areas of traditional settlement.15 The influence of preexisting networks on locational patterns is decisive among contemporary labor migrants because they are not guided by recruiting agents but by spontaneous individual and family decisions, which are usually based on the presence in certain places of kin or friends who can provide shelter and assistance. Exceptions to this pattern are found most often among other types of immigrants. Professionals, such as physicians, engineers, and scientists, tend to rely less on the assistance of preexisting ethnic communities than on their own skills and qualifications. They often come only after securing job offers from U.S. employers and tend to be more dispersed throughout the country than physical-labor migrants. Although no foreign group is formed exclusively by professionals and their families, a few—​such as recent Indian immigrants—​approximate this pattern and provide examples of its characteristic dispersion.16 Entrepreneurial minorities tend to settle in large urban areas that provide proximity to markets and sources of labor. Like working-class migrants, foreign entrepreneurs are often found in the areas of principal ethnic concentration because of the cheap labor, protected markets, and access to credit that they make available. This is the case, for example, of Koreans, concentrated in Los Angeles; Chinese entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York; and Cubans in Miami. However, other business-minded immigrants choose to move away from areas of ethnic concentration to pursue economic opportunity. The latter are commonly found in the role of intermediary merchants and lenders to domestic minorities. Koreans and Chinese in several East Coast cities and Cubans in Puerto Rico provide contemporary examples.17 Finally, the early locational patterns of political refugees and seekers

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of political asylum are often decided for them by government authorities and private resettlement agencies. In the past the goal of official resettlement programs was to disperse refugee groups away from their points of arrival to facilitate their cultural assimilation and attenuate the economic burden they are supposed to represent for receiving areas. This official decision accounts for the multiplicity of locations in which groups such as the Cubans and the Vietnamese are found today, as well as more recent arrivals from Somalia, Iraq, and Burma. Gradually, however, refugees tend to trek back toward areas that are closer to their homeland and more compatible in terms of climate and culture. The presence of ethnic communities of the same nationality or a related one has frequently played a decisive role in promoting these secondary migrations. The rapid growth of the Cuban population in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and of the Vietnamese population in Orange County and San Jose, California, can be traced directly to this process. By 1979, on the eve of the Mariel boat lift, half of the Cuban-origin population of the United States was found in the Miami metropolitan area, a result primarily of return migration by refugees originally resettled elsewhere; by 2000 the national share of Cuban Americans in the Miami area had grown to 60 percent, before declining proportionately in 2010 to about half of their growing national total of 1.8 million. Similarly, by 1990 Orange County alone had more Vietnamese refugees than any state except California itself, with its hub in the communities of Santa Ana and Westminster (“Little Saigon”), where the Nguyens outnumbered the Smiths two to one among Orange County home buyers; this locale was followed by San Jose in Northern California. By 2000 Orange County and San Jose accounted for one-fifth of all Vietnamese in the country; by 2010, of the 1,550,000 Vietnamese counted by the census, their proportion in the Orange County and San Jose areas remained unchanged, at 20 percent. Calle Ocho (S.W. 8th Street) in Miami is the heart of Little Havana; Bolsa Avenue in Westminster has been called the Vietnamese capital of America.18 These various causal processes have led to a settlement pattern among recent immigrants to the United States that combines two apparently contradictory outcomes: concentration, because a few states and metropolitan areas receive a disproportionate number of the newcomers, and diffusion, because immigrants are found in every state of the Union and because different immigrant types vary significantly in their locational decisions.

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Changing Contemporary Settlement Patterns: A Map of Immigrant America In 1910, at the peak of the era of mass European migration, the census counted a foreign-born population of 10.6 million, or 14.7 percent of the national total. At that time the bulk of the immigrant population (62 percent) was concentrated in seven northern states, though only 39 percent of the U.S. population lived there: New York (21 percent), Pennsylvania (10 percent), Illinois (9 percent), Massachusetts (8 percent), New Jersey (5 percent), and Ohio and Michigan (4 percent each). In 2010, a century later, 67 percent of the foreign-born population of forty million was concentrated in just six states, though again only 39 percent of the U.S. population lived in those states: California (25 percent), New York (11 percent), Texas (10 percent), Florida (9 percent), New Jersey (5 percent), and Illinois (4 percent). Of those, three states remained from a century earlier as main areas of immigrant concentration, but their combined share of immigrants had decreased from 35 percent to 20 percent: New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. The rapid growth of southern and western states as new immigrant destinations, notably California—​which by 1990 accounted by itself for one-third of the foreign-born total but only for 10 percent of the native-born population—​Texas, and Florida, reflects the postwar economic and demographic shifts to the country’s Sun Belt. This changing geography of immigrant settlement has accompanied, in turn, the change in the national origins of U.S.-bound immigration in recent decades. Figures 4 and 5 provide a pair of maps of immigrant settlement by county in the contiguous forty-eight states at the beginning of the twentyfirst century (based on the last decennial census that collected data on the foreign-born population for each county). The first map shows the absolute number of the foreign-born population residing in each county; the second shows the relative proportion of the foreign-born as a percentage of each county’s total population. While vast expanses of the country, particularly in the heartland, contained relatively few immigrants in absolute or relative terms as of 2000, other regions exhibited extraordinary concentrations, especially along the coasts. Large concentrations were apparent throughout much of the entire state of California, most notably along its southern corridor from Los Angeles to San Diego, as well as in South Florida, the northeast coastal corridor extending from Washington, D.C., through Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston, and the greater ­metropolitan areas of Chicago,

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Detroit, Houston, Dallas–​Fort Worth, Phoenix, Atlanta, Minneapolis–​ St. Paul, and Seattle. High relative proportions were especially evident in less-populated counties along the Mexican border from Texas to California and, more recently, in some nontraditional areas of immigrant settlement, notably in North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast, and in Colorado and Nevada in the Southwest. This evolving map of immigrant America is updated in figure 6, which displays the proportion of the foreign-born in the fifty states as of 2010 and their number in principal metropolitan areas of immigrant concentration. The twin processes of continuing concentration and diversification in immigrant settlement patterns in recent decades are detailed in table 9. It documents the growing size of the immigrant population in the top six states from 1990 to 2010 but also the top ten states ranked by the rate of growth in their foreign-born populations. Despite continuing immigrant population growth in the former, it is the extraordinarily rapid growth of the latter that has called attention to the emergence of “new destinations” in immigrant settlement.19 During these twenty years the U.S. immigrant population doubled from 19.8 million in 1990 to 40 million in 2010. In the top six states the foreign-born population increased from 14.4 million to 25.9 million—​in California alone it grew from 6.5 million in 1990 to 10.2 million in 2010—​but only Texas and Florida exceeded the national growth rate; California and New York grew by slightly more than 50 percent. By contrast, as shown in figure 7, ten states—​all located in the South or in the mountain West—​grew by 280 to 525 percent, led by North Carolina and Georgia, followed by Arkansas, Tennessee, Nevada, South Carolina, Kentucky, Nebraska, Alabama, and Utah. The areas experiencing the fastest growth rates were places that had relatively small immigrant populations prior to the 1990s. While the net increase in the number of immigrants in California during this period (nearly four million) was larger than the total foreign-born population in those ten fastgrowth states combined, the impact of foreigners in regions unused to the incorporation of immigrants produced political reactions by natives at the state and local levels that have shaped the national policy debate, as we will see in chapter 5. To be sure, different nationalities settle in different places. Table 10 documents the concentrations at the state level of the ten largest immigrant groups in 2010. California alone was home to greater than 25 percent of all U.S. immigrants—​a decrease from its 33 percent share in

F igu r e 4. The foreign-born population in the United States by county, 2000. Source: 2000 U.S. census.

0–10,000 10,001–50,000 50,001–100,000 100,001–250,000 250,001–3,500,000

Number of foreign-born

F igu r e 5. The foreign-born in the United States as a percentage of total county population, 2000. Source: 2000 U.S. census.

Percent foreign-born 0.0–4.9 5.0–9.9 10.0–14.9 15.0–19.9 20.0–50.9

ALASKA

Riverside

HAWAII

Houston

Dallas

Atlanta

Washington DC

Miami

4,400,000–5,500,000

1,800,001–2,200,000

Foreign born 700,000–1,250,000 1,250,001–1,800,000

Percent of foreign born Less than 1% 1 to 1.9% 2% to 5% 9% to 10.9% 25.4%

New York

F igu r e 6. States and metropolitan areas of immigrant concentration, 2010: Percentage of the foreign-born population in the fifty states and number of foreign-born in principal metropolitan areas. Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010; and Jeanne Batalova, Migration Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.

Los Angeles San Diego

San Francisco

Chicago

Boston

10

HAWAII

8

9

2

6

1

States with 1.7 million or more immigrants (2010) States (ranked) with 280 percent or higher growth (1990 to 2010)

3

4

7

DC

F igu r e 7. Concentration and diversification, 2010: The six largest states of immigrant concentration and the ten states with the fastest-growing immigrant populations. Sources: American Community Survey, 2010; and Jeanne Batalova, Migration Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.

ALASKA

5

4

1,524,436

952,272

Illinois

43,533

58,600

Alabama

Utah

33

35

41

158,664

87,772

74,638

80,271

115,978

316,593

159,004

73,690

577,273

430,000

1,529,058

1,476,327

2,899,642

2,670,828

3,868,133

8,864,255

31,107,889

N

2000

26

35

37

36

32

19

25

38

10

15

5

6

3

4

2

1

Rank

222,638

168,596

112,178

140,583

218,494

508,458

288,993

131,667

942,959

719,137

1,759,859

1,844,581

4,142,031

3,658,043

4,297,612

10,150,429

39,955,854

N

2010

27

33

38

34

28

16

23

37

8

14

6

5

3

4

2

1

Rank

279.9

287.3

297.8

312.0

337.3

385.0

388.9

429.5

444.7

524.9

84.8

90.8

171.7

120.0

50.7

57.2

102.1

% growth of foreign-born (1990 to 2010)

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, The Foreign-Born Population; U.S. Census Bureau, “Ancestry: 2000”; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey. aStates listed by 1990 ranks.

34,119

28,198

Kentucky

Nebraska

39

23 34

104,828

South Carolina

49,964

42 31

24,867

59,114

Arkansas

Tennessee

Nevada

16

115,077

173,126

North Carolina

21

6

5

Georgia

Top states of immigrant growth

966,610

New Jersey

Texas

3

1,662,601

Florida

1 2

6,458,825

2,851,861

19,767,316

Rank

California

immigrationa

N

New York

Top states of

United States

States

1990

Foreign-born population

Table 9  Top Six States by Size of Foreign-Born Population, 1990, 2000, and 2010; Top Ten States by Percent Growth of the Foreign-Born, 1990 to 2010

1,214,049

1,104,679

1,100,422

El Salvador

Cuba

Korea

Total native-born

100

100

2.1

2.2

2.8

2.8

3.0

3.1

4.5

4.5

4.5

29.3

California

First

California

California

California

New York

California

Florida

California

California

California

California

California

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010. aImmigrants from mainland China only.

39,955,854

269,393,835

Total foreign-born

879,187

1,240,542

Vietnam

830,824

1,601,147

Dominican Republic

1,777,588

Philippines

Chinaa

Guatemala

1,780,322

11,711,103

N

India

Mexico

Country of birth

% of total immigrants

10.1

25.4

31.7

50.1

31.4

76.5

34.8

39.3

30.3

45.6

18.3

36.8

%

Texas

New York

Florida

New Jersey

New York

New Jersey

Texas

Texas

New York

Hawaii

New Jersey

Texas

Second

7.8

10.8

8.4

14.5

9.2

4.5

13.9

12.7

21.3

6.1

11.6

21.2

%

States of principal settlement

Table 10  States of Principal Settlement of the Ten Largest Foreign-Born Groups, 2010

New York

Texas

Texas

Florida

New Jersey

California

New York

Washington

Texas

New York

Texas

Illinois

Third

5.6

10.4

6.8

11.0

7.1

3.4

8.7

3.9

4.5

4.8

9.2

6.1

%

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1990 but still making it the principal state of settlement for eight of the ten largest immigrant nationalities. The state of New York absorbed another 10.8 percent of the nation’s foreign-born, while being home to only 5.6 percent of the native-born. Texas followed, with 10.4 percent of the foreign-born total, compared to 7.8 percent of the native-born. These three states combined to account for nearly half of all immigrants in the country. Another 18 percent of the foreign-born were found in Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey, so 66 percent of all immigrants nationally still resided in the same six states in 2010 (but their overall percentage was down from their 73 percent share in 1990). Within this general picture some immigrant nationalities are far more concentrated than others. Of the ten largest groups in 2010, threefourths of all Cubans were in Florida; half of all Dominicans were in New York, with another 15 percent next door in New Jersey; threefifths of the nearly twelve million Mexican immigrants remained in California and Texas, despite growing geographic diversification since the mid-1990s; and between 30 and 50 percent of Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans were also in California. By comparison, and for reasons noted earlier, Indian immigrants were the most dispersed, with 18 percent found in California, 12 percent in New Jersey, and 9 percent in Texas. The top six states have been the primary destination states for legal immigrants in every year since 1971. In fiscal 2011, two-thirds of the 1,062,040 foreign-born persons admitted for legal permanent residency went to the same half a dozen states in approximately the same proportions: California (20 percent), New York (14 percent), Florida (10 percent), Texas (9 percent), New Jersey (5 percent), and Illinois (4 percent). At the other extreme no state received fewer than four hundred immigrants, the least favored being Montana (511) and Wyoming (420).20

Locational Decisions of Immigrant Groups An alternative portrait of the settlement process emerges when we examine locational decisions of the major immigrant groups themselves rather than major areas of destination. Although there is overlap between both methods of arranging the data, the two vary because national contingents differ in their levels of concentration and their propensity to locate in metropolitan areas. Table 11 presents the relevant information for 2011. Six of the ten largest immigrant groups obtaining their legal permanent resident status in that year—​Mexicans,

87,016

69,013

57,011

46,109

36,452

34,157

22,860

18,667

11,092

Chinesea

Indian

Filipino

Dominican

Cuban

Vietnameseb

Korean

Salvadoran

Guatemalan

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Miami

New York

Los Angeles

New York

New York

Los Angeles

Metropolitan area

23.5

23.0

23.8

16.9

68.9

62.0

15.2

16.3

32.6

11.5

%

Most common destination

37.2

46.8

43.2

31.8

77.4

74.0

29.8

28.1

52.8

22.2

% at top three destinations

19.5

11.8

15.8

18.7

10.7

8.5

21.0

17.8

13.1

29.2

% at other metropolitan destinations

Source: U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2011, supplemental table 2. aImmigrants from China, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan. bLos Angeles metropolitan (core-based statistical) area includes Orange County.

143,466

N

Mexican

Nationality

residency status in fiscal year 2011)

1.9

0.7

2.3

0.4

0.2

0.9

4.1

0.6

0.9

2.6

% at nonmetropolitan destinations

1.0

1.8

2.2

3.2

3.4

4.3

5.4

6.5

8.2

13.5

% of total immigration

Table 11  Metropolitan Destinations of the Ten Largest New Legal Immigrant Groups, 2011 (Persons admitted to legal permanent

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Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans—​shared a preferred place of destination: Los Angeles. New York was the first choice of three other groups: immigrants from mainland China, India, and the Dominican Republic. More than two-thirds of the last group—​ the Cubans—​overwhelmingly preferred Miami. The locational decisions of all major contemporary inflows reflect both historical patterns of settlement and types of contemporary immigrants. The most concentrated and least rural are Cubans, 69 percent of whom settled in Miami. In 2011, as in prior years, recorded immigration from Cuba did not correspond to actual arrivals but was formed instead by former political refugees who adjusted their legal status. As refugees, Cubans were far more dispersed following the deliberate resettlement policy of government agencies. The high concentration of Cubans as “immigrants” thus reflects voluntary individual decisions to migrate back to South Florida. As a result the majority of the city of Miami’s population is today of Cuban origin, and about two-thirds of the metropolitan population of Miami-Dade County is now classified as Hispanic or Latino. Undoubtedly, geography and climate have played a role in the process, but more important seems to have been the business and employment opportunities made available by the emergence of an ethnic-enclave economy in the area.21 Next in concentration are Dominicans, a group whose rapid growth has taken place during the last four decades and is composed primarily of industrial workers and urban laborers. Employer recruitment and the existence of an older Dominican colony in New York City appear to have been the decisive factors channeling Dominican migration toward the Northeast.22 After New York City, Boston and Miami came in a distant second and third as preferred places among new Dominican immigrants. As we have already noted, one of the most spatially dispersed is Indian immigrants—​the group with the highest proportion of university graduates and professionals, whose numbers in the United States have more than tripled since the 1990s. The Indian pattern of settlement corresponds to that expected from professional immigrants. In 2002 less than 10 percent had settled in their preferred destination (San Jose), reflecting the occupational composition of Indian immigration since it is tied to employment in the high-tech industries of Silicon Valley; by 2011 the top choice for Indians was New York City (preferred by 16 percent of those receiving their green cards that year), followed by Chicago and then San Jose.

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The Chinese exhibit both a clear preference for New York City and a moderately high level of concentration in their next major places of destination—​Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Like Indians, a high proportion of recent Chinese immigrants possess university degrees; and, like Cubans, they often prefer areas where an ethnicenclave economy already exists. In this case, traditional Chinatowns and emerging ones in suburban areas seem to provide the lure for the entrepreneurially inclined, as well as those seeking wage work in ethnic firms.23 The largest national contingents are relatively similar in their levels of metropolitan concentration, although this convergence is not the outcome of the same historical process. The largest group by far—​ Mexicans—​is formed overwhelmingly by workers and their families. The proportion of professionals and managers among occupationally active Mexican immigrants remained the lowest among all major immigrant groups in 2010, as it had been in prior years; the percentage of urban workers and farm laborers was, however, the highest. Originally a rural-bound flow, Mexican immigration has become mostly urban in recent years. The considerable dispersion of this group can be attributed to its size and its long-standing character as a source of wage labor throughout the Southwest and Midwest and, since the 1990s, to its growing extension to new areas of settlement in the South and Northeast.24 Filipinos represent another large group with a long history of settlement in the United States. Early arrivals, in particular those going to Hawaii, were mostly rural workers.25 Unlike Mexicans, however, contemporary Filipino immigrants are a diverse group, combining family reunification with a sizable contingent of new professionals, especially nurses. A tradition of serving as subordinate personnel in the U.S. Navy accounts for sizable Filipino concentrations in Pacific fleet ports, in particular San Diego. By 2011, Filipinos who obtained legal permanent residency were settling primarily in Los Angeles, followed by New York—​a new but growing destination—​and then by San Francisco and San Diego. Koreans are an entrepreneurial group of more recent vintage, with a sizable number of professionals. Their main destination remains Los Angeles, where an ethnic-enclave economy grew rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s. Koreans have also become prominent in produce retailing and other intermediary small businesses in East Coast cities. New York and Washington, D.C., came next to Los Angeles as their

98  |  Moving

places of destination in 2011; they were also the single largest foreign group arriving in large mid-Atlantic cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore.26 Like Cubans, the Vietnamese are not newly arrived immigrants but mostly former refugees who have adjusted their legal status. The influence of government resettlement programs in the spatial distribution of refugee groups can be seen clearly in this instance. About 17 percent of 2011 Vietnamese immigrants planned to settle in the Orange County area, their preferred location. Earlier evidence had suggested that the Vietnamese, like the Cubans in the past, began leaving areas of initial settlement and concentrating in other cities, primarily in California but also in the Houston and Dallas areas in Texas. As early as 1993, the proportion of Vietnamese settling in Orange County had reached 18 percent, with adjacent Los Angeles and San Diego absorbing an additional sizable share of these former refugees.27 By 2011 the share of new Vietnamese immigrants who chose Orange County remained at about the same level, with San Jose and San Diego accounting for 11 percent, Houston and Dallas for another 11 percent. In general, however, refugee groups that are sponsored and resettled initially through official programs tend to exhibit higher levels of spatial dispersion at the start of their American lives than subsequently. This pattern is illustrated in table 12, which presents data on preferred areas of residence of the five largest refugee groups admitted in 1987, 1993, 2001, and 2010. All three Southeast Asian nationalities, generally resettled through officially sponsored programs, chose California as their preferred destination, but much smaller fractions were initially settled there. Over time, however, family sponsorships led to increasing concentrations in their preferred locales. In 1987 only 6 percent of Hmong refugees from Laos were resettled in Fresno, but by 1993 the proportion going to Fresno had quadrupled to 25 percent. The proportion of Iranians settling in Los Angeles increased by 10 percent between 1987 and 1993. Like immigrants of the same nationality, Cuban “refugees” in 1987 were not new arrivals but mostly individuals who had come during the Mariel boat lift and then adjusted their earlier “entrant” status. After the initial resettlement period, Mariel refugees were free to select their place of residence. Like other Cubans, they gravitated heavily toward South Florida. As table 12 shows, 78.5 percent of all 1987 Cuban refugees and 76.5 percent of all 1993 Cuban refugees settled in Miami, as did 66 percent of all Cubans admitted in 2001.

Table 12  Metropolitan Destinations of the Five Major Refugee Groups Admitted in 1987, 1993, 2001, and 2010 Nationality

N

Most common destination

%

Second most common destination

%

1987 Cuban

26,952

Miami, FL

78.5 New York, NY

5.9

Vietnamese

20,617

Orange County, CA

9.2 Los Angeles, CA

7.4

Cambodian

12,206

Stockton, CA

9.3 Los Angeles, CA

6.0

Laotian

6,560

Minneapolis– St. Paul, MN

12.1 Fresno, CA

6.4

Iranian

5,559

Los Angeles, CA

40.3 New York, NY

5.8

Soviet Union

45,900

New York, NY

24.5 Los Angeles, CA

Vietnamese

30,249

Orange County, CA

17.9 San Jose, CA

Cuban

11,603

Miami, FL

76.5 Jersey City, NJ

3.7

Laotian

6,547

Fresno, CA

24.6 Minneapolis– St. Paul, MN

9.4

Iranian

3,875

Los Angeles, CA

60.9 New York, NY

6.2

1993 8.7 10.3

2001 Former Yugoslaviaa

29,830

Chicago, IL

8.8 St. Louis, MO-IL

Cuban

22,687

Miami, FL

66.0 Tampa, FL

Former Soviet Unionb

19,057

New York, NY

15.8 Sacramento, CA

Vietnamese

10,351

Orange County, CA

Iraqi

3,060

Detroit, MI

5.0 3.6 13.5

7.0 San Jose, CA

6.8

19.4 San Diego, CA

12.2

2010 Iraqi

18,016

Southfield, MI

4.3 Phoenix, AZ

3.5

Burmese

16,693

Indianapolis, IN

4.5 Phoenix, AZ

3.7

Bhutanese

12,363

Denver, CO

3.6 Erie, PA

3.1

Somalian

4,884

Columbus, OH

5.8 Minneapolis, MI

4.4

Cuban

4,818

Miami, FL

23.3 Hialeah, FL

9.6

Sources: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1987 Statistical Yearbook, table 40; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1993 Statistical Yearbook, table 37; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 2001 Statistical Yearbook, table 33; U.S. State Department, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), country reports, 2011. aIncludes migrants from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. bIncludes migrants from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and other former Soviet Union states.

100  |  Moving

As we saw in chapter 1, geopolitical events since the early 1990s changed the composition of refugees admitted into the United States. In the 1990s the flows of Cambodians and Laotians slowed to a trickle, while new waves of refugees were ushered in from the successor republics of the former Soviet Union. They were joined by Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Iraqis, and Somalis coming as refugees in the wake of American interventions in their respective countries. For these newer arrivals a pattern of dispersal to new destinations, similar to that experienced by earlier refugee groups, was the norm. In 2001 the two most common destinations for newly admitted refugees from the former Yugoslavia were Chicago (9 percent) and St. Louis (5 percent); for those from the former USSR it was New York (16 percent) and Sacramento (13 percent); and for Iraqis Detroit (19 percent) and San Diego (12 percent). The 2001 figures for Iraqis were for refugees admitted in the fiscal year ending on September 30; virtually all had been admitted before the attacks of September 11, after which their numbers plummeted—​as did refugee admissions generally—​all the more after the United States went to war against Iraq in March 2003. Not until 2008 did refugee admissions from Iraq increase substantially, and by 2010 they were the largest refugee group admitted. New refugees from Burma and Bhutan followed in number of admissions, being resettled primarily in new destinations such as Indianapolis, Phoenix, Columbus (Ohio), and Erie (Pennsylvania). If history is any guide, these groups likely will subsequently gravitate toward locations selected for reasons of history or propinquity, thereby increasing their respective levels of concentration.

Preferred Places Immigration to the United States is today an urban phenomenon, concentrated in the largest cities. In 2010 less than 5 percent of legal immigrants went to live in nonurban areas; 38 percent settled in just five metropolitan locations (New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and Houston), and 85 percent resided in the one hundred largest metros. In particular, recent years have seen the gradual end of what was a significant component of pre–​World War I immigration: rural-bound groups coming to settle empty lands or work as farm laborers. This trend is probably less marked among undocumented immigrants, many of whom continue working in agriculture, from California’s Central Valley to dairy farms in upstate New York. There are no reliable figures on the size and occupational distribution of the undocu-

Moving  |  101

mented population, but a series of studies conducted among returning immigrants in their places of origin indicates both a continuing rural presence and an increasing urban concentration. Many undocumented immigrants apparently begin as rural workers but gradually drift into the cities, attracted by higher wages and better working conditions.28 As we saw in chapter 1, there is a close interaction between legal and illegal immigrants from the same countries. A large proportion of legal migration from countries like Mexico and the Dominican Republic is composed of formerly undocumented immigrants who managed to legalize their situation. Hence, the spatial distribution of the recorded component of these inflows gives us a partial glimpse of what takes place underground.29 The bias of contemporary immigration toward a few metropolitan places is not a phenomenon of recent years but one that has occurred regularly during the last several decades. Year after year, with remarkable regularity, the same cities emerge as preferred sites of destination for the total inflow and its major national components. Table 13 illustrates this trend with data for selected years, beginning in 1967. During the subsequent forty-five years, approximately one-fourth to one-third of total immigration concentrated in the three principal areas of destination. Until the 1990s New York remained always the preferred site, while the next two places alternated among Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. The single most significant change during the period was the emergence of Los Angeles as the most preferred destination of immigrants overall by the turn of the century; but by 2011 New York had regained its primacy. Table 13 presents trends for the four major nationalities for which data are available during the entire period. Mexicans went from 12 percent of total immigration in 1967 to more than 20 percent in 2002, all the while increasing their absolute numbers from some forty thousand to more than two hundred thousand per year, before reducing their numbers after 2006 and their share to 13.5 percent of total immigration by 2011. Dominicans maintained roughly the same proportion of total immigration throughout these years, peaking in 1993 and decreasing through 2002 before peaking again in 2011. Filipino immigration experienced a significant absolute increase between 1967 and 1987 and then stabilized at about fifty thousand immigrants per year through 2011. Cuban immigrants—​mostly adjusted former refugees—​declined significantly until the mid-1980s and then increased again to about 5 percent of total immigration in 1987. This quantum jump is an outgrowth of the

Cuban

33,587

28,272

36,452

1997

2002

2011

28,916

13,666

1987

1993

33,321

25,955

1967

219,380

143,446

2002

2011

1975

126,561

146,865

1993

1997

62,205

72,351

1975

1987

42,371

1967

Mexican

N

Year

Nationality

3.4

2.7

4.2

1.5

4.8

6.7

9.2

13.5

20.6

18.4

14.0

12.0

16.1

11.7

% of total legal immigration

77.4

71.3

78.8

81.5

86.0

57.9

59.0

22.2

27.0

22.5

31.4

33.0

22.7

19.6

% in top three destinations

Miami

Miami

Miami

Miami

Miami

Miami

Miami

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

First

Tampa

Tampa

Tampa

Jersey City

New York

New York

New York

Houston

Riverside

Chicago

Chicago

El Paso

Chicago

Chicago

Second

Most common destinations

New York

Jersey City

Palm Beach

Tampa

Tampa

San Juan

San Juan

Dallas

San Diego

Houston

Houston

San Diego

El Paso

El Paso

Third

Table 13  Destinations of Major Immigrant Nationalities Obtaining Legal Permanent Residence in Selected Years

46,109

1,062,040

798,378

1,063,732

1997

2002

2011

601,516

904,292

1987

1993

361,972

386,194

1967

51,308

57,011

2002

2011

1975

53,457

49,117

1993

1997

31,751

50,060

1975

1987

10,865

2011

1967

27,053

22,604

1997

2002

24,858

45,420

1987

1993

11,514

14,066

1967

1975

3.2

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

5.4

4.8

6.2

7.0

8.3

8.2

3.0

4.3

2.1

3.4

5.0

4.1

3.6

90.6

32.2

21.5

27.0

30.9

33.2

28.2

26.1

29.8

20.9

24.8

26.0

30.0

20.1

25.6

74.0

49.8

65.6

71.1

76.0

84.7

New York

New York

Los Angeles

New York

New York

New York

New York

New York

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

San Francisco

San Francisco

New York

New York

New York

New York

New York

New York

San Juan

Miami

Los Angeles

New York

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Miami

New York

San Diego

Honolulu

New York

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Honolulu

Miami

Chicago

Miami

Chicago

Miami

Chicago

Chicago

San Francisco

Chicago

San Diego

San Diego

San Diego

Honolulu

New York

Miami

Boston

Boston

Boston

San Juan

Boston

Bergen-Passaic

Jersey City

Bergen-Passaica

San Juan

San Juan

San Juan

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States (1968, 1976, 1988, 1994, 1998); and U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (2003, 2012). aSan Juan is not listed after 2002 in the OIS statistical yearbook.

 

Totals

Filipino

Dominican

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Mariel exodus, which also accounts for an extraordinary rise in spatial concentration. More than 70 percent of recent Cuban immigrants cluster in just three cities, with the overwhelming majority going to Miami. As seen previously, Dominicans come close to Cubans in level of concentration, although their strong preference for New York has declined in recent years. Filipinos and Mexicans are far more dispersed, yet, with some exceptions, their preferred areas of destination remain the same. Los Angeles consolidated its place during this period as the major area of settlement for both groups, and in the 1980s and 1990s San Diego surged ahead to third place for Mexicans and second place for Filipinos, replacing more traditional destinations. By 2011, however, after Los Angeles, Mexicans preferred Houston and Dallas; New York and San Francisco occupied the second and third settlement choices for Filipinos. Reasons for the spatial concentration of immigrant flows, the strong urban bias of recent ones, and the consistency of their destinations over time are all linked to the characteristic economics of immigration. Like native youths, newly arrived immigrants are newcomers to the labor market who tend to search for immediately available opportunities. Regardless of their qualifications and experience, recent immigrants generally enter at the bottom of their respective occupational ladders. Thus, foreign physical laborers are channeled toward the lowest-paying and most arduous jobs; immigrant professionals—​such as engineers, programmers, physicians, and nurses—​also must accept less desirable entry jobs within their professions and even outside of them.30 Last, entrepreneurs also start small, with shops catering to their own community or in riskier “intermediary” ventures in the inner city. In the absence of deliberate recruitment or other ad hoc factors, entry jobs at the bottom of the respective ladders are more easily accessible in large urban agglomerations, especially in those experiencing rapid economic growth. Once immigrants from a particular nationality “discover” the existence of such opportunities, migration becomes self-perpetuating through the operation of ethnic networks. It is thus not surprising that the principal concentrations of the largest immigrant groups at present are found in Los Angeles, a large metropolitan area that has experienced sustained economic expansion in recent decades. Nor is it surprising that Cubans concentrate in Miami, another fast-growing city that has become the center of U.S. trade with Latin America. Washington, D.C., is also an attractive area of destination for entrepreneurially oriented groups because of the presence of a large inner-city minority population, along with a sizable segment of well-paid government workers.

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Less obvious are the forces leading to the continuation of New York–​ bound immigration, given the industrial decline of the area in recent history. Between 1980 and 1990 the most affected sector in New York was manufacturing, where employment decreased by almost one-third. New York’s industrial decline raises the question of why immigrants persist in going there instead of following manufacturing jobs to their new locations in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, or Texas. One reason is that, despite declines in both population and employment, New York continues to be the nation’s largest urban agglomeration. Another is that large, established ethnic communities continue to serve as a magnet for new immigrants from their home countries. More important, however, amid industrial decline there has been significant economic growth spurred by other sectors, including services and construction. From 1977 to 1987 close to two-thirds of all new jobs created in New York were in the information industries. In 1990 total construction activity was up by more than 25 percent over the 1980 level. Between 1981 and 1990 demand for office space remained strong,31 Manhattan alone gaining more than fifty-three million square feet of new office space. About half of the jobs generated in distributive and producer services in New York City are in the highest-paid earning classes; this is particularly true in the so-called FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) and in transportation, communications, and utilities. However, about 45 percent of employment in producer services and 65 percent in consumer services are formed by jobs paying minimum or near-minimum wages. Approximately 20 percent of employment in construction is also in this low-wage class, a figure that increases significantly among nonunion workers.32 Immigrants have found in these low-paying jobs a continuing and expanding entry point into New York’s labor market; in turn their presence has been a significant element fueling the city’s economic expansion. In addition to producer services, consumer services, and construction, there are indications of renewed industrial activity, but it is developing through subcontracting, sweatshops, home services, and other informal arrangements. Several field studies point to a heavy concentration of immigrants among both owners and workers in this informal industrial economy.33 Thus, recent economic growth in New York has been accompanied by a profound reorganization of production and distribution activities in a number of sectors. As Saskia Sassen has noted: “The large influx of immigrants from low-wage countries over the last fifteen years . . . cannot be understood

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separately from this restructuring. . . . It is the expansion in the supply of low-wage jobs generated by major growth sectors that is one of the key factors in the continuation of the current immigration to New York.”34 Roger Waldinger has argued that an ethnic division of labor in this context allows immigrants to gain entry into lower-level service jobs ahead of native minorities. A hiring queue allocates jobs among ethnic groups in terms of desirability for preferred jobs. Factors such as the shape of the queue (the relative sizes of the groups), resources, ethnic networks, and discrimination determine where a group will fall in the resulting hierarchy.35

Persistent Ethnicity A final question is what locational trends can be expected in the future. In other words, will recent immigrants and their descendants continue to be disproportionately concentrated in a few metropolitan places, or will they gradually disperse throughout the country? Theories of immigrant assimilation have consistently assumed the latter outcome: insofar as immigrants and their children become more like native Americans, their patterns of spatial mobility will become more similar to those of the rest of the population. In this view of things the gradual disappearance of concentrated immigrant communities represents the spatial counterpart of cultural assimilation as foreign groups “melt” into the host society. In some writings the process is described as an elementary version of queuing theory, with older immigrant groups leaving urban ethnic areas to new ones: “There has also been an historical pattern of one group replacing another in neighborhoods, jobs, leadership, schools, and other institutions. Today’s neighborhood changes have been dramatized by such expressions as ‘white flight’ but these patterns existed long before. . . . In nineteenth century neighborhoods where Anglo-Saxons had once fled as the Irish moved in, the middleclass Irish later fled as the Jews and Italians moved in.”36 We showed previously that new immigrants tend to be persistent in their choice of spatial location. This pattern says little, of course, about the long-term preferences of particular groups once they have settled in the country for generations. To explore this question, we must move back in time and examine locational patterns of groups that have been in the United States for longer periods. One study provided initial support for the assimilation hypothesis by reporting a negative correlation between time in the country and spatial concentration as mea-

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sured by the index of dissimilarity (D) from the American population as a whole. For ten European nationalities, most of which were already well represented in the country at the time of independence, the correlation between these two variables is −.72.37 The same study goes on to report, however, that immigrant groups’ initial settlement patterns have had a decisive influence on the ethnic composition of each of the country’s regions. For example, with few exceptions the five largest ancestry groups within each regional division include groups that were among the five largest immigrant contingents already living in the area in 1850, 1900, or 1920. Thus, German and Irish are among the largest ancestry groups in New England, where they were also among the principal immigrant nationalities in each of these earlier years; Norwegians and Swedes were strongly represented in the northern Midwest, just as their ancestors were at the turn of the century.38 What is true of regions is also true of specific nationalities. Descendants of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants, particularly those coming from the Mediterranean and from non-European countries, tend to remain in their original areas of settlement. As we have seen, Mexicans and Filipinos continue to arrive in large numbers and continue to go to the places in which they were concentrated half a century ago. The remaining groups are, however, descendants of immigrants who arrived in the United States mostly before World War II. Despite long residence in the country, they cluster in the same areas as their forebears. Four-fifths of all Portuguese Americans reside at present in only two regions of the country: the Northeast (mainly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island) and the West (mainly in California and Hawaii); most Japanese Americans are found in just the latter two states.39 Within major areas of settlement there has been, of course, outward movement and dispersal, and this pattern has been taken as evidence of full assimilation. The telling fact, however, is that after several generations particular nationalities continue to be associated with specific patches of national territory, giving them their distinct idiosyncrasies and cultural traits. Such stable locations are a far cry from the image of a thoroughly homogenized “melted” population with identical proportions of the same original nationalities found everywhere. There is little reason to believe that the resilience of these ethnic communities will disappear in the future. The American population as a whole is gradually moving away from the Northeast and Midwest toward the South and Southwest. If present trends continue indefi-

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nitely, New England and the mid-Atlantic region will see their combined share of the total population reduced from 21 to just 10 percent, and the southern Midwest and Pacific regions will increase theirs from 24 to 36 percent. Already in 2010, 60 percent of the U.S. population was located in the South and the West, a share that keeps increasing. However, this spatial displacement will not necessarily lead to greater dispersion of ethnic communities. If trends observed since the late 1980s continue, their overall spatial concentration will either persist or will be renewed following the new pioneering displacements observed since the late 1990s. Reasons for this somewhat surprising outcome are threefold. First, ethnic groups concentrated in regions losing population are less likely to leave, so over time their relative proportion increases. Second, when members of an ethnic minority move, they are more likely to go to areas where their own group is already numerous, including those experiencing out-migration. Third, when an ethnic group moves en masse from its traditional area, it does not become necessarily dispersed but often regroups in another region. The outcome of these trends, when projected into the future, is that nationalities such as the Poles will tend to remain heavily concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, Norwegians in the northern Midwest, and Cubans in the Southeast; Jews of mostly Russian origin will tend to abandon the mid-Atlantic region to reconstitute themselves as a major ethnic group in the West.40 An instructive example involves the 130,000 Indochinese refugees who arrived in the United States in 1975. Upon arrival they were sent to four major reception centers, from which they were resettled in 813 separate locations spread throughout all fifty states. Data collected at the reception centers show that less than half of these refugees (47 percent) were sent to the state of their choice. By 1980, however, 45 percent lived in a state other than the one to which they had been sent. Nearly 40 percent had moved to areas of high ethnic concentration in California. Conversely, the proportion that lived in dispersed communities with fewer than five hundred refugees of the same nationality dropped from 65 percent to 40 percent. Secondary migration trends during the 1980s and 1990s continued reinforcing the predominance of a few areas of Indochinese concentration.41 Given these past experiences and the propensity of major contemporary immigrations to remain clustered, there is little reason to expect a dispersal of recent immigrants and their children. Contrary to conventional assimilationist views, the safest prediction is that ethnic com-

Moving  |  109

munities created by present immigration will endure and will become identified with their areas of settlement, giving to the latter, as other immigrants had before them, a distinct cultural flavor and a new “layer” of phenotypical and cultural traits.

Conclusion: The Pros and Cons of Spatial Concentration The question of why ethnic communities tend to stay put in certain parts of the country can be discussed jointly with advantages and disadvantages of this pattern because the two issues are closely intertwined. Overall, the entire process of immigrant settlement is “sticky” because new arrivals tend to move to places where earlier immigrants have become established, and later generations do not tend to wander too far off. Following assimilation theory, it could be argued that this pattern is irrational because economic opportunities, especially for the American-born generations, are often greater elsewhere. Individualistic aspirations should lead to dispersal because upward economic mobility often requires spatial mobility.42 There is, however, an alternative logic. By moving away from places where their own group is numerically strong, individuals risk losing a range of social and moral resources that make for psychological wellbeing as well as for economic gain. A large minority that becomes dispersed risks lacking a significant presence or voice anywhere; in contrast, even a small group, if sufficiently concentrated, can have economic and political influence locally. For members of the immigrant generation, spatial concentration has several positive consequences: preservation of a valued lifestyle, regulation of the pace of acculturation, greater social control over the young, and access to community networks for both moral and economic support. For subsequent generations, preservation of the ethnic community, even if more widely dispersed, can also have significant advantages. Among the entrepreneurially inclined, ethnic ties translate into access to sources of working capital, protected markets, and pools of labor.43 Others also derive advantages from an enduring community. There is strength in numbers, especially at the ballot box, and this fact allows minority groups to assert their presence and their interests in the political process. As chapter 5 will show, politics can also serve as an avenue of individual upward mobility when other paths remain blocked. The ascendance of urban Irish politicians in the late nineteenth century and

110  |  Moving

that of their Italian counterparts later on provide classic examples.44 The highly concentrated Cuban population in South Florida has followed the same path. The question of relative advantages and disadvantages can be turned around, however, and asked from the point of view of mainstream society. Many writers, most loudly Samuel Huntington, have expressed fears of continuing immigration precisely because it leads to growing ethnic concentration, which, they believe, will alter the cultural fabric of the nation. At worst, secessionist movements have been anticipated in those areas where immigrants and their descendants become the majority.45 There is little doubt that the best way to minimize the social and cultural impact of immigration is either to stop it or to disperse new arrivals, but this also minimizes the potential long-term contribution that immigrant communities can make. Throughout the history of the United States, communities created by foreign groups have been a significant force in promoting the growth and economic development of cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, as well as entire regions like the Midwest. Once immigrants have settled and integrated economically, their traditions and folkways have entered local culture. After a while these syncretic products become institutionalized and are then proudly presented as “typical” of the local lore. St. Patrick’s Day parades, German beer fests, Chinese New Year celebrations, Mardi Gras carnivals, Mexican fiestas, and the like are so many manifestations of this process. Without the past and present contributions of immigrant groups, the dynamism and vibrancy of contemporary American culture would have given way to a uniform, gray landscape. But what about separatism? During the first two decades of the century, immigrants came to represent more than one-fifth of the American labor force, and they and their children composed absolute majorities of the country’s urban population. This situation, in which the foreign presence relative to the native population vastly exceeded that found today, did not give rise to any secessionist movement. Instead, immigrants focused their energies on carving an economic niche for themselves; their children learned English and gradually entered native social circles and the local political process. Perhaps the most telling case against nativist fears is that of Mexican Americans in the Southwest. Despite the substantial size of this minority, its proximity to the home country, and the fact that these territories were once Mexico’s, secessionist movements within the Mexican American population have been insignificant.

Moving  |  111

During World War II and the Korean War, Mexican American youths could easily have avoided military service by taking a short ride into Mexico; instead, they contributed tens of thousands of soldiers and battle casualties to the nation’s war effort.46 There are more Mexican Americans who have honorably served this nation in its many wars than words in Huntington’s essay against them.47 Recent illustrations come in the form of the commanding officer of American troops in Iraq in 2003 and early 2004, Lt. General Ricardo Sánchez—​a second-generation Mexican American from a poor immigrant family settled right next to the U.S.-Mexico border—​and in the form of many “green card marines,” such as José Angel Garibay and Jesús Angel González (both twenty-two years old), who were born in Mexico, grew up in poverty in Southern California, and were among the first to die in action in Iraq at the start of the war in 2003.48 Ethnic communities have been much less the Trojan horses portrayed by nativists and xenophobes than effective vehicles for long-term adaptation. As Andrew Greeley stated: “It could be said that the apparent inclination of men . . . to consort with those who, they assume, have the same origins provides diversity in the larger society and also creates substructures that meet many functions the larger society would be hard put to service.” Greeley also notes, however, that “the demons of suspicion and distrust prove very hard to exorcise from interethnic relationships.”49 At a time when such “demons” are again on the rise in the United States, it may be well to recall past experience, where spatial concentrations of immigrants from all over the globe did not lead either to political separatism or to cultural alienation. Within their respective areas of settlement ethnic communities created by immigration have grown and diversified; later generations’ efforts to maintain a distinct culture have been invariably couched within the framework of loyalty to the United States and an overarching American identity. Today’s immigrants, in all likelihood, will follow the same path.

Chapter 4

Making It in America Education, Occupation, and Entrepreneurship

As we noted in chapter 2, a common perception of contemporary immigration is that it is predominantly a low-skill labor flow and that its quality is declining over time. This perception is not only common among the public at large but has been given academic credibility as well. Some time ago, an economist described his version of the trend as follows: “As one moves from one country to another . . . one begins to believe that there is something in common among jobs held by migrants in widely diverse geographic areas and very different historical periods: the jobs tend to be unskilled, generally but not always low-paying and to connote inferior social status; they often involve hard or unpleasant working conditions and considerable insecurity.”1 In testimony before Congress another economist puts forth a different version of this argument: “The labor market quality of immigrant cohorts has changed substantially over time and has declined in the last 20 or 30 years; the kinds of skills and the kinds of people we are getting now are different from the kinds of skills and the quality of immigration we were getting 30 or 40 years ago.”2 Forty years ago there was little immigration, of course, and what there was came under a quota system that effectively barred most nationalities. Statements about an overwhelmingly low-skill flow may be applicable to undocumented immigration but, like those about “declining quality,” neglect the sizable recorded immigration of recent years. The socioeconomic profile of the foreign-born is quite different from what 112

Making It in America  |  113

such statements would make us believe. In 2010 the proportion of college graduates among all immigrants was about the same as in the total U.S. population (28 percent). More significantly, that proportion was higher among immigrant cohorts arriving since the 1990s. In 2010 the proportion of the foreign-born in professional specialty occupations was quite close to the same figure for the native-born (27 percent vs. 33 percent). These facts contradict popular stereotypes about immigration as a Third World “invasion” by the poor and downtrodden, as well as equally biased academic stereotypes about the “low quality” of contemporary immigration. The reality is very different and can only be accounted for by the diversity of types of immigration described in chapter 1. In this chapter we examine in detail the most recent evidence pertaining to the education, labor-force participation, occupational status, and incomes of the foreign-born population. We examine determinants of occupational and income achievement of immigrants and propose an alternative interpretation that contrasts an exclusively individualistic approach with one that takes into account the sociological reality of different contexts of reception experienced by different immigrant minorities.

Immigrants in the American Economy Education Within the general picture of an educationally advantaged population, there is great diversity. If most immigrants are not illiterate, neither are they all college graduates. Variation in educational background highlights again the central theme of great heterogeneity among the foreignborn. In table 14, for example, the British and the Nigerians appear as the most educated immigrants because close to 100 percent are high school graduates; if the indicator is college rather than high school graduation, then Asian Indians take first place. The largest foreign group—​Mexicans—​has the lowest level of schooling according to both indicators. This result is not due to Mexico’s having a singularly bad educational system but to its having a two-thousand-plus-mile border with the United States, allowing peasants and workers of modest origins to come in search of work. Mexico is a midincome country, with indicators of development generally superior to India’s, but an ocean bars the potential migration of tens of millions of impoverished Indian peasants. The Mexican immigrant population

114  |  Making It in America Table 14  Educational Attainment of Principal Immigrant Nationalities in 2010 Country of Birth

Total persons (N)

College High school Immigrated graduatesa (%) graduatesa (%) 2000–2010 (%)

Total native-born

267,410,918

28.2

88.7

Total foreign-born

39,327,516

27.3

68.1

32.4

1,783,907

74.8

92.0

46.8

Above U.S. average India Taiwan

365,243

70.0

95.0

22.7

Nigeria

207,106

61.1

95.7

42.9

Hong Kong

212,053

54.2

86.1

16.2

Pakistan

297,172

53.1

86.5

35.6

1,012,621

52.9

91.2

34.6

Former USSR (15 republics)

344,557

52.8

89.4

25.3

Korea

Iran

1,088,870

51.1

91.3

30.1

Philippines

1,785,404

50.0

91.6

28.7

175,386

50.0

92.7

49.1

Venezuela Japan

338,002

48.3

93.3

39.3

China

1,511,111

44.5

74.1

39.6

808,749

41.5

89.5

24.9

Near U.S. average Canada United Kingdom

667,138

41.4

92.8

21.9

Argentina

169,932

37.1

85.4

40.5

Brazil

339,897

33.9

85.3

52.7 (continued)

of the United States is composed of the peasants and workers who are on this side of the border at any given time, as well as their families.3 The generalization that low-educated immigrants come exclusively from Latin America and the Caribbean is contradicted, however, by the presence of European nationalities in the bottom educational category. Immigrants from Italy and Portugal, in particular, are noteworthy for their low average educational attainment. They represent, for the most part, the remnants of earlier migrant flows. On the opposite side, Brazilians, Colombians, and Peruvians slightly exceed the proportion of college graduates among the native-born, while immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean (Jamaica and Guyana) come close to this figure.

Making It in America  |  115 Table 14  (continued) Country of Birth

Total persons (N)

College High school Immigrated graduatesa (%) graduatesa (%) 2000–2010 (%)

Germany

622,612

32.2

88.4

16.0

Poland

459,691

29.7

86.1

21.0

Colombia

636,329

28.9

83.2

34.5

Peru

413,562

28.7

88.2

38.9

Vietnam

1,215,136

23.2

67.7

20.2

Jamaica

649,925

21.7

81.2

22.3

1,039,550

21.0

72.0

27.6

Cuba Below U.S. average Italy

367,744

17.8

62.4

8.7

Nicaragua

251,297

16.8

71.4

20.1

Haiti

563,850

16.7

73.4

31.2

Ecuador

432,768

15.5

66.5

37.7

Dominican Republic

828,776

13.6

60.8

28.5

Cambodia

156,279

13.3

57.9

18.5

Laos

198,889

12.7

60.3

9.0

Portugal

166,519

10.1

53.6

8.1

Honduras

493,614

8.4

48.7

45.6

Guatemala

798,430

7.3

43.1

46.1

El Salvador

1,166,579

6.7

44.4

32.8

11,658,428

5.3

39.2

33.2

Mexico

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2008–10. aPersons age twenty-five or older.

The portrait of education among the foreign-born presented in table 14 is puzzling and does not lend itself to ready interpretation. The view that the educational level of immigration has been declining over time does not find support in these data, either in terms of general averages or when disaggregated by national origins. The last column of table 14 presents the proportion of immigrants coming from 2000 to 2010 as a rough indicator of their recency of arrival. More than one-third of the best-educated groups arrived in recent years. Notable in this respect is the continuation of highly educated flows from India, Pakistan, and Nigeria, almost half of whom arrived in the last decade. By contrast, higher proportions of those groups with lower levels of education were already in the country before 2000.

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This conclusion is also supported by results in table 15 that indicate higher proportions of college and high school graduates among immigrants who arrived during the last ten years than among the entire foreign-born population. With the exception of Africa, from which the arrival of family dependents of earlier professional immigrants lowered the averages, all other regions registered increases in the proportion of college graduates during the last decade. Notable, in particular, is the proportion of college graduates among Asians that exceeds half of all immigrants from that region during the last decade. The rapid rise in education among Europeans is a direct consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union triggering massive outflows from Russia and the successor Soviet republics. The overall trend is for a sustained improvement of the educational profile of the foreign-born negating any simplistic conclusion about “declining quality.” A full interpretation of educational differences among the foreignborn thus requires consideration of a plurality of factors. There are actually two different levels of explanation: that of differences between nationalities and that of differences among individuals. At the first or aggregate level relevant factors involve the countries of both origin and destination. Concerning the latter, immigration policies and labor demand are the most important explanatory variables. As we saw in chapter 1, prior to 1965, U.S. immigration policy made it difficult for Asians and Africans to come. After that year a new immigration policy opened doors on the basis of two criteria: family reunification and occupational qualifications. Unlike European and certain Latin American nationalities, most Africans and Asians had few families to reunite with in the United States; hence, the only path open to them was that of formal credentials. This situation, plus the physical barriers to low-skilled migration created by oceans and long distances, explains the high average levels of education of most Asian and African immigrants. It also helps account for the slight decline in the last few years among African migrants as the arrival of dependents gained significance. Apart from regular immigration, the U.S. government has also chosen to admit certain groups at particular times for political reasons. As we saw in chapter 1, most of these refugee groups came in the past from communist-dominated countries. At present they come from countries hostile to the United States, such as Iran, and from those marked by extensive political turmoil, such as Bosnia and Somalia. The educational profile of each such nationality depends on the evolution over time of the inflow. Initial waves of refugees tend to come from the higher socio-

Making It in America  |  117 Table 15  Educational Attainment of U.S. Immigrants Age Twenty-Five and Older, 2010, by Region of Birth and Last Decade of Arrival All immigrants (25 and older)

Immigrated 2000–2010

College graduate (%)

High school graduate (%)

Immigrated (%)

College graduate (%)

High school graduate (%)

Total immigrants 25 and older

27.3

72.7

32.4

32.0

69.1

Asia

49.0

84.0

33.4

57.6

86.1

Africa

42.0

88.7

48.6

34.0

85.0

Europe, Canada, Australia

37.0

85.5

23.9

50.9

92.9

Latin America and Caribbean

11.4

52.7

33.2

12.6

52.0

Region of birth

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, merged 2008–10 samples.

economic strata, but as the movement continues, they are increasingly drawn from the popular classes. This decline in schooling tends to be faster when refugees originate in poor countries where the well-educated represent but a small proportion of the total population. In combination these factors explain the low average levels of education of most Southeast Asian refugee groups, the middling average levels of Vietnamese and Cubans, and the high educational profile of Russians and Iranians. During the 1990s the momentous process leading to the demise of communism in Eastern Europe was aided by an American policy that greatly facilitated the arrival of Soviet citizens as refugees. These were positively selected by the American consulates in Russia and other former Soviet republics, explaining the high educational level of this new immigrant cohort. As Asians and Africans before them, Russians had few relatives with whom to reunite in the United States, which accounts for the continuing positive educational selectivity of this inflow.4 Finally, demand for low-wage labor in agriculture and other laborintensive industries has given rise, as seen earlier, to a sustained underground flow. Not surprisingly, this demand has had its greatest impact in less-developed countries near America’s borders rather than in distant or more developed nations. In the past, unauthorized migration of low-

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skilled workers tended to be cyclical. The progressive enforcement of the southern border by the American government did not stop the unauthorized flow but deterred its return to Mexico and other sending countries, as migrants who succeeded in crossing opted to stay on the U.S. side rather than to repeat their harrowing experience.5 This population, which between 2000 and 2010 reached an estimated twelve million, together with the number of migrants from the same origins who managed to legalize their status by one means or another, explains the low average education of immigrants from Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and most of Central America—​countries that have been the primary sources of unauthorized migration in the past. Geopolitical concerns and labor demand in the United States do not solely explain the diversity of educational achievement among the foreign-born. The relative opening of American borders after 1965 may have been a godsend to the highly educated in countries of the Global South, but it was a matter of indifference to others. Similarly, American growers’ demand for low-wage rural workers had a significant impact on Mexico and Central America but a very limited one on Canada. Finally, the relative decline in the numbers of European immigrants after 1965 took place despite the expanded facilities for immigration from these countries through either family reunification or occupational preferences. Even a new program of “diversity” visas, created by the U.S. Congress to restimulate migration from Ireland and other former European sources of migration, had limited success. Clearly, an increasingly prosperous European population did not see changes in American law as a cause for much excitement. The greatest impact of the new preference system was elsewhere, namely, on the less-developed countries of Asia and Africa. Unlike Western Hemisphere nations, for which the doors were never closed, the possibilities to migrate to the United States from Africa or Asia had been absent until this time. The 1965 act changed this situation, and the well-educated in these countries took note. After the demise of communism and the ensuing harsh period of economic adjustment, the same thing happened to educated citizens of the former Soviet Union. During the early 2000s they came to join Asians and Africans among foreign groups with the highest proportion of college graduates. Table 16 lists the fifteen nations contributing the highest proportions of college graduates to the United States in 2010. These countries share three notable characteristics. First, they are all distant, being located (with the exception of France) in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or the former Soviet

Making It in America  |  119

Union. Second, these immigrants are of recent origin, as indicated by the proportion that emigrated after 1990; most came after that date, with proportions ranging from 42 percent for Hong Kong to more than 80 percent for Russia, Belarus, and Nepal. Third, with the exception of France and Australia, all contributors to this highly skilled flow are situated in the Global South. As also shown in table 16, a number of the most important sending countries, including India, Egypt, Nigeria, and Nepal, still suffer from substantial illiteracy rates, and the per capita product (at purchasing power parity) of about a third of them did not exceed US$5,000 in 2011. The table also makes clear that among the sources of collegeeducated immigrant professionals to the United States in the last two decades, India has pride of place. The 1.34 million college graduates among Indian immigrants in 2010 exceeded the sum total of the next highest five nations and more than quintupled, in absolute numbers, the next largest contributor, Taiwan (256,000). The rapid rise of the university-educated Indian population in the United States is a direct consequence of the implementation of the H-1B program, discussed in chapter 1, as well as the regular occupational preferences of the 1965 and 1990 immigration laws. The source country of this vast flow—​a large, distant, and poor nation with a 40 percent illiteracy rate—​can be considered emblematic of the major sources of professional immigration today. It is thus clear that the lure of occupational and economic opportunities in the United States, created by the new preference systems for the highly skilled, had its greatest impact in parts of the world where such opportunities are scarce and where the well-educated have had few other alternatives.6 But the lists of countries in table 16 do not include the very poorest in the world—​places like Haiti, Niger, or Burkina Faso. The reason is that such countries lack the facilities to train professionals at the level of competence required by prospective employers in the advanced world. Instead, nations occupying a step up on the development ladder possess the educational facilities, but not necessarily the capacity, to profitably employ their university graduates. They thus can become recruitment targets for firms and institutions in the advanced world and thus sources of a sustained brain drain. A second approach to explaining educational differences is identifying individual background factors that affect the process. In a classic article, Hirschman and Falcón analyzed educational attainment among twenty-five “religio-ethnic” groups in the United States, including both

59,613

52,416

80,538

53,344

Malaysia

Nepal

South Africa, Union of

Byelorussia (Belarus)

297,172

103,773

344,557

Pakistan

Turkey

Iran

52.8

53.0

53.1

53.6

54.2

55.2

55.3

56.0

57.1

57.5

59.5

61.1

63.5

70.0

74.8

% college graduatesa

44.5

66.1

71.2

65.8

41.9

89.4

51.1

85.4

64.9

95.9

62.6

72.8

59.9

45.8

75.0

12,200

14,600

2,800

40,800

49,300

13,500

35,000

14,900

11,000

1,300

15,600

2,600

6,500

37,900

3,700

% immigrated to United GDP per capita ($), ca. States, 1990–2010 2011b

77.0

87.4

49.9

99.0

93.5

98.2

99.0

99.6

86.4

48.6

88.7

68.0

71.4

96.1

61.0

% literate population, ca. 2000–2005c

Sources: United States 2000 census; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2008–10; Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, 2011. Note: Table limited to nationalities with at least fifty thousand immigrants in the United States. aPersons twenty-five and older. bPurchasing power parity (PPP), 2011. cPersons fifteen and older who can read and write.

73,924

212,053

Australia

Hong Kong

57,651

207,106

Nigeria

Bulgaria

134,510

Egypt

151,884

365,243

France

1,783,907

Taiwan

Total immigrants in the United States, 2010

India

Country of birth 

Table 16  Immigrant Groups with Highest Proportions of College-Educated Persons in the United States in 2010 and Characteristics of Countries of Origin

Making It in America  |  121

recent immigrants and descendants of earlier arrivals. A sample size of close to seven thousand cases and information on a number of relevant variables make results of this study worth careful attention.7 Not surprisingly, parental schooling and the father’s occupational characteristics were the most important individual factors accounting for educational differences across groups. Parental schooling alone explained about a third of these differences. The net advantages of Jews, Asians, and British ancestry groups were thus due, in large measure, to their having been reared by parents with above-average levels of education. Conversely, the large disadvantage of Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Mexicans was reduced by about half once parental schooling was statistically controlled. Also significant was the finding that immigrant generation did not affect education. There was a rise in average schooling from the first to the third generations and a decline in the fourth and subsequent ones. The net impact of generation was not, however, of much consequence. This result indicates that time in the United States does not necessarily compensate for low educational endowments among earlier immigrant generations. First-generation newcomers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are generally better educated, on average, than established ethnic groups from more modest origins. After controlling statistically for a series of individual factors, Hirschman and Falcón found that the original differences in education were significantly reduced but that important ones remained. For example, Asians who were statistically “equal” to others in parental schooling and other background factors retained a 1.6-year educational advantage over the rest; Mexicans suffered a 1.4-year disadvantage.8 This result was reproduced in a longitudinal study of educational attainment of Mexican Americans up to the fifth generation in the United States. Telles and Ortiz, the authors of this study, report some educational advancement between the first and second generation, but this is followed by a decline in the third and subsequent generations: “Our evidence shows no educational assimilation. Indeed the third and fourth generation[s] do worst of all, suggesting downward assimilation in education. Large gains from immigrant parents to their children aside, Mexican-American schooling remained fairly flat in succeeding generations.”9 Another longitudinal study of the educational attainment of secondgeneration youths, conducted by Portes and Rumbaut, found similar results. The study followed more than fifty-two hundred children of

122  |  Making It in America

immigrants attending public and private schools in the metropolitan areas of Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and San Diego over a ten-year period. In agreement with Hirschman and Falcón and Telles and Ortiz, this study showed that immigrant parents’ education and occupational status played a decisive role in the academic achievement of their offspring, as did being raised in an intact family (both biological parents present). To these effects were added those of gender and educational aspirations in early adolescence—​females generally achieved significantly higher grades and overall education, as did students with higher levels of ambition early in life. After controlling for these and a number of other variables, significant differences still remained among nationalities in academic performance, dropout rates, and completed years of education. Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Cuban students whose parents came in the earlier exile waves had significantly higher academic performance and overall attainment, as measured by years of completed education by age twenty-four. Mexican Americans, and to a lesser extent Nicaraguanorigin youths, did worse on average on both counts.10 These persistent nationality differences point to the operation of contextual factors not captured by individual or family variables. In other words, the specific characteristics and experiences of immigration of different foreign groups play a significant role in academic attainment, above and beyond the effects of family on individual predictors. We will return to this point after examining occupational status and self-employment in the next section. Occupation and Entrepreneurship As seen in table 17, 68.4 percent of the foreign-born population in the United States was in the labor force in 2010, a figure exceeding the national average. Labor-force participation was significantly higher than average among immigrants from India (71.5 percent) and Nigeria (80.8 percent), countries that, as we have just seen, make a significant contribution to the highly skilled labor flow. At the other extreme, migrants from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti also registered very high participation rates. Interestingly, immigrant unemployment in 2010 did not differ significantly from that among the native-born. There is variation, however, around this figure, with immigrant groups composed of professional-level workers registering below-average unemployment rates; the opposite is the case among nationalities composed mainly of low-skilled

Table 17  Labor-Force Participation and Professional Specialty Occupations of Selected Immigrant Groups, 2010 % in the labor forcea

% unemployed % professional (looking for specialty work)b occupationsc

Country of birth

Number of persons

Total native born

267,410,918

64.5

9.0

33.1

Total foreign born

39,327,516

68.4

8.5

27.0

1,783,907

71.5

6.1

66.9

Above U.S. average India Taiwan

365,243

67.2

5.7

62.1

France

151,884

61.0

5.3

60.3

United Kingdom

667,138

59.9

5.6

54.8

Hong Kong

212,053

75.4

5.4

54.6

Israel

136,716

68.5

6.4

54.0

Canada

808,749

58.0

5.5

53.4

Japan

338,002

54.3

4.0

52.9

Iran

344,557

64.9

9.2

50.8

Nigeria

207,106

80.8

8.8

49.4

Egypt

134,510

65.4

7.3

47.2

China

1,511,111

62.3

7.0

46.6

 

 

 

Below U.S. average Peru

413,562

75.4

7.8

22.1

Portugal

166,519

62.0

6.9

21.2

Haiti

563,850

73.4

13.1

20.1

Cambodia

156,279

65.5

8.2

19.2

Laos

198,889

68.1

9.2

18.9

Nicaragua

251,297

74.7

9.8

17.0

Ecuador

432,768

74.4

8.3

14.5

Dominican Republic

828,776

67.8

11.8

14.2

El Salvador

1,166,579

79.2

9.5

8.7 7.8

Honduras Mexico Guatemala

493,614

77.3

11.1

11,658,428

70.6

9.3

7.5

798,430

78.3

9.4

7.5

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2008–10. aPersons age sixteen or older. bOf persons age sixteen or older in the labor force. cRanked by proportion of professional specialty occupations.

124  |  Making It in America

labor migrants. Thus, despite their higher-than-average labor engagement, unemployment among Mexicans, Central Americans, and especially Haitians has been significantly above the national average. The same diversity among nationalities in levels of education is found when we examine types of occupation in the United States. Given the close association between both variables, it is not surprising that highly educated groups are those most frequently represented in professional and managerial occupations. The wide occupational diversity among the foreign-born stems from the by-now-familiar bimodal pattern in which certain groups concentrate at the top of the occupational distribution, while others are found consistently at the bottom. Table 17 illustrates this pattern with data for selected groups in 2010. Immigrant nationalities that exceeded by a significant margin the proportion of professionals in the American labor force come from Asia, the Middle East, Canada, and Europe. Noteworthy again is the occupational profile of Indians, where professionals represent two-thirds of occupationally active immigrants, and that of the Taiwanese, where they represent more than half. Immigrants from the developed world, such as the British, French, and Canadians, also cluster in these types of occupations. At the other end we find nationalities from Latin America and South­ east Asia, where the relative number of workers in high-level occupations is 60 percent or less than the national average. Note that the low presence of these groups at the height of the occupational distribution is not correlated with weak labor-force participation. Latin American immigrants are among the most active in the American labor market. It bears repeating that the clear bimodal pattern illustrated by these results and by the location of different immigrant groups at the top and bottom of the American educational and occupational hierarchies are, to a large extent, the result of geographical accident. India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Nigeria, among other senders of well-educated immigrants, are as poor or poorer on a per capita basis than Mexico, the Dominican Republic, or Ecuador. They are just one or several oceans away, with no possibility of entering the United States by land or via a short commercial flight. The proximity of the United States to Mexico and the countries of the Caribbean Basin and the hegemony exercised by the American economy and culture have influenced peasants and low-skilled workers in these countries far more than those in distant lands. Only rarely does the Egyptian peasant or Indian laborer make it to New York, Los Angeles, or Miami, yet people of the same class origins from Mexico, Haiti, or the Dominican Republic come to these places in abundance.11

Making It in America  |  125 Table 18  Principal Countries of Emigration by Category of Admission, 2010 Regular immigrants

Category of admission Family-related preferences or relatives of U.S. citizens (%)

Country of origin

Total admissions, 2010

All countries

1,042,625

14.23

66.28

13.07

139,120

08.29

88.19

00.29

China

70,863

25.33

53.35

21.09

India

69,162

44.99

52.73

01.91

Philippines

58,173

11.04

88.69

00.09

Dominican Republic

53,870

00.74

98.95

00.13

Cuba

33,573

00.02

10.75

88.77

Vietnam

30,632

01.18

95.06

03.37

Haiti

22,582

00.79

84.83

12.47

Colombia

22,406

10.60

77.70

11.23

South Korea

22,227

52.38

47.15

00.03

Mexico

Employment-related preferences (%)

Refugee adjustment (%)

Source: U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, 2010 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, table 10.

Table 18 presents an alternative portrayal of the occupational composition of contemporary immigration by listing the ten largest countries of out-migration by the proportion of regular immigrants admitted under the occupational references of the law versus those admitted for family reasons or as refugee adjustments. Occupational-preference visas are regularly granted to college-educated professionals and highly skilled workers. The average educational and occupational composition of family-related immigration tends to be much lower. As shown in table 18, although more than 85 percent of legal immigration from Mexico and almost all immigrants from the Dominican Republic come under family preferences (and, conversely, the relative proportion of occupational-preference migrants from these countries is minimal), the proportion of occupational preferences among Indians reaches 45 percent and among South Koreans a remarkable 52 percent. The sole exception to this pattern is Vietnam, a major source of political refugees during the 1980s and 1990s from which recent migrants are, overwhelmingly, relatives of former refugees who have been naturalized.

126  |  Making It in America

The continuing refugee flow from Cuba is also reflected in these figures, where Cuban “immigrants” are mostly adjusted refugees already in the country. As we have noted, the educational and occupational composition of recent Cuban migration has been significantly lower than among the earlier middle-class waves of political exiles arriving during the 1960s and 1970s.12 Few studies have been conducted on the individual occupational achievement of immigrants, but those that exist point toward the overwhelming importance of formal education, work experience, and knowledge of English. Even though this is the predominant pattern, ethnographic evidence also shows that professionals who are part of predominantly low-skilled migrant flows may fail to secure legal permits to practice in the United States and become unlicensed service providers for their respective communities.13 As important as the status of the jobs that newcomers occupy is their relative propensity for self-employment. As we saw in chapter 2, immigrant minorities are more prone than the native population to work for themselves. As we also saw in chapter 1, the rate of self-employment is important as an indicator of economic self-reliance and a potential means for upward mobility. In general, immigrants who own their own established businesses earn significantly more than those working for wages. A study of immigrant earnings in the 1990s by Portes and Zhou found consistent and significant differences between self-employed entrepreneurs and salaried workers among seven major foreign nationalities, including Mexicans, Dominicans, Cubans, Chinese, and Koreans. Among Chinese immigrants, for example, the self-employed had average annual earnings of $43,151 compared to $29,721 for salaried workers; among Cubans the respective figures were $36,558 to $26,510. After controlling for an array of predictors commonly included in earnings equations, such as education, work experience, and length of U.S. residence, the differences declined but did not disappear. Chinese entrepreneurs who were statistically equal in background characteristics to salaried workers still made $8,900 more per year; Cuban entrepreneurs made $7,500 more than their equivalent salaried conationals.14 A more recent study based on 2010 census data uncovered similar patterns. Among native whites and immigrants the self-employed had average annual incomes that exceeded by approximately $10,000 those of the wage or salaried population. The advantage increased to $30,000 when the self-employed category was restricted to persons with incorporated businesses. Among Indian immigrants, for example, the sala-

Making It in America  |  127

ried population had 2010 incomes of $81,698 on average, compared to $102,556 for incorporated entrepreneurs; the corresponding figures for Iranians were $85,562 versus $108,349.15 A multivariate analysis controlling for other predictors found the usual effects of education and work experience or incomes. A college degree increased annual incomes by a net $41,212, a figure that increased to $73,530 among those with a postgraduate education. Each additional year of work experience raised incomes by an additional $883. Even after taking all these variables into account, self-employment retained a highly significant positive effect. Among the incorporated self-employed that advantage reached $18,917 per year.16 As in other forms of labor-market achievement there is significant variation in this dimension as well. Table 19 presents the relevant figures. In 2010 the rate of self-employment among the native-born economically active population was 94.4 per thousand; a rate similar to that registered ten years earlier. In both years, however, the figure among the foreign-born was significantly higher. Table 19 presents, first, all immigrant groups with at least twenty thousand self-employed persons and for whom rates of entrepreneurship exceeded the U.S. average by at least thirty points; second, nationalities close to the U.S. average, with at least fifteen thousand self-employed persons; and third, groups whose rates of entrepreneurship fell below the national average. Diversity in this table is highlighted by the large gap between the most and least entrepreneurial immigrant nationalities and by the internal composition of each of the three categories. The self-employment rate among Greeks, Israelis, and Iranians—​ the three most entrepreneurial groups—​more than quadruples that of Laotians, Haitians, and Filipinos at the bottom of the distribution. Entrepreneurship among the top nationality in the bottom category, Mexicans, is fifty points below the Vietnamese, at the bottom of the top group. Highly entrepreneurial immigrant groups come from all over the world, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. They are composed of regular immigrants, as well as former refugees such as Iranians, Cubans, and Vietnamese. The close-to-average category is equally heterogeneous. Only the bottom groups indicate some geographical affinity, with a high concentration of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. Note that in absolute terms the number of self-employed Mexicans far surpasses that among any other nationality and that there are sizable numbers of entrepreneurs among other bottom groups such as Filipinos and

128  |  Making It in America Table 19  Self-Employment among Selected Immigrant Groups, 2010

Country of birth

Number of self-employed (persons age 16 or older)

Rate of self-employment per 1,000 population employed

Total native-born

14,475,529

94.37

Total foreign-born

3,188,111

113.97

22,070

274.27

Above U.S. average Greece Israel

24,167

245.16

Iran

57,437

234.69

Brazil

61,410

225.62

Korea

159,072

224.19

Italy

38,875

201.56

Argentina

23,867

190.08

Poland

52,374

160.60

United Kingdom

70,038

154.56

Pakistan

30,016

154.50

Venezuela

19,436

151.17

Germany

53,961

149.53

Egypt

13,543

149.34

Canada

78,491

148.26

Cuba

95,445

147.38

128,317

142.90

Vietnam

(continued)

Haitians. These numbers get buried, however, in the average statistics because of the large size of the respective adult populations. Lower rates of entrepreneurship among high human capital and English-speaking groups, such as Indians and Filipinos, reflect their strong concentration in the professions and, hence, their lesser need to use self-employment as an avenue for economic advancement. A second important source of information on this topic is the Survey of Minority Business Ownership, which is conducted by the Census Bureau every five years. It distinguishes between firms with or without paid employees and provides information on their relative size. Unfortunately, these data are gathered only for a few specific minorities and not for all immigrant or ancestry groups. Nevertheless, they provide a useful point of comparison, as shown in table 20. Results reflect a somewhat different depiction of intergroup differ-

Making It in America  |  129 Table 19  (continued)

Country of birth

Number of self-employed (persons age 16 or older)

Rate of self-employment per 1,000 population employed  

Near U.S. average Colombia

64,670

135.35

Taiwan

37,229

134.02

Former USSR (15 republics)

83,819

130.32

Japan

25,647

124.32

Honduras

45,938

118.71

Peru

37,727

118.70

Nicaragua

22,461

113.04

Guatemala

69,210

112.18

Ecuador

35,940

108.98

El Salvador

94,186

100.09

China

98,249

99.68

Hong Kong

17,059

99.33

Nigeria

15,659

94.59  

Below U.S. average Mexico

781,776

93.42

India

123,098

93.15

Trinidad & Tobago

16,022

92.62

Dominican Republic

53,133

91.10

Jamaica

43,014

83.99

Guyana

13,861

71.48

Laos

9,955

67.71

Haiti

22,325

55.00

Philippines

71,731

53.01

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2008–10. Note: Table limited to nationalities with at least fifteen thousand immigrants in the United States.

ences. If total number of firms is considered, the most entrepreneurial group on a per capita basis is Cubans, followed by the Chinese and Koreans. Again, Mexicans have the highest absolute number of firms among all immigrant nationalities, but this figure is swamped by the size of their population. In relative terms Mexicans and Filipinos have the lowest rates of entrepreneurship, with the Mexican rate being lower even than the corresponding figure among African Americans. As we

67.6

108,338

423,650

163,163

Japanese

Chinese

51.5

African American 1,921,864

78,265,621

135,739,834

154,942,238

58,307,148

20,119,442

142,430,082

39,329,933

151,787,438

70,629

149,570

232,322

123,309

336,198

363,030

492,032

406,556

Gross receipts per firm

106,566

119,233

32,210

21,067

109,653

22,820

109,151

71,411

Total number of firms  

2.8

4.1

20.0

8.7

36.1

28.4

42.5

53.1

Firms per 1,000 population

8.5

8.6

7.7

6.7

7.1

9.2

7.7

5.9

97,144,898

120,754,906

50,478,443

15,655,435

127,702,215

35,887,794

140,241,758

71,878,029

911,594

1,012,764

1,567,167

743,126

1,164,603

1,572,647

1,284,842

1,006,540

Sales receipts or Gross Employees value of shipments receipts per firm ($1,000) per firm

Firms with paid employees

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistics for All Firms in the U.S., 2007”; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2007.

35.5

250,976

1,035,920

Mexican

155.8

134.9

Cuban

Latin American

Filipino

139.4

308,491

120.0

192,509

Korean

143.2

Firms per Sales receipts or 1,000 value of shipments population ($1,000)

Asian Indian

Asian

Group

Total number of firms

All firms

Table 20  Minority Firm Ownership and Indicators of Firm Performance, 2007

Making It in America  |  131

have already noted, Filipinos, a highly educated group, have mostly opted for the professional salaried route in lieu of self-employment. If we shift attention to firms with paid employees, we notice at once that they are much larger in terms of gross receipts. Koreans are at the top of this league in number of firms per thousand population, followed by Indians. As a highly educated group, Indians have combined the professional salaried route with sizable entrepreneurial investments. Cubans present a paradoxical picture, being one of the groups least represented in the category of enterprises with employees but having the second-largest firms in terms of gross receipts per firm. Figures for this group, on the left and right side of the table, reflect its bifurcation between the earlier waves of exiles in the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent refugee cohorts coming after the chaotic Mariel exodus of 1980. While equally entrepreneurial, post-Mariel Cuban refugees have lacked the resources to create anything beyond single-person ventures.17 African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Filipinos appear again at the bottom in terms of firms with employees per capita, although Mexicans own the largest absolute number of such firms. Figures in this table thus paint a complex picture that suggests the existence of different entrepreneurial paths governed by the resources and contexts of reception of immigrant minorities. Differences in the propensity for business ownership and business success among ethnic and immigrant groups have given rise to several culturalist theories that affirm that the value system and traditions of various groups are the key factors leading to greater or lesser entrepreneurship. As Light has noted, all these cultural theories trace their origin, directly or indirectly, to Max Weber’s thesis about the Protestant ethic and its effect on the development of capitalism.18 An initial problem with culturalist theories, however, is that they are always post-factum; that is, they are invoked once a group has achieved a notable level of business success, but they seldom anticipate which ones will do so. A second problem is the diversity of national and religious backgrounds of entrepreneurially oriented groups. Among minorities with high rates of business ownership we find Jews and Arabs, southern and northern Europeans, Asians and Latin Americans. They practice Protestantism, Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and Islam. If a set of unique entrepreneurial “values” must be associated with each of these distinct religio-cultural backgrounds, it is difficult to see what is left out as a point of comparison. This theoretical untidiness is compounded by the presence of other

132  |  Making It in America

groups of similar cultural or religious origins that are not significantly represented among minority business owners. Why, for example, are Chinese Buddhists prone to business ownership, whereas Cambodian Buddhists are not? Why Catholic Cubans but not Catholic Dominicans? A theory that must invent a unique explanation for each positive instance or for each exception ends up explaining nothing. For this reason sociologists have moved away from these explanations to try to find in the situational characteristics of different immigrant groups the key to their economic behavior. As we saw in chapter 2, this search culminated with the identification of the human-capital endowment and the context of reception of particular foreign groups as the major factors accounting for their propensity for self-employment. As we noted in that chapter, entrepreneurship tends to be more common among immigrants than natives, but it is especially salient among groups that contain a substantial number of persons with business expertise brought from the country of origin. That, plus a favorable or at least neutral context of reception, produces consistently high rates of business ownership.19 These factors explain the high rates of entrepreneurship among Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans—​ Asian groups with high levels of human capital and whose recent contexts of reception, defined by legal status and strong coethnic communities, have been positive. Indians have increasingly turned toward formal business ownership, as shown by the number and size of their firms in table 20. Despite professional training and fluency in English, a growing number of Indians have identified selfemployment as a more rewarding (and possibly more profitable) path than salaried work.20 High levels of entrepreneurship among Cuban exiles arriving in the 1960s and 1970s are explained by a similar combination of business acumen and favorable context of reception. A shift toward more informal and less-well-remunerated forms of self-employment and wage work among later arrivals is accounted for by a reversal of the conditions that gave rise to the original Cuban enclave in Miami. Income The best summary measure of the relative economic position of an immigrant group in the United States is arguably its average income level. Given the variability of education, occupation, and business ownership among the foreign-born, it is not surprising that average incomes also vary widely, although the patterns observed are not what other factors would suggest. Table 21 presents the available evidence from the

Table 21  Median Annual Household Incomes and Poverty Rates of Principal Immigrant Nationalities and Regions of Origin, 2010 Income

Age

Persons (N)

Median household income ($)

269,393,845

50,541

14.8

All immigrants

39,955,854

46,224

18.9

12.4

Asia

11,283,574

63,777

14.0

12.6

Region/country of birth Total native-born

Poverty rate (%)

65 years and older (%) 13.2

Europe, Canada, and Australia

5,687,621

68,071

8.4

22.7

Africa

1,606,914

45,926

20.7

6.3

21,224,087

38,238

23.6

8.7

Latin America and Caribbean

Above U.S. Average (above $60,000) India United Kingdom Hong Kong Philippines

1,780,322

94,907

6.8

9.7

236,840

84,819

5.8

20.1

199,971

84,657

9.3

7.0

1,777,588

78,692

6.0

16.3

Taiwan

358,460

76,893

13.0

9.6

Canada

798,649

64,478

8.9

25.9

Israel

127,896

61,847

17.9

10.9

Iran

356,756

61,223

13.9

20.4

Nigeria

219,309

61,120

12.5

6.0

Close to U.S. Average ($45,000–$55,000) Vietnam

1,240,542

52,522

15.1

12.0

China

1,601,147

52,187

17.3

16.3

Poland

475,503

51,943

8.4

19.7

South Korea

624,538

50,786

15.2

11.1

Jamaica

659,771

48,568

12.8

15.5

Colombia

636,555

47,485

14.2

11.5

Peru

428,547

47,214

12.3

11.5

Ecuador

443,173

47,205

16.6

10.6

Russia

383,166

46,967

14.6

17.2

Germany

604,616

46,465

9.8

40.5 (continued)

134  |  Making It in America Table 21  (continued) Income

Region/country of birth

Persons (N)

Median household income ($)

Age

Poverty rate (%)

65 years and older (%)

Below U.S. Average (below $45,000) 1,214,049

42,515

19.0

4.9

Haiti

El Salvador

587,149

40,969

21.5

12.2

Guatemala

830,824

38,778

24.8

3.8 3.9

Honduras Mexico Cuba

522,581

36,108

26.2

11,711,103

35,254

28.1

6.3

1,104,679

34,919

19.6

27.3

Dominican Republic

879,187

32,253

24.3

10.4

Iraq

159,800

30,288

42.0

11.7

82,454

18,391

52.9

6.2

Somalia

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010.

2010 census. Median immigrant incomes lag about $4,300 for households in comparison to the total U.S. population. When figures are aggregated by continents, immigrants from developed Western nations (Australia, Canada, and Europe) have the highest household incomes, followed by Asians. Latin American and Caribbean immigrants rank at the bottom and also exhibit much higher poverty rates. The poverty rate among these groups is fully ten points above the national average. This level of aggregation is somewhat deceptive because it conceals significant differences within geographic regions. Table 21 lists foreign groups of one hundred thousand or more people that occupied the top and bottom of the household income distribution in 2010, as well as those that came close to the national median ($50,500). Although a number of factors, including household size, household composition, and length of time in the country, affect these average figures, it is noteworthy that the top category is occupied mostly by the same nationalities that were well represented at the top of the educational and occupational distributions. Asian Indians—​the group with the highest average human capital, largest number of H-1B professional workers, and nextto-largest firms—​emerge, unsurprisingly, as the richest immigrant group

Making It in America  |  135

in America. The large-scale human flow between India and the United States has been positive for both nations since, as seen previously, Indian immigrant professionals and entrepreneurs have also engaged in largescale transnational activities benefiting their home country.21 Other rich migrant nationalities include the Taiwanese, Filipinos, and Nigerians—​groups also noted for their high levels of human capital—​and the Israelis and Iranians, who, as seen previously, are among the most entrepreneurial. The middle of the 2010 income ranking is occupied by a very diverse group of nationalities, including large Asian minorities that have managed to develop economic enclaves (such as the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Koreans), Eastern European groups with relatively high levels of human capital (Poles and Russians), and several Andean nationalities (Colombians, Ecuadoreans, and Peruvians). The bottom income category is occupied exclusively by Latin American groups, including Mexicans, plus recent refugees from Iraq and Somalia. All these groups have above-average poverty rates, which, in the case of Mexicans, exceed by ten points the national average. The contrasting economic experiences of Cubans, Russians, and Vietnamese—​three earlier refugee groups—​are noteworthy for what they tell us about factors determining the average economic well-being of foreign nationalities. Cubans, who twenty years earlier ranked economically above the national average, declined steadily to the bottom category, now on par with Mexicans. This reflects the passing from the scene of the earlier highly skilled exile waves and their substitution by a continuous inflow of low-skilled refugees, starting in the 1980s. In addition, and as seen in table 21, Cubans have, by far, the highest proportion of persons aged sixty-five or older among all Latin American nationalities. Starting with more modest levels of human capital, the Vietnamese have managed to steadily improve their economic situation, sustained by the rapid development of economic enclaves in Orange and Santa Clara counties.22 Unlike Cubans, the original professional and entrepreneurial talent among the Vietnamese has not been diluted by a sustained low-skill inflow. Post-1990 migration from Vietnam has been limited to family reunification and has been more selective in terms of human capital. In 2000, Russians and other former Soviet refugees ranked at the bottom of the income distribution, reflecting their recency in the country. High levels of human capital and a favorable context of reception led, however, to rapid economic mobility during the last decade, putting the Russian population of the United States on par with the overall for-

136  |  Making It in America

eign-born income average. We will examine in greater detail the reasons for these contrasting histories in the following section. Several studies have attempted to establish the effect of individual characteristics on the earnings of the foreign-born. A classic study by Chiswick analyzed male immigrant earnings in 1970 on the basis of such characteristics as education, work experience, and time since immigration. He found that education had a positive effect on earnings among immigrants but that the effect was not as high as among the native-born. Every year of education increased earnings by about 7 percent among natives but by only 5.5 percent among the foreign-born. Similarly, the positive effect of work experience was “discounted” for immigrants whose earnings increased less per year of past work than among natives. For all immigrants, earnings increased by about 7 percent after five years in the United States, 13 percent after ten years, and 22 percent after twenty years.23 The study found that, after controlling statistically for individual background characteristics, immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, Asia, and Africa had significantly lower earnings than the rest. Chiswick attributed the Cuban gap to the recency of their arrival because 80 percent of this group had arrived in the decade prior to the 1970 census. Most significant, however, was the finding that the earnings gap for Mexicans—​ by far the largest non-European immigrant group—​did not decline significantly with time in the United States. Chiswick attributed this large and persistent gap to a Mexican “ethnic-group effect.”24 Subsequent studies have generally confirmed this finding. In an econometric analysis of the earnings of Spanish-origin males, Reimers found that, after she controlled for education, work experience, and other background traits, Mexican men earned about 6 percent less than non-Hispanic whites; Cubans earned about 6 percent more. There were no such differences among women, in part because average earnings of native-born and immigrant women alike were so low.25 Another analysis based on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) in the 1990s by Bean and Stevens found the predictable effects of education in raising earnings among the foreign-born. In 1998, college-educated male immigrants from Latin America had average incomes of $50,215, compared to $19,481 among those with less than high school educations; for Asian immigrants the corresponding figures were $60,600 versus $20,707. However, all first-generation migrants registered income gaps relative to similarly educated native whites, and the distance persisted across all income categories. Latin American immigrants, regard-

Making It in America  |  137

less of their education, made about 75 percent of the earning of comparable native whites; for Asians the figure rose to about 80 percent.26 In agreement with past studies, Bean and Stevens found that the gap was particularly large for Mexicans and that it repeated itself across all educational categories. Thus college-educated Mexican immigrants had earnings that were, on average, only 60 percent of similar natives in 1989; for those with a high school education the gap closed marginally to about 69 percent. A more recent study by Telles and Ortiz has documented the persistence of the Mexican income gap across generations. Between 1970 and 2000 Mexican male incomes in the five southwestern states declined in real dollars, while those of non-Hispanic whites and, to a lesser extent, African Americans rose, confining Mexicans to the bottom of the income distribution. These authors conclude: “Our findings show a consistent lack of economic progress across generations. . . . There is no economic assimilation. . . . Indeed, our statistical analysis shows that generation-since-immigration has no significant effect on any of the leading socio-economic indicators, once other variables, especially education, are considered.”27 The limited ability of models based on individual predictors to account for economic differences among immigrant groups and between them and the native-born, plus the persistent earnings disadvantage suffered by groups like Mexicans, points once again to the need for a more encompassing explanation. This task must focus on contextual factors that go beyond the individual characteristics that immigrants bring from abroad or their present levels of skill and effort. We turn to this task next.

Explaining the Differences: Modes of Incorporation There are two ways to “make it” in America, at least legally. The first is the salaried professional or managerial route; the other is entrepreneurship. There is no doubt that what immigrants “bring with them” in terms of motivation, knowledge, and resources is a decisive feature affecting whether they will gain entry into one or another path of economic mobility. The typology of immigration presented in chapter 1 is essentially a qualitative summary of these basic resource endowments. For example, immigration of manual laborers is generally characterized by low levels of education and occupational skills and an absence of prior entrepreneurial experience. This scarcity of human capital, char-

138  |  Making It in America

acterizing immigrants of modest origin, makes raw physical power their principal marketable asset on their arrival in America. Professional immigration is characterized by high levels of education and skill. These resources may not translate immediately into highly paid positions because of language difficulties and lack of job-seeking experience. Over time, however, education and professional training tend to give these immigrants an edge in gaining access to better-paid positions. This is well-exemplified by the occupational and economic trajectory of Russians and other immigrants from the Soviet successor republics in recent years. Similarly, entrepreneurial flows are distinguished, as seen previously, by a substantial number of immigrants with prior business experience. These skills may remain dormant for a while, as new arrivals struggle with language and customs at the receiving end. However, with increasing time and familiarity with the host economy, many are able to reenact past experience by eventually moving into selfemployment. The experiences of the Vietnamese and the early waves of Cubans, discussed previously, illustrate this trajectory. Hence, time is an important variable influencing socioeconomic achievement, but it is so for some groups more than for others. As previously discussed research has shown, earnings tend to increase with number of years since arrival. This process is likely to be more accelerated, however, for those who possess the necessary skills and resources than for those who must rely on their physical energy alone. Among refugee groups, time has a different meaning, at the collective level, because it is often associated with a declining socioeconomic gradient. As we noted in chapter 1, earlier exiles tend to come from the elite and middle classes; later refugee cohorts increasingly resemble the mass of the sending country’s population. The fate of these late arrivals depends, to a large extent, on the kind of community created by their conationals and the access to the resources that this community possesses. An emphasis on the different modes in which immigrants become incorporated into the host society is a way to overcome the limitations of individualistic models of immigrant achievement. The basic idea is simple: individuals with similar skills may be channeled toward very different positions in the labor market and in the stratification system, depending on the type of context in which they become incorporated. This process helps explain differences in occupation, business ownership, and income among immigrants who are statistically “equal” in a series of personal characteristics. It is not sufficient to point to the importance of context, however, just as it is not enough to attribute per-

Making It in America  |  139

sistent income differences to an “ethnic group effect.” We must move beyond this level of generalization to specify at least what some of these contextual factors are and how they operate. Contexts of Reception For immigrants the most relevant contexts of reception are defined by the policies of the receiving government, the character of the host labor market, and the features of their own ethnic communities. The combination of positive and negative experiences encountered at each of these levels determines the distinct mode of newcomers’ incorporation. Governments are important because their policies determine whether sizable immigration movements can occur at all and, once under way, the forms that they will take. Regular legal migrant flows can only exist, of course, with the consent of governments. In some cases sustained underground labor flows have also taken place with tacit official consent.28 When this agreement does not exist, clandestine immigration is shaped and constrained, at every step, by the need to bypass the state’s enforcement machinery. In every instance governmental policy represents the first stage of the process of incorporation because it affects the probability of successful immigration and the framework of economic opportunities and legal options available to migrants once they arrive. Although a continuum of possible governmental responses toward foreign groups exists, the basic options are three: exclusion, passive acceptance, or active encouragement. When enforced, exclusion precludes immigration or forces immigrants into a wholly clandestine existence. The second alternative is defined by the act of granting access, explicitly or implicitly, without any additional effort to facilitate or impede the adaptation process. Most economically motivated immigration to the United States in recent years has taken place under this alternative. The third governmental option occurs when authorities take active steps to encourage a particular inflow or to facilitate its resettlement. At various times during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the U.S. government was directly or indirectly involved in recruiting laborers or skilled workers deemed to be in short supply domestically. The Bracero Program described in chapter 1 represented one of the most important of these experiences in the twentieth century.29 Since passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, active governmental intervention to stimulate migration or facilitate its resettlement has been restricted to selected refugee inflows. Governmental support is impor-

140  |  Making It in America

tant because it gives newcomers access to an array of resources that do not exist for other immigrants. However, the interaction of this contextual dimension with individual characteristics can lead to very different outcomes: for refugees with professional or business skills, governmental assistance represents a means to accelerate social integration and economic advancement; for those lacking these skills, it can be a means to achieve family reunification, but it can also perpetuate welfare dependence and economic marginalization.30 Labor markets represent the second dimension of contexts of reception. Clearly, several features affect the economic prospects for immigrants. These features—​such as stages in the business cycle, demand for specific kinds of labor, and regional wage differentials—​have been discussed at length in the economic literature as potential determinants of individual earnings. However, there is a sociological aspect of labor markets that is perhaps more significant, namely, the way in which particular immigrant groups are typified. Employers as a whole may be indifferent toward a particular group, or they may have a positive or negative view of it. Positive or negative typification of a specific minority can take, in turn, different forms. For example, widespread discrimination may hold that certain groups are able only to perform low-wage menial labor (“Mexican work” or, in an earlier time, “coolie labor”), or it can hold that they are simply too incompetent to be employable at all. In the first instance discrimination contributes to confinement of the group to the low-wage segment of the labor market; in the second it contributes to its exclusion and hence unemployment.31 Positive typification, as opposed to mere neutrality, has been less common. Preferential hiring of immigrants as workers tends to occur when employers are of the same ethnicity. Hence, when a segment of the local labor market is composed of an ethnic enclave, recent immigrants of the same origin often gravitate toward it in search of employment opportunities unavailable elsewhere.32 Positive typification can also occur when members of an ethnic group or immigrant nationality are viewed as more motivated to work and more reliable than their potential competitors. This positive image may grant them preferential access to entry-level jobs, although there is no guarantee that they will be able to rise beyond them.33 Several recent studies have shown that employers of low- and semiskilled labor tend to “think ethnically,” exchanging among themselves information about groups preferable because of their work disposition and reliability and those to be avoided because of their “attitude.”34 These various labor-market situations interact, of course, with indi-

Making It in America  |  141

vidual skills and resources, leading to a plurality of outcomes. The main difference lies in the ability of different types of immigrants to neutralize labor-market discrimination. Lack of resources and information makes discrimination most serious for immigrant laborers who are generally trapped in positions believed to be “appropriate” for their group. Even if they receive preferential access to these low-paid menial jobs, these may be dead-end positions that lead nowhere. Professionals and entrepreneurs can escape discrimination by moving to other parts of the country and sometimes by disguising their nationality or ethnicity. In other instances, however, they may emphasize the same traits as a source of solidarity for the construction of ethnically defined employment niches or business enclaves.35 The ethnic community itself represents the third and most immediate component of contexts of reception. A first option is that no such community exists, in which case immigrants must confront the host labor market unaided. If employers do not discriminate against them, the situation approaches the ideal assumed by individualistic human-capital models because, presumably, only the person’s education and work abilities will affect his or her earnings. Among contemporary immigrants this situation is most closely approximated by professionals, who frequently accept jobs away from areas of ethnic concentration and who compete primarily on the basis of their own scarce skills.36 Most common, however, is the arrival of immigrants into places where an ethnic community already exists. As we saw in chapter 2, a common sociological observation is that such communities cushion the impact of cultural change and protect immigrants against outside prejudice and initial economic difficulties. Of equal importance is the fact that the process of socioeconomic attainment in this context is largely networkdriven. Ethnic networks provide sources of information about outside employment, sources of jobs inside the community, and sources of credit and support for entrepreneurial ventures. Because isolating themselves from the influence of kin and friends is quite difficult for newcomers in the early stages of adaptation, the characteristics of the ethnic community acquire decisive importance in molding their entry into the labor market and, hence, their prospects for future occupational mobility. Ethnic communities vary widely in a number of dimensions, but from the perspective of socioeconomic advancement, the central difference is whether they are composed primarily of manual laborers or contain a significant professional or business element. Typically, ethnic groups seek to protect and promote their own, but how they do so varies signif-

142  |  Making It in America

icantly across these situations. For newcomers in working-class communities the natural path is to follow the course traced by earlier arrivals. The assistance that ethnic networks can provide for securing employment in this situation tends to be constrained by the kind of jobs already held by established members of the community. In addition, there is often a collective expectation that new arrivals should not try to surpass, at least initially, the status achieved by older migrants.37 In this fashion individuals of above-average ability and motivation may find themselves restricted to low-status jobs and limited in their chances for future mobility. Ethnic network assistance comes at the cost of pressures for conformity, and the latter often reinforce employers’ expectations about the “proper” position of the minority in the labor market. These dynamics help explain the self-perpetuating character of poor ethnic communities and the frequent tendency among their members to receive lower-than-average rewards for their human capital. The case of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, described in chapter 1 and in previous sections of this chapter, provide arguably the most important illustration of these dynamics. The dominant feature of the opposite situation—​where a substantial number of community members hold high-status occupations—​is that the support of ethnic networks is not contingent on acceptance of a working-class lifestyle or outlook. Hence, newcomers, dependent as always on the assistance of kin and friends, may be steered from the start to the whole range of opportunities available in the host labor market. Within this general pattern entrepreneurial communities have the additional advantage of being not only sources of information about outside jobs but also sources of employment themselves. Immigrant firms tend to hire and promote their own, and, as we have seen, they often represent the only segment of the labor market in which newcomers can find preferential employment.38 In the past there was a common belief, especially among economists, that jobs in coethnic firms were equivalent to those in the lower tier or “secondary” labor market, insofar as both constrained future mobility opportunities. Recent studies indicate, however, that this is not the case because employment within an ethnic enclave is often the best route for promotion into managerial positions and for business ownership. These studies have found that education brought from the home country can have a greater economic payoff, at least initially, in coethnic firms and that a key factor promoting business ownership is prior employment in firms owned by persons of the same nationality. In this manner ethnic

Making It in America  |  143

enclaves can function as “training systems” for the acquisition of the requisite business skills by newcomers.39 This complex set of factors can be illustrated with data on the differential performance of immigrant groups in the American labor market. Economic models of employment and earnings have focused primarily on individual characteristics such as education and work experience as predictors. As we have seen in this chapter, such variables are important but yield imperfect results that do not fully account for between-group differences. Table 22 further illustrates these conclusions with data from a sample of more than two thousand immigrant parents surveyed as part of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS, 1992–​ 2002). Results from that project will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 7. For the moment our interest is on the incomes of adult immigrant parents and their determinants.40 The CILS parental survey contains a sizable number of immigrants and refugees who may be considered “emblematic” of the different modes of incorporation described above. Among them, pre-1980 Cubans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians—​all refugee groups from communist regimes—​were recipients of generous governmental resettlement assistance and of a generally positive public reception as escapees from governments hostile to the United States. Governmental support for family reunification allowed each of these groups to rebuild families and form cohesive communities that became, with the exception noted above (see note 38), a key source of assistance for later arrivals. Such positive context may be expected to have a significant effect on the economic mobility of these minorities.41 The survey also contained a sizable number of immigrants who find themselves in the opposite situation. Mexicans, in particular, not only do not receive any governmental aid, but they have been subjected to much official persecution as potential illegal aliens. This is coupled with widespread discrimination and hostility among the native population, which has frequently regarded Mexicans as the core of a “silent invasion” undermining the linguistic and cultural integrity of the nation. The modest educational qualifications of most Mexicans, combined with a negative official and public reception, have resulted, in turn, in weak and transient communities lacking the material and social resources to effectively support their members. The studies by Bean and Stevens and, in particular, Telles and Ortiz, reviewed above, lend strong support to this conclusion. Haitians find themselves in a parallel situation where a federal policy designed to prevent their entry and discourage their

Table 22  Determinants of Adult Immigrant Economic Outcomes a Family monthly earningsb

Individual yearly incomesb

Predictor

I

II

Ic

IIc

Sex (male)

562***

429***

2,365***

1,795*

6 n.s.

−1 n.s.

−30 n.s.

−60 n.s.

Age Years of U. S. residence

10*

16**

135**

165**

Post–high school education

327**

407**

5,425***

5,120***

College graduate

851***

866***

8,680***

7,265***

1,565***

1,679***

8,305***

8,450***

Knowledge of English

233***

275***

2,485***

2,330***

Occupational status

511***

540***

3,605**

Self-employment

−49 n.s.

56 n.s.

Postgraduate education

580 n.s.

3,930*** 1,015 n.s.

Nationality Colombian

−454*

Cuban

−192 n.s.

Filipino

−865 n.s. 1,500 n.s.

91 n.s.

Haitian

4,305**

−697*

Laotian/ Cambodian

−5,930**

901***

4,960**

Mexican

−401*

Nicaraguan

−583**

−475 n.s.

Vietnamese

324*

1,220 n.s.

West Indian R2 N

−1,910*

−441* .248 2,010

.313

−1,015 n.s. .311

.354

2,010

Source: Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, table 4.3 based on the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), parental survey. aOrdinary least squares regressions with unlogged dollar figures as dependent variables. bUnstandardized regression coefficients. c Decimals (cents) suppressed. Coefficients evaluated at the mean of each income interval. *Moderate effect (coefficient exceeds 2.5 times its standard error). **Strong effect (coefficient exceeds four times its standard error). ***Very strong effect (coefficient exceeds six times its standard error). n.s. = Nonsignificant effect.

Making It in America  |  145

stay is combined with widespread public discrimination because of their condition as a black minority. As with Mexicans, this hostile environment, coupled with the modest education and economic resources of most Haitians, has given rise to an impoverished ethnic community that functions more as a trap than as a platform for upward mobility.42 The case of Nicaraguan immigrants is also quite telling. This is mostly a population of would-be asylees who came to America fleeing the Sandinista regime in their country. They expected a favorable official reception comparable to that received by the early Cuban exile waves but were promptly disabused of that hope. By the time of their arrival, U.S. policy had shifted, seeking to bottle up discontent inside Nicaragua in support of the contra insurgency rather than hosting and promoting a new refugee community in South Florida. Accordingly, most Nicaraguans were denied asylum, and those who stayed were initially classified as illegal aliens. Though subsequently granted temporary protected status (TPS), they never benefited from the set of resettlement assistance resources granted to Cubans and were thus unable to translate human-capital resources brought from the home country into occupational and economic ascent.43 Columns I and III of table 22 show the powerful effects of education, knowledge of English, length of U.S. residence, and gender in the economic attainment of first-generation immigrants.44 A college degree, for example, yielded a net $850 gain per month in earnings and almost $8,700 in annual incomes. A postgraduate degree produced even larger monthly earnings. Each additional level in the four-point scale of knowledge of English used in these models yielded almost $2,500 extra in annual incomes, and each additional year of U.S. residence added $135. The human-capital equation succeeds in explaining one-fourth of the variance in monthly earnings in this sample. But even with all these variables controlled, between-group differences persist, as indicated by the corresponding nationality coefficients in column II. The direction of these coefficients corresponds to our theoretical expectations based on the known modes of incorporation of different immigrant groups. Mexican, Haitian, and Nicaraguan immigrants experienced a significant loss in monthly earnings after controlling for their education, knowledge of English, and occupation. The same is generally true for yearly incomes. For example, Mexicans who are statistically “equal” to the rest of the sample in individual characteristics pay a penalty of almost $2,000 per year; the figure increases to a remarkable $6,000 for Haitians. Since education and other relevant individual traits are

Yearly income

146  |  Making It in America 40000 37500 35000 32500 30000 27500 25000 22500 20000 17500 15000 12500 10000 7500 5000 2500 0

Haitian Mexican Filipino Laotian-Cambodian

Male; college graduate; 20 years in U.S. fluent in English

Female; no high school; 3 years in U.S. no English

Actual annual incomes

F igu r e 8. Annual incomes in U.S. dollars by nationality and different human capital and gender profiles. Source: Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, 81, based on Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), parental survey.

controlled, this penalty is directly attributable to the negative modes of incorporation experienced by these groups. Results are in line with those reported by Reimers and other earlier studies. Statistically insignificant nationality effects indicate that initial group differences are fully accounted for by individual human capital, as well as by subsequent work experience in the United States. Thus, for Cubans, an older refugee group with many years of U.S. experience, the advantages of an early favorable mode of incorporation had largely dissipated by the time the survey was conducted. This result also reflects the difference between the favorable mode of incorporation experienced by early Cuban exiles and the increasingly negative reception of Cuban refugees arriving during and after the Mariel exodus of 1980. About 40 percent of Cuban immigrant parents in the sample belong to that second category.45 By contrast, Southeast Asian refugees have benefited from a consistently positive mode of incorporation corresponding to their more recent arrival and continuous governmental assistance. As seen in table 22, these groups enjoy a positive and generally significant net advantage in monthly earnings and yearly incomes, despite their low initial levels of human capital. This is especially true for Laotians and Cambodians, refugee groups of very modest education who nevertheless had a net advantage in yearly incomes of almost $5,000. This remarkable result is directly attributable to governmental assistance, given the low human capital, low labor-market participation, and low levels of entrepreneurship of these Southeast Asian minorities.46

Making It in America  |  147 5000 4500

Haitian Nicaraguan Mexican Vietnamese Laotian-Cambodian

4000 3500 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500

Male; college graduate; 20 years in U.S. fluent in English

Female; no high school; 3 years in U.S. no English

Actual monthly earnings

F igu r e 9. Monthly earnings in U.S. dollars by nationality and different human capital and gender profiles. Source: Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, 82, based on Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), parental survey.

Figures 8 and 9 illustrate these results by presenting income and earnings data for immigrants of different nationalities possessing two hypothetical individual profiles. The first is a college-educated male who is fluent in English and has lived in the United States for twenty years; the second is a recently arrived female with no English and an education less than high school. The difference in projected earnings based on our models is stark. Yet in each case major differences persist across immigrant nationalities. Hence, monthly earnings of our hypothetical male in 1995 dollars would range from $2,950 if he were Haitian to about $4,000 if he were a Southeast Asian refugee. At the opposite end, an uneducated Haitian woman could expect to earn no more than $560 per month, but a Laotian woman in the same situation would receive more than $2,100. Actual earnings of each immigrant nationality, presented in the third panel of the figure, show that they come closer to the low human-capital profile above. Yet in all instances but one they exceed these figures by a considerable margin, indicating higher levels of average education, knowledge of English, and work experience than our hypothetical bottom example. The exception is the Laotian/Cambodian group, for whom actual earnings come close to those projected on the basis of minimum human capital. This result corresponds to the low human capi-

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tal and entrepreneurial skills of these refugee groups and their almost exclusive reliance on a favorable governmental reception. Similar results were found when the effects of education, length of U.S. residence, and other earnings predictors were compared across strategic nationalities. Groups advantaged by an early favorable mode of incorporation, such as pre-1980 Cubans and Vietnamese, enjoyed a sizable payoff for their high school or college education and for each year of additional residence in the United States. By contrast, Mexican immigrants and Nicaraguan would-be asylees experienced no gain for additional time in the country or for achieving a college degree. Only among the very few who had managed to achieve a postgraduate degree did education pay off significantly. As we have seen in this chapter, making it in America is a complex process, dependent only partially on the motivation and abilities that immigrants bring with them. How they use these personal resources often depends on international political factors—​over which individuals have no control—​and on the history of earlier arrivals and the types of communities they have created—​about which newcomers also have little say. These complex structural forces confront immigrants as a fait accompli that channels them in widely different directions. A Haitian or Mexican professional may do worse in the American labor market than an Indian or Vietnamese worker through no personal fault because of these external circumstances. Later on, apologists of successful groups will make necessities out of contingencies and uncover those “unique” value traits underlying their achievements; detractors of impoverished minorities will similarly describe those cultural “shortcomings” or even genetic limitations accounting for their failure. Both are likely to affirm that, in the end, “where there is a will, there is a way.” The reality is different. Knowledge of the contexts that immigrants confront negates culturalist or genetic explanations because it demonstrates the importance of the modes in which they are incorporated and the resulting material and moral resources made available by governments, the labor market, and their own coethnic communities. The most hardworking individuals may end up in poor jobs simply because they perceive no alternatives or are offered none; others may rise to the top by riding in the wake of a lucky set of external circumstances. Social context renders individualistic models insufficient because it can alter, in decisive ways, the link between personal skills and motivations and their eventual occupational and economic payoff.

Pl at e 1. First Chinese New Year parade in Monterey Park, California (“the first suburban Chinatown”). Since the 1970s, many Asian-origin newcomers have moved to the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles, illustrative of a general trend of immigrants settling in suburban middle-class communities rather than the inner-city locales long associated with immigrant settlements in U.S. urban history. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 2. Philippine-American Club of Greater Lansing on parade, Lansing, Michigan. For more than forty years, since the late 1960s, only Mexico had sent more immigrants to the United States than the Philippines. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 3. Indochinese refugees at the Phanat Nikkom refugee camp in Thailand in the 1980s, saying good-bye to family and friends on “the bus to America” as they leave for a processing center before coming to the United States, not knowing whether they will ever see each other again. Photograph by Erica Hagen.

Pl at e 4. A Hmong refugee carries her son while doing her needlework. Her husband was a refugee resettlement worker for Catholic Community Services in San Diego. More than one million refugees from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam were resettled in the United States after 1975. Photograph by Erica Hagen.

Pl at e 5. Welcoming the newcomers: Soviet Jews in the Chabad program, Los Angeles. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 6. Immigrant computer programmers from Hong Kong and Leningrad at the University of California, Berkeley. Labeled “brain drain” in the countries of origin, the emigration of highly trained personnel from those countries represents a significant gain for the United States. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 7. Trinidadian barbershop, Boston, Massachusetts. On the wall are images of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and Joe Louis, along with a poster for the Boston Celtics. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 8. A Mexican restaurant and an Ethiopian restaurant share a wall in Adams Morgan, Washington, D.C. The area has since been gentrified. Photograph by Luis E. Rumbaut.

Pl at e 9. Billboards in Little Saigon, Orange County, California. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 10. Along Calle Ocho, Miami, Florida, in the heart of “Little Havana.” More than eight hundred thousand Cuban Americans reside in greater Miami. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 11. The Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles. More than two million Mexican immigrants live in greater Los Angeles; another two million Angelinos were born in the United States of Mexican immigrant parents, including the former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 12. Haitian cabbie, Miami Beach. Most Haitian immigrants in the United States have settled in two metropolitan areas: New York and Miami. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 13. View of Cañón Zapata in Tijuana on the U.S.-Mexico border prior to the fencing and militarization of the border in the early 1990s. Each year during the peak summer months, more than a thousand undocumented immigrants crossed nightly into the United States from this point, falling to a low of about two hundred a day during November and December. The same patterns had been observed for many years. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 14. Cramped quarters for migrant workers, these crude cavelike shelters were dug into hillsides and covered with cardboard and chaparral in canyons near farms where migrants seek work. The plastic jugs were used to bring water to the site. A typical shelter would sleep three men for eight months of the year. Photograph by Michael Franklin, San Diego Union.

Pl at e 15. Mexican migrant farm laborers in northern San Diego County pile on a flatbed truck for a short ride back to camp at the end of a workday. For employers they are a source of abundant and inexpensive labor. For the migrants themselves the work is a means of survival and a vehicle of economic mobility. Photograph by Michael Franklin.

Pl at e 16. Two migrant workers pick tomatoes side by side in a field north of San Diego just as they do in their village in Oaxaca, Mexico. Each year they made the twothousand-mile journey to work in these fields. Growers say the Oaxacans have a gentle way of picking that avoids bruising the fruit. Photograph by Michael Franklin.

Pl at e 17. Pico-Union area of Los Angeles, home of the largest settlement of Central American immigrants, mostly from El Salvador. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 18. Korean shops in Queens, New York. Korean immigrants have settled principally in Los Angeles and New York. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 19. First steps in political incorporation: a Vietnamese immigrant runs for Congress in a heavily Vietnamese district in Orange County, California. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Pl at e 2 0. Civic engagement: meeting in “Little Saigon” with the Asian American U.S. secretary of labor. Photograph by Steve Gold.

Chapter 5

From Immigrants to Ethnics Identity, Citizenship, and Political Participation

In the Society but Not of It In 1916 Madison Grant, in a book called The Passing of the Great Race, deplored the “mongrelization” of America as the waves of eastern and southern European peasant immigrants threatened to overwhelm the great Anglo-Saxon traditions of the past. Grant minced no words: “The immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword.”1 Exactly eightyeight years after The Passing of the Great Race, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington sounded the same themes with reference to Mexican immigration. In his article “The Hispanic Challenge” Huntington bemoaned the harm that the inferior language and culture of Hispanic immigrants would do to English and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant world. Like Grant before him, Huntington went straight to the point: “The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves . . . and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.”2 In 2007 Huntington’s colleague Robert Putnam announced that immigration indeed caused harm to the nation because it increased cultural diversity, which, in turn, reduced civic engagement and mutual 161

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trust.3 In both 1916 and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the analyses of the distressing influence of immigration on the core fabric of the nation ended up with a call for immediate restrictionism. The noteworthy parallelism among Grant, Huntington, and Putnam is one of many manifestations of the same underlying motif: a fear of what the “foreign element” may do to America.4 Interestingly, this fear has taken many and frequently contradictory forms over time. In 1903, for example, an act promulgated by the U.S. Congress enabled immigration authorities to look for the many “radicals” allegedly arriving among the masses of European immigrants and to deport them expeditiously. Agents of the Immigration Bureau set out to canvass ports of entry and processing stations; working with the Secret Service and local police, they circulated undercover within immigrant communities in search of the centers of rebellion. Few were found. Twenty-three districts out of the thirty or so covered by the campaign reported no “cases” of radicalism at all; in the remainder agents managed to uncover a handful of anarchists who had lived in the country for a long time.5 In a more recent example, during the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. English movement reached nationwide prominence with its campaign for a constitutional amendment to declare English the official language of the country. Headed by S. I. Hayakawa, a senator of Japaneseimmigrant origin, the movement set out to combat what it saw as the threat of denationalization posed by the new waves of immigrants who speak other languages. Anticipating by two decades the themes sounded by “The Hispanic Challenge,” U.S. English set out to suppress the public and, when possible, private use of foreign languages across the land.6 The “English Language Unity Act,” seeking to establish English as the official language of the United States, was introduced in 2005 and reintroduced in 2007, 2011, and 2012. These efforts took place at the same time that research on language acquisition consistently reported the massive shift to English in the second generation and the equally drastic loss of parental languages.7 And in the first decade of the twenty-first century CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs conducted a relentless anti-immigration campaign focused on undocumented Mexicans. Dobbs accused the migrants of every possible evil, including bringing the leprosy virus into the United States.8 Much heated rhetoric and much money has been spent combating these alleged evils; playing on these fears has also proven lucrative for a host of nativist groups, agitators, and pundits. For the most part the targets of these efforts, the presumed sappers of democracy, linguistic

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unity, and territorial integrity, have looked at all these activities with a mixture of resignation and puzzlement. One may surmise the attitudes of poor Italian and Polish immigrants who barely knew the language and struggled daily for survival at the sight of Secret Service agents canvassing their neighborhoods in search of political “extremists.” Such a situation was not too different from Mexican immigrants today accused of everything from not learning English to bringing crime and leprosy into the country. The response of immigrant communities to the imagined threats of yesterday and today have been marked more by passive endurance than active opposition. The notion that California and Texas may someday be returned to Mexico, articulated by Huntington and others, is so ludicrous as to preclude any need for a response; the demands of the U.S. English movement have also gone largely unopposed. The view among immigrants who happen to be aware of these demands is that declaring English the official language of the United States is at best a costly redundancy. Immigrants in California and elsewhere overwhelm English classes in the belief that acquisition of the language is the ticket to upward mobility for themselves and their children. Immigrant parents have been known to picket public schools that insist on teaching their offspring in parental languages, thus delaying English acquisition.9 No significant movement in favor of the preservation of Spanish or any other foreign language has emerged among immigrant groups. For the most part U.S. English and similar organizations have been shadow-boxing. To a large extent nativist fears and the feverish pitch reached by campaigns based on them are due to the peculiar position of immigrant communities that are “in the society, but not yet of it.”10 Their very foreignness provides fertile ground for all sorts of speculations about their traits and intentions. At the same time, immigrants often lack sufficient knowledge of the new language and culture to realize what is happening or to explain themselves effectively. For the most part, the first foreignborn generation lacks “voice.”11 It is on this enforced passivity that the nativist fears of the many and the hostility and lucrative demagoguery of a few have flourished. Campaigns against the first generation have had a peculiar political consequence, however. Because their targets have been largely illusory, they have never visibly succeeded in their declared goals, be they rooting out political extremism or restoring linguistic integrity. What these campaigns have accomplished, above all, is stirring ethnic militancy in

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subsequent generations. More attuned to American culture and fluent in English, the offspring of immigrants have gained voice and have used it to reaffirm identities attacked previously with so much impunity. The resilient ethnic identification of many communities and the solidary ethnic politics based on it can be traced directly to this process of “reactive formation.”12 As Nathan Glazer and others have noted, ethnic resilience is a uniquely American product because it has seldom reflected linear continuity with the immigrants’ culture but rather has emerged in reaction to the situation, views, and discrimination they faced on arrival. These experiences turned the circumstance of national origin into the primary basis of group solidarity, overwhelming other competing identifications, such as those based on class. The immigrant world has always been a difficult one, torn between old loyalties and new realities. For the most part the politics of the first generation—​to the extent that such politics have existed—​have been characterized by an overriding preoccupation with the home country. Early participation in American politics has been limited to the more educated groups, those prevented from going back to their countries of origin, and those exceptional circumstances in which the very survival of the immigrant community is at stake. Even then, however, old loyalties die hard because individuals socialized in another language and culture have great difficulty giving them up as a primary source of identity.13 Throughout the history of immigration the characteristics of sending countries have also made a significant difference in shaping the politics of the first generation, as well as the timing of its shift into American-based concerns. Immigrants in the past or present may have come from (1) stateless nations, divided lands contested by warring factions or occupied by a foreign power; (2) hostile states, dictatorships that oppressed the entire population of their countries or singled out the immigrants’ own group for special persecution; (3) consolidated but indifferent nation-states that neither promoted nor acknowledged the migrants’ departure; or (4) states that actually supported and supervised emigration, regarding their nationals abroad as outposts serving their country’s interests. These diverse origins interact with contexts of reception to give rise to a complex geometry of political concerns among the foreign-born that mold, in turn, the politics of later generations. Depending on this variable geometry of places of origin and destination, immigrant communities may be passionately committed to political causes back home,

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either in support of or in opposition to the existing regime; they may see themselves as representatives of their nation-state abroad; or they may turn away from all things past and concentrate on building a new life from the ground up in America. Examples of these and other possible outcomes are found both at the start of the twentieth century and at present. We look first at the earlier period in order to provide a backdrop against which to describe contemporary developments.

Immigrant Politics at the Threshold of the Twentieth Century The Domestic Impact of Immigration The massive waves of southern and eastern Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the 1890s and early 1900s and the smaller flows of Asian immigrants who traversed the Pacific about the same time altered in various ways the fabric of American society, particularly its demographic and political structure. Few could have anticipated at the start that these movements would have such consequences, for, as we saw in chapter 1, they were composed of humble men and women who came to fill the labor needs of an expanding industrial economy. Given the criteria for economic achievement outlined in the previous chapter, early twentieth-century immigrants were in a uniformly disadvantageous position. With some exceptions their individual educations and occupational skills were modest, and they confronted a generally unfavorable context on arrival: the American government allowed them in but did not assume any responsibility for their well-being; employers hired them but assigned them to the lowest-paid jobs; their own communities helped them but confined them to the same unskilled, dead-end occupations filled by earlier arrivals. Despite their concentration at the bottom of the economic and social ladders and their political powerlessness, immigrants were the subject of much agitation. A number of alarming traits and political designs were imputed to them, and, on that basis, nativist organizations mobilized for action.14 As today, the sins attributed to immigrants were quite different and, at times, contradictory, but the ultimate demand was always the same: containment or suppression of the inflow. On the right the usual accusation was political radicalism. Immigrant workers transported the “virus” of socialistic ideas that threatened to undermine American democratic institutions: “In 1919, the Socialist Party of the United States had about 110,000 members, over half of whom belonged to non-­

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English-speaking bodies, the autonomous and practically independent language federations. . . . Ultimately, a split was precipitated and the emergence of the new Communist organizations drew predominantly on these federations.”15 On the political left immigrants were accused pretty much of the opposite—​ inertia, organizational incapacity, and docility—​ which undermined the efforts of the unions and weakened the political organizations of the working class. The central European peasant, “so steeped in deference, so poor, and so desperate for the American dream that . . . he knelt down and kissed the hand of the boss who sent him to work,”16 was a favorite of employers, who used him to break the power of the unions. Out West, similar accusations were leveled against Asian immigrants, as we saw in chapter 1. The characterization and denunciation of immigrants as either a radical threat or an inferior stock that undermined the welfare of American workers was based on a stereotypical image of newcomers. Then, as now, immigrants were perceived as having similar traits. The reality was quite different. Generalizations about political extremism or political docility each had a basis of fact in the characteristics of some groups and were contradicted, in turn, by those of others. Most but not all immigrants arriving at the time were peasants or laborers; there were also skilled industrial workers coming from countries with a well-developed working-class movement. As we also saw in chapter 1, there were Scandinavians socialized in a strong trade-union tradition and artisans and literate merchants from Russia and east central Europe. In the Midwest, Finnish loggers and miners divided between the meek “Church Finns” and the militant “Red Finns.” The latter had also learned working-class politics in their native land, and their experience served them well in union organizing in America. Finnish socialists were the backbone of the Socialist Party in many mining and industrial towns, consciously promoting class over ethnic solidarity and proselytizing among the less politically conscious groups, such as Italians and Slavs.17 Back east it was the Jewish needle-trade workers who formed the core of the union movement. These hardworking immigrants, many refugees from czarist persecution, saw socialism less as a political movement than as a way of life. There was, therefore, a basis of fact for the view that immigrants participated in and promoted leftist political organizations. As we saw in chapter 1, this was one of the reasons for the loss of interest of American industrial employers in further European migration. The gen-

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  167

eralization was inaccurate, however, in the majority of cases. Militant workers and artisans from an urban-industrial background were the minority among turn-of-the-century arrivals; even less common were those with extensive political socialization. These were present only among certain nationalities, and even within them they did not always represent a majority: German-born farmers, shopkeepers, and laborers outnumbered militant German workers; the views of “Church Finns” eventually prevailed, and Finnish radicalism faded away; Jewish immigrants became shopkeepers and small entrepreneurs en masse, and their economic progress undermined any support for radical causes. Most European immigration during this period did not come from the cities but from rural areas, and it was not formed by skilled artisans but by peasants. Past political socialization among these masses had exactly the opposite effect as among the literate minority. Not only were party politics foreign to them, but they sometimes could not even tell what nationality they belonged to. Sicilian peasants identified with their village or, at best, with the surrounding region; in America they sought the comfort of fellow villagers: “Thus, in the Italian neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1920s, it was possible to trace, block by block, not only the region of Italy but also the very villages from which the inhabitants had come.”18 Nationality to these immigrants came with their exposure to American society. In Max Ascoli’s apt description, “they became Americans before they were ever Italians.”19 Lack of political consciousness among Italian, Slavic, and Scan­ dinavian peasants proved to be a boon to many American employers who, as we have seen, used them as a valuable tool against domestic labor organizations. Nowhere was this “divide-and-rule” strategy more effective than in the Pennsylvania coal mines: “Beginning in 1875 and for at least a quarter-century thereafter, central, southern, and eastern European laborers flowed steadily into the anthracite coal basin of Pennsylvania. . . . This new wave of immigrants doubled the labor supply, reinforcing competition for jobs with competition between cultures and organizational position. The new immigrants received lower pay, exacerbating cultural and occupational tensions, because mechanization was simultaneously depressing the value of skilled career miners.”20 The antiunion strategy of Pennsylvania collieries and freight railroads proved highly successful and was adopted by other employers. The difficulty in organizing peasant newcomers into labor unions owed much to

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the absence of relevant political socialization among these immigrants. In addition, peasant newcomers were, more often than not, sojourners whose ultimate goals were in their lands of origin. Although many were to settle eventually in America, this final outcome did not preclude their viewing their journey as temporary and instrumental. Commitment to American political causes, especially those of a radical sort, was not particularly attractive to Hungarian, Italian, or Norwegian peasants, whose goal was to save in order to buy land in their home villages. As Rosenblum notes: “Insofar as the late nineteenth and early twentieth century immigration was predominantly economic in orientation, such migrants were, to a large extent, ‘target workers’ initially seeking the wherewithal to preserve or enhance a position in the society from which they came.”21 In the end, the overall political effect of pre–​World War I immigration was to be conservative. Socialist and communist movements drew large proportions of their members from the foreign-born, but this effect was diluted by the masses of apolitical peasants and laborers arriving during the same period. The question of how these latter groups undermined working-class militance is still a subject of debate. For some authors it was because domestic trade unions were forced to adopt an increasingly conservative position to defend their privileges against the waves of migrant workers. For others, it was because peasant groups themselves rejected political and labor militancy in favor of an “instrumental” politics of gradual improvement within the American labor market. Regardless of the form, the result was the same: a militant labor party never became consolidated, socialist and communist ideologies gradually declined, and business unionism under the American Federation of Labor prevailed over the radicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World.22 Framed by the experiences of the first arrivals, ethnicity rather than class was to provide the fundamental matrix of American-based politics for subsequent generations. Ironically, the class consciousness of the more literate immigrants faded away, while ethnic consciousness, forced on the peasant masses by native prejudice, endured. Because early twentieth-century immigrants had been defined and discriminated against in America according to their imputed ethnic traits, the politics of later generations pivoted around the same traits seeking their revindication. Hence, ethnic markers, originally used by employers to fragment the working class, were redefined by reactive formation into symbols of pride and rallying points for mass political participation.

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Obscure Identities, Split Loyalties The political equation had another side, however: the countries left behind. Because most late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants intended to return, they paid more attention, at least initially, to events back home than in the United States. Political leaders and agitators of all sorts came from abroad to canvass immigrant communities in search of support for their causes. In Nathan Glazer’s typology, many immigrants came from nations struggling to become states. The early prototypical example had been the Germans. German immigrants started coming to America in the eighteenth century, long before the consolidation of a German state. United by a common language and culture, they proceeded to re-create a nation in the midst of the American republic, just as their ancestors had done under multiple fragmented principalities in Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, other immigrant communities from stateless nations had developed: Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Croatians, Slovenians. The larger these communities became, the stronger their influence on home-country politics. Educated immigrants from these lands took the lead in promoting the cause of national political independence. Although the masses of rural immigrants proved uninterested in American class politics, they often could be persuaded to support independence movements at home. Nationalist agitation among European immigrants in the United States also had peculiar consequences. According to Glazer, the first newspaper in the Lithuanian language was published in this country, not in Lithuania. The Erse revival began in Boston, and the nation of Czechoslovakia was launched at a meeting in Pittsburgh.23 Similarly, the cause of Polish liberation was given a powerful impulse by the organization of the Polish Central Relief Committee in the United States, with Paderewski as honorary president, and by the contributions of hundreds of thousands of dollars by Polish Americans.24 Examples of the significance of immigration for the cause of independent statehood were not limited to Europe, however, but extended to the New World. The Cuban War of Independence, for instance, was launched from the United States with funds contributed by the émigré communities of New York, Tampa, and Key West. José Martí, leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, organized the war against Spanish rule from his New York office. After his death in 1895, the Cuban Revolutionary Committee continued a campaign of agitation through the New York

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media that contributed, in no small measure, to the entry of the United States into the war on the rebels’ side.25 The opposite situation, in Glazer’s typology, is that of immigrants leaving states that were not yet nations. These immigrants were eventually to describe themselves as Norwegians, Greeks, or Albanians, but such self-definitions were not clear at the start; instead, they worked themselves out during the process of settlement. According to Greeley, “The Norwegians and Swedes came to think of themselves as Norwegians and Swedes only when they banded together to form communities of their fellows, particularly in rural areas.”26 Southern Italian peasants represented the archetypal example of a group with exclusively local ties that acquired consciousness of their broader national identity in America: “Thus the American relatives of Southern Italians (to whom the Ethiopian war meant nothing more than another affliction visited upon them by the alien government of the North) became Italian patriots in America, supporting here the war to which they would have been indifferent at home.”27 The contribution of immigration to national consciousness was not limited to Europeans, but also had its New World counterpart. South of the border, Mexico achieved statehood early in the nineteenth century, but the central government’s hold extended precariously into the frontiers of a vast territory. First Central America and then Texas seceded. The rest of the North—​today the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming—​was lost during the Mexican-American War (1846–​48). Even in its diminished state, governmental authority continued to be a remote presence in most indigenous communities and among rural migrants trekking north.28 Like Italians and other European groups in the East, Mexican peasant immigrants learned to think of themselves as Mexicans by being defined and treated as such in the American Southwest. The Mexican Revolution of the first decades of the twentieth century increased the size and diversity of this immigrant flow and heightened its sense of identity. Previously apolitical immigrants contributed time and money to a struggle to which only a few years before they had been indifferent.29 Finally, there were also flows coming from consolidated nation-states. There was no common pattern within this general category, either, nor did the existence of a strong home government facilitate early return or adaptation to the new country. Immigration under these conditions took three forms: it could be “apolitical” and dictated exclusively by

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economic conditions; it could be “political,” in the sense of escape from an oppressive regime; or it could be “politicized” a posteriori by an interventionist state bent on making use of its expatriates. During most of the nineteenth century, British emigration to America was representative of the first type. British labor flows across the Atlantic took place without much interference from the home government, being governed primarily by supply and demand at different stages of the economic cycle.30 British subjects abroad may have remained concerned with events at home, but few were intent on revamping either the English or the American political systems. Russia was also a consolidated nation-state, but migration from this country took place under very different conditions, exemplifying the second situation. The movement was neither free nor temporary because most of those who escaped the czarist autocracy never intended to return. This was especially the case for the two million Jews who left Russia between 1880 and 1914. In the United States Russian Jews were simultaneously at the forefront of the American socialist movement and in unanimous opposition to imperial rule back home. Opponents of the autocracy recruited support and funds from this population. Trotsky was in New York at the time of the czar’s abdication, and, as we saw in chapter 1, the Bolshevik triumph led to a rapid rise in Russian affiliations to the American Socialist and Communist Parties.31 German immigration—​previously a stateless flow—​became an example of attempted interventionism, as the newly minted German state went on to promote its cause abroad. The growth of the pan-German movement in Berlin coincided with the consolidation of the GermanAmerican Central Alliance in the United States. By 1914 the Alliance and related groups had made German Americans “by far the best organized of all foreign elements.”32 This impressive organization was not created to support global pan-Germanism, however, but to fight domestic Prohibition. German Americans saw Prohibition as an Anglo-Puritan threat to their way of life; unfortunately for them, the lines of cleavage in this purely internal matter became entangled with those of the approaching European war. German American organizations were compelled by the force of events to argue strenuously for neutrality and against British efforts to draw the United States into World War I. When war finally came, German Americans were confronted with one of the most painful choices ever made by an immigrant or ethnic group. Having re-created their nation in America, they were now forced to choose unequivocally between the two states. In a country at war,

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attacks against German Americans grew in intensity and focused on “swatting the hyphen” from their self-definition. Already in 1916, prior to the American entry into the war, President Wilson had warned of “hyphenated Americans [who] have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.” Theodore Roosevelt made the point in no uncertain terms: “The men of German blood who have tried to be both Germans and Americans are no Americans at all, but traitors to America and tools and servants of Germany against America. . . . Hereafter we must see that the melting pot really does not melt. There should be but one language in this country—​the English.”33 The outcome was surprising by its unanimity and speed. In April 1918 the German-American Alliance dissolved itself, turning its funds over to the American Red Cross; other German American organizations changed their names and initiated campaigns for the sale of U.S. war bonds; men of German ancestry joined the American armed forces by the thousands. After 1918 visible signs of German kultur declined rapidly throughout the country. By their own choice, German Americans had “swatted the hyphen” and acceded to Roosevelt’s demand for prompt and complete assimilation. In synthesis, the politics of immigration was affected as much by events in the sending countries as by those in the United States. Immigrants differed in their past political socialization, commitment to return, and national situations left behind. The combination of these factors affected not only their stance in American domestic politics but also their orientations and behavior toward the homeland. Depending on the particular mix of factors, some groups struggled for independent statehood for their countries, while others did not know that they had left countries behind. Among immigrants from consolidated nationstates, some regarded the homeland political system with relative indifference; others left to escape its hold; still others had to contend with its expansionist overtures. This diversity negated any easy generalization during the period and simultaneously established a precedent and point of reference for understanding the political behavior of later arrivals.

Immigrant Politics Today In contrast to pre–​World War I immigrants, those bound for America today seldom come from stateless lands or lack well-defined national identities. The gradual consolidation of a global interstate system means

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  173

that most people today not only belong to a nation-state but are aware of this fact. Consolidated states and strong national identities mean very different things, however, when immigrants see themselves as representatives, in some sense, of their home nations, when they have come fleeing from them, or when their journey has been dictated by purely individual interests and is a matter of official indifference to the sending country. Although, as in the earlier period, these three types are seldom found in pure form, they provide a basic framework for understanding the politics of the first generation. Early political concerns of the foreign-born today seldom have to do with matters American. As with pre–​World War I migrants these concerns tend to center on issues and problems back home. This is especially the case for sojourners—​those whose stay in the United States is defined as instrumental for attaining goals in their own communities and countries. In such cases there is every reason to regard U.S. politics with relative indifference. The attachment to home-country issues persists, however, even among those who have settled here permanently. For political refugees barred from returning home, it may be the lingering hope of doing so someday, a feeling of seemingly remarkable persistence. For nonpolitical immigrants, the increasing facility for return trips and ease of communication with family and friends made possible by modern technologies serve to keep alive the identifications and loyalties into which they were socialized. The Advent of Transnationalism Political ties to the home country have been significantly reinforced in the contemporary period by two novel developments: first, innovations in transportation and communications and, second, the strength of sending nation-states and their “new attitude” toward their respective immigrant diasporas. As we discussed in chapter 2, cheap air transport and the advent of telephone and electronic communications have greatly facilitated contact across countries and geographical distances. Immigrants today can keep themselves informed, on a daily basis, of events in their home communities and countries and travel there rapidly when conditions require it. They can call their families every day, regardless of distance, and send electronic mail to them, as well as to community leaders and government authorities. The end result of this technological revolution has been the emergence of “transnational communities” suspended, as it were, between

174  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

two countries. Politically, this translates into a far greater presence and influence of immigrant diasporas in the affairs of their home nations. They can affect domestic politics through a variety of means that include contributing finances to parties and candidates, creating philanthropic and political action committees, and influencing the vote of kin and friends at home.34 As we have just seen, earlier European immigrants also engaged in multiple activities concerning the politics of the places from which they came, but no matter how strong their motivation, they could not affect domestic affairs with the intensity and rapidity that contemporary migrants do. To make their voices heard, they depended on the mail or, at best, the telegraph rather than long-distance telephone and the Internet. To be present at key events, they had to travel for days or weeks on boats and trains rather than commute by plane. Today’s much more fluid communications decisively affect what influence immigrants can exert on their home communities and nations. The response of sending-country governments constitutes the second part of the equation. As we have just seen, most immigrants do not come today from stateless lands or places where states are a feeble presence. Nor are these states relatively indifferent, as often in the past, to the departure and the lives of their expatriates. The growth of migrant diasporas, the size of the remittances that they send back, and their increasing capacity to support or resist home-country authorities mean that the latter must respond actively to the needs and demands of their nationals abroad.35 For many countries of emigration, remittances have become one of the most sizable and predictable sources of foreign exchange. To these must be added the investments made by expatriates in land, equipment, and business and the impact of the skills and values learned abroad on their home communities, what Levitt calls “social remittances.”36 Accordingly, governments of sending countries have taken an increasingly active role in the affairs of their communities abroad, seeking to rechannel and expand the flow of remittances, stimulate investment, and turn community leaders into representatives for their countries abroad. Some governments harbor the hope that their diasporas would become lobbies for national interests and goals in the United States. Even when diasporas are formed by exiled opponents of the regime in power, efforts have been made to reach out to them. The granting of dual citizenship, voting rights in national elections, tax exemptions, and other privileges have stemmed from the increasingly

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  175

proactive stance of sending-country governments toward their nationals abroad.37 Naturally, these actions interact with the transnational activities and projects initiated by the migrants themselves, creating a highly dynamic back-and-forth traffic of resources, ideas, and outcomes across national borders. The following two examples illustrate the extent and impact of this phenomenon. Two Transnational Projects Mexican Transnationalism As we have seen, Mexicans are the largest immigrant group in the United States today. The 2010 census counted twelve million Mexicanborn persons and indicated that the Mexican-origin population had surpassed thirty million, or almost two-thirds of all Hispanics—​the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population.38 As Roberts, Frank, and Lozano-Ascencio have noted, the size of both the sending and the receiving country and their proximity guarantee that the interaction between immigrants in the United States and their communities of origin would be very complex and assume very different forms.39 For most of the twentieth century, Mexican migration to the United States was temporary and fundamentally apolitical. As Massey and others have stressed, this labor flow was mostly cyclical, involving young men coming to work in harvests and other agricultural tasks for part of the year and then returning home. Like any other large-scale human movement, a sizable “sediment” developed as some temporary migrants eventually became permanent settlers. Those who did so were of no concern to Mexican authorities, and if they acquired U.S. citizenship, they lost their Mexican nationality, including the right to own land. Pochos was the derogatory term used in Mexico to refer at the time to the expatriates and their descendants.40 The situation changed dramatically during the last two decades of the twentieth century as a consequence of changes in U.S. immigration law that, first, granted amnesty to formerly unauthorized immigrants and, second, sought to enforce the border by making illegal crossing much more difficult. The first measure, promulgated as part of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), gave legal residence to more than two million formerly unauthorized migrants, facilitating their free movement across the border and making it possible for them to bring their relatives a few years later. These developments signifi-

176  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

cantly increased the size of the legally settled Mexican population in the United States.41 The second measure—​heightened border enforcement—​did not deter continued illegal immigration across the border, but as Roberts, Massey, and others have noted, it had the unexpected consequence of encouraging unauthorized immigrants not to return to Mexico and to bring their families to the United States instead. This outcome significantly increased the size of the underground Mexican population north of the border.42 As this newly settled population searched for new sources of employment and sought to avoid detection by the authorities, it started to move eastward, turning what had been a regional phenomenon (concentrated in Texas, California, and elsewhere in the Southwest) into a truly national presence.43 With roughly one-tenth of its native population north of the border, with immigrant remittances becoming the second most important source of foreign exchange, and with immigrant organizations starting to support and make contributions to presidential candidates in Mexico, the Mexican government could not remain indifferent to its millions of expatriates. Beginning with the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a drastic change toward Mexicans in the United States took place aimed at preserving their national loyalty and turning them into an integral part of an imagined, extraterritorial Mexican nation. The change was signaled by the creation of the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad (PCME in its Spanish acronym), which aimed at strengthening ties with Mexican immigrant communities. This program eventually came to sponsor the Dos por uno plan, in which every dollar raised by immigrant organizations for philanthropic works at home would be matched by two dollars from the Mexican federal and state governments.44 Passage of dual nationality legislation in 1996—​ itself partly a reaction against the rising anti-immigrant tide in the United States—​ enabled Mexican immigrants to acquire U.S. citizenship without losing their Mexican passports or the right to own land in Mexico.45 In a remarkable policy shift, the Mexican government went from treating those who naturalized in the United States as defectors to encouraging such naturalizations as a way of empowering immigrants and giving them a real voice in North American politics.46 Legislation passed in 2005 allows immigrants to vote in Mexican elections without having to travel back to Mexico. The Institute for Mexicans Abroad (IME, in the Spanish acronym), which replaced the PCME, has taken a still more

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  177

proactive stance, organizing the election of more than a hundred representatives of immigrant communities to its Consultative Council. As Goldring notes, “The strategy of fostering ties with Mexicans and people of Mexican origin shifted to become more universalistic, explicitly extraterritorial, and perhaps more rhetorical. This change of orientation began with a redefinition of the Mexican nation to include Mexican[s] living outside the national territory.”47 Mexican political transnationalism was not initiated by the actions of the Mexican government; the actions were taken in response to the initiatives of the migrants themselves. Migrant transnational initiatives took two principal forms: (1) the organization of hometown committees and (2) campaigns and financial support for candidates in Mexican elections. As soon as a Mexican expatriate community of any size gets settled, one of its first organizational acts is to create a comité de pueblo or club de oriundos to bring together people of the same locality in an effort to maintain contact with their hometown and support its development. When the number of associations from a particular Mexican state reaches ten or more, a state-level federation emerges, generally supported by the respective state government. In Los Angeles immigrants from the states of Durango, Jalisco, Nayarit, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi, Sinaloa, Tlaxcala, and Zacatecas have created such federations. Grouping more than forty hometown committees, the Zacatecan Federation is particularly strong. It hosts regular visits from the governor and other state dignitaries and maintains intense year-round contact with state and municipal governments, focusing on a variety of public works and other projects supported with immigrant funds.48 During the Mexican presidential election of 1988, the challenger, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, surprised the ruling party by the level of support he garnered among immigrant communities in the United States. That support translated into both substantial campaign contributions and votes in Mexico, as the expatriates influenced the political preferences of kin and friends. More than any other factor it was the transnational political activism of sizable Mexican communities in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and other areas of concentration during the 1988 election, plus the level of organization achieved by these communities, that prompted the hasty shift in orientation by the Mexican government and ruling party.49 The increasing presence of the Mexican federal and state governments has transformed decisively the transnational field. As Iskander

178  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

notes, the eagerness to find interlocutors among their expatriates has led several Mexican state governments to create and sponsor committees and organizations where none existed before. Similarly, the Dos por uno became the Tres por uno with the additional dollars contributed by the benefited municipalities. Today, migrant philanthropic contributions are largely channeled through this program. Hometown committees are barred from participating if they are not affiliated with a state-level federation: “According to program guidelines finalized in 2008, any group of migrants interested in participating in the 3x1 program must formally register with consular authorities and secure a toma de nota, a document that certifies their existence and their compliance with certain minimal requirements established by the Mexican government.”50 Using Hirschman’s classic trilogy, Roberts and his collaborators analyzed Mexican political transnationalism as an interplay of “exit,” “voice,” and “loyalty.” Mexicans exited their homeland in search of a better life denied to them in their country; as they settled in the United States, their aggregate remittances and organization on behalf of philanthropic and political causes gave them the voice in Mexican affairs that they never had before departing; seeking to maintain and increase remittances, investments, and contributions and to channel them in ways supportive of the country, the Mexican government launched a number of programs aimed at heightening the loyalty of its expatriates.51 In this manner an increasingly dense and previously unexpected traffic has developed across the border, with Mexican officials visiting and courting immigrant communities in all major U.S. cities and the migrants, often former peasants and poor unskilled workers, going home in their new role as benefactors of their towns of origin, as well as significant political actors. The greater power of government has allowed it to gain the upper hand in this field, guiding and often restricting migrant initiatives. In this manner the spontaneous “transnationalism from below” created by grassroots activities now confronts a “transnationalism from above” that simultaneously enhances the developmental scope of migrant initiatives but conditions them to the interests and vision of Mexican authorities. Chinese Transnationalism At approximately 2.3 million, the Chinese are the second-largest immigrant group in the United States. As we saw in chapter 1, the repeal

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  179

of the Chinese Exclusion Act and a new immigrant policy that based admission on skills and family ties drastically transformed the old Chinatowns in American cities, as well as the character of this immigrant group. Unlike earlier Chinese immigrants who came from low socioeconomic backgrounds and rural origins, contemporary migrants are highly diverse, both in their socioeconomic status and in their places of origin and settlement. Their organizational life differs from that of their predecessors as well. Since the 1970s there has been a surge of new Chinese immigrant organizations, many established outside the old Chinatowns. Although the Chinese government has become increasingly involved in the transnational field, the large majority of organizations have been created by the migrants themselves. Traditional organizations, such as family and district associations and business associations, or tongs, continue to be dominant in Chinese immigrant communities. Jointly, they represent about 40 percent of the total. Along with them, however, more modern forms of organizations have grown rapidly. In particular, educational, alumni, and professional organizations now represent approximately 22 percent of the total. Formal Chinese professional organizations in the United States are registered as nonprofit groups. They are well represented in science, engineering, medicine, and finance. Membership ranges from a few dozen to several thousands. Almost all (greater than 90 percent) of these organizations are transnational, maintaining ties with Chinese government agencies at the national, provincial, and district levels. They regularly hold conferences in both North America and China. Examples include the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (national, with fifteen regional chapters), the Silicon Valley Chinese Engineers Association (based in California), and the Chinese Biopharmaceutical Association (based in Washington, D.C.).52 As is true for professional organizations, few alumni associations existed in the traditional Chinatowns since the large majority of their inhabitants lacked even a secondary education. Unlike traditional Chinese organizations, alumni associations are formed on the basis of colleges and universities and, to a lesser extent, high schools from which immigrants graduated in China. The main mission of alumni associations is networking and information exchange among members. Their transnational activities are mainly oriented to support their respective graduates. Members of these organizations are also commonly members of professional and civic associations whose scope of activity is much broader. In 1978 the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of China’s State Council

180  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

(national Qiao-ban) and similar offices in selected provinces and cities were reactivated after being dormant during the years of the Cultural Revolution. The policies of the Chinese Communist Party changed dramatically as well—​from viewing its expatriates as potential spies and traitors to welcoming them as “supporters, pioneers, and promoters” of China’s economic reform. In May 1989 the State Council reiterated the important role of the overseas Chinese in implementing China’s new open-door policy by making investments in China and transferring technology. Policy toward students abroad, that initially emphasized return, was also relaxed in the 1990s to recognize that returning to China “is not the only way to serve the country.”53 Parallel to these developments was the reactivation of the various levels of the Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (Qiao-lian). Both the Qiao-ban and the Qiao-lian have offices at the national, provincial, district, and city levels, staffed by paid officials whose role is to maintain regular contact with immigrant communities worldwide and to promote transnational activities. This complex bureaucracy, resting on the twin pillars of state and party, intersects with the vast web of Chinese immigrant organizations, creating a strong social and economic synergy. Contributions by hometown organizations and other civic, professional, and alumni associations have funded everything from roads and schools to entire universities. Wuyi University in Jiangmen, Guangdong Province, was created, for example, with contributions from expatriates in the United States, Canada, and Southeast Asia.54 Overseas Chinese investment is credited with the rapid economic development of the coastal zones, especially Shanghai and other smaller cities in the Yangtze River Delta and Guangzhou and other smaller cities in the Pearl River Delta. Through its agencies at various levels the state and party have assiduously cultivated these developments by receiving and honoring leaders of expatriate organizations and major investors, funding professional and business conferences, and hosting festivals and celebrations both in China and through its network of consulates in North America and elsewhere in the world. Examples of these activities include summer and winter camps for overseas Chinese youths, organized by Qiao-ban at various levels, and Chinese-language training programs organized by the Chinese Language Council through a network of Confucius Institutes (CIs) abroad. As of June 2010 there were sixty-four CIs in thirty-seven U.S. states, with the first one established in 2005.55 Figure 10 depicts the Chinese transnational field. As in the case of Mexico, the proactive stance of Chinese authorities at all levels has

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  181 UNITED STATES a. Training programs for leaders of overseas immigrant communities b. World Chinese Entrepreneurial Association (WEA) c. Language maintenance through 64 Confucius institutes a. Youth Camps b. Professional and business conferences

CHINA National Qiao-ban and Qiao-lian

Provincial (Guandong, Fujian Qiao-ban and Qiao-lian

c. Provincial and local festivals CCBA of New York 2009

$90,000 donation for victims of typhoon in southern China

CCBA of San Francisco and Suey Sing Association

Organization of Chinese Olympic Torch welcome ceremonies in 2008

Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST–USA)

Co-sponsorship of the Wuhan International Conference on the Environment (WICE, 2009)

Baisha Village Association (Fujian province)

Wedding donations (xi-juan); ”happiness’ donations (le-juan) for infrastructure projects.

F igu r e 10. Transnational connections of Chinese immigrant organizations: Selected examples. Source: Portes and Zhou, “Transnationalism and Development,” figure 3.

both enhanced the power and visibility of immigrant organizations and constrained them to observe government-set rules. This simultaneous enabling and restricting role creates a number of political and social tensions whose outcome is at present uncertain. Assimilation and Transnationalism At first glance the rise in transnational activism among today’s immigrants and the numerous programs of sending-country governments aimed at strengthening it appear to undermine the process of assimilation and retard the integration of immigrants into the American body politic. How might immigrants and their children start to turn their interests and attention to political life in their new country when they are still stuck in the affairs and loyalties of the old? As is often the case in social life, reality is more complex. While it is possible that transnational activities may slow the acquisition of new loyalties and identities in some cases, the bulk of the evidence indicates that this is not a zerosum game and that many aspects of transnationalism end up accelerating the political integration of immigrants in the United States. This is so for several reasons. First, political activism is not mutually exclusive, and skills learned in one context frequently transfer to

182  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

another. Thus, experience gained in founding hometown committees or lobbying the home-country government can be transferred, when the occasion requires, to campaigns to further migrant interests in the American context. As we saw in chapter 2, ethnic resilience and ethnic mobilization represent the first steps for effective incorporation of immigrant groups into the American political mainstream. Contemporary transnationalism reflects an updated version of the same process. As one example, the Centro Civico Colombiano (CCC), one of the principal Colombian organizations in New York, organizes the celebrations of Colombian Independence Day on July 20 by bringing prominent entertainers and political figures from Colombia. The festivities are also attended by New York City and New York State officials who use the occasion to lobby for votes and political support. CCC officials and other Colombian immigrant leaders make use of the mass turnout to highlight the political weight of their community and position themselves favorably for future New York elections.56 While some local Dominican leaders in New York have complained that continuing involvement with the political affairs of the home country weakens mobilizations in favor of the immigrant community itself, the fact is that transnational organizations are commonly involved in both. Thus, representatives of Dominican political parties in New York or Providence support candidates in U.S. elections or take a turn running for local office themselves. Alternatively, successful ethnic politicians may try their luck in national elections in the home country. Leonel Fernández, overwhelmingly reelected in 2004 to the presidency of the Dominican Republic, was raised in New York City, where he was active in local community affairs.57 In general, immigrants who are politically inactive in one setting tend to be inactive in others, while those who become involved in transnational political or civic activism are more likely to be interested and involved in American politics as well. Second, the passage of dual nationality and dual citizenship laws by sending nations, instead of retarding acquisition of U.S. citizenship, has tended to accelerate it. This happens because immigrants lose the fear of giving up their nationality and attendant rights and of being perceived as “defectors” at home. The ability to hold on to their identities (and passports) removes a key disincentive against naturalization and often encourages immigrants to acquire U.S. citizenship. Once they do, it is an easy step to register, vote, and become involved in American politics. As Cristina Escobar puts it for the case of Colombian immigrants: “The concern of Colombian [immigrant] leaders was the lack of U.S. citizenship which was limiting the economic and political development of

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  183

the Colombian immigrant community. Since Colombians did not want to renounce their nationality, they lacked access to the best financial sources and could not support their own candidates for elected positions in the U.S. . . . Analysis of the rate of naturalization of Colombians in the U.S. following enactment of the new dual nationality law shows that it had the intended effect.”58 The third reason why assimilation and transnationalism are not necessarily at odds is that many transnational civic and political activities aim precisely at instilling North American values and political practices in the home countries. Pundits who worry about the likelihood that immigrants may act as a “fifth column” give American institutions too little credit. Writing without knowledge of the facts, Samuel Huntington sounded the alarm, for example, about the possibility that the Southwest may one day defect to Mexico because of its large Mexican American population. This concern does not take into account the fact that Mexican transnationalism is aimed at improving life in Mexico, not only by transferring economic resources but by moralizing politics on the basis of U.S.-learned political norms. This concern is also incompatible with the patriotism repeatedly displayed by Mexican Americans in the multiple U.S. wars.59 Last, it is worth keeping in mind that, for all its prominence and vigor, transnationalism is a first-generation phenomenon. It represents the means by which immigrants are able to reconcile their home-­country loyalties with new attachments and concerns in their adopted country. For their children, however, the old country and its affairs represent increasingly distant concerns. Involvement in transnational organizations and activities tends to decline drastically by the second generation.

Making It Count: Citizenship Acquisition Naturalization Trends Whether involved in transnational activities or not, immigrants cannot make their voices heard effectively in American politics until they naturalize. As we have seen, transnationalism may actually encourage U.S. citizenship acquisition. Yet there are wide differences in naturalization among immigrant nationalities, even among those who have become permanent settlers. Some first-generation groups opt for being “in” the society but not “of” it, avoiding naturalization at all costs; others change flags at the first opportunity. Higher numbers, greater concentration, and higher rates of citizenship acquisition all contribute to the political strength of immigrant

184  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics Table 23  Naturalizations for Selected Countries and Regions, 2002–2011 2002

Region Africa

N (000s) 31.5

Asia

239.0

2003

% 5.5

N (000s) 28.5

41.7 197.0

2004

% 6.2

N (000s) 34.5

42.6 224.1

2005

% 6.4

N (000s)

%

38.8

6.4

41.7 243.5

40.3

China, People’s Republic

32.0

5.6

24.0

5.2

27.3

5.1

31.7

5.2

India

33.7

5.9

29.8

6.4

38.0

7.1

36.0

6.0

Philippines

30.4

5.3

29.0

6.3

31.4

5.8

36.7

6.1

Vietnam

36.7

6.4

25.9

5.6

27.5

5.1

32.9

5.4

86.6

15.1

68.9

14.9

84.0

15.6

91.7

15.2

3.4

0.6

3.2

0.7

3.8

0.7

3.8

0.6

Poland

12.8

2.2

9.1

2.0

10.3

1.9

9.8

1.6

Russia

9.8

1.7

6.7

1.5

7.6

1.4

8.3

1.4

12.1

2.1

8.2

1.8

8.1

1.5

9.3

1.5

8.2

1.4

6.7

1.4

7.8

1.4

8.1

1.3

28.1 180.5

30.0

Europe Germany

Ukraine United Kingdom North

Americaa

Canada

169.5

29.6 130.5

28.2 151.0

7.6

1.3

6.4

1.3

7.7

1.4

7.8

1.3

Cuba

10.9

1.9

7.7

1.7

11.2

2.1

11.2

1.8

Dominican Republic

15.6

2.7

12.6

2.7

15.5

2.9

20.8

3.4

El Salvador

10.7

1.9

8.7

1.9

9.6

1.8

12.2

2.0

Mexico

76.3

13.3

55.9

12.1

63.8

11.9

77.1

12.7

2.3

0.4

2.9

0.6

3.6

0.7

3.9

0.6

42.8

7.5

33.6

7.3

38.7

7.2

44.5

7.4

Oceania South America Totalb

572.6

462.4

537.1

604.3

Source: U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, 2012 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. a North America includes Central America and the Caribbean. b Percentages do not add up to 100.0 because of exclusion of “unknown” category.

communities. As we have seen in prior chapters, the first two factors vary significantly across immigrant groups; thus it is not too surprising that the third does too. The “propensity” of a particular group to naturalize is a composite of two related but different trends: the numbers that actually acquire U.S. citizenship and the speed at which they do so. Hence, the political weight of two immigrant groups that exhibit similar rates of naturalization by the end of the first generation will be very different if one completed the change soon after arrival and the other waited until the years of retirement.

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  185

2006 N (000s) 50.4 263.5

2007

% 7.2

N (000s) 41.6

37.5 243.8

2008

% 6.3

N (000s) 54.4

36.9 330.6

2009

% 5.2

N (000s) 60.4

31.6 276.4

2010

% 8.1

N (000s) 64.0

37.1 257.6

2011

% 10.3

N (000s)

%

69.7

10.0

41.5 249.9

36.0

35.4

5.0

33.1

5.0

40.0

3.8

37.1

5.0

34.0

5.5

32.9

4.7

47.5

6.8

46.9

7.1

66.0

6.3

52.9

7.1

61.1

9.9

46.0

6.6

40.5

5.8

38.8

5.9

58.8

5.6

38.9

5.2

35.5

5.7

42.5

6.1

29.9

4.2

27.9

4.2

39.6

3.8

31.1

4.2

19.3

3.1

20.9

3.0

105.1

14.4

81.8

12.4 188.7

10.4

90.2

12.1

78.0

12.6

82.2

11.8

4.6

0.6

3.6

0.4

4.6

0.6

4.0

0.6

4.5

0.6

0.5

4.7

10.2

1.4

9.3

1.4

14.2

1.3

10.6

1.4

8.0

1.3

8.8

1.3

9.4

1.3

7.7

1.1

10.8

1.0

9.5

1.3

7.6

1.2

8.3

1.2

10.1

1.4

8.6

1.3

11.0

1.0

9.1

1.2

7.3

1.2

8.1

1.2

9.1

1.3

7.8

1.1

12.1

1.2

10.1

1.3

8.4

1.4

9.2

1.3

26.4 217.7

31.4

223

31.7 241.1

36.5 462.3

44.1 250.2

33.6 163.8

9.6

1.4

8.5

1.3

12.4

1.2

9.8

1.3

8.5

1.4

9.3

1.3

21.5

3.1

15.4

2.3

39.9

3.8

24.9

3.3

14.1

2.3

21.1

3.0

22.2

3.1

20.6

3.1

35.2

3.4

20.8

2.8

15.4

2.5

20.5

2.9

1.9

17.1

2.6

35.8

3.4

18.9

2.5

10.3

1.7

13.8

2.0

22.1 111.6

15.0

67.1

10.8

94.8

13.7

13.4 84.0

11.9 122.3

18.5 231.8

3.7

0.5

3.3

0.5

4.8

0.5

3.9

0.5

3.6

0.6

3.7

0.5

60.0

8.5

48.1

7.3

84.8

8.9

61.7

8.3

58.5

9.4

70.5

10.1

702.6

660.5

1,046.5

743.7

619.9

694.2

Differential propensities for acquiring citizenship combine with the size of eligible pools from each nationality to produce aggregate naturalization trends. Between 1908 and 1990 the number of persons naturalizing each year exceeded three hundred thousand only in 1943 and 1944, in the midst of World War II. Since 1990, in contrast, naturalizations have exceeded three hundred thousand every year except 1992.60 By the first decade of the twenty-first century the rate of naturalizations jumped again, never dropping below 450,000. Table 23 presents an overview of naturalization trends between 2002 and 2011. During

186  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

this period more than 6.6 million immigrants became American citizens. Asia had pride of place among regions of origin, topping all others in all but one year. The trend is noteworthy since North America, not Asia, is the prime source of immigrants in absolute terms. The difference is due to the rapidity with which many Asian nationalities adopt U.S. citizenship. It is also due to the large proportion of Mexicans and Central American immigrants who are undocumented and, hence, ineligible to initiate the naturalization process. The decline in the proportion of European naturalizations was arrested in the 2000s by the influx of Russians and other East Europeans in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise. Among individual countries, Mexico is by far the largest source of new citizens, accounting by itself for 15 percent of the total. This figure reflects the absolute size of the Mexican immigrant population rather than its propensity to naturalize or its speed in doing so. On both counts, Mexico ranks far below the next three major sources of new citizens, all originating in Asia (China, India, and the Philippines). Again, the large number of unauthorized Mexican migrants, estimated to represent greater than half of this population, is a key factor in the low average naturalization rates for this group. In the Americas the most important sources besides Mexico are in Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) and the Caribbean. None of these groups reached the number of naturalizations among the three main Asian groups. The existence of very large proportions of unauthorized migrants among Central Americans plays the same inhibiting role as for Mexicans. Aside from Russia and Eastern Europe, the legacy of the Cold War is still apparent in the sizable numbers of former refugees from Cuba and Vietnam in these series. Their relative proportions are slated to decline, however, with the end of the mass refugee waves of the past. Reasons for the greater representation of Asian nationalities in the overall naturalization totals are further clarified by figures in table 24 showing the regional median number of years to citizenship acquisition. Asians, together with Africans, are the most prone to naturalize after reaching the required five years of U.S. residence. Their figures contrast notably with those from North America that reflect the slower pace of Mexicans and Canadians in starting the naturalization process. In a recent article Massey and Pren argue that Mexican and other Latin American immigrants have resorted to “defensive naturalization” to protect themselves against the onslaught of anti-immigrant measures approved by the U.S. Congress in the wake of the 2001 terror-

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  187 Table 24  Median Years of U.S. Residence, by Year of Naturalization and Region of Birth, 1995–2011 Year of naturalization Region

1995

2000

2005

2009

2010

2011

Totals

9

9

8

7

6

6

Africa

6

7

7

6

5

5

Asia

7

8

7

6

5

6

Europe

9

7

6

7

6

6 10

North America

14

11

11

11

10

Oceania

11

11

9

8

7

7

South America

10

10

8

6

5

6

Sources: Lee, “U.S. Naturalizations: 2011”; U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, 2012 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, table 7.

ist attacks.61 Along with approval of dual citizenship by the Mexican Congress in the late 1990s, this reorientation is reflected in the drop from fourteen years to ten in the average time for naturalization among eligible Mexicans. Along parallel lines, Stewart has vividly documented the shift in sentiment and the growing hostility toward Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants in the first decade of this century.62 “Defensive naturalizations,” aided by eligibility for dual citizenship, may account for the surge in Mexican naturalizations in recent years, especially in 2008, as documented in table 23. Despite these developments, the same trends observed in past decades hold at present, with eligible Mexicans and Central Americans trailing all major Asian nationalities in the number and relative speed of citizenship acquisition. Determinants of Naturalization European immigrants arriving in the first decades of the twentieth century also registered significant variations in their propensities to acquire U.S. citizenship. In 1936 sociologist W. S. Bernard proposed that the gap between “old” (northwestern) and “new” (southeastern) Europeans in acquiring citizenship was due to different levels of literacy and education. Among immigrants arriving at the same time, those with better education could be expected to understand the benefits of naturalization faster and to start the process earlier than others. The observed dif-

188  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics Table 25  Rates of U.S. Naturalization for Immigrants Who Arrived before 2005, by National Origin, 2010 Year of U.S. arrival

Country of birth

N

Naturalized

Pre1990 (%)

Total immigrantsa

33,582,131

49.8

70.9

%

Well above average Vietnam Cambodia

 

1990– 1994 (%)

1995– 1999 (%)

2000– 2004 (%)

48.3

34.3

16.9

 

 

 

 

 

1,094,462

82.1

91.2

83.2

73.1

50.1

142,495

73.5

77.7

72.6

73.0

44.5

Hong Kong

197,086

84.8

94.8

83.6

71.9

38.4

Iran

304,524

81.5

91.5

81.7

71.5

48.7

Former USSR (15 republics)

862,104

72.0

91.5

86.7

66.6

41.9

1,533,554

73.8

88.8

75.1

64.3

32.5

Pakistan

251,556

67.0

87.3

73.6

63.2

36.7

Taiwan

321,473

80.5

94.3

80.2

62.3

30.8

585,231

67.1

78.6

66.3

55.6

30.4

Philippines

Above average Jamaica India

1,323,494

58.7

89.3

78.0

52.2

18.6

China

1,181,558

64.2

90.6

71.8

48.7

28.9

Haiti

486,335

56.2

74.2

53.4

46.1

23.3

Poland

424,664

65.6

84.0

65.9

45.2

20.6

Cuba

907,351

64.4

83.2

51.7

43.5

22.4

Italy

348,970

77.8

82.5

58.2

42.2

20.4

Dominican Republic

714,780

54.0

70.9

49.7

42.1

24.1

Korea

915,639

65.1

86.4

63.6

40.1

16.4 (continued)

ferences between Italian peasants and northern European skilled workers was attributed to this factor.63 Bernard’s hypothesis has been supported by more recent studies. As we saw in chapter 4, Asian and East European immigrants tend to have higher levels of human capital than others, especially those originating in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The differences in education and skills between these various flows correspond fairly closely with their propensity to naturalize. Table 25 presents additional evidence for testing this hypothesis by listing the twenty-eight major for-

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  189 Table 25  (continued) Year of U.S. arrival

% Country of birth

N

Naturalized

Pre1990 (%)

1990– 1994 (%)

1995– 1999 (%)

2000– 2004 (%)

Near to below average Peru

360,525

49.2

77.4

57.3

39.1

15.0

Colombia

555,190

53.8

81.3

56.5

33.9

19.3

United Kingdom

591,159

53.5

65.9

42.8

30.8

10.7

Germany

561,684

69.0

79.5

38.9

29.9

14.6

Canada

697,687

51.5

66.0

41.5

27.8

13.3

Brazil

258,755

33.5

67.7

46.8

27.2

9.6

Ecuador

372,951

43.5

73.0

42.2

26.8

14.3

Well below average Honduras El Salvador Guatemala Mexico

 

 

 

 

 

391,645

 

26.8

58.5

26.1

16.4

6.1

1,010,339

32.1

54.2

24.6

15.1

6.6

622,897

28.1

52.9

24.6

14.4

9.3

10,209,013

25.1

46.8

17.5

10.5

5.4

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2008–10. aNationalities are ranked according to the rate of naturalization of the 1995–1999 cohort (highlighted).

eign-born nationalities arriving in the United States before 2005 and counted in the 2010 census. The table presents the total rates of naturalization for each group, although these rates are heavily influenced by the different lengths of U.S. residence of different nationalities. For example, Italy has one of the highest naturalization rates of any country (77.8 percent), but this figure reflects the fact that 90 percent of naturalized Italians have been living in the United States for thirty years or more. For this reason countries are ranked according to the rate of naturalization of immigrants who arrived between 1995 and 1999 and, hence, had at least ten years of residence in the country by 2010. The census counts all immigrants, regardless of legal status in the country. The rankings make apparent two trends. First, all national groups that exceeded the average naturalization rate of the 1995–​99 cohort by 25 percent or more came from Asia or Eastern Europe. This category includes well-educated nationalities like Filipinos, Taiwanese, and Iranians but also (and at the very top) less-educated former refugee groups, such as

190  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

Cambodians and Vietnamese. Their presence indicates the operation of factors other than education in the decision to acquire U.S. citizenship. Second, most immigrants who failed to naturalize during this period came from Latin America in general and from Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala, in particular. As seen previously, these are the countries that represent the major sources of low-skill, physical-labor immigration to the United States at present. Greater than half of them are estimated to be unauthorized and, hence, automatically ineligible for U.S. citizenship acquisition. Throughout the last century the U.S. government has adopted an individualistic laissez-faire policy toward citizenship acquisition, setting universalistic rules for its process and managing but not providing major resources to undertake it. As Bloemraad has stressed, the United States differs greatly in this respect from its northern neighbor. Canada’s policy of multiculturalism has provided significant resources to immigrant organizations in order to facilitate the naturalization of their co­ethnics.64 The single exception to the U.S. individualistic stance is governmental support for refugee groups to facilitate their settlement and adaptation. Southeast Asian refugees (as well as Cubans) fit into this category, which may partially explain their high rates of naturalization. As we have seen, Mexicans had the largest absolute number of naturalized citizens. Still, the Mexican rate of naturalization remains the lowest of any nationality, reflecting the low average level of education of this group, as well as the ineligibility to start the process by many of its members. In general, immigrants of low human capital not only may take longer to grasp the advantages of citizenship, following Bernard’s hypothesis, but also may find the process of naturalization more difficult. Tests of English knowledge and U.S. civics included in this process create an additional and frequently impassable barrier for immigrants of modest educational backgrounds.65 Furthermore, the cost of applications for naturalization has steadily increased, exceeding $600 at present. A final factor contributing to the low relative level of citizenship acquisition among Mexicans is the geographical proximity of their country of origin and, hence, the “reversibility” of migration. Despite the recent shift in policy by the Mexican government, supporting U.S. citizenship acquisition by their migrants, the fact that their hometowns are often a bus ride away reduces the finality of migration and, hence, the incentive to initiate the process. The same factor partially accounts for the low propensity to change flags among Canadian immigrants, despite their higher average levels of education (see table 25).

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  191

Geographical proximity and reversibility of migration weaken the commitment to permanent settlement and, hence, the incentive to naturalize. This situation can be usefully compared with that of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Russian, and Iranian refugees coming to escape dire political conditions at home. For these groups the act of leaving their countries was a momentous, onetime decision with permanent settlement abroad being the only possible outcome. Coupled with official U.S. resettlement assistance, the irreversibility of their move led almost half of the members of these nationalities to naturalize as soon as possible and close to two-thirds of those arriving in the late 1990s to do so. Reversibility is also behind the low rates of naturalization of British and German immigrants who come from wealthier, democratic nations. Persons from these countries may regard the American green card more as a convenience than as a permanent commitment to settlement. For these immigrants, as well as for Canadians, the cumbersome and expensive naturalization process creates an additional disincentive, making U.S. citizenship a less-than-worthwhile prospect for many. Table 25 makes clear that Bernard’s hypothesis, while generally accurate, does not fully capture the range of motivations prompting foreigners to change flags. The table also highlights the point that, regardless of nationality, the passage of time leads inexorably to higher levels of naturalization, despite the difficulty of the process. The time factor “rounds the picture” concerning the key determinants of citizenship. Level of education, length of residence in the country, and reversibility of migration jointly provide a powerful model accounting for differences in the probability of naturalization among immigrant nationalities in the United States. While the most educated and those who come escaping the most harrowing conditions do so first, others eventually follow suit as part of a time-driven inexorable process of incorporation. Left outside are poor immigrants who, by dint of their unauthorized status, are unable to start the process. Since citizenship endows immigrants with the capacity to both contribute and acquire a voice in the American political system, the mass of undocumented workers is condemned to remain in the shadows until their situation is resolved.

The Future of Immigrant Politics Resilient Ethnicities Time and the passing of the first generation inevitably turn former immigrant communities into ethnic groups with fundamentally American

192  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

concerns. Most contemporary immigration is still of recent vintage, so the politics of the first generation is still very much in evidence. It is in this situation where transnational activities have flourished. Despite efforts of immigrant families and sending-country governments to preserve vibrant national loyalties among the second generation, however, the process of acculturation inexorably turns their members into Americans with primarily domestic views and aspirations.66 As early transnational concerns fade from view, ethnic politics takes over. The historical record of all immigrant groups, old and new, shows that the politics of the second and successive generations pivot less around issues of class than those tied to a common ethnic origin. By the early twenty-first century some contemporary immigrant groups had spent sufficient time in the country for this process to become evident. Mexicans are again the prime example because, as we saw previously, they have been coming continuously, with only temporary interruptions, since the nineteenth century. This flow has thus spawned a second, third, and even higher generations. Cuban exiles arriving in Miami in the 1960s and 1970s have also become well entrenched after almost half a century in the country. This group has acquired a highly visible political profile, increasingly dominated by its second generation. Despite a common language and religion, these two Latin nationalities are very different in terms of class of origin and contexts of reception representing, respectively, a manual labor inflow versus a displaced entrepreneurial and professional class leaving its country for political reasons. Their experiences can thus illuminate the future of immigrant politics, as other groups consolidate their presence in the American scene. Mexican American Politics Although Mexican American political organizing dates back to several late nineteenth-century self-help associations known as mutualistas, its first real impulse did not occur until World War I and its aftermath. In 1921, returning Mexican American veterans created in San Antonio the Orden de Hijos de América; in 1923 the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was formed in Corpus Christi. The Orden, created to protect the veterans and other members of the minority against discrimination, eventually merged with LULAC, which was to become the oldest and largest Spanish-origin political organization in the country.67 Thus, at a time when the most urbanized European

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  193

groups back east continued to be involved in socialism and class politics, Mexican American political activism in the Southwest already focused on issues of ethnicity and racial-cultural exclusion.68 This orientation was to continue and assume more militant overtones after World War II. As we saw in chapter 1, Mexican Americans, together with African Americans, were the exceptions in the warpropelled melting process that brought other nationalities into the American mainstream. Thousands of returning Mexican American veterans, many highly decorated, found that they were still barred from movie theaters, residential neighborhoods, and even cemeteries in their own hometowns. As a result the G.I. Forum was organized in 1948 to defend the interests of veterans and to campaign against racial barriers. By this time, the process of reactive formation was in full swing. Just as Mexican immigrants had been made aware of a common identity by being discriminated against together, so their descendants recaptured the symbols of that identity and turned them into rallying points of political solidarity. By 1960 the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) had been formed. It explained its raison d’être as follows: “MAPA grew out of many and difficult experiences of thousands of Mexican-Americans throughout California who have tried so hard to elect representatives to state and local government. . . . An organization was needed that would be proudly Mexican-American, openly political, necessarily bipartisan.”69 Ethnic consciousness and mobilization reached their climax during the 1960s and early 1970s, driven by an increasingly vocal U.S.born generation. Mexican American politics during this period were patterned closely after the black power movement. As with established black groups, older organizations like LULAC were threatened with displacement by a proliferation of radical youth movements—​ the United Mexican American Students, the Mexican American Youth Organization, and the Brown Berets. Younger intellectuals went beyond pragmatic demands to articulate a vision of collective identity in which race, language, and culture were paramount. Concepts like Aztlán (the submerged Indo-Mexican nation of North America) and La Raza (The Race—​the racial-cultural community of its inhabitants) were coined and popularized during this period. Like Germans during World War I, Mexican Americans in the 1960s also “swatted the hyphen,” but they did so in the direction of ethnic reaffirmation: Chicano, rather than Mexican-American, became the preferred self-designation. By the end of the decade these symbolic developments had reached political expres-

194  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

sion in such movements as the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán (MEChA) and the La Raza Unida Party.70 The radical period was short-lived, however. La Raza Unida achieved some notable electoral successes in South Texas, primarily in municipal elections, but by the end of the 1970s it had effectively disappeared from the political scene. In the 1980s the older, more moderate LULAC—​ with branches in forty-one states—​ and new organizations like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), formed in 1968, staffed by professionals, and well-financed by private foundations, took the lead in Mexican ethnic politics.71 In retrospect the militancy of the 1960s can be interpreted as an inevitable reaction, in the context of the time, to the singularly oppressive conditions Mexican migrants and their descendants had endured for decades. Like African Americans, Mexican Americans saw themselves as a simultaneously exploited and despised minority. Because it was difficult to restore ethnic pride under these circumstances, reactive formation among the younger generation necessarily went beyond mild demands to articulate a radical alternative vision of reality. Chicano militancy accomplished in a few years what decades of moderate efforts had not. The doors of high political office opened for the first time to Mexican Americans; citizens of Mexican ancestry finally began registering and voting in high numbers; and presidential candidates were increasingly compelled to court the Mexican vote. Because of their concentration in the five southwestern states, Mexican Americans can play a crucial “swing” role in states that heavily influence Electoral College outcomes. As seen in table 26, the Hispanic vote in the Southwest represents a much higher proportion than nationwide. The roughly 19 percent of Hispanic (overwhelmingly Mexican) voters in the region can, when mobilized as a bloc, significantly affect elections in states that jointly control one-fifth of the votes needed to elect a new president. Nationwide, 71 percent of Hispanic voters supported Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election. The figure was 70 percent in California, increasing to 74 percent in Arizona, and 75 percent in Colorado.72 The overwhelming Hispanic vote in favor of the incumbent president was widely credited as a key factor in his reelection. It also prompted opponents in the Republican Party to reconsider their position against immigration reform. Consequences of this shift in policy stances toward immigrants in general and Hispanics in particular will be examined in the final chapter. As seen previously, the Mexican American electorate is potentially

1,826

Colorado

95,987

6,646

3,804

1,012

183

144

2,058

407

Spanish-origin vote (000s)

6.9

19.1

18.1

31.6

7.9

19.2

18.8

% Spanish origin

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “Reported Voting and Registration,” 2010, table 4b.

20,900

Total United States

5,600

Subtotal

Texas

579

10,725

California

New Mexico

2,170

Total vote (000s)

Arizona

State

National election, November 2010

Table 26  The Spanish-Origin Vote in the Southwest

538

113

34

5

9

55

10

Electoral college votes

137,263

29,336

9,493

746

2,299

13,864

2,934

Total registered (000s)

10,982

6,432

2,334

249

214

3,025

610

Spanish-origin registered (000s)

Registered citizens

8.0

22.0

24.6

33.4

9.3

21.8

20.8

% Spanish-origin

196  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

much higher because of the large number of nonnaturalized legal immigrants. Between 1990 and 2010, however, the Spanish-origin electorate in the Southwest grew swiftly—​from 10 to almost 20 percent of the total. As Passel notes, the Hispanic population—​consisting predominantly of Mexican-origin persons—​will become about a quarter of the U.S. total by midcentury, and its eligibility to vote will increase by about 25 percent. Thus, all indications point to the increasing political influence of this population.73 During the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s Mexican Americans were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, to the governorships of three states, and to mayoralties of major cities such as San Antonio and Denver. In the early 2000s, a Mexican American, Cruz Bustamante, served as lieutenant governor of California and was the runner-up in the 2004 gubernatorial election. Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and (despite his name) a second-generation Mexican American, played an increasingly prominent role in Democratic Party politics in preparation for the 2004 presidential elections. By that time 90 percent of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus was Mexican American. In the Democratic Convention of 2012, San Antonio mayor Julian Castro played a highly visible role. He is widely regarded as a “rising star” in the party, likely to run for national office in the future. Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant measure promoted by California governor Pete Wilson in a bid to improve his reelection prospects in 1994, turned out to be a watershed in Mexican American politics. Interpreted as an anti-Mexican measure, it led to a new reactive mobilization of proportions not seen since the 1960s. Mexican American organizations, such as the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) and MALDEF, were now sufficiently strong to use the occasion for massive naturalization and electoral registration campaigns. A study of electoral participation among ethnic minorities in the 1990s concluded that “the evidence from 1994 to 1998 supports our hypothesis regarding anti-immigrant legislation and voting behavior. In 1994, first generation immigrants in California were twice as likely to have voted as their generational counterparts in other states that did not have similar measures. . . . Second generation immigrants in California were 83 percent more likely to have voted as their generational peers elsewhere.”74 The Mexican American electorate thus turned out in force to punish proponents of 187 and elect their own to office. Congressman Robert Dornan, a conservative Republican from Orange County and a vigorous

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  197

advocate of the proposition, lost his seat to a young Mexican American Democrat, Loretta Sanchez. Governor Wilson, who had won reelection in 1994, ran unsuccessfully for president in 1996 and soon faded from view. Thereafter, no candidate for statewide office in California would dream of antagonizing Mexican American voters, and most explicitly courted their support.75 The increasing political weight of Mexican Americans is driven both by rising levels of naturalization and electoral registration and by the continuing flow of immigration from Mexico. As we saw in chapter 1, new immigrants do not vote, but they are counted for purposes of electoral redistricting, thus increasing political opportunities for coethnic candidates.76 The Mexican American electorate is heavily pro-Democratic, and the party has acknowledged its influence. There were up to three Mexican Americans of cabinet-level rank in the Clinton administration, and Mexican-origin Democrats, led by Bill Richardson, played other significant roles in it. President Obama pursued a similar policy, appointing several Hispanics to top-level posts and nominating another Hispanic of Puerto Rican origin, Sonia Sotomayor, to the Supreme Court. But he seriously alienated the Mexican and Hispanic electorate by allowing the deportation campaign against unauthorized immigrants, started by his predecessor, to continue and even expand. Implemented by Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, the campaign saw the number of deportees rise from a few thousand in the late 1990s to a peak of four hundred thousand in 2010 and again in 2011.77 As Stewart noted, actions like this were based on an increasingly distorted public perception equating unauthorized migration with terrorism even though no Mexican migrant has ever been accused or convicted of such acts.78 Belatedly realizing the political repercussions of these actions, Obama’s secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, announced in the fall of 2011 changes in the ICE deportation campaign and the review of pending cases on a “one-by-one basis.” With the presidential election looming, Obama went further in the summer of 2012, announcing “deferred action,” or temporary stays, from deportation of immigrant youths brought to the United States by their parents and whose unauthorized status was, therefore, no fault of their own. While this measure did not go far enough in creating a legalization path for this young population, numbering an estimated 1.4 million, it was wellreceived by Hispanic voters as a “first payment” on overdue comprehen-

198  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

sive immigration reform. Subsequently, Mexican American leaders, led by the mayors of Los Angeles and San Antonio, vigorously attempted to rally the Hispanic vote in support of Obama. Aware of the rapidly rising influence of the Mexican American electorate, Republicans have also been seeking to make inroads in it, with some success. Older, better-established, and wealthier Hispanos from New Mexico have been a prime target, with several prominent Hispanic Republicans coming from their ranks.79 Nevertheless, preferences for one or another party among Mexican Americans do not reflect consistent class differences. As with Europeans before them, ethnicity and ethnic issues continue to be the fundamental pivot of Mexican American politics. The launching of a massive deportation campaign by Republican president George W. Bush and a series of harsh antiimmigrant measures sponsored by Republican governors in Arizona, Alabama, and other states seriously compromised efforts by the party to reach out to the Hispanic electorate in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections.80 Predictably, such campaigns triggered a new wave of ethnic reaffirmation and street mobilizations by Mexican Americans. They culminated in the heavily lopsided Hispanic vote against the Republican presidential nominee in November 2012. Efforts of the Republican leadership to recover from this major defeat have included a new stance toward immigration reform and toward the millions of unauthorized Mexican immigrants living in the country. Policy consequences of this shift will be discussed in the final chapter. The Mexican population of the United States oscillates today between the transnational concerns of first-generation immigrants, engaged in an intense dialogue with their communities of origin and Mexican state and federal officials, and the ethnic politics of second and higher generations, seeking an increasing voice and influence within the American political system. Ironically, an immigrant group made up mostly of peasants and unskilled laborers has ended by playing an increasingly significant role in the politics of both their original and their adopted countries. Its size and growing empowerment makes it likely for its influence to continue growing in the future. Cuban American Politics Up until 1980, two decades after the advent of Castro’s revolution in Cuba, Cuban exile politics focused exclusively on seeking the demise of

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  199

the communist dictator. That year brought about two events that decisively changed the political orientation of this community, turning it inward. First, the Mariel exodus brought more than 125,000 new refugees in a six-month period. The key characteristic of this exodus is that it was unwelcome, forced on the United States by the decision of the Cuban government to open the Mariel port to all exiles wishing to take their families off the island. Castro’s government deliberately placed aboard the boats common criminals and mental patients, with the aim of discrediting both the exodus itself and its enemies in the Cuban community of Miami.81 This aim was achieved, as the reaction to the Mariel episode among the American public could not have been more negative, casting a pall over the entire Cuban exile community. The native-white establishment in Miami viewed the exodus as a cataclysm, thoroughly discrediting the city as an attractive tourist destination. Spearheaded by its mouthpiece, the Miami Herald, it organized a vigorous campaign to stop the Mariel flow or at least deflect it from South Florida. A content analysis of coverage of the episode in the Herald during 1980 showed that the tone of the articles was consistently negative and denunciatory. On April 24, 1980, for instance, a strong editorial condemned the boat lift, begun three days earlier, calling it humiliating and dangerous and asserting that “would-be rescuers from Florida are pawns in Castro’s open diplomatic war.” On May 1, a very negative article reported that five thousand refugees had arrived and that “the strident exile community in the United States shows little inclination of winding things down.”82 This coverage continued for months, stigmatizing the Mariel exodus by claiming that “this is not the entrepreneurial class that moved here 15 years ago. . . . A Cuban ghetto might develop.”83 This reception and its effects nationwide also tarnished the old exile community that saw itself demoted from a “model minority” and the “builders of South Florida” into just another undesirable group. Evidence of the arrival of criminals and other misfits rapidly reduced support for the boat lift among older Cubans and led them to distance themselves from the new arrivals, who had begun to be called, pejoratively, Marielitos. But it was too late, and the damage deliberately inflicted by Castro on his Miami enemies was accomplished.84 In the wake of Mariel a second episode signaled to Cubans how unwelcome they had become. An antibilingual referendum was placed on the ballot in the Miami-Dade County elections of November 1980 and passed overwhelmingly. It directed city and county officials to con-

200  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

duct business exclusively in English and prohibited them from funding activities in any other language. A sponsor of the measure explained his sentiments as follows: “My parents were immigrants and they had to learn English promptly; Cubans should do likewise.”85 Caught unawares by the hostility of those whom they had seen so far as allies in the anticommunist struggle, Cuban exiles reacted by pulling together and reorienting their economic resources and political organization inward. A Cuban American Miami-Dade County official described the situation as follows: There were four stages to Mariel and its aftermath: In the first, there was great solidarity by Cuban Americans with the Mariel refugees. . . . In the second, the Feds took over. The campaign against Mariel in the press got tougher. Cuban Americans began to believe it and abandoned the new arrivals. . . . In the third stage, there was the anti-bilingual referendum which was a slap in our face. People began to feel “more Cuban than anyone.” There was anger at the insult, but no organization. In the fourth stage, there is embryonic organization promoted by the business leaders; the plan today is to try to elect a Cuban mayor of the city and perhaps one or two state legislators.86

Relative to other immigrant groups, the key difference in the reactive formation process among Cuban exiles in the aftermath of Mariel was the considerable professional and entrepreneurial resources that they brought into play. Following the referendum, Cuban American businessmen began to withdraw from native-white (“Anglo”) organizations or to combine participation in them with parallel coethnic organizing. Facts about Cuban Exiles (FACE) and the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) were founded at the time. Plans were made to run candidates for local office. More important, a new discourse began to emerge in response to the antibilingual movement. In this alternative discourse the exile community itself represented the solution to Miami’s problems and the builder of its future. Luis Botifoll, a leading Cuban American banker, became one of the most prominent exponents of this view: Before the “Great Change,” Miami was a typical southern city, with an important population of retirees and veterans, whose only activity consisted in the exploitation of tourism in the sunny winters. No one thought of transforming Miami into what it is today. It is no exaggeration to say that the motor of this Great Change were the Cuban men and women who elected freedom and came to these shores to rebuild their homes and face with courage an uncertain future. . . . These last decades have witnessed the foundation of a dynamic and multi-faceted Miami over the past of a Miami that

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  201

was merely provincial and tourist-oriented. Today, the level of progress has reached unanticipated heights, beyond the limits of anyone’s imagination.87

Instead of complaining about discrimination or arguing for minority rights, Cubans laid claim to the city. Their claim was backed by the considerable economic resources of their business enclave (described in chapter 4) and by a very rapid process of naturalization and electoral registration among the early exile waves. Monolithic bloc voting among Cuban Americans accomplished, in a few years, what would have been unimaginable in 1980. Established native-Anglo leaders, including those who had supported the referendum, were voted out of office, replaced by former exiles. By middecade the mayors of the cities of Miami, Hialeah, West Miami, and smaller municipalities were Cuban Americans, and there were ten Cuban Americans in the state legislature.88 By 2000 the mayoralty of Miami-Dade County itself and three slots in the U.S. Congress were added. Cuban American congresspersons were repeatedly elected, without credible opposition, during the 1990s and again in the 2000s. In predominantly Hispanic districts of South Florida it became scarcely worthwhile to run for office if one was not a Cuban American. Since 1980, this ethnic vote has lined up solidly behind the Republican Party. This was in response to the abandonment of the Cuban exile brigade in the Bay of Pigs by the Kennedy administration in 1961. Since then, Cuban Americans have seen their best prospects in their perennial struggle with Fidel Castro and his regime in aligning themselves with Republican leaders. That view was significantly buttressed by the Elián González episode in 1999. The decision by Democratic attorney general Janet Reno to forcibly remove the child from his Miami Cuban relatives (in accordance with a federal court ruling) triggered days of rioting in the city. Following Elián’s return to Cuba, exile leaders reorganized the community to “punish” the Democrats at election time. Bloc voting was at its height during the presidential elections of 2000, with more than four-fifths of Cuban Americans casting their ballots for George W. Bush.89 Though Cubans represent only a small fraction of the Florida electorate, their high voting rates and strong Republican bent were seen as decisive in the highly contested 2000 election in Florida. After his victory President Bush was compelled to reward his fervent Caribbean allies. He did so by appointing Cuban Americans Mel Martinez to the cabinet, Otto Reich as his personal representative for Latin America,

202  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

and a number of others to important posts. In preparation for the 2004 elections, he further tightened the economic embargo against Cuba by strictly limiting family trips, remittances, and investments to the island in a bid to please his hard-line allies in Miami.90 In 2004 Mel Martinez was elected to the U.S. Senate from Florida, further strengthening the Cuban American congressional representation. The economic bifurcation that we saw in chapter 4 between the old Cuban middle-class exodus and the post-1980 refugee waves is also evident in the political field. Cubans continue to be the only foreign group who, upon setting foot on U.S. soil, are automatically granted asylum. This legal provision—​a remnant of the Cold War known as the Cuban Adjustment Act—​has facilitated a continuous inflow from the island, through both legal and clandestine means. The political orientation of the post-1980 refugees is, however, quite different from their predecessors’. Born and raised under the revolution, the new Cuban migrants are less interested in overthrowing the Castro regime than in moving ahead economically. Their principal concerns are both apolitical and familistic, as they are fundamentally committed to supporting kin and friends left behind.91 Ironically, the apolitical transnationalism of these recent refugees may have done more to transform the Cuban economy and society than the political and confrontational stance of their predecessors. As Eckstein has noted, the Cuban government succeeded in beating back all the efforts of earlier exiles to overthrow it, but it has opened itself to the flow of remittance and goods brought by the post-1980 refugees.92 In doing so, it has allowed this group to have a disproportionate influence in the island population’s values, cultural preferences, and economic behavior. Meanwhile, Cuban American politics in the United States have been increasingly taken over by the children of earlier exiles—​a well-educated and well-endowed second generation that has continued their parents’ themes of intransigent opposition to the communist regime in the island and firm support for the Republican Party. The success of this strategy, at least as far as American politics is concerned, is reflected in the election of Marco Rubio to replace Mel Martinez as U.S. senator from Florida. A charismatic, second-generation Cuban American, Rubio is widely regarded as a rising star in Republican ranks, having been seriously considered for the vice presidential slot on the 2012 GOP ticket and deemed a possible presidential candidate for 2016. The patent failure of the earlier Cuban exiles to overthrow the communist regime

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  203

in Cuba has thus been compensated by their evident success in South Florida politics. They have, in the process, unwittingly transferred the task of transforming Cuban society to the newer refugee cohorts. Although Cuban American politics continues to be dominated by the earlier exile cohorts, there are signs that the arrival on the scene of the second generation and the more recent refugee waves are gradually changing it. A Cuban American Democrat, Joe García, was recently elected to Congress. In the 2012 presidential election the Cuban vote in Florida was split (47 percent for Romney; 49 percent for Obama). This represents a marked departure from the overwhelming 2000 Cuban vote in favor of President Bush.93 More important still, Republican Senator Rubio has taken the lead in promoting a new comprehensive immigration reform bill, confronting, in the process, the most reactionary elements of his own party. While quite different in history and ideological orientations, Mexican American and Cuban American politics are similar in two crucial respects. First, in both cases the origins of contemporary mobilizations date back to key episodes of reactive formation—​for Mexicans, in response to Proposition 187 and the more recent deportation campaign, following a long history of discrimination; for Cubans, in response to the Mariel exodus and the 1980 antibilingual referendum. Second, for both groups consequences of these mobilizations have been long-lasting, with ethnicity easily trumping class as the fundamental lever of political action. Naturalized first-generation citizens and their children seldom vote their pocketbooks only but rather support those parties and candidates seen as closer to their ethnic self-definition, their pride, and their goals. The careers of Mexican American mayor Julian Castro, his brother Congressman Joaquin Castro, and Cuban American senator Marco Rubio have been moving ahead rapidly riding on those sentiments.

Emergent Ethnicities We have seen how “nationalities” were often forged by immigration through the common expedient of lumping together groups that shared only a tenuous bond before arriving in America. The consolidation of nation-states during the twentieth century preempted this function so that, by the time the doors were reopened in 1965, most immigrants arrived with well-defined national identities. But recent years have witnessed the rise of a higher level of collective identification. Colombian immigrants certainly know that they are Colombian and Mexican immi-

204  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

grants that they are Mexican; what they probably do not know when they arrive in the United States is that they belong to a larger common category called Hispanics. Colombians, Mexicans, Cubans, and other immigrant groups from Latin America are generally aware that they share common linguistic and cultural roots, but this fact seldom suffices to produce a strong overarching solidarity. National experiences are too divergent and national loyalties too deeply embedded to yield to this supranational logic. In Latin America patriotism is often sharpened by periodic revivals of conflict with a neighboring Latin nation. Thus, Colombians and Venezuelans, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians, Chileans and Argentines have traditionally reaffirmed their sense of national pride in actual or symbolic confrontations with each other. Upon arrival in the United States, they learn differently. As Sicilian peasants were informed in New York of their being “Italian,” contemporary Latin American immigrants are told—​in no uncertain terms—​that despite their ancestral differences, they are all “Hispanic.”94 This experience is not an isolated one. Immigrants from Asia, especially those with common racial features, are lumped together under the label “Asian” or “Oriental.” In this instance the distance between ethnic labeling and actuality is even more egregious because groups so designated do not even share a common language. Even so, the labels Asian and Asian American figure prominently as categories under which people are counted, students and workers classified, and journalistic articles written.95 Ethnicity has always been a socially constructed product, forged in interaction between individual traits and the surrounding context. It is, therefore, not impossible that these supranational identities will take hold and come eventually to define groups so labeled to others, as well as to themselves. The history of immigration certainly supports this possibility. Students of ethnic mobilizations, such as Joane Nagel, have argued that receiving nation-states play a crucial role in the rise of ethnicity through their defining and treating various groups differently. More recently, Wimmer has shown that the creation of ethnic boundaries depends on the interplay between the interest of powerful groups in legitimizing their privileges and those of subordinate ones in improving their own status.96 Despite the very heterogeneous character of the populations subsumed under the new pan-national labels, it is likely that Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans are on their way to becoming the new

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  205 Table 27  Self-Reported Race of Children of Immigrants and Their Parents, by National Origin Groups, 1995–1996 National origin

White Relations (%)

Black (%)

Cuba

Child

41.2

Parent

93.1

1.1

Mexico

Child

1.5

0.3

Parent

5.7

—

Nicaragua

Child

19.4

—

Parent

67.7

0.5

Other Latin Child America Parent

22.8

1.9

69.5

4.6

0.8

Asian (%)

Multi­ racial (%)

—

11.5

0.3 — 2.1 — 1.6 — 0.8

Hispanic, National Latino origina Other (%) (%) (%) 36.0

5.5

4.9

2.5

1.1

0.5

1.4

12.0

25.5

56.2

4.5

21.6

15.9

26.1

28.5

9.7

61.8

2.7

6.5

22.0

5.4

0.5

2.2

14.7

52.9

4.6

3.1

17.8

2.3

1.9

3.1

Source: Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, table 7.7. Note: Figures are raw percentages. a For example, “Mexican.”

ethnic minorities because they are defined as single entities in numerous official publications, lumped together in affirmative action programs, counted together by the census, and addressed jointly in official rhetoric. Academic researchers and the media have contributed heavily to this process of ethnic construction through the same expedient of addressing disparate nationalities “as if” they were part of the same collectivity. To the extent that the new labels prevail, the ethnic mobilizations to emerge in the Latin barrios and Asian “towns” of major American cities will not be bound by the original national identities but by the supranational ones initially bestowed on them from the outside. There is evidence that this new process of ethnic formation is taking hold, if not in the first generation at least in the second. Results of the large survey of immigrant children and their parents, already described in chapter 4, indicate that parents hold on to their nationalities as their prime self-identifiers but that their children learn to describe their ethnicity, and even their race, according to pan-national labels. Table 27 presents evidence of this trend in a cross-generational comparison of responses to the question, “What is your race?” Latin immigrant parents seldom confuse their ethnicity with their race; among children, however, “Hispanic” has taken hold as a racial self-designation. Of first-generation Cubans, for example, 93 percent identify themselves racially as “white,” but only 41 percent of their offspring agree. Fully 36

206  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics 14,000,000

Million persons

12,000,000 10,000,000 8,000,000 6,000,000 4,000,000 2,000,000 0

Non-Hispanic White

Black

Asian

Hispanic

F igu r e 11. Population change by race/ethnicity in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas, 2000–​2010. Source: Frey, “The New Metro Minority Map,” figure 1.8.

percent of these adolescents see themselves racially as Hispanic, a figure that increases to 62 percent among Nicaraguan Americans. When ethnicity “thickens” into race, important behavioral consequences follow. Economic and political entrepreneurs are giving a vigorous push to these emergent ethnicities because of their interests in expanding both the pan-ethnic market and the electorate. Thus, whatever major differences exist in the historical origins and political orientations of Cuban, Mexican, and Central American immigrants, they are being increasingly swept under a common term. Under a different label the same process is taking place among descendants of Filipino, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese immigrants. To the extent that these pan-ethnic categories take hold into actual ethnicities or even races, the political consequences can be momentous. Figures 11 and 12 present the evolution of four such categories in the one hundred largest U.S. metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2010. While the white non-Hispanic population declined 14 percent during this period, “Hispanics” increased their numbers by 45 percent and “Asians” by 53 percent. These relative figures translate into a changed ethnic profile in which, by 2005, 20 percent of the U.S. metropolitan population was Hispanic, surpassing blacks as the nation’s largest minority, and an additional 8 percent were Asians.97 In reality the political behavior of contemporary immigrant communities has not yet been completely subsumed under the new pan-eth-

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  207 100%

80% 57%

60%

71%

40%

20%

12% 13%

14% 11%

0%

White non-Hispanic Black Hispanic any race Asian Other

63%

1990

20% 3% 1%

14% 5%

2000

1%

8%

3%

2010

F igu r e 12. Population by race/ethnicity. Source: Frey, “The New Metro Minority Map,” figure 1-A.

nic categories. Significant national differences remain, as shown by the prior discussion of Mexican American and Cuban American politics. In addition, transnational activities and identities and the efforts of sending-country governments to strengthen them help keep national identities alive, at least in the first generation. What seems to be happening at present is defined by two trends. First, immigrant nationalities vote their particular interests, but they cooperate pan-ethnically on common issues. Thus, different Latin American nationalities may have specific political concerns and even opposite ideological preferences, but they cooperate on the defense of bilingualism and in opposition to restrictionist and anti-immigrant policies.98 Second, leaders and activists from particular nationalities use panethnic categories to increase support for their specific political goals. Thus, Chinese American political candidates in California and elsewhere regularly appeal to the “Asian” vote. “Hispanic” politics in South Florida is quite different from California’s: the first is largely dominated by Cuban American interests and values and the second by those of concern to Mexican Americans. Smaller or more recent Latin immigrant groups are prompted, through appeal to the common “Hispanic” label, to fall in line with the regionally dominant group. While their political ideologies were diametrically opposed, Bill Richardson served as the “Hispanic” governor of New Mexico while Mel Martinez and then Marco Rubio became the “Hispanic” senators of Florida.

208  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics Table 28  Types of Immigrants in the United States and Their Political Orientations Immigration types

Feature Propensity to naturalize

Unskilled/ semiskilled workers

Professionals

Entrepreneurs

Political refugees

Low

High

High

High Low (Blocked)

Transnational political activism

Low

High

High

Salience of politics

Low

High

Medium

High

Reactive

Linear

Reactive

Linear

Character of ethnicity

Variations on a Theme Little has been said so far about how the typology of contemporary immigration, outlined in chapter 1, relates to different political activities and orientations. This omission is, in part, because the typology is largely based on the different class resources that immigrants bring with them while, as seen in this chapter, ethnicity regularly trumps class as a motive for collective mobilization. Still, major differences exist between types of immigrants in several of the political dimensions discussed previously. Table 28 summarizes these differences by comparing immigrant types along four key dimensions: propensity to naturalize, propensity to engage in transnational political activities, salience of politics, and the character of collective political mobilizations. We have already shown that higher levels of human capital lead to higher rates of citizenship acquisition. Thus, with equal time in the country, immigrant professionals and entrepreneurs can be expected to naturalize faster and more frequently than physical laborers. The factor of “reversibility” of migration comes into play in the case of asylees and refugees. To the extent that their return option is blocked, higher rates of citizenship acquisition can be expected among these groups. This factor explains the very high rates of naturalization among the early waves of Cuban exiles and among Southeast Asian and Russian refugees at present. It also partially explains the low rates among Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylees, groups for whom the return option became open with the end of civil war and the return to democracy in their respective countries.99 For other undocumented Central Americans, as well as

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  209

Mexicans, lack of legal status in the United States creates an impassable barrier on the road to naturalization. Recent studies of determinants of political transnationalism have shown that higher human capital among first-generation immigrants also leads to higher levels of involvement in the politics of their home nations. Reasons for this trend are twofold: first, higher levels of education translate into more information about and concern with political affairs; second, higher human capital also translates into better incomes, enabling immigrant professionals and entrepreneurs to engage in these activities. Table 29 presents evidence of this trend based on an analysis of factors leading to political transnationalism among first-generation Colombian, Dominican, and Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. The table presents models for both “regular” and “occasional” transnational participation, but for purposes of discussion we focus on the first as the more rigorous definition of these activities.100 As the table shows, educated individuals are significantly more likely to take part in transnational political activities. A high school diploma increases the probability of doing so by 173 percent, and a college degree raises it by an additional 38 percent. The point made previously that there is no zero-sum game between transnationalism and integration to the American political system, including naturalization, is supported by these results. It is further supported by other findings in this table indicating that U.S. citizenship acquisition does not affect the propensity to participate in transnational activities and that length of U.S. residence actually increases it. Hence, the better established and more educated immigrant groups are, the more likely to naturalize and to be involved in transnational affairs. As seen previously, manual laborers who have become better established and more legally secure also become more involved in transnational activities. They tend to do so through philanthropic initiatives in their hometowns, however, rather than through participation in national political causes. The case of refugees is unique. While the very reasons for their departure makes these groups very “political,” salience of politics does not necessarily translate into transnational activism, given the common relationship of opposition between these groups and the regimes they escaped. As the experiences of Cubans and Vietnamese in the past and of Iranians today illustrate, the situation of political refugees can be referred to as “blocked transnationalism” because realities on the ground prevent interests and concerns with the home country to be translated into an effective presence there. Despite blocked transnation-

210  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics Table 29  Determinants of Political Transnationalism among Latin American Immigrants Regular involvementa Determinants

Coefficientc

% changed

Occasional involvementb Coefficientc

% changed

Demographic Gender (male) Marital Status (married)

1.209*

235.3

.710* −.056

103.4

.118***

12.6

—

1.003***

172.7

.646***

90.8

.324**

38.3

.320**

37.8

.034***

3.5

.010

—

—

.189

—

.078***

8.2

Educatione High School Graduate College Graduate Assimilation Years in the U.S. U.S. Citizen

−.041

Social Networks Sizef Scopeg Likelihood Ratio Pseudo R2 N (unweighted)

.095*** −.84 2,331.25*** .104

10.0 —

−.031

—

2,731.87*** .078

1,202

Source: Guarnizo, Portes, and Haller, “Assimilation and Transnationalism,” 1230–31. aParticipation in transnational activities is part of the routine daily life of respondents. bParticipation in transnational activities is sporadic and prompted by extraordinary events. cNegative binomial regression coefficients indicating net effects on the count of transnational activities engaged in by Colombian, Dominican, and Salvadoran household heads. The weighted sample is representative of approximately 187,000 first-generation adult immigrants in their principal areas of concentration. dPercent change in the count of transnational activities is computed for significant effects only. eLess than a high school education is the reference category. fActual number of ties reported by respondents. gRatio of nonlocal ties to local ties in the present city of residence. *p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001

alism, the political orientation of refugee groups tends to be linear—​ that is, dominated by a relentless opposition to the regime that forced them to escape. This orientation can be expected to continue unless native hostility in the United States triggers a reactive formation process. As seen previously, this was the case of Cuban exiles whose political orientations were linear until 1980 but became reactive after the Mariel episode.

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  211

Blocked transnationalism among refugees may diminish, however, across generations. The Vietnamese government, for example, has actively courted the ancestral concerns and interests of second-generation youths, bypassing the intransigent political opposition of their parents.101 Vietnamese authorities have strongly supported organizations of second-generation Vietnamese seeking to implement developmental and philanthropic projects in their old homeland. As we have also seen, more recent Cuban refugee cohorts in Miami have also managed to pry open the door to sustained transnational activism, defying in the process the economic embargo of the island sponsored by their earlier compatriots. Contrary to refugees, immigrant laborers do not find politics a salient issue unless sustained discrimination and nativist campaigns against them produce a reactive mobilization. The history of Mexican American politics, especially after Proposition 187 in California and the Sensenbrenner bill passed in 2005 by the U.S. House of Representatives criminalizing unauthorized immigrants, provides examples. Professional immigrants are the least likely to experience widespread discrimination. This is so because of their high levels of human capital and because, as we saw in chapter 1, they tend to be more dispersed geographically in pursuit of their careers. Professionals seldom create visible, culturally distinct concentrations that elicit opposition among the native-born. The politics of first-generation professionals is thus linear and guided primarily by concerns and interests in the home country, to which American ones are gradually added. As we have seen, this is the type of immigrant most prone to engage in transnational political activism and, simultaneously, to acquire U.S. citizenship. Immigrant entrepreneurs are in a parallel situation, except that their concentration in visible ethnic enclaves can make them the target of native hostility, leading to reactive mobilizations. Korean entrepreneurs in Los Angeles provide a case in point, especially after the riots of 1992, when many of their businesses were torched. The episode elicited a strong, collective reaction in the Korean community, aimed at both protecting itself and heightening its visibility and significance in local and state politics.102 The antibilingual referendum of 1980 and other hostile measures elicited a similar reaction among Cuban entrepreneurs in Miami, as we have seen. Similar attacks against business enclaves created by other nationalities have produced exactly the same response. The economic resources accompanying reactive ethnicity in such instances have boded ill for the sponsors of ethnocentric policies.

212  |  From Immigrants to Ethnics

Conclusion In The Immigration Time Bomb former Colorado governor Richard D. Lamm complained: “Increasingly, the political power of more than fifteen million Hispanics is being used not to support assimilation but to advance ‘ethnic pride’ in belonging to a different culture. The multiplication of outsiders is not a model for a viable society. . . . If immigrants do not feel that they are fully part of this society, as American as everyone else, then we are failing.”103 Throughout the history of the United States, immigrants have seldom felt “as American as everyone else” because differences in language and culture have separated them from the majority and because they are too often made painfully aware of that fact. Being “in America but not of it,” even if they wish to be, has represented an important aspect of the experience of most foreign groups and a major force promoting ethnic reaffirmation in subsequent generations. The rise of ethnic pride among children of recent arrivals is not surprising, as it is a tale repeated countless times in the history of immigration. The significant aspect of Lamm’s statement is the peril that it outlines and the solution that it proposes. The peril is the “fragmenting of America” by outside cultures, and the solution is rapid assimilation so that immigrants will become “as American as everyone else.” As happened a century ago, immigration is portrayed as somehow un-American, but whereas in the early twentieth century its alleged sins were political radicalism or political docility, at present they consist of excessive cultural diversity. This was the danger stirring Samuel Huntington to alert the nation to the “Hispanic Challenge.” More recently, as we saw earlier, Robert Putnam has harped on the same theme by asserting that immigration increases diversity and this, in turn, leads to a decline in “social capital.”104 Pundits past and present have seldom taken the time to examine the empirical evidence, preferring instead to give free rein to their prejudices. Assimilation to America has seldom taken place in the way recommended by nativists. Instead, the reaffirmation of distinct cultural identities—​whether actual or manufactured in the United States—​has been the rule among foreign groups and has represented the first effective step in their social and political incorporation. Ethnic solidarity has provided the basis for the pursuit of collective goals in the American political system. By mobilizing the ethnic vote and by electing their own to office, immigrants and their children have learned the rules of the democratic game and have absorbed its values in the process.

From Immigrants to Ethnics  |  213

Assimilation, the immediate transformation of immigrants into Americans “just like everyone else,” has never happened. Instead, the definition of the foreign-born by their nationality, rather than by their class, has meant that the first steps of political apprenticeship have consisted in reaffirming symbolically the same national and cultural characteristics and organizing along these lines. Italians voted as a bloc for Italian candidates in Boston and New York, just as Mexicans do for their own in Los Angeles and San Antonio today. Before Irish, Italian, or Greek politicians entered the mainstream as interpreters of American values and aspirations, their predecessors spent years in ward politics representing their ethnic groups’ interests and defending their identities. Ethnic resilience has been the rule among immigrants, old and new, and constitutes simultaneously a central part of the process of political incorporation. Today, “Hispanicity” in the Southwest is a synonym for Mexican American cultural reaffirmation, a latter-day manifestation of the same process. Despite the growth of transnational ties among firstgeneration immigrants, the politics of the second and subsequent generations has been overwhelmingly American, as are the values and loyalties of their members. Hence, the perils that so much alarm the current self-appointed guardians of national integrity are likely to be as imaginary as those that agitated their forebears. The vain search for political radicals in immigrant neighborhoods, described at the beginning of this chapter, finds its present counterpart in efforts to eradicate an imaginary resistance to English through constitutional reform. Back in the early 1900s the United States received annual numbers of immigrants comparable to what it receives today; foreigners represented up to 21 percent of the American labor force and close to half of the urban population; groups like Germans had succeeded in literally transplanting their nations and culture into America. The country was certainly more “fragmented” then than it is today. What held it together then, and continues to do so today, was not enforced cultural homogeneity but the strength of its political institutions and the durable framework that they offered for the process of ethnic reaffirmation and electoral mobilization to play itself out. Defending their own particular interests—​defined along ethnic lines—​was the way many immigrants and their descendants learned to identify with the interests of the nation as a whole. With different voices, and in new languages, that process continues today.

6

Language Diversity and Resilience

Learning to live simultaneously in two social worlds is a requisite of “successful” immigrant adaptation. In a world so different from one’s native land, much has to be learned initially to cope—​especially, the new language. With few exceptions newcomers unable to speak English in the Anglo-American world face enormous obstacles. Learning English is a basic step to enable them to participate in the life of the larger community, get an education, find a job, obtain a driver’s license and access to health care or social services, and apply for citizenship. Language has often been cited as the principal initial barrier confronting recent immigrants, from the least educated peasants to the most educated professionals.1 To be sure, the process of language learning—​played out, particularly for the children of the new immigrants, in the institutional context of the public schools—​is a complex story of mutual adaptation, of the accommodation of two or more ethnolinguistic groups in diverse structural contexts. It is also, as we will see, a story of considerable diversity, fraught with irony and controversy. Language acquisition and language shift parallel in many ways the story of immigrant settlement in American society and adaptation to the polity and economy told in earlier chapters. Yet the process is not simply a reflection of the immigrant experience in these other realms, for language in the United States has a meaning that transcends its purely instrumental value as means of communication. In a country lacking centuries-old traditions and receiving millions of foreigners from the 214

Language  |  215

most diverse lands, language homogeneity came to be seen as the bedrock of national identity. Immigrants were not only expected to speak English but to speak English only as the prerequisite of social acceptance and integration. Unlike many European nations that are tolerant of linguistic diversity, in the United States the acquisition of nonaccented English and the dropping of foreign languages came to represent the litmus test of Americanization. Other aspects of immigrant culture (such as cuisine, community celebrations, and religion, which we will examine in a later chapter) often last for several generations, but the home language seldom survives. Linguistic transition, its forms and its implications, is the subject of this chapter. We examine recent data on language loyalty and change in the United States, sketching a national profile of foreign- and Englishlanguage patterns over time and generations, and consider the role of fluent bilingualism on intergenerational relations within immigrant families, school achievement, and economic outcomes. As in previous chapters, we also look to the historical record to place present concerns in a broader comparative context.

The Babel Proclamation In 1870, when the foreign-born made up 17.1 percent of Iowa’s population, the state’s Board of Immigration, established by law and chaired by the governor, published a remarkable ninety-six-page pamphlet, Iowa: The Home for Immigrants.2 A first edition of thirty-five thousand copies was printed in English, plus another fifteen thousand copies in German, six thousand in Norwegian, four thousand in Swedish, and five thousand in Dutch, with a note urging the reader to “lend it to your neighbor, or send it to some friend in the East who may be benefited by the information it contains.” It described Iowa’s natural, economic, and institutional resources in extraordinary detail, “to give to all who may desire to seek new homes in the West, a correct idea of the superior advantages which our young State offers to those who may be induced to come within her borders.” Its opening chapter dwelled on its diverse history, from the meaning of the state’s indigenous name (“Beautiful Land”) to the fate of the tribes that had once been the most numerous and powerful between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, to the fact that the territory that was now Iowa had been part of France’s vast “Province of Louisiana,” then of Spain and back to France before the historic 1803 Purchase that absorbed it as a U.S. territory, until achiev-

216  |  Language

ing statehood in 1846. From the first Iowa census, Germans formed the largest immigrant group and remained so for a century; by 1900 German immigrants had settled in all ninety-nine Iowa counties and had developed bilingual parochial schools, German-language newspapers, and cultural organizations.3 Still, despite the immigrant recruitment efforts, 1870 proved to be the high-water mark of the foreignborn share of Iowa’s population; it declined steadily in every census thereafter, to 12 percent in 1910, less than 5 percent in 1940, and barely above 1 percent in the last decades of the twentieth century. When the United States entered the Great War in 1917 against Germany, German Americans felt the wrath of national hostility. We saw in chapter 5 how the bilingual German American community was forced to “swat the hyphen” and abandon German-language schools and newspapers shortly after the start of World War I. The nemesis of German American biculturalism, Theodore Roosevelt, put the general rule in stark terms: “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language; for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse; and we have room for but one sole loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people.”4 In Iowa, Governor William L. Harding took the rule to an extreme when he issued the Babel Proclamation in 1918, outlawing the public use of all foreign languages. Although he had been elected in 1917 with German American support, he argued that destroying the vital bond of language within ethnic communities would force their assimilation into the dominant culture and heighten patriotism and unity in a time of crisis. The proclamation stipulated that only English was legal in public or private schools, in public conversations, on trains, over the telephone, at all meetings, and in all religious services; those who could not speak or understand English were required to conduct their religious worship in their homes. As events unfolded, German-language instructors were fired and German textbooks burned. German newspapers disappeared from circulation, businesses with German names were branded un-American, and many German Americans altered the spelling of their family names. In the town of Lowden, where most residents were of German heritage, mobs from other towns came during Armistice Day celebrations of the end of the war and made the minister of the ­German-language Evangelical Reformed Church march through the streets with an American flag before ordering him out of town. AntiGerman prejudice spread to disdain for all foreigners, as the Babel Proc-

Language  |  217

lamation lumped other non-English-speaking groups—​Scandinavians, Bohemians, French, Italians—​with the German scapegoats. Although Harding repealed the Babel Proclamation in December 1918, he maintained his support for language restriction in Iowa. “National unity can be best maintained by the employment of a common vehicle of communication, and this vehicle . . . is the English language.”5 By 1998 a new governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, took office with a plan to make Iowa the “Ellis Island of the Midwest,” seeking to attract and accommodate immigrants and refugees. A Strategic Planning Council sought to have Iowa designated as an “immigration enterprise zone” and to establish regional Diversity Welcome Centers to assist new residents with legal and cultural obstacles in relocating to Iowa. Yet in March 2002 the Iowa English Language Reaffirmation Act reestablished English as the official language of government in Iowa. The law further urged “every citizen of this state to become more proficient in the English language.”6 The governor signed it despite reservations. Iowa is not alone in declaring English the official language. Thirty other states have approved similar measures, mostly since the 1980s during the present era of mass migration. The contrasting Iowa experiences of 1870 and 1918, and their echoes in 1998 and 2002, oscillating alternatively between welcoming (economically) and rejecting (socially and politically) immigrants, illustrate patterns that go back to colonial times, with foreign languages seen as fractious markers of cultural difference and potential disloyalty even as immigrants are needed to meet labor demands. Benjamin Franklin, alarmed about German newcomers in colonial Philadelphia, put it this way as early as 1751: “Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?”7 As we have seen, more than two and a half centuries later, Samuel Huntington argued that the arrival of Latin American immigrants in large numbers threatened the core of American identity and culture. He asserted that Latin Americans are much less likely to speak English than earlier generations of European immigrants because they all speak a common language, are regionally concentrated within Spanish-speaking enclaves, and are less interested in linguistic and cultural assimilation

218  |  Language

than in identity politics. For Huntington “there is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”8

A Babel in Reverse “What do you call a person who speaks two languages?” “Bilingual.” “And one who knows only one?” “American.”9

Contrary to what may seem true from a purely domestic angle, the use of two languages is not exceptional, but normal, in the experience of a good part of the world’s population. More than seven billion people speak an estimated six thousand languages in a world of some two hundred autonomous states. Thus, there are about thirty times as many languages as there are states; and the dominance of certain languages (such as Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and English)—​combined with global communications and transportation technologies, international trade, and immigration—​contributes to the proliferation of bilingualism.10 Over the past two centuries the United States—​historically a polyglot nation containing a diverse array of languages—​has incorporated more bilingual people than any other country in the world. Yet the American experience is remarkable for its near mass extinction of non-English languages: in no other country, among thirty-five nations compared in a detailed study by Lieberson and his colleagues, did the rate of mothertongue-shift toward (English) monolingualism approach the rapidity of that found in the United States. Within the United States some relatively isolated indigenous groups (such as the Old Spanish, the Navajo and other American Indians, and the Louisiana French) had changed at a much slower rate; but language-minority immigrants shifted to English at a rate far exceeding that obtained in all other countries.11 Other studies of the languages of European and older Asian immigrant groups in the United States have documented a rapid process of intergenerational “Anglicization” that is effectively completed by the third generation. Bilingualism, American style, has been unstable and transitional—​at least until recently. The general historical pattern seems clear: those in the first generation learned as much English as they needed to get by but continued to speak their mother tongue at home.

Language  |  219

The second generation grew up speaking the mother tongue at home but English away from home—​perforce in the public schools and then in the wider society, given the institutional pressures for Anglicization and the socioeconomic benefits of native fluency in English. The home language of their children, and hence the mother tongue of the third generation, was mostly English. As a classic essay saw it, immigrant families were often transformed “into two linguistic sub-groups segregated along generational lines. . . . Ethnic heritage, including the ethnic mother tongue, usually ceases to play any viable role in the life of the third generation. . . . [The grandchildren] become literally outsiders to their ancestral heritage.”12 Calvin Veltman’s extensive study of America’s historical experience, Language Shift in the United States, concluded in the early 1980s that in the absence of immigration, all non-English languages would eventually die out, usually quite rapidly. As the linguist Einar Haugen put it, reflecting on this paradox, “America’s profusion of tongues has made her a modern Babel, but a Babel in reverse.”13

Language Diversity in the United States A Century of Change, 1910 to 2010 We saw in chapter 1 that in 1910 nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a proportion that has not been reached since. Of those 13.5 million immigrants, 3.4 million spoke English as their “mother tongue”—​they hailed mainly from Ireland, Great Britain, and Canada. German was by far the largest non-English language spoken, with 2.8 million speakers, followed by Italian (1.4 million), Yiddish (1.1 million), Polish (944,000), Swedish (683,000), French (529,000), Norwegian (403,000), and Spanish (258,000). As mass European immigration waned over the subsequent decades, so did linguistic diversity. The proportion of the population that was foreign-born fell steadily over the next half century to a nadir of 4.7 percent in 1970, when the Census Bureau stopped asking its question on mother tongue. At that time English was still the language spoken by the largest number of immigrants (more than 1.7 million, again drawn chiefly from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland), followed now by Spanish (with nearly 1.7 million speakers and growing rapidly over the previous decade), then German (1.2 million), Italian (1 million), and—​with fewer than five hundred thousand each—​Yiddish, Polish, and French. That year likely marked the end, comparatively, of the most

220  |  Language Table 30  Language Diversity in the United States, 1980–2010 U.S. population 5 Spoke non-English years or older Spoke English only language at home Year

N (millions) N (millions)

Spoke Spanish at home

%

N (millions)

%

N (millions)

%

89.1

23.1

11.0

11.1

5.3

1980

210.2

187.2

1990

230.4

198.6

86.2

31.8

13.8

17.3

7.5

2000

262.4

215.5

82.1

47.0

17.9

28.1

10.7

2010

289.2

229.7

79.7

59.5

20.3

37.0

12.6

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. censuses; American Community Survey, 2010.

linguistically homogeneous era in U.S. history. By 1980, for the first time, a non-English language—​Spanish—​surpassed English as the language spoken by more immigrants than any other, and the number of non-English languages spoken has proliferated as well. Since 1980, official data on languages spoken have been gathered from a set of three questions: Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? And how well does this person speak English? These questions were asked of all persons five years old or older on the censuses of 1980, 1990, and 2000, and thereafter on the American Community Survey (ACS), which replaced the census long form. Because respondents were not asked whether this was the “usual” language spoken at home or how frequently or well it was used relative to English, it probably elicited an overestimate. Still, the data point to the presence of a substantial and growing minority of persons who are not English monolinguals. Table 30 summarizes the responses to the first question by decade between 1980 and 2010, showing the number and percent of all U.S. residents (whether immigrants or natives) who spoke a non-English language at home and those who spoke only English. Because Spanish is now by far the most widely spoken non-English language in the United States, also shown is the number and percent of the population who speak Spanish at home. Accompanying the rise of immigration in recent decades, the percentage speaking only English at home has steadily fallen, declining from 89.1 percent in 1980 to 79.7 percent in 2010, while the share speaking a language other than English correspondingly increased from 11 percent to 20.3 percent. In absolute numbers, persons five years old or older

Language  |  221

speaking a language other than English at home rose from 23.1 million to 59.5 million, with greater than two-thirds of the increase attributable to the growing number of people speaking Spanish at home, who at 37 million made up 12.6 percent of the total population—​and an unprecedented 62 percent of all non-English speakers in 2010. Most of the increase in Spanish-language use has been driven by immigration from Latin America. Indeed, as will be elaborated below, most (57 percent) of the country’s nearly sixty million speakers of non-English languages are immigrants. Among the 230 million who spoke only English at home in 2010, just 2.6 percent were born outside the United States (mostly immigrants from countries where English is a first or native language); among those who spoke Spanish at home, half (49 percent) were foreign-born. Spatial Patterns Speakers of non-English languages are concentrated in areas of primary immigrant settlement (described in chapter 3)—​notably along the Mexican border from Texas to California and in large cities such as Chicago, Miami, and New York. Figure 13 shows the share of non-­ English-language speakers by county in the contiguous forty-eight states in the year 2000 (the last decennial census that collected data on the foreign-born population for each county). Among all the 3,141 counties in the United States, the median percentage of the population who spoke a language other than English at home was a mere 4.6 percent. That is, in half of all counties—​a vast swath of the United States (shown in white in figure 13)—​more than 95 percent of the residents were English monolinguals. In other areas, however, bilingualism was prevalent—​as was the case in Hialeah and Miami in South Florida; Santa Ana and East Los Angeles in Southern California; Laredo, McAllen, Brownsville, and El Paso along the Texas-Mexico border; and Elizabeth, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City, where between 67 and 93 percent of the residents spoke languages other than English. Table 31 updates the geography of foreign-language use through 2010, ranking the top twenty-five states and the top twenty-five metropolitan areas with at least five hundred thousand inhabitants according to the percentage of non-English speakers. Clearly, speaking a foreign language remains concentrated in cities and states along the coasts, the Great Lakes, and the U.S.-Mexico border. California tops the list of states, with 43 percent of its thirty-seven million residents ­speaking

Figure 10. Percentage of persons who spoke a language other than English at home, by county, 2000

Census Bureau, Census 2000 who Summary Filea3.language other than English at home, by county, 2000. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, FSource: igu r U.S. e 13. Percentage of persons spoke Note: Data are for persons age five older. Census 2000 Summary File 3.and Data are for persons five years old and older.

Under 5% 5% – 19.9% 20% – 32.9% 33% – 49.9% 50% or more

Language  |  223

a non-English language at home, followed by 36 percent in New Mexico, 34 percent in Texas, and more than 29 percent in both New York and New Jersey. The states listed in table 31 include both the six most important immigrant-receiving states (California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, Florida, and Illinois) and a number of emerging immigrant destinations (Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Utah, and Nevada). In a country where by 2010 one in five persons (20.3 percent) spoke a foreign language at home, West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, and Alabama stood in sharp contrast, with 95 to 98 percent of their populations speaking English only. Linguistic diversity, like immigration, is also chiefly a metropolitan phenomenon. Greater than 91 percent of the population of nonmetropolitan areas in the United States speaks English only. The twenty-five metropolitan areas with the highest percentages of residents who speak a non-English language at home are confined entirely to the six gateway states, as shown in table 31; the sole exceptions are Las Vegas and Albuquerque. Ten of the top twenty metropolitan areas are in California alone. Not surprisingly, the largest shares of people living in homes where a language other than English is spoken are found in the large border metropolises of McAllen and El Paso, Texas, where 85 percent and 75 percent of their populations, respectively, speak a non-English language at home (overwhelmingly Spanish). Miami (73 percent), Jersey City (59 percent), Los Angeles (57 percent), and San Jose (51 percent) are also home to dominant shares of non-English speakers. Even at the bottom of the list, 30 percent of the Chicago metropolitan area’s population speaks a non-English language at home. Among metropolitan areas of newer immigrant settlement that do not appear in table 31, by 2010 only Tucson, Phoenix, Seattle, and Denver exceeded the national non-English-usage norm of 20 percent; but Portland, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh-Durham were not far behind. Language Variability Which non-English languages are spoken in the United States today? The Census Bureau records 382 discrete languages, coded into thirtynine main languages and language groups, the largest of which are summarized in table 32. The first two columns of the table show the estimated number and percentage of people aged five or above who reported speaking various languages at home (though no official data are collected on their fluency in or frequency of use of the non-­

224  |  Language Table 31  Percentage of Population Who Speak a Non-English Language at Home, by States and Metropolitan Areas, in Rank Order, ca. 2010 (U.S. mean = 20.3%)

Top 25 states

%

Top 25 metros

%

California

43.4

McAllen, TX

85.4

New Mexico

36.1

El Paso, TX

74.7

Texas

34.5

Miami, FL

73.0

New York

29.6

Jersey City, NJ

59.0

New Jersey

29.1

Los Angeles, CA

56.8

Nevada

28.8

San Jose, CA

50.8

Arizona

27.0

New York, NY

46.3

Florida

27.0

Orange County, CA

44.8

Hawaii

26.0

Fresno, CA

43.1

Illinois

21.9

San Francisco, CA

42.2

Massachusetts

21.5

Bakersfield, CA

41.0

Rhode Island

21.0

Riverside, CA

40.5

Connecticut

20.8

Bergen-Passaic, NJ

40.5

Washington

17.8

San Antonio, TX

40.2

Colorado

16.9

Houston, TX

38.8

Maryland

16.4

Oakland, CA

38.8

Alaska

16.0

Ventura, CA

37.4

Oregon

14.5

Fort Lauderdale, FL

37.1

Virginia

14.4

San Diego, CA

36.9

Utah

14.1

Middlesex-Somerset, NJ

34.4

District of Columbia

13.9

Las Vegas, NV

32.8

Georgia

12.9

Dallas, TX

32.1

Delaware

12.1

Albuquerque, NM

31.3

Kansas

10.6

Vallejo-Fairfield-Napa, CA

30.9

North Carolina

10.6

Chicago-Gary, IL

30.2

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2008–10 merged files. Note: Persons five years old or older; metropolitan areas with populations greater than five hundred thousand.

English language). As we have noted, Spanish dominates among non-­ English languages: 12.6 percent of U.S. residents aged five or older said they spoke Spanish at home. The next-closest language was Chinese, accounting for just 0.9 percent of the population (2.4 million speakers), followed by Hindi, Urdu, and related languages at 0.7 percent (1.7 million), Tagalog and related Filipino languages at 0.6 percent (1.5

Table 32  Main Languages Spoken in the United States and Nativity of Speakers, ca. 2010 (persons five years old or older) Languages spoken English-only

Estimated N of speakers

% of population

% speakers % speakers foreign-born born in U.S.

228,285,377

79.7

2.6

97.4

58,266,345

20.3

56.7

43.3

Spanish

36,149,240

12.6

49.4

50.6

Frencha

1,267,188

0.4

38.6

61.4

Germanb

1,102,804

0.4

38.6

61.4

Russian

849,796

0.3

82.6

17.4

Italian

738,871

0.3

40.6

59.4

Non-English languages Europe/Americas

Haitian Creole

696,163

0.2

71.5

28.5

Portuguese

689,697

0.2

70.5

29.5

Polish

583,427

0.2

66.7

33.3

Greek

313,092

0.1

42.1

57.9

East/South Asia Chinese

2,633,123

0.9

78.0

22.0

Hindi, Urdu and related

2,088,057

0.7

81.4

18.6

Filipino Tagalog and related

1,709,651

0.6

87.1

12.9

Vietnamese

1,338,309

0.5

76.7

23.3

Korean

1,124,994

0.4

80.7

19.3

Khmer, Hmong, Lao, related

748,896

0.3

65.7

34.3

Dravidian

595,019

0.2

88.5

11.5

Japanese

455,253

0.2

60.4

39.6

West Asia/North Africa Arabic

819,678

0.3

69.5

30.5

Persian (Farsi)

370,759

0.1

79.5

20.5

All other languages Total

3,992,328

1.4

61.3

38.7

286,551,722

100.0

13.6

86.4

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2008–10 merged files. aFrench excludes Patois, Cajun, and Haitian Creole. bGerman excludes Pennsylvania Dutch.

226  |  Language

­ illion), and Vietnamese at 0.5 percent (more than 1 million). No other m language category exceeded 0.5 percent. Moreover, the two largest nonEnglish categories after Spanish hide considerable diversity, given the many mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese and the diversity of tongues spoken by people from the Indian subcontinent. The right-hand columns of table 32 show the percentages of language speakers born abroad and in the United States. Immigrants who speak only English number nearly six million out of the forty million foreignborn in 2010. Among languages spoken in Europe and the Americas, the percentages of immigrant versus U.S.-born speakers vary widely, reflecting both past and present immigrant flows. Russian, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Polish speakers today are largely foreign-born, while French, German, Italian, and Greek speakers are mainly U.S.-born. Spanish speakers lie between these two extremes, with roughly half being born in the United States and half abroad. Among those speaking Asian languages, the vast majority were born abroad, with two exceptions: those who speak Khmer, Hmong, Lao, and related languages and those who speak Japanese, greater than a third of whom were born in the United States. The former reflects high levels of U.S. fertility and declining migration after 1990 for refugee groups from Laos and Cambodia; the Japanese are the only contemporary Asian-origin population that is primarily U.S. born. The share of speakers born in the United States does not exceed 25 percent for any other Asian language. Speakers of Arabic and Farsi are likewise dominated by immigrants. Among immigrants five years old or older, what do we know about linguistic variability within national origin groups? Table 33 presents data on home-language use for the largest non-English immigrant cohorts, average length of U.S. residence, and educational and occupational attainment. The bottom panel presents a breakdown by period of arrival for the pre-1990, 1990–​99, and post-2000 foreign-born populations, compared to the native born.14 Two main conclusions can be derived from these results. First, recently arrived immigrants tend to remain loyal to their native language, regardless of age and education. Although there is some evidence that nationalities with high proportions of college graduates and professionals shift toward English more rapidly, the vast majority of recent arrivals retains its own language at home. Second, time has a strong eroding effect on native-language retention: as seen in the bottom rows of the table, about 11 percent of recently arrived immigrants use English only at home, but greater than 20 percent of immigrants with longer U.S. residence do so. These results

Language  |  227

align well with those concerning shifting political affiliations and interests with the passage of time (as reviewed in the previous chapter).

Language Shift English Proficiency and Contemporary Immigrants Language transition among recent immigrants has a second aspect, namely, the extent to which they have learned English. In other words, use of the native language at home does not indicate whether users are non-English monolinguals or limited or fluent bilinguals. The American Community Survey does not test for English knowledge objectively but includes a self-report of ability to speak English (very well, well, not well, or not at all). Table 34 presents the relevant figures, again broken down for the largest non-English-origin nationalities and by year of immigration. Although self-reported bilinguals (defined here as those who both spoke a foreign language at home and spoke English very well) among 2000–​2010 immigrants represented only about one-third of the total, that proportion had grown to nearly 45 percent of the pre1990 immigrants. Among the most recent (2000–​2010) arrivals 44 percent reported not being able to speak English well or at all, but that figure had declined to 29 percent of pre-1990 arrivals. A fuller picture of today’s linguistic diversity can be gleaned by examining the data in table 34 on English-speaking ability for the largest non-English-origin nationalities. The highest levels of fluency are seen for Germans, Nigerians, Filipinos, Indians, and Pakistanis, the latter four coming from countries where English is either an official language or the common language among speakers of different native tongues.15 Between two-thirds and four-fifths of these immigrants are able to speak English “very well.” Most others, however, fall well below those levels of self-reported fluency. Among immigrants from Southeast Asia, China, Ecuador, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, more than 40 percent do not speak English well, as is the case among more than half of the immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. In general, age at arrival, time in the United States, and level of education are the most significant predictors of the acquisition of English fluency among immigrants of non-English origin. The effect of each of these three factors is specified in table 35 for the largest immigrant nationalities. The speed with which English fluency is acquired by immigrant children is especially notable, underscoring the importance of age at arrival. As shown in table 35, among immigrants who arrived in the

364,071

1,491,659

560,474

198,195

294,504

Haiti

Laos

Pakistan

338,340

Brazil

Taiwan

1,762,129

India

China

343,994

Iran

1,001,251

211,471

Hong Kong

Former USSR (15 Reps.)

459,026

1,777,857

Philippines

Poland

1,079,550

Korea

7

8

8

8

8

9

9

10

12

12

13

14

16

18

23

367,090

333,145

Italy

Japan

42 27

619,534

205,268

English only (%)

Germany

Persons 5 years or older (N)

Nigeria

Country of birth

93

92

92

92

92

91

91

90

88

88

87

86

84

82

77

73

58

Non-English language (%)

Language spoken at home

15

24

18

16

20

12

13

21

15

23

24

19

19

20

41

14

37

53

13

17

45

70

34

75

53

53

54

30

50

51

48

18

61

32

Length of residence College graduatea in U.S. (years) (%)

41

19

20

47

62

27

67

51

42

55

29

40

43

53

36

49

45

High-status professionb (%)

Table 33  Language Spoken at Home and Related Social Characteristics for the Largest Immigrant Groups and the Native-Born, 2010 (Ranked by percent of foreign-born from non-English-speaking countries who spoke English only)

90

11

12

21

15

3

3

4

10

89

88

79

85

97

97

96

95

95

95

95

94

94

94

93

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2008–10 merged annual surveys. aPersons twenty-five years old and older. bProfessionals, managers, technicians among employed persons sixteen years old and older. cTotals include immigrants from native-English-speaking countries.

247,484,428

15,651,457

Arrived 2000–2010

U.S.-born

10,930,073

Arrived 1990–1999

39,067,294

12,485,764

Foreign-bornc

Arrived before 1990

11,595,014

825,765

Dominican Republic

Mexico

431,437

Ecuador

5

5

250,324

1,162,749

Nicaragua

El Salvador

5 5

1,037,332

491,087

Honduras

Cuba

6

412,526

782,144

Peru

Guatemala

6

6

7

633,945

1,210,036

Colombia

Vietnam

NA

5

14

33

19

17

18

17

17

20

13

25

14

16

19

18

28

32

26

25

27

5

14

15

7

17

8

21

7

29

23

29

33

24

25

31

27

8

14

15

9

17

8

24

7

22

27

27

Table 34  English-Speaking Ability of Immigrants from Largest Source Countries, 2010 English proficiencyb

Country of birth

Foreign-born personsa 5 years old or older who speak a non-English language at home (N)

Speaks English “very well” (%)

Speaks English “not well” or not at all (%)

Median age (years)

Germany

358,522

83.2

2.2

59

Nigeria

150,067

82.2

3.7

42

Philippines

1,525,993

65.3

8.1

48

India

1,597,005

70.0

10.0

37

272,813

62.2

13.3

39

Pakistan Hong Kong

185,803

52.1

16.3

45

Taiwan

333,806

44.0

18.5

47

Italy

284,112

49.8

19.5

64

Iran

309,366

52.6

21.5

50

Brazil

308,460

49.7

22.7

36

Japan

272,399

38.8

23.3

42

Poland

399,939

43.5

24.0

48

Haiti

517,787

41.9

25.5

43

Former USSR (15 reps.)

881,861

42.3

27.4

43

Peru

389,265

41.7

28.6

43

Colombia

592,400

41.1

29.9

44

Korea

906,258

34.0

32.9

44

Nicaragua

238,637

38.1

36.7

42

Laos

183,241

30.5

40.4

44

Vietnam

1,131,845

28.1

41.1

43

Ecuador

413,405

32.2

41.8

39

China

1,377,462

29.8

42.0

44

Cuba

986,849

34.7

44.4

51 42

Dominican Republic El Salvador Mexico Honduras Guatemala

798,746

31.6

45.4

1,109,449

25.1

50.2

37

11,223,211

24.8

52.8

36

467,326

24.3

54.1

34

738,150

21.5

56.1

34

33,074,187

38.8

36.1

40

Arrived before 1990

12,305,028

44.4

29.6

52

Arrived 1990–1999

9,634,961

39.2

35.6

37

Arrived 2000–2010

11,134,198

32.4

43.7

29

Foreign-borna

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2008–10 merged annual surveys. aTotals exclude immigrants from native-English countries and those who speak English only. bAsked of persons who spoke a language other than English at home.

Language  |  231

U.S. as children under thirteen years of age and who speak another language at home, 71 percent could speak English “very well,” compared to 35 percent of those who immigrated between the ages of thirteen and thirty-four (in adolescence or early adulthood), and only 18 percent of those who were thirty-five or older when they immigrated. Even among the nationalities with the poorest English proficiency—​those from Mexico and Central America, the Spanish Caribbean, Ecuador, China, and Southeast Asia—​between two-thirds and three-fourths of children under thirteen spoke English very well. At the same time, level of education is strongly associated with English fluency. Among immigrant adults, almost two-thirds of college graduates speak English very well, compared to 38 percent of high school graduates and only 11 percent of those with less than a high school diploma. Figure 14 illustrates these patterns jointly for all immigrants from nonnative-English countries. Linearly, over time in the United States, immigrants of different ages at arrival and with different levels of education all increase their level of English fluency (defined as speaking English only or very well), but the younger the age at arrival and the higher the level of education, the greater the difference in fluency. Thus, among those arriving as children under age thirteen most recently (2000–​2010), 65 percent already spoke English very well, a share that increases to 81 percent for those who had lived in the United States the longest (pre-1990); but among those arriving at ages thirty-five and older, the degree of maximum fluency in English barely nudges up (from 23 to 25 percent) as time in the country increases. Similarly, among college graduates the share who speak English very well increases from 58 percent of the most recent arrivals to 78 percent of the old-timers, while among adults with less than a high school education, the proportion who speak English very well increases from only 8 percent of the most recent arrivals (post 2000) to 21 percent of those who had resided in the United States since before 1990. Generational Patterns The power of assimilative forces, already detected on economic achievement and the character of ethnic politics (chapters 4 and 5), is nowhere clearer than in the linguistic shift across generations over time. Until recently, however, there were scarcely any systematic three-generation analyses of language maintenance and shift in the research literature. (A key problem is that census data on parental nativity, which until

64

83

82

72

Colombia

Haiti

Taiwan

Peru

81

81

Former USSR (15 republics)

87

84

Iran

45 51

82

76

Italy

Hong Kong

Poland

49

86

84

Pakistan

Brazil

71

43

43

40

44

49

45

63

76

82

85

Philippines

85

84

13–34

India

88

84

Germany

0–12

Nigeria

Country of Birth 

16

13

13

13

13

14

20

22

25

27

36

40

46

72

72

35 and older

Age at U.S. arrival

47

49

44

50

47

47

64

57

48

64

67

71

70

87

85

Before 1990

45

42

42

43

45

44

46

48

63

56

66

72

65

85

86

1990s

33

35

37

33

36

36

36

43

57

42

55

68

59

77

76

2000s

Decade of U.S. arrival

68

14

13

11

11

10

22

7

7

27

16

13

14

24

27

84

43

33

33

23

26

34

36

38

61

40

50

45

58

76

66

52

54

53

47

63

72

72

78

69

76

81

77

90

89

College graduate

Education completed Not high High school school graduate graduate

Percentage who speak English “very well” by

Table 35  Ability to Speak English “Very Well” by Age at U.S. Arrival, Decade of Arrival, and Highest Education Attained, among Selected Immigrant Groups Who Speak a Language Other Than English at Home, 2010

62

71

Guatemala

Total a

41

35

16

15

18

20

25

35

24

19

32

30

28

31

21

18

6

6

9

6

7

9

6

6

9

8

10

10

45

44

34

30

39

31

34

29

35

34

37

46

40

45

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2008–10 merged annual surveys. a Excluding immigrants from native-English countries and those who speak English only.

63

63

Honduras

Mexico

69

65

Dominican Republic

El Salvador

70

64

Vietnam

China

76

70

Korea

Laos

72

83

Ecuador

Cuba

60

80

Japan

Nicaragua

52

39

25

26

26

25

34

35

24

22

35

28

33

35

28

32

12

18

16

18

25

25

19

20

30

19

25

23

19

11

9

10

9

11

10

3

6

9

14

11

8

13

32

38

33

33

30

35

34

14

24

38

22

36

34

43

47

64

49

49

47

50

50

51

58

65

39

51

56

53

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

81%

0–12 years old

65%

78%

44%

Age of arrival

13–34 years old

34%

38%

25%

35 and older

23% 22%

2000–2010 1990–1999 Pre-1990

12%

Less than high school

8%

21%

Level of education

High school graduate

26%

38%

58%

College graduate

58%

67%

78%

F igu r e 14. English fluency of immigrants by age at arrival, education, and decade of arrival, 2010 (persons five years old or older from non-English countries who speak English only or very well). Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010.

Speaks English only or very well

Language  |  235

1970 had permitted the identification of the foreign-born [the first generation] from the U.S.-born of foreign parentage [second generation] and of native parentage [third and higher generations] have not been collected since, making it impossible to rely on these national data for intergenerational analyses of language change.) An early exception was the work of David López, who conducted two relevant studies among Spanish-origin minorities in the United States. The first involved a 1973 survey of a representative sample of 1,129 Mexican-origin couples in Los Angeles. His findings document a pattern of rapid language transition across the three generations that contradicts the common assumption of unshakable Spanish-language loyalty among Mexican Americans. Among first-generation women, for example, he found that 84 percent used Spanish only at home, 14 percent used both languages, and only 2 percent used English solely. By the third generation there was almost a complete reversal, with only 4 percent speaking Spanish at home, 12 percent using both, and 84 percent shifting to English only.16 Figures for men were similar, except that the shift to English from the first generation to the second was even more marked. The study also attempted to examine the determinants and consequences of language transition. It found that generation had the strongest causal effect, exceeding by far those of age, rural origin, and other predictors. Spanish maintenance appears to have had some positive occupational advantages—​controlling for education and other factors—​among the immigrant generation but none for subsequent ones. Among the latter, residual Spanish monolingualism is associated with poor schooling and low socioeconomic status. López concluded that the appearance of high language loyalty among Mexican Americans is due largely to the effect of continuing high immigration from the country of origin.17 A second study by the same author assessed language patterns across three generations, this time for different Spanish-origin groups on the basis of data from the 1979 Current Population Survey. The study confirmed the same negative association between Spanish monolingualism and social class measured by such variables as education, occupational prestige, and income. For the entire sample, as well as for each national group, adoption of English was positively associated with both higher education and higher socioeconomic status. However, López also uncovered a second trend that differed from both monolingual patterns in which Spanish maintenance was associated with high social class and greater English fluency.18

236  |  Language

This latter trend was clearer among Spanish-origin groups other than Mexican Americans and may help explain why third-generation bilingualism is relatively higher among Hispanics overall than among other foreign-origin groups. In effect, despite strong pressures toward Anglicization, this evidence documents the existence of a small but resilient group of high-achieving bilinguals across generations. Thus, López’s findings raise the issue of “elite” versus “folk” bilingualism or “fluent” versus “limited” use of two languages. Although the intergenerational trend toward English monolingualism is unmistakable and by far the dominant one for all immigrants, this last intriguing set of results compels us to probe deeper into the relationships among social class, language, and socioeconomic achievement. Before turning to those considerations, however, we highlight briefly the results of other recent studies of intergenerational language shift that provide convergent and compelling contemporary evidence of the three-generation model of mother-tongue erosion from the adult immigrant generation to that of their grandchildren. The first is an innovative analysis of the 2000 census by Richard Alba and his colleagues focusing on children six years old to fifteen years old.19 It analyzed the home languages of school-age children in newcomer families, linking children to their parents in the same household to permit distinguishing between the second generation (U.S.-born children with at least one foreign-born parent) and the third (or a later) generation (U.S.-born children whose parents are also U.S.-born). Despite group differences in the degree of language shift, for every nationality without exception the following patterns held: the vast majority of first-generation immigrants who come to the United States as children speak English well; bilingualism is most common among second-generation children, who grow up in immigrant households and speak a foreign language at home but are almost all proficient in English; English-only is the predominant pattern by the third generation; and what third-generation bilingualism exists is found especially in border communities such as Brownsville and El Paso, Texas, where the maintenance of Spanish has deep historical roots and is affected by proximity to Mexico, or in areas of high ethnic densities, such as are found among Dominicans in New York and Cubans in Miami. Away from the border, Mexican American children of the third generation are unlikely to be bilingual. A second study, done by the Pew Hispanic Center, was based on a national telephone survey of a representative sample of Hispanic adults

Language  |  237

eighteen years old and older in the forty-eight contiguous states, of whom 2,929 self-reported as Hispanic or Latino (with oversamples of Salvadorans, Dominicans, Colombians, and Cubans).20 Unlike previous censuses or the ACS (which ask only about spoken proficiency in English), the respondents were asked about their ability to speak and read in both English and Spanish. On the basis of their answers they were classified as Spanish dominant, bilingual, or English dominant. The results by generation parallel uncannily those of López’s Los Angeles survey taken three decades earlier. First-generation adults were overwhelmingly Spanish dominant (72 percent), with a fourth classified as bilingual and only 4 percent as English dominant. That pattern was reversed by the third generation, with 78 percent being English dominant and 22 percent still classified as bilingual, but less than 1 percent could be deemed Spanish dominant. Among the second generation, Spanish dominance plummeted to only 7 percent. However, nearly half (47 percent) were classified as bilingual and nearly as many as English dominant (46 percent) by the second generation. Findings from Southern California Additional evidence of language-shift patterns comes from two surveys carried out in Southern California, a region adjacent to the Mexican border that has been not only the nation’s largest net receiver of immigrants in the decades since 1970 but one that also contained more Spanish speakers and persons of Mexican origin than any other area. By the year 2000, one of every five immigrants in the United States resided in the region’s six contiguous counties (San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside, and San Bernardino), including the largest communities of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Iranians, and Cambodians outside of their countries of origin. The data come from the “Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles” (IIMMLA) survey,21 on which we will further rely in chapter 8, and the San Diego third wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILSIII), which will be examined in greater detail in chapter 7. The two data sets were merged to boost sample size; they total 6,135 young adults of the same average age (mid to late twenties), evenly divided by gender, who were surveyed at about the same time in the six contiguous counties. The sample is representative of 1.5-generation and second-generation groups of immigrant origin who had settled in the area, as well as

238  |  Language

third and fourth (and later) generation whites, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. All were asked if they spoke a language other than English at home growing up; about their understanding, speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in the non-English language; and their current language preferences and use. The results are broken down by detailed generational cohorts: the “1.5” generation (foreign-born, arrived preadolescence)

•

the “2.0” generation (U.S.-born, both parents foreign-born)

•

the “2.5” generation (U.S.-born, one parent foreign-born)

•

the third generation (both parents U.S.-born, one or more grandparents foreign-born)

•

the fourth (and later) generation (those with no foreign-born grandparents)22

•

Figure 15 presents the results graphically, showing clearly the generational progression in each of the measures of language use and preference. For example, while 94 percent of the 1.5 generation and 87 percent of the 2.0 generation grew up speaking a non-English language at home, those proportions dropped to 58 percent among the 2.5 generation, suggesting how rapidly English can become the sole language in homes where one parent is U.S.-born. Only 22 percent of the third generation reported speaking a non-English language at home when growing up, and only a tenth reported doing so by the fourth generation. At the same time, their preference for English increased rapidly in the 1.5 and second generations, reached 89 percent among the 2.5 generation, and had become universally preferred by the third generation. These preferences in turn reflect the rapid atrophy of understanding, speaking, reading, and writing skills in the foreign language from one generation to the next. (Without exception proficiencies in English are greater than those in the non-English language.) One dichotomous measure shown on the last panel of figure 15 is “balanced bilingual,” defined as the ability to understand, speak, read, and write a non-­English language “very well” or “well.” Those who are not “balanced bilinguals” by this measure include English monolinguals and “limited bilinguals” (who understand, speak, read, and write a non-English language not well). The figure shows that the proportion of “balanced bilinguals”

Language  |  239 100% 90%

94%

98% 99%

Generation

89%

87%

1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.0

80% 70%

70% 60%

58% 52%

50%

51% 44%

40% 30% 20% 10%

24%

22% 10%

9% 4%

0%

Growing up spoke non-English language at home

Prefers now to speak English only at home

Balanced bilingual

F igu r e 15. Language shift and bilingualism by generation (merged samples). Sources: Rumbaut et al., “Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles” (IIMMLA); and Portes and Rumbaut, Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, San Diego (CILS–San Diego).

decreases generationally from 51 percent in the 1.5 generation to 9 percent in the third and 4 percent by the fourth generation. Of the four dimensions of non-English language proficiency, respondents reported greater ability in understanding a language, followed by speaking it, then reading, and the greatest difficulty in writing in that language. Figure 16 provides a similar graphic presentation, from the 1.5 to the fourth generations, of each of the measured dimensions of linguistic ability: understanding, speaking, reading, and writing. The atrophy of each of these proficiencies is seen clearly, with the most rapid decrease occurring in the 2.5 generation. Once a respondent is raised in a family where one parent is not an immigrant or native speaker of a non-English language, it becomes very difficult to sustain balanced bilingualism in the home. The patterns described here hold across all of the ethnic groups surveyed and demonstrate the rapidity with which English is acquired and comes to be preferred by immigrants who arrive at a young age and especially by the U.S.-born children and grandchildren of immigrants.

240  |  Language 60% 55% Generation 50%

49%

1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.0

47%

40% 34%

34% 30%

26%

25%

24%

19%

20% 16% 10%

10%

9% 4%

0%

13%

Understands non-English language very well

5% 2% Speaks non-English language very well

4%

2%

Reads non-English language very well

3%

1%

Writes non-English language very well

F igu r e 16. Dimensions of non-English language proficiency by generation (merged samples). Sources: Rumbaut et al., “Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles” (IIMMLA); and Portes and Rumbaut, Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, San Diego (CILS–San Diego).

All of the Asian-origin groups were much more likely than all of the Spanish speakers to lose bilingual skills (especially literacy skills) by the second generation and to effectively become English monolinguals. Among those of Mexican descent, between half and two-thirds of the 1.5 and 2.0 cohorts can still speak and read Spanish very well, but those proportions fall to between a quarter and a third in the 2.5 cohort and decrease to single digits by the third. In a recent study of “linguistic life expectancies,” also using the merged CILS–​San Diego and IIMMLA data sets, Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean estimated the average number of generations a mother tongue can be expected to survive after the arrival of an immigrant in Southern California.23 The analysis showed that even among those of Mexican origin, the Spanish language “died” by the third generation; all other languages “died” between the second and third generations. These data reconfirm that assimilation forces in American society, even in a border region as dense with immigrants as Southern California, are strongest in the linguistic realm and that they operate most visibly across rather than within generations.

Language  |  241

Bilingualism and Achievement The remarkable rapidity and completeness of language transition in America is no mere happenstance, for it reflects the operation of strong social forces.24 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pressures against bilingualism had actually two distinct albeit related strands. First, there was the political variant—​represented by Roosevelt, Harding, and others—​that saw the continuing use of foreign languages as somehow un-American. Pressure along these lines led to rapid linguistic loss among immigrant minorities and to the subsequent rise of ethnic reactive formation processes, as seen in chapter 5. Second, there was a scientific and educational literature that attempted to show the intellectual limitations associated with lack of English fluency. These works gave scientific legitimacy to the calls for restriction and linguistic assimilation so common in the political discourse of the time. We turn now to a review of these studies and their conclusions. Language and Achievement in the Early Twentieth Century By the early twentieth century the scientific debate did not revolve around the close relationship between lack of English and lower intelligence—​a settled matter at the time—​but around the direction of causality: did the immigrants’ lack of intelligence cause their lack of English or vice versa? At about this time the development by Alfred Binet of a test of “mental age,” soon after translated into English by H. H. Goddard, provided a powerful new tool to the eugenics perspective on immigration. In a 1917 study Goddard administered the English version of the Binet IQ test to thirty newly arrived Jewish immigrants on Ellis Island and found twenty-five of them to be “feeble-minded.” Taking the validity of the test for granted, he argued on the basis of their responses to a section of the test measuring word fluency that “such a lack of vocabulary in an adult would probably mean lack of intelligence” and concluded, “We are now getting the poorest of each race.”25 When World War I broke out, Goddard and his colleagues persuaded the U.S. Army to test some two million draftees, many of whom were foreign-born and illiterate in English. Perhaps the most influential analysis of these data was A Study of American Intelligence, published in 1923 by Carl Brigham, who concluded: “The representatives of the Alpine and Mediterranean races in our immigration are intellectually inferior to the representatives of the Nordic race.” A confirmed heredi-

242  |  Language

tarian, Brigham further insisted that “the underlying cause of the nativity differences we have shown is race, and not language.”26 Along the same lines, in his 1926 volume Intelligence and Immigration Clifford Kirkpatrick argued against expecting much progress among immigrants through the reform of school programs, because “high grade germplasm often leads to better results than a high per capita school expenditure. Definite limits are set by heredity.”27 Educational psychologists who shared similar hereditarian views and whose work was shaped by the larger zeitgeist followed with a string of studies seeking to demonstrate that the cause of low IQ among bilingual immigrant schoolchildren was based on genetic factors (nature) rather than on a “language handicap” (nurture). One line of argument claimed that the inferiority of foreign-born children on tests of mental age persisted even after the children had had time to learn English. Another, typified by the influential work of Florence Goodenough, reviewed numerous studies of immigrant children that showed a negative correlation between group intelligence and the extent of foreign-language use in the home. From such correlational evidence Goodenough argued against a “home environment” theory that would interpret the data to mean that “the use of a foreign language in the home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation as measured by intelligence tests” and instead proposed a different causal sequence in favor of innate differences: “A more probable explanation is that those nationality groups whose average intellectual ability is inferior do not readily learn the new language.”28 In other words, for early psychologists of this school, lack of English was not a cause but an effect of inferior intelligence, and the disproportionate presence of feebleminded aliens was blamed on “selective immigration.” Educational psychologists who stressed not heredity but the environment of the bilinguals came to diametrically opposite interpretations regarding causality, but until the early 1960s most reached equally negative conclusions about immigrant intelligence. From this point of view, low intelligence and poor academic achievement were caused by a learned characteristic: bilingualism itself. Beginning in the early 1920s, in tandem with the flourishing of psychometric tests, the overwhelming majority of these studies consistently reported evidence that bilingual children suffered from a “language handicap.” Compared to monolinguals, bilingual children were found to be inferior in intelligence test scores and on a range of verbal and nonverbal linguistic abili-

Language  |  243

ties (including vocabulary, grammar, syntax, written composition, and mathematics). Such findings were interpreted as the effects of the “linguistic confusion” or “linguistic interference” supposedly suffered by children who were exposed to two languages at once. That handicap, in turn, was viewed as a negative trait of the bilingual person’s mind. Bilingualism in young children particularly was said to be “a hardship and devoid of apparent advantage,” bound to produce deficiencies in both languages being learned and to lead to emotional as well as educational maladjustment.29 Perhaps most influential in advancing these views was the work of Madorah Smith, whose research on the speech of preschool Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese children in Hawaii concluded that the attempt to use two languages was “an important factor in the retardation in speech” found among these youngsters. The bilinguals fared poorly in comparison to a monolingual sample of children from Iowa, based on her method for analyzing proper English usage in speech utterances.30 This and similar studies reinforced the popular nostrum that bilingualism in children was a serious handicap and that English monolingualism for immigrant youngsters the proper course to follow. Bilingualism Reassessed This negative view dominated academic circles until the early 1960s largely because researchers failed to question the fundamental methodological flaw on which it was based. With few exceptions, none of these studies—​whether approached from hereditary or environmental perspectives—​had introduced controls for social class. They had also typically failed to assess the immigrant children’s actual degree of bilingualism, itself a complex issue (in one study, bilingualism had been determined by looking at the child’s name).31 These and other methodological problems fatally flawed the validity of early research findings purporting to document the negative effects of immigrant bilingualism on intelligence and achievement. In an influential 1962 study in Montreal, Peal and Lambert pointed out that earlier research often compared high-status English-speaking monolinguals with lower-class foreign-born bilinguals, obviously stacking the results a priori.32 In their study Peal and Lambert distinguished between two types of bilinguals: true or “balanced” bilinguals, who

244  |  Language

master both languages at an early age and can communicate competently in both, and semi- or “pseudo-” bilinguals, who know one language much better than the other and do not use the second language in communication. They carried out a carefully controlled study of tenyear-old children, classified into groups of French monolinguals and French-English balanced bilinguals, finding that the bilingual group had, on the average, a higher socioeconomic level than the monolinguals. Of more consequence, with socioeconomic status controlled, the bilingual group performed significantly better than the monolinguals on a wide range of verbal and nonverbal IQ tests—​contradicting four decades of prior research. In particular, controlling for social class and demographic variables, the bilinguals in this study performed best on the type of nonverbal tests involving concept formation and cognitive or symbolic “flexibility.” Peal and Lambert offered several hypotheses to explain the advantages observed for the bilinguals. They suggested, following Leopold’s extensive case studies, that people who learn to use two languages have two symbols for every object.33 Thus, from an early age they become emancipated from linguistic symbols—​from the concreteness, arbitrariness, and “tyranny” of words—​developing analytic abilities to focus on essentials and to think in terms of more abstract concepts and relations, independent of the actual word. In switching from one language to another, the balanced bilingual uses two different perspectives and is exposed to the “enriched environment” of a wider range of experiences stemming from two cultures. By contrast, monolinguals “may be at a disadvantage in that their thought is always subject to language” and “may be more rigid or less flexible than the bilinguals on certain tests.”34 It bears emphasizing, however, that these and subsequent positive evaluations in the literature are built on a considerable body of evidence concerning the performance of fully (or “true”) bilingual children. By contrast, little research was done on limited (or “semi-”) bilinguals. Adding and Subtracting Language learning is only one dimension, though a fundamental one, of the process of acculturation. Until recently, the prevailing notion, derived from the assimilationist perspective (see chapter 2), was that of a zero-sum process: acculturation involves shedding the old and assimilating the new and hence a necessary trade-off between the native lan-

Language  |  245 English Language Acquisition

Parental Language Retention

−

+

−

I. Limited Bilinguals

II. English Monolinguals

+

III. Mother-tongue Monolinguals

IV. Fluent Bilinguals

F igu r e 17. Language retention and acquisition among immigrant groups: A typology.

guage and English. To learn English and become American means, from this point of view, that immigrants should not maintain their mother tongues. In the final analysis this is the litmus test of Americanization. Bilingualism is regarded as unstable and transitional, for, as Roosevelt stated, there is no room for two languages and two ethnic identities under the same national roof. In theory, however, English monolingualism and abandonment of the mother tongue represent only one possible linguistic outcome of the process of immigrant incorporation. As illustrated in figure 17, others include continued use of the mother tongue, limited bilingualism, and fluency in both languages. Still, assimilationists have continued to emphasize use of English as the proper end result of the process.35 The call for prompt linguistic assimilation has not been motivated exclusively by concerns with the inferior intellectual performance of immigrants. Similar concerns have been voiced, albeit in a different tone, when immigrants actually outperformed natives. An example comes from a Canadian study conducted in the mid-1920s that departed markedly from the familiar reporting of intellectual inferiority among the foreign-born. Five hundred Japanese and Chinese children attending public schools in Vancouver were tested in the study. The Japanese median IQ score was 114.2, the Chinese 107.4, both well above the white norm. The authors found these results “surprising, even startling,” and concluded: “There is every reason for believing that the Japanese are the most intelligent racial group resident in British Columbia, with the Chinese as a more doubtful second. The superiority is undoubtedly due to selection. In the main, it is the Japanese and Chinese possessing the qualities of cleverness, resourcefulness, and courage who emigrate. . . . But the presence of so many clever, industrious, and frugal aliens, capable (as far as mentality is concerned) of competing suc-

246  |  Language

cessfully with the native whites . . . constitutes a political and economic problem of the greatest importance.”36 Half a century later, a leader of the U.S. English movement in Miami was to express a similar concern by complaining that “the Latins are coming up fast” and that he and other natives had not come to Miami “to live in a Spanish-speaking province.”37 The meaning of such calls is further clarified when the attempt to compel immigrants to shed their language is contrasted with the efforts of many native-born middleclass youths to acquire a foreign tongue in universities and other institutions of higher learning. There is irony in the comparison between the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars put into acquiring a halting command of a foreign language and the pressure on fluent foreignborn speakers to abandon its use. These contradictory goals—​English monolingualism for the masses but bilingualism or multilingualism for elites—​shed light on the real underpinnings of linguistic assimilation. The pressure for immigrants to learn English can be attributed, reasonably, to the need to maintain a fundamental element of American identity and culture. The pressure to learn English only, especially when contrasted with the efforts of many Americans to do exactly the opposite, must be sought in other factors. The conclusions of Peal and Lambert’s study concerning the cognitive advantages accruing to fluent bilinguals are relevant at this point. Knowledge of more than one language represents a resource in terms of expanding intellectual horizons and of facilitating communication across cultures. This resource and its associated advantages can become a serious threat to monolinguals who must compete in the same labor markets. It is for this reason that nativist calls for subtractive acculturation—​not English, but “English only”—​find a receptive audience among less educated segments of the domestic population.38 Although the sense of threat among those exposed to labor-market competition is understandable, we must ask whether campaigns to compel immigrants to entirely abandon their cultural heritage are justified. In chapter 5 we saw how such campaigns leveled against early twentieth-century immigrants gave rise to processes of reactive formation and ethnic strife later on. Reactive ethnic mobilizations came, however, without the benefit of fluent bilingualism, sacrificed by earlier generations that sought to Americanize as quickly as possible. To the personal suffering inflicted on the first generation by discrimination and xenophobic attacks must be added the net loss of intellectual and economic resources for their offspring and for American society at large.

Language  |  247

The “Know Nothing” movement has been a perennial tendency in the politics of the nation, leading to frequent attacks precisely against those who “know something” or “know more,” bilinguals included. Growing evidence of the significance and positive benefits of speaking more than one language leads a number of immigrant parents today to seek to balance the learning of English among their offspring with the preservation of their own languages. Such efforts are mostly unsuccessful because of external pressures, but the factors leading to different outcomes deserve additional attention. Indeed, they are increasingly coming to national attention and prompting major efforts at the state and local levels to implement language immersion programs from kindergarten through the end of high school for all students. A program such as this is currently being implemented throughout the state of Utah, among other places.39 English Plus and the Role of Social Class Large-scale studies in the San Diego Unified School District and elsewhere have found that students classified as fluent bilinguals tend to excel in school, surpassing the performance of both English monolinguals and limited bilinguals.40 This positive association may be due to the effects of bilingualism on cognitive skills, an argument in line with Peal and Lambert’s hypothesis; but it may also be due to the effect of other factors, such as family socioeconomic status, which account for both language knowledge and academic performance. Research findings elsewhere confirm that immigrants from higherclass backgrounds are most able to cope with contradictory demands through an “additive” approach that incorporates knowledge of the new language and customs, while preserving the old. An example is provided by a survey of 622 adult Korean immigrants in Chicago. These immigrants, ranging in age from thirty to fifty-nine, had been in the United States for an average of eight years. Their English ability was tested through an objective vocabulary scale drawn from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and through subjective selfreports. English ability and English-language use at home decreased with age but increased with time in the United States, as did the proportion of respondents who regularly read American newspapers and magazines—​while also maintaining fluency and usage of the Korean language, including reading Korean newspapers. This additive pattern was strongest for college graduates, who maintained more eth-

248  |  Language 90% 80%

Fluent bilingual* English dominant Foreign language dominant Limited bilingual

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

College or higher educational aspirations

Professional/ executive aspirations

High self-esteem**

Low depression***

F igu r e 18. Types of language adaptation and their social-psychological correlates. *See text for description of types of language adaptation. **Mean scores of 3.5 or higher in Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale. Range is 1 (low) to 4. ***Mean scores of 1.5 or less in Center for Epidemiological Studies–​Depression Subscale (CES–D). Range is 1 (low) to 4. Source: Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, 132.

nic a­ ttachments with Korean friends and organizations. Over time, the more educated the Koreans in this sample, the more they fit the pattern of high-achieving balanced bilingualism noted by López among nonMexican Hispanics.41 Similar results were obtained by the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), referred to previously and to be examined in detail in chapter 7. In this panel of more than fifty-two hundred youths in the San Diego and South Florida areas whose parents came from seventy-seven different countries, it was found that higher parental socioeconomic status was positively and significantly associated with fluent bilingualism, controlling for other factors. Each additional point in the parental socioeconomic status (SES) index led to a net increase of 3 percent in the probability of fluent bilingualism in the second generation. The study also showed that fluent, but not limited, bilingualism has significant and positive effects on academic achievement, as well as on related dimensions such as educational and occupational aspirations and self-esteem. Controlling for other predictors, fluent bilinguals had significantly higher math and reading scores, as well as grades, in junior high school. Effects of language types on psychosocial correlates of achievement are depicted graphically in figure 18. Chances for additive acculturation—​not English-only but Englishplus—​are thus greater in families of professionals and other educated

Language  |  249

immigrants. Migrant laborers, in contrast, are more likely to swing from foreign-language monolingualism in the first generation to limited bilingualism or English monolingualism in the second. All children of immigrants must contend, however, with the powerful external pressures pushing toward the latter outcome. The same CILS longitudinal panel found that, about the time of high school graduation, only a minority (28.5 percent) were fully bilingual; the majority had already shifted toward English monolingualism, with a significant number (17.8 percent) becoming limited bilinguals. As seen in figure 18, the latter pattern is associated with the worst social-psychological adaptation outcomes.42 Bilingualism and Dropping Out of High School Dropping out of high school is a key turning point in the transition to adulthood and a key predictor for future life chances, particularly in the labor market. Prior research has shown that dropping out of high school is strongly linked to higher unemployment or the likelihood of being laid off or of having never worked; the lowest level of earnings and lifetime income; being disabled; and worse health outcomes.43 High school dropouts are more likely to be divorced or separated, to come from low-SES families, and to have grown up in more dangerous neighborhoods. They are four to five times more likely to be incarcerated, to have had a teen pregnancy, and to have had a nonmarital birth. Given the strong link between dropping out of school and future economic outcomes, what are the effects of balanced bilingualism on the odds of dropping out? Data from the merged IIMMLA and CILS surveys in Southern California described earlier were used to analyze the effects of balanced bilingualism and other key predictors on the likelihood of dropping out of school. English monolinguals (or limited bilinguals) and non-Hispanic whites were the reference groups. High school grades and parental socioeconomic status were the strongest inhibitors of dropping out. Latinos and blacks, and males of all groups, were significantly more likely to drop out, even after controlling for other predictors. Chinese and Vietnamese were the least likely to do so. The gender effect disappeared once grades entered the model (females had higher GPAs). In all models, however, the dichotomous measure of balanced bilingualism had a strong and significant negative effect on dropping out: English monolinguals and limited bilinguals were 66 percent more likely than balanced bilinguals to abandon their schooling, net of other factors.44

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This finding confirms other research that has pointed to the positive effects of bilingualism for academic achievement, family cohesion, parent-child relations, aspirations, and other factors that protect against the decision to drop out.45 Feliciano, for example, found that bilingual students are less likely to quit school than English-only speakers; students in bilingual households are less likely to drop out than those in English-dominant or English-limited households; and students in immigrant households are less likely to quit than those in nonimmigrant households.46 Bilingualism and Earnings The research literature has focused largely on examining the workplace and economic benefits of English (or host-country language) fluency among immigrant workers.47 Proficiency in the host language is seen as a human-capital variable, a resource in the labor market. That literature regularly finds that the more proficient immigrants are in the language of the host country, the higher their wages. Fluency in a second language combined with English proficiency has been largely ignored as a competitive resource. Some new studies are now providing evidence of the economic benefits of bilingualism. Figure 19 graphically summarizes the effects of different levels of bilingualism (fluent, moderate, and limited) on annual earnings (measured in dollars), again using the merged IIMMLA and CILS data sets in Southern California. Respondents were classified as “fluent bilinguals” if they understand, speak, read, and write a non-English language “very well”; “moderate bilinguals” if they understand, speak, read, and write a non-English language “well”; and “limited bilinguals” if they understand, speak, read, and write a non-English language less than well. In the regressions English monolinguals are the reference group, as are non-Hispanic whites. Two models are presented: the first controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and parents’ socioeconomic status; the second adding controls for high school GPA and total years of education attained. The regressions predicting annual earnings show strong and significant effects for the different levels of bilingualism: the higher the level of bilingualism, the higher the annual earnings and the more strongly significant the effect. Fluent bilingualism, net of other predictors, is associated with an annual gain of $2,827; when GPA and years of education are entered into the second model, the effect is reduced, but fluent bilinguals still

Language  |  251 $3,000 $2,500

$2,827

Fluent bilingual Moderate bilingual Limited bilingual

$2,425 $2,234

$2,000

$1,876

$1,500

$1,258 $1,078

$1,000 $500 $0

1

2

for age, gender, ethnicity, parents’ socioeconomic status, and living with parents (white native FModel igu1rcontrols e 19. Regressions of annual earnings on levels of bilingualism among young parentage English monolinguals are the referent group). adults in Southern California. Model 1 and controls for of age, gender, ethnicity, parents’ Model 2 controls in addition for high school GPA total years education attained in adulthood. socioeconomic status, andonliving with parents native-parentage English Bilingualism levels are measured a 4-item scale of ability(white to understand, speak, read and write the non English language (fluent bilingual = “verycategory). well” on all 4; moderate = “well” on 4; limitedfor = less than well). monolinguals are the reference Model 2 controls inall addition high Earnings (regression annual dollars, net of otherin variables in the models. school GPA and coefficients) total yearsinof education attained adulthood. Bilingualism levels Results for fluent and moderate bilinguals are significant at p < .001; for limited bilinguals at p < .05.

are measured on a four-item scale of ability to understand, speak, read, and write the non-English language (fluent bilingual = “very well” on all four; moderate = “well” on all four; limited = “less than well”). Earnings (regression coefficients) in annual dollars, net of other variables in the models. Results for fluent and moderate bilinguals are significant at p