Ten—
Passages to America:
Perspectives on the New Immigration

Rubén G. Rumbaut

Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.
—OSCAR HANDLIN , The Uprooted (1951)

Ironically, those opening lines of Handlin's famous portrait of immigrant America ring truer today than they did when he penned them at mid-century. As Handlin would add in a postscript to the second edition of The Uprooted two decades later, immigration was already "a dimly remote memory, generations away, which had influenced the past but appeared unlikely to count for much in the present or future"; and ethnicity, not a common word in 1950, seemed then "a fading phenomenon, a quaint part of the national heritage, but one likely to diminish steadily in practical importance."^[1] After all, the passage of restrictive national-origins laws in the 1920s, the Great Depression and World War II had combined to reduce the flow of immigrants to America to its lowest point since the 1820s. But history is forever ambushed by the unexpected. Handlin might have been surprised, if not astonished, to find that in at least one sense the "American Century" seems to be ending much as it had begun: the United States has again become a nation of immigrants, and it is again being transformed in the process. To be sure, while the old may be a prologue to the new, history does not repeat itself, whether as tragedy or as farce. America is not the same society that processed the "huddled masses" through Castle Garden and Ellis Island, and the vast majority of today's immigrants and refugees hail not from Europe, but from the developing countries of the Third World, especially from Asia and Latin America. Not since the peak years of immigration before World War I have so many millions of strangers sought to make their way in America. They make their passages legally and illegally, aboard jumbo jets and in the trunks of cars, by boat and on foot; incredibly, in 1990 a Cuban refugee came across the Straits of Florida riding a windsurfer. Never before has the United States received such diverse

groups—immigrants who mirror in their motives and social class origins the forces that have forged a new world order in the second half of this century and who are, unevenly, engaged in the process of becoming the newest members of American society.^[2]

The American ethnic mosaic is being fundamentally altered; ethnicity itself is being redefined, its new images reified in the popular media and reflected in myriad and often surprising ways. Immigrants from a score of nationalities are told that they are all "Hispanics," while far more diverse groups—from India and Laos, China and the Philippines—are lumped together as "Asians." There are foreign-born mayors of large American cities, first-generation millionaires who speak broken English, a proliferation of sweatshops exploiting immigrant labor in an expanding informal economy, and new myths that purport to "explain" the success or failure of different ethnic groups. Along "Calle Ocho" in Miami's Little Havana, shops post signs to reassure potential customers that they'll find "English spoken here," while Koreatown retailers in Los Angeles display "Se habla español" signs next to their own Hangul script, a businesslike acknowledgment that the largest Mexican and Salvadoran communities in the world outside of Mexico and El Salvador are located there. In Brooklyn, along Brighton Beach Avenue ("Little Odessa"), signs written in Cyrillic letters by new Soviet immigrants have replaced old English and Yiddish signs. In Houston, the auxiliary bishop is a Cuban-born Jesuit who speaks fluent Vietnamese—an overflow of 6,000 faithful attended his recent ordination, and he addressed them in three languages—and the best Cuban café is run by Koreans. In a Farsi-language Iranian immigrant monthly in Los Angeles, Rah-E-Zendegi , next to announcements for "Business English" classes, a classified ad offers for sale a $20 million square block on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue, and other ads deal with tax shelters, mergers, and acquisitions. In Santa Barbara, a preliterate Hmong woman from the Laotian highlands, recently converted to Christianity, asked her pastor if she could enter heaven without knowing how to read; while in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a twelve-year-old Cambodian refugee, Linn Yann, placed second in a regional spelling bee (she missed on "enchilada"). At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tue Nguyen, a twenty-six-year-old Vietnamese boat refugee, set an MIT record in 1988 by earning his seventh advanced degree, a doctorate in nuclear engineering, just nine years after arriving in the United States—and landed a job at IBM designing technology for the manufacture of semiconductors. In the San Jose telephone directory, the Nguyens outnumber the Joneses fourteen columns to eight, while in Los Angeles, a Korean restaurant serves kosher burritos in a largely black neighborhood. And then there was this in the New York Times: "At the annual Lower East Side Jewish Festival yesterday, a

Chinese woman ate a pizza slice in front of Ty Thuan Duc's Vietnamese grocery store. Beside her a Spanish-speaking family patronized a cart with two signs: 'Italian Ices' and 'Kosher by Rabbi Alper.' And after the pastrami ran out, everybody ate knishes."^[3]

Immigration to the United States is a social process, patterned within particular structural and historical contexts. The contemporary world has shrunk even as the populations of developing countries have expanded. Societies have become increasingly linked in numerous ways—economically, politically, culturally—as states and markets have become global forms of social organization, and modern consumption standards (especially American life-styles) are diffused worldwide. Over time, social networks are created that serve as bridges of passage to America, linking places of origin with places of destination. Indeed, transnational population movements of workers, refugees, and their families are but one of many other exchanges of capital, commodities, and information across state borders, all facilitated by a postwar revolution in transportation and communication technologies. In general, the patterns reflect the nature of contemporary global inequality: a flow of capital from more developed countries (MDCs) to less developed countries (LDCs), a flow of labor from LDCs to MDCs, and—in an era of Cold War and global superpower confrontation, decolonization and the formation of new states, revolutions and counterrevolutions—continuing flows of refugees, primarily from one Third World country to another.^[4]

Still, moving to a foreign country is not easy, even under the most propitious circumstances. In a world of 5 billion people, only a fraction—perhaps 2 percent—are immigrants or refugees residing permanently outside their country of birth. In absolute numbers, the United States remains by far the principal receiving country: by the late 1950s the United States had admitted half of all legal immigrants worldwide, and that proportion had grown to two-thirds by the 1980s. In relative terms, the picture is different: only 6.2 percent of the 1980 U.S. population was foreign-born, a percentage exceeded by many other countries. For example, recent censuses showed a foreign-born population of 20.9 percent in Australia, 16.1 percent in Canada, 8.2 percent in France, 7.6 percent in West Germany, 7.2 percent in Venezuela, 6.8 percent in Argentina, and 6.6 percent in Great Britain. Some smaller countries have much higher proportions, such as Israel (42 percent) and Saudi Arabia (36 percent). But the 14.1 million foreigners counted in the 1980 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world.^[5]

The public image of today's new American immigration clashes with its complex realities. Because the sending countries are generally poor, many Americans believe that the immigrants themselves are poor and uneducated. Because the size of the new immigration is substantial and

concentrated in a few states and metropolitan areas, concerns are raised that the newcomers are taking jobs away from the native-born and unfairly burdening taxpayers and public services. Because of the non-European origins of most new immigrants and the undocumented status of many, their prospects for assimilation are sometimes perceived as worse than those of previous flows. And as in the past—if without much of the vitriol and blatant racism of yesterday's nativists—alarms are sounded about the "Balkanization" of America, the feared loss of English as the national language and even of entire regions to potential secessionist movements. As this chapter will attempt to show, such concerns are fundamentally misplaced, even though immigration again plays a central role in an American society in transition. Within its limits, the essay has three objectives: (1) to sketch a portrait of the contours and diversity of recent immigration to the United States, (2) to examine the modes of incorporation of main types of immigrant groups, and (3) to consider some of the determinants of the new immigration and its consequences for the American economy and society.

Immigration to the United States: Historical Trends and Changing Policies

Decennial trends in immigration to the United States are summarized in table 10.1 for the century from 1890 to 1989. Authorized immigration reached its highest levels (8.8 million) during 1901–10, more than doubling the number of immigrants admitted in the preceding decade. Much of this flow was initiated by active recruitment on the part of employers, and many immigrants (over one-third) returned home after a few years in the United States—"birds of passage," often young single men, whose movements tended to follow the ups and downs of the American business cycle.^[6] In the post–World War II period, legal immigration flows have been much less clearly a function of economic cycles and deliberate recruitment, and much more apt to be sustained by social networks of kin and friends developed over time. Since 1930, moreover, some two-thirds of all legal immigrants to the United States have been women and children.^[7] After the peak decade of 1901–10, immigration began a steady decline until the trend reversed itself immediately after World War II. Only 23,000—the smallest annual flow recorded since the early nineteenth century—entered in 1933 and again in 1943, in the midst of the Depression and then the world war. The number of legal immigrants doubled from the 1930s to the 1940s, more than doubled again in the 1950s (to 2.5 million), and more than doubled yet again by the 1980s. Indeed, if the 3 million people who recently qualified for legalization of their status under the amnesty provisions of the Immigration Reform

and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 were added to the regular admission totals for the 1980s, the decade ending in 1990 would exceed 8 million immigrants and rival the record numbers registered during the first decade of this century.^[8] At that time, however, foreign-born persons constituted 14.7 percent of the total U.S. population, more than twice the relatively small 6.2 percent counted in the 1980 census. As table 10.1 also shows, net immigration accounted for nearly 40 percent of total population growth in the United States by 1910—a level not since approached, though net immigration today (adjusting for both emigration and illegal immigration) makes up an increasing proportion of total U.S. population growth. Given a declining national fertility rate, the demographic impact of immigration will continue to grow in importance.^[9]

Until 1890 the overwhelming number of immigrants had come from northwest Europe—particularly from Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia. From Asia, Chinese laborers were recruited, especially to California, after 1850, until their exclusion by federal law in 1882 (rescinded in 1943, when the United States and China were allies in World War II); their place was taken by Japanese immigrants, who were themselves restricted (though not entirely excluded) by the "Gentleman's Agreement" of 1907 between the U.S. and Japanese governments. After 1890, however, a much larger "new" immigration from southern and eastern Europe—particularly from Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires—significantly changed the composition of the trans-atlantic flow. From 1890 to 1920, as shown in table 10.1, well over half of all immigrants to America arrived from these regions. In response, the most restrictive immigration laws in the nation's history were passed in 1921 and 1924 (fully implemented in 1929), limiting the annual flow to 150,000 for Eastern Hemisphere countries and setting national-origins quotas that barred Asians and allocated 82 percent of all visas to northwestern Europeans, 16 percent to southeastern Europeans, and 2 percent to all others. Largely at the urging of American growers, no limits were set on Western Hemisphere countries; it was understood that Mexican labor could be recruited when needed (as happened during World War I and the 1920s, and again during the Bracero Program of contract-labor importation, begun in 1942 to meet labor shortages during World War II but maintained until 1964), and that those laborers could be deported en masse when they were no longer needed (as happened during the 1930s and again during "Operation Wetback" in the mid-1950s).

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 retained the national-origins quota system, slightly increasing the annual ceilings for the Eastern Hemisphere to 159,000 and the allocation of visas to northwestern Europeans to 85 percent. It included—again at the urging of growers—a "Texas Proviso" that exempted employers from sanctions for hiring illegal

aliens (a loophole, formally closed by IRCA in 1986, that in fact encouraged undocumented immigration, all the more after the Bracero Program was ended in 1964). And it set up a preference system to meet specified labor needs and family reunification priorities. Among numerically restricted immigrants, half of the visas were granted to highly skilled professional and technical workers, and half to immediate relatives of permanent residents and to the parents, siblings, and married children of U.S. citizens. Exempted from the numerical quotas were spouses and unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens. Many British, German, and other European scientists and professionals journeyed to America in the aftermath of the war to pursue opportunities not available in their countries, and the first "refugees" recognized as such by the U.S. government—European "displaced persons" in the late 1940s, Hungarian escapees after the 1956 revolt—were admitted under special legal provisions. In any case, as table 10.1 shows, from 1920 to 1960 the majority of all immigrants to the United States again came from northwest Europe and Canada. After 1960, however, the national composition of the flow changed dramatically, and by the close of the 1980s more than 80 percent of total legal immigration originated in Asia and Latin America.

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 (fully implemented in 1969), which eliminated the national-origins quota system and basically remained in effect until 1990, has been frequently cited as the main reason for these changes. For a variety of reasons, however, this explanation is insufficient; entry policies do influence but do not determine immigrant flows. As in the past, rules governing immigration are ultimately defeasible and are accompanied by consequences never intended by policymakers. The 1965 Act—amended in 1976, again by the Refugee Act of 1980 and IRCA in 1986—is a case in point. Emmanuel Celler, Brooklyn congressman who cosponsored the 1965 law, had long sought to repeal the discriminatory quota system, but noted that "my efforts were about as useless as trying to make a tiger eat grass or a cow eat meat." He lobbied for the new law—in a political climate changed by the Civil Rights Movement at home and by the geopolitical interests of U.S. foreign policy abroad—by offering opponents family preferences as an alternative to national-origins quotas, confidently predicting that "there will not be, comparatively, many Asians or Africans entering this country . . . since [they] have very few relatives here."^[10] Similar pronouncements were made by the Attorney General and other officials in testimony before the Congress; they expected instead that the number of southern and eastern European immigrants would grow. Historically, after all, Asian immigration to the United States had averaged only 2 percent to 4 percent of total admissions—until the 1950s, when 6 percent of legal immigrants came from Asian countries, most of them as brides of U.S. servicemen

overseas—and (uncoerced) African immigration had never been a factor. But by the 1980s, Asian immigration accounted for 45 percent of total admissions, and African immigration—though still small in relative numbers—increased eightfold from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. European immigration, in turn, decreased significantly over the same period—precisely the opposite of what had been anticipated.

Immigrants who are legally admitted to the United States fall into two broad categories: those subject to a worldwide limitation and those who are exempt from it. With minor modifications until it was overhauled in late 1990, the 1965 law set a worldwide annual ceiling of 270,000 immigrants, with a maximum of 20,000 per country, under a preference system that greatly emphasized family reunification. The number of immigrants subject to this worldwide limitation remained relatively constant from year to year, since the demand for visas far exceeded the annual limit of 270,000. For example, as of January 1989, there were 2.3 million active registrants awaiting immigrant visas at consular offices abroad.^[11] Among these numerically restricted immigrants, 20 percent of the visas were granted to persons certified by the Department of Labor to possess needed job skills (half of them professional, managerial, and technical workers) and their immediate families, and 80 percent to immediate relatives of permanent residents and to siblings and married children of U.S. citizens. But parents as well as spouses and unmarried minor children of American citizens are numerically unrestricted—opening "chain migration" channels for those with family connections—and in addition, refugees and asylees are admitted outside the worldwide limitation under separate ceilings determined each year by the Administration and the Congress (the 1990 refugee ceiling was raised to 125,000). The flow of immigrants thus exempt from numerical limits increased significantly over the past two decades, underscoring the progressive nature of network building processes: for example, 27 percent of the 1.9 million immigrants admitted during 1970–74 came outside the regular quota, as did 36 percent of the 2.4 million admitted during 1975–79, 50 percent of the 2.8 million admitted during 1980–84, and 56 percent of the 3 million admitted during 1985–89.^[12] Of all nonquota immigrants legally admitted into the United States in recent years, two-thirds have been immediate relatives of American citizens, and one-third have been admitted as refugees.

Since 1960, the overwhelming majority of refugees have come from Cuba and, since the end of the Indochina War in 1975, primarily from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Indeed, the consolidation of communist revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam represent by far the worst defeats of American foreign policy in modern history. U.S. refugee policy, a product of the Cold War era, has always been guided by fundamentally politi-

cal and not purely "humanitarian" objectives, and refugees fleeing from communist-controlled states to the "free world" have served as potent symbols of the legitimacy of American power and foreign policy. Even after the 1980 Refugee Act accepted the United Nations' ideologically neutral definition of a refugee, more than 90 percent of entrants granted refugee or asylee status by the United States during the 1980s continued to be from communist countries; most escapees from noncommunist regimes, such as Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing death squads and civil wars in their countries, have instead been generally labeled as "economic migrants"—and deported or driven underground along with other undocumented immigrants.^[13] The conferral or denial of asylum or refugee status has significant consequences for immigrants' incorporation in the American economy and society, since persons so classified have the right to work (which illegal immigrants and temporary visitors do not) and to access public assistance programs on the same basis as U.S. citizens (which legal immigrants do not, at least during their first three years in the country).

The undocumented immigrant population has not only grown but diversified during the 1980s. As noted previously, over 3 million immigrants qualified for legalization of their status under IRCA's amnesty provisions by 1989—including residents who had entered the United States illegally prior to 1982, and Special Agricultural Workers (SAWs) who had been employed in seasonal work during the mid-1980s. Immigrants who entered illegally after 1981 (other than SAWs) were not eligible to qualify for legalization under IRCA, and thus reliable data on the size and composition of that population are unavailable. However, a majority of Central Americans in the country today are probably included—themselves in some measure an unintended consequence of U.S. policy and intervention in their home region—as well as an estimated 100,000 Irish immigrants who have, since 1982, overstayed their temporary visitor visas and clustered in historical areas of Irish settlement in Boston and New York.^[14] Furthermore, again contrary to official predictions, IRCA has not stopped the flow of unauthorized migrants; in fact, the number of apprehensions along the Mexican border increased abruptly after 1989 and may again reach historically high levels.^[15] In addition, the growing backlog and waiting periods faced by persons applying legally for numerically restricted immigrant visas—above all in Mexico and the Philippines—are likely to encourage further extralegal immigration. Former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner Leonel Castillo estimated in 1990 that the waiting period for Mexicans applying under the second preference (spouses and children of permanent U.S. residents) could jump to 22 years, and to 10 to 17 years for Filipinos under various family preference categories.^[16]

Immigration to the United States: Contemporary Trends and the Changing Ethnic Mosaic

National Origins of the New Immigration

Quinquennial trends in U.S. immigration from 1960 to 1989 are summarized in table 10.2, broken down by the major sending countries. While today's immigrants come from over 100 different nation-states, some countries send many more than others, despite the egalitarian numerical quotas provided by U.S. law. The 21 countries listed in table 10.2 accounted for nearly three-fourths of all legal immigration since 1960. One pattern, a continuation of trends already under way in the 1950s, is quite clear: immigration from the more developed countries has declined over time and that from less developed countries has grown steadily. Among the MDCs, this pattern is clearest for Canada, Great Britain, Italy, and Germany, with the sharpest reductions occurring during the 1960s. Although traditional countries of immigration in the past, their prosperous postwar economies dampened the relative attraction of America, while many Italian "guest-workers" sought instead newly opened opportunities in Germany and Switzerland. The smaller flows of Polish and Soviet refugees have oscillated over time, reflecting changes in exit policies in those countries and in their bilateral relations with the United States. The flow from Japan, which as of the early 1960s was still the largest source of immigrants from Asia, has remained small and stable at about 4,000 per year, nearly half entering as spouses of U.S. citizens—in part reflecting labor shortages and exit restrictions at home. Among the LDCs, the major countries of immigration are located either in the Caribbean Basin—in the immediate periphery of the United States—or are certain Asian nations also characterized by significant historical, economic, political, and military ties to the United States. These historical relationships, and the particular social networks to which they give rise, are crucial to an understanding of the new immigration, both legal and illegal—and help explain why most LDCs are not similarly represented in contemporary flows, as might be predicted by orthodox "push-pull" or "supply-demand" theories of transnational labor movements.

In fact, just eight countries have accounted for more than half of all legal immigration since 1975: Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, China, India, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Of these, Mexico and the Philippines alone have sent 20 percent of all legal immigrants to the United States over the past three decades, and Mexico also remains by far the source of most unauthorized immigration. Of the 3 million immigrants who qualified for legalization of their status under IRCA by 1989, about 2 million were Mexican nationals; and while most

of the remaining amnesty applicants came from nearby Caribbean Basin countries, Filipinos ranked sixth (behind Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Haitians, and Colombians, but ahead of Dominicans, Jamaicans, and Nicaraguans).^[17] Indeed, Mexicans and Filipinos comprise, respectively, the largest "Hispanic" and "Asian" populations in the United States today.^[18]

Not surprisingly, Mexico and the Philippines share the deepest structural linkages with the United States, including a long history of dependency relationships, external intervention, and (in the case of the Philippines) colonization. In both countries, decades of active agricultural labor recruitment by the United States—of Mexicans to the Southwest, Filipinos to plantations in Hawaii and California—preceded the establishment of self-sustaining migratory social networks. In the case of Mexico, the process has evolved over several generations. From California to Texas, the largest Mexican-origin communities in the United States are still located in former Mexican territories that were annexed in the last century, and they are today linked to entire communities on the other side of the border.^[19] In the Philippines—unlike Puerto Rico, which also came under U.S. hegemony as a result of the 1898 Spanish-American War—its formal independence from the United States after World War II has since led to different patterns of immigration. During the half-century of U.S. colonization, the Americanization of Filipino culture was pervasive, especially in the development of a U.S.-styled educational system and the adoption of English as an official language, and the United States today is not only the Philippines' major trading partner but also accounts for more than half of total foreign investment there.^[20] Since the 1960s, as will be detailed below, the Philippines have sent the largest number of immigrant professionals to the United States, as well as a high proportion of the many international students enrolled in American colleges and universities. Moreover, the extensive U.S. military presence in the Philippines—including the largest American bases in the Asian-Pacific region—has fueled immigration through marriages with U.S. citizens stationed there, through unique arrangements granting U.S. citizenship to Filipinos who served in the armed forces during World War II, and through direct recruitment of Filipinos into the U.S. Navy. Remarkably, by 1970 there were more Filipinos in the U.S. Navy (14,000) than in the entire Filipino navy.^[21] During 1978–85, more than 51 percent of the 12,500 Filipino babies born in the San Diego metropolitan area—site of the largest naval station in the United States and the third largest destination of Filipinio immigrants—were delivered at just one hospital: the U.S. Naval Hospital.^[22]

Among the other six leading countries of recent immigration, linkages unwittingly structured by American foreign policy and military in-

tervention since the 1950s are most salient in the exodus of the Koreans and Vietnamese. Indeed, an ironic consequence of the wars that took tens of thousands of Americans to Korea and Vietnam is that tens of thousands of Koreans and Vietnamese—including many Amerasians—have since come to America, albeit through quite different routes. Emigration connections variously shaped by U.S. intervention, foreign policies, and immigration policies are also a common denominator in the exodus of the Chinese after the 1949 revolution, the Cubans after the 1959 revolution, and the Dominicans after the U.S.-backed coup in 1965. In the case of India, South Korea, and Taiwan, large-scale U.S. foreign aid, technical assistance, trade, and direct investment (which in India surpassed that of the United Kingdom soon after decolonization) helped to forge the channels for many professionals and exchange students to come to America.^[23] It has been estimated that since the early 1950s fewer than 10 percent of the many thousands of students from South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong who have come to the United States for training on nonimmigrant visas ever returned home; instead, many adjusted their status and gained U.S. citizenship through occupational connections with American industry and business, thus becoming eligible to send for family members later on.^[24] None of this is to suggest, of course, that the complex macrostructural determinants that shape migration flows—above all global market forces, which will be considered further on, and internal dynamics and crises in the sending countries—can be reduced to politico-military factors or state policies, but rather to focus attention on the importance of particular historical patterns of U.S. influence in the creation and consolidation of social networks that over time give the process of immigration its cumulative and seemingly spontaneous character.^[25]

Social Class Origins of the New Immigration

There is no doubt that wage differentials between the United States and the LDCs act as a magnet to attract immigrants to America. This is especially the case along the 2,000-mile-long border between the United States and Mexico—the largest point of "North-South" contact in the world. During the 1980s, the minimum wage in the United States ($3.35 per hour) was six times the prevailing rate in Mexico, and higher still than most rates in Central America. But wage differentials alone do not explain why even in neighboring Mexico only a small fraction of the population ever undertakes the journey to "El Norte." What is more, 10 of the 15 poorest nations of the world (with sizable populations and national per capita incomes below U.S. $200)—Chad, Zaire, Mozambique, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nepal, Malawi, Bangladesh, Uganda, and Burma—are scarcely represented among immigrants to America, if at all. Signifi-

cantly, the only sizable groups of recent immigrants who do hail from the world's 15 poorest countries—from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and (though to a much lesser extent) Ethiopia and Afghanistan—have been admitted as political refugees.^[26]

Moreover, the fact that most newcomers to America come from comparatively poorer nations—such as the 14 LDCs listed above in table 10.2—does not mean that the immigrants themselves are drawn from the uneducated, unskilled, or unemployed sectors of their countries of origin. Available evidence from the INS, summarized in table 10.3, indicates just the opposite. Over the past two decades, an average of more than 60,000 immigrant engineers, scientists, university professors, physicians, nurses, and other professionals and executives have been admitted each year into the United States. From the 1960s through the early 1980s, about one-third of all legal immigrants to the United States (excluding dependents) were high-status professionals, executives, or managers in their countries of origin. The proportion of these so-called brain drain elites declined somewhat to 26.5 percent by the late 1980s—still a higher percentage than that of the native-born American population—despite the overwhelming majority of immigrants having been admitted under family preferences over the past two decades. In part, these data suggest that while many "pioneer" immigrants have entered with formal credentials under the occupational preferences of U.S. law, their close kin who join them later are drawn from the same social classes—accounting for both the relative stability and similarity of their flows over time, if with a gradually diminishing upper-crust occupational profile as family "chain migration" processes evolve and expand. But the dynamics of particular types of flows are much more complex than might seem at first glance.

Take, for example, the case of so-called foreign medical graduates (FMGs). Worldwide, about 5 percent of physicians have immigrated to foreign countries in recent decades, of whom about half have come to the United States—75,000 entered in the 1965–74 decade alone.^[27] During the 1950s and 1960s, enrollments in U.S. medical schools remained virtually stationary, while the American health care system expanded greatly (all the more after the passage of Medicaid and Medicare in the early 1960s), creating many vacancies in the number of internship and residency positions in U.S. hospitals (especially in underserved areas such as inner cities, which did not attract U.S. medical graduates). The demand, reinforced by the new channels opened up by U.S. immigration law and the higher salaries offered by U.S. hospitals, enabled FMGs and nurses to flock to America, particularly from developing countries such as India and the Philippines, where English-language textbooks are used and where many more professionals were graduating than the economies could absorb. Few of these people were directly recruited by

American hospitals; most made their own arrangements through professional networks of friends who were or had been in the United States, or by writing blind letters to hospitals listed in American Medical Association or state directories. By the mid-1970s there were about 9,500 Filipino and 7,000 Indian FMGs in the United States—more than the number of American black physicians—as well as some 3,000 FMGs each from Cuba and South Korea, and 2,000 each from Mexico and Iran. Perhaps the most extraordinary instance occurred in 1972, when practically the entire graduating class of the new medical school in Chiangmai, Thailand, chartered a plane to America. The effect of this kind of emigration on the sending countries' domestic stock of physicians has varied greatly: in 1972 the number of Mexican and Indian FMGs in the United States represented only 4 percent of Mexico's stock and 5 percent of India's, but the proportion was 18 percent of South Korea's, 22 percent of Iran's, 27 percent of Thailand's, 32 percent of the Dominican Republic's, 35 percent of Taiwan's, 43 percent of Cuba's, 63 percent of the Philippines', and—incredibly—95 percent of Haiti's. Since the late 1970s the flow of FMGs has declined, due to a constricting job market (as the supply of U.S.-trained physicians has increased) and the passage of more restrictive U.S. visa and medical licensing requirements, but by the late 1980s, FMGs still comprised 20 percent of the nation's physicians.^[28]

The worldwide trends presented in table 10.3 conceal a wide range in the class character of contemporary immigration to the United States; among the principal sending countries there are considerable differences in the occupational backgrounds of immigrants. "Brain drain" immigrants have dominated the flows of Indians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Chinese (including Taiwanese) since the 1960s. High proportions are also in evidence among the Japanese, Canadian, and British groups—although their immigration flows are smaller, as seen earlier—as well as among some refugee groups, particularly Soviet Jews and Armenians and the more sizable first waves of refugees from Vietnam and Cuba. By contrast, immigration from Mexico, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and (until very recently) Italy has consisted predominantly of manual laborers and low-wage service workers, as has also been the case among refugees from Laos and Cambodia, and the more recent waves of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Haitians. Between these extremes in occupational profiles are Colombians, Jamaicans, Germans, and Poles.

Over time, the drop in the proportion of highly skilled immigrants within particular national groups is most apparent among non-European refugees, consistent with a general pattern that characterizes refugee flows: initial waves tend to come from the higher socioeconomic strata, followed later by heterogeneous working-class waves more representative of the society of origin. As table 10.3 shows, rapid declines are seen

among refugees who come from poor countries, such as Vietnam, where only a small proportion of the population is well educated.

The information provided in table 10.3, while useful as a first step to sort out the diverse class origins of the new immigration, is limited in several ways. The INS does not collect data on the educational backgrounds of legal immigrants, nor on the occupations they enter once in the United States, nor, for that matter, on the characteristics of undocumented immigrants or of emigrants (those who leave the United States after a period of time, estimated at about 160,000 annually). A more precise picture can be drawn from the last available census, which counted a foreign-born population of 14.1 million persons in 1980 (including an estimated 2.1 million undocumented immigrants). Census data on several relevant indicators for the largest foreign-born groups in the United States as of 1980 are presented in table 10.4, rank-ordered by their proportions of college graduates. The picture that emerges shows clearly that the foreign-born are not a homogeneous population; instead, to borrow a term from Milton Gordon, the formation of different "eth-classes" is apparent. Less apparent is the fact that within particular nationalities there is often also considerable socioeconomic diversity.

An upper stratum is composed of foreign-born groups whose educational and occupational attainments significantly exceed the average for the native-born American population. Without exception, all of them are of Asian origin—Indians, Chinese (especially Taiwanese), Filipinos, Koreans, and Japanese—with the most recently immigrated groups reflecting the highest levels of attainment. It is precisely this stratum that accounts for the popularization of the recent myth of Asian-Americans as "model minorities," whose children are overrepresented among the nation's high school valedictorians and in admissions to elite universities from Berkeley to Harvard. For instance, foreign-born students collected 55 percent of all doctoral degrees in engineering awarded by American universities in 1985, with one-fifth of all engineering doctorates going to students from Taiwan, India, and South Korea alone. In 1988 the top two winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the nation's most prestigious high school competition, were immigrant students from India and Taiwan in New York City public schools; indeed, 22 of the top 40 finalists were children of immigrants. Moreover, the stories of competitive success are not limited to science and math-based fields (where Asian immigrant students tend to concentrate to reduce their English-language handicaps): the 1985 U.S. National Spelling Bee champ was Chicago schoolboy Balu Natarajan, who speaks Tamil at home, and the 1988 winner was a thirteen-year-old girl from a California public school, Indian-born Rageshree Ramachandran, who correctly spelled "elegiacal" to beat out runner-up Victor Wang, a Chinese-American.^[29]

Yet also during the 1980s, the highest rates of poverty and welfare dependency in the United States have been recorded among Asian-origin groups, particularly refugees from Indochina. One study found poverty rates ranging from over 50 percent for the Vietnamese to 75 percent for the Chinese-Vietnamese and the Lao, 80 percent for Cambodians, and nearly 90 percent for the Hmong. And Southeast Asian and, to a lesser extent, Korean workers are much in evidence, along with undocumented Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants, in a vast underground sweatshop economy that has expanded during the 1980s and into the 1990s in Southern California. Those findings debunk genetic and cultural stereotypes that have been propounded in the mass media as explanations of "Asian" success, and point instead to the diversity of recent Asian immigration and to the class advantages of particular Asian-origin groups.^[30]

A middle stratum evident in table 10.4, composed of groups whose educational and occupational characteristics are close to the U.S. average, is more heterogeneous in terms of national origins. It includes older immigrants from England, the U.S.S.R., Germany, and Canada (the majority entering the United States prior to 1960), and more recent immigrants from Cuba, Colombia, Vietnam, and Jamaica. The post-1980 waves of Mariel refugees from Cuba and Vietnamese "boat people" from more modest social class backgrounds are not reflected in the data in table 10.4, since they arrived after the census was taken; the 1990 census will probably reflect much wider differences in the characteristics of these two refugee populations, underscoring the internal diversification of particular national groups over time.

Finally, as table 10.4 shows, a lower stratum is composed of working-class groups who fall substantially below native-born norms. It includes recent immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic—of whom a substantial number entered without documents—but also includes less visible, older European immigrants from Poland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Portugal. The 1990 census most probably will add to this stratum several groups who have arrived in sizable numbers during the past decade, including Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Cambodian and Laotian refugees. Not included in this bottom stratum are Puerto Ricans, since they are not "foreign-born" but are U.S. citizens by birth; but their aggregate socioeconomic characteristics would place them here, and their large-scale post–World War II migration to the mainland resembles in many respects that of Mexican labor immigration. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans make up the overwhelming majority of the supranational "Hispanic" population of the United States, and their particular characteristics and circumstances have colored the construction of negative ethnic typifications.^[31] In any case, these findings, too, debunk cultural stereotypes that have been propounded in the mass

media as explanations for the lack of "Hispanic" success in contrast to that of "Asians" and white European ethnics, and point instead to the diversity of recent Latin American immigration and to the class disadvantages of particular groups.

Significantly, there is an imperfect correlation between educational and occupational attainment among these groups. For example, as table 10.4 shows, the percentage of longer-established Canadian and certain European immigrants employed in professional specialties actually exceeds the respective proportion of their groups who are college graduates. By contrast, the percentage of more recently arrived Asian and Latin American immigrants who are employed in the professions is generally far below their respective proportions of college graduates—and, for that matter, far below their respective proportions of those who held professional positions in their countries of origin prior to admission into the United States (as documented previously in table 10.3). These discrepancies offer a clue about barriers such as English proficiency and strict licensing requirements that regulate entry into the professions and that recent immigrants—most of them nonwhite, non-European, and non–English speakers—must confront as they seek to make their way in America. In response, some immigrants shift instead to entrepreneurship as an avenue of economic advancement—and as an alternative to employment in segmented labor markets. Indeed, the process of occupational and economic adaptation is complex and not simply a function of the "human capital" brought by the immigrants. Their varying social-class resources at the time of entry interact with other differences in the contexts of reception experienced by particular groups—such as government policies and programs, local labor markets, cultural prejudices and racial discrimination, and existing ethnic communities and networks—to mold their diverse modes of incorporation in the American economy and society.

In general, however, immigrants who come to the United States are positively selected groups, not only in terms of their above-average urban backgrounds and socioeconomic resources compared to homeland norms, but also in terms of their ambition, determination, and willingness to work and to take risks. Legally or illegally, most make their passages to America not so much to escape perennial unemployment or destitution, but to seek opportunities for advancement that are unavailable in their own countries. They are "innovators," in Robert Merton's sense of the term, who choose immigration as a feasible solution to a widening gap between life goals and actual means, between their own rising aspirations and the dim possibilities for fulfilling them at home. The lure of America is greatest for those who experience this gap at its widest and who have the requisite resources and connections to meet the costs of

immigration to a foreign world—such as well-educated cosmopolitans in the less developed countries—and those groups have taken full advantage of the preferences available under U.S. law. Immigration requires both restlessness and resourcefulness, and on the whole, the main reason the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor do not immigrate is because they are, respectively, unmoved or unable to move.

Even undocumented migrants must be able to cover the often considerable costs of transportation and surreptitious entry into the United States, as must refugees such as "boat people" be willing to take extraordinary risks and pay the costs of surreptitious exit from their countries. Although the socioeconomic origins of unauthorized immigrants are modest by U.S. standards, they consistently meet or surpass the average for their countries of origins. Recent studies report that "coyotes" (smugglers) charge U.S. $700 to get border-crossers from Mexico to Los Angeles, $500 to Houston, $250 to $450 to San Antonio—in large groups the fee may be lowered to $200—and that undocumented Mexican immigrants are on average more urban and literate than the general Mexican population. In the Dominican Republic, it may cost $1,000 to $2,000 to obtain papers and be smuggled out of the country, and undocumented Dominicans actually tend to be more educated than those who immigrate legally. Haitian "boat people" reportedly pay $500 to $1,000 per person to buy passage aboard barely seaworthy craft to South Florida. A decade ago in Vietnam, ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese refugees were paying five to ten gold pieces ($2,000 to $4,000) per adult to cross the South China Sea in flimsy fishing boats—a price well beyond the means of the average Vietnamese. To afford this often required ingenious exchange schemes through kinship networks. For example, a family in Vietnam planning to escape by boat contacted another that had decided to stay to obtain the necessary gold for the passage; they in turn arranged with family members of both already in the United States (usually "first wave" refugees) for the relatives of the escaping family to pay an equivalent amount in dollars to the second family's relatives.^[32] Those who surmount such obstacles and succeed in reaching America are far from being representative of the population of their societies of origin. They, too, add to the vitality, energy, and innovativeness that immigrants contribute to American society.

The New Immigrants in America: Impacts on Economic and Cultural Institutions

Patterns of Settlement and Incorporation

Although fewer than one in ten persons in the United States today is an immigrant, the impact of the new immigration on American communities is much more significant than might appear at first glance. The main

reason is that immigrants tend to concentrate in urban areas where coethnic communities have been established by past immigration. Such spatial concentrations serve to provide newcomers with manifold sources of moral, social, cultural, and economic support that are unavailable to immigrants who are more dispersed. In general, patterns of concentration or dispersal vary for different classes of immigrants (professionals, entrepreneurs, manual laborers) with different types of legal status (regular immigrants, refugees, the undocumented). The likelihood of dispersal is greatest among immigrant professionals—who tend to rely more on their qualifications and job offers than on pre-existing ethnic communities—and, at least initially, among recent refugees who are sponsored and resettled through official government programs that have sought deliberately to minimize their numbers in particular localities. However, refugee groups, too, have shown a tendency to gravitate as "secondary migrants" to areas where their compatriots have clustered (for example, Cubans to South Florida, Southeast Asians to California). The likelihood of concentration is greatest among working-class immigrants—who tend to rely more on the assistance offered by pre-existing kinship networks—and among business-oriented groups, who tend to settle in large cities. Dense ethnic enclaves provide immigrant entrepreneurs with access to sources of cheap labor, working capital and credit, and dependable markets. Over time, as the immigrants become naturalized U.S. citizens, local strength in numbers also provides opportunities for political advancement and representation of ethnic minority group interests at the ballot box.^[33] Social networks are thus crucial for an understanding not only of migration processes, as noted earlier, but also of adaptation processes and settlement patterns in areas of final immigrant destination.

Table 10.5 lists the states and metropolitan areas of principal immigrant settlement (SMSAs) in the United States as of 1980. In addition, table 10.5 provides comparative data on the places of settlement of recent legal immigrants (those admitted during 1987–89) as well as of the 3 million illegal immigrants who qualified for legalization of their status under IRCA in 1989. While there are immigrants today in every one of the fifty states, just six states (California, New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey) accounted for two-thirds of the total 1980 foreign-born population, for nearly three-fourths of 1987–89 legal immigrants, and for almost nine-tenths of all IRCA applicants. A pattern of increasing spatial concentration is clear for the four states of greatest immigrant settlement (California, New York, Florida, and Texas). California alone, which in 1980 already accounted for 25 percent of all the foreign-born, drew 29 percent of 1987–89 immigrants and a whopping 54 percent of IRCA applicants. New York and Florida combined for another quarter of the foreign-born in 1980 and also of 1987–89 immigrants, but only 11 percent of IRCA applicants. Texas, whose share of immigrants increased

from 6.1 percent in 1980 to 6.6 percent in 1987–89, also accounted for 14.5 percent of IRCA applicants. In fact, over two-thirds of IRCA applicants resided in California and Texas alone—both states situated along the Mexican border. In Illinois, the proportion of immigrants decreased from 5.9 percent in 1980 to 4.4 percent in 1987–89—partly because Chicago has ceased to be a preferred destination for Mexican immigrants—while in New Jersey the levels for the two time periods remained unchanged at 5.4 percent.

Patterns of immigrant concentration are even more pronounced within particular metropolitan areas. As table 10.5 shows, just eleven SMSAs accounted for more than half of all legal and illegal immigrants in the United States during the 1980s, and five of these were California cities. As in the past, the New York metropolitan area remains the preferred destination of immigrants, accounting for 13.8 percent of the 1980 U.S. foreign-born population and another 15.4 percent of 1987–89 immigrants, though only 5 percent of IRCA applicants resided in New York. Los Angeles is not far behind, with 11.8 percent and 12.4 percent of 1980 and 1987–89 immigrants, respectively—but a huge 26.6 percent of all IRCA applicants nationally (more than 800,000 persons) were concentrated in Los Angeles, more than five times the number in any other urban area. Adjacent areas in Southern California (Santa Ana and San Diego) also show significant increases in both legal and especially illegal immigrant settlement. Of the leading SMSAs, only Chicago showed a drop in its relative proportion of immigrants, from 5.3 percent in 1980 to 3.5 percent in 1987–89 (although more IRCA applicants were recorded in Chicago than in Houston), while Boston's share remained at 2.0 percent during the decade (although only a tiny fraction of IRCA applicants lived in the Boston area). All other cities in table 10.5—Miami; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Houston; and San Jose—showed significant increases over time.

Moreover, different immigrant groups concentrate in different metropolitan areas and create distinct communities within each of these cities. For example, among the largest contingents of recent immigrants, Miami remains the premier destination of Cubans (they are already a majority of the city's total population), as is New York for Dominicans, Jamaicans, and Soviet Jews. Colombians and Haitians are also most concentrated in Miami and New York. The Los Angeles area is the main destination for Mexicans, Salvadorans, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Cambodians—their communities there are already the largest in the world outside their respective countries—and it is the third choice of Chinese and Indians. After Los Angeles, recent Mexican immigrants have settled in largest numbers in San Diego and El Paso; Filipinos in San Diego and San Francisco; Koreans in New York and Washington, D.C.; and

Vietnamese in Santa Ana and San Jose. More Chinese immigrants settle in New York than in any other city, followed by San Francisco; more Indians also settle in New York, followed by Chicago (although among all major immigrant groups Indians tend to be the most dispersed, reflecting their significantly greater proportion of professionals).^[34]

Notwithstanding the relative dispersal of immigrant professionals, they have significant impacts in the sectors within which they are employed. Rather than compete with or take jobs away from the native-born, these groups fill significant national needs for skilled talent and in some respects also serve as a strategic reserve of scarce expertise. For example, we have already mentioned the disproportionate impact of immigrant engineers in U.S. universities. Given the continuing decline of enrollments in advanced engineering training among the native-born, the proportion of the foreign-born in these fields has grown rapidly. By 1987 over half of all assistant professors of engineering under thirty-five years of age in U.S. universities were foreign-born, and it is estimated that by 1992 over 75 percent of all engineering professors in the United States will be foreign-born. Already one out of every three engineers with a doctorate working in U.S. industry today is an immigrant.^[35]

The impact of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) is almost as great: over the past two decades they have constituted about 20 percent of the nation's physicians and from about 33 percent (in the 1970s) to 18 percent (by the late 1980s) of its interns and residents. They are not, however, randomly dispersed throughout the country: in New York City in the mid-1970s, for instance, more than half of the interns in municipal hospitals and four-fifths of those at voluntary hospitals were Asian immigrant doctors. Their mode of incorporation into the American health care system is largely determined by the U.S. market for interns and residents. By the mid-1970s, for example, 35 percent of available internships and residency positions could not be filled by U.S. and Canadian medical graduates, and the geographical clustering of immigrant doctors in some northeastern and midwestern states is largely a function of job availability in certain types of hospitals that draw heavily on FMGs. In general, FMGs are concentrated in the less prestigious, non-university-affiliated hospitals in underserved areas that do not attract native-born physicians, and they are relatively few in hospitals with the greatest scientific emphasis and degrees of specialization located in the most desirable areas (such as California). Among FMGs, a further process of socio-cultural stratification is evident: FMGs from countries like Great Britain have exhibited patterns of entry most similar to those of U.S. and Canadian medical graduates; followed by a second stratum of FMGs from countries like Argentina, Colombia, and India; then a third stratum from countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Iran, and the Philippines; and

lastly by Cuban refugee physicians (who entered the least prestigious and least scientifically oriented training hospitals). Despite substantial increases in the pool of U.S. medical graduates during the 1980s, many hospitals have been unable to attract even native-born nurse practitioners or physician assistants to replace FMGs who are willing to accept resident salaries and put in the typical 80-to-100-hour resident work week. A recent survey found that FMG-dependent teaching hospitals would each lose $2 to $5 million a year in Medicare training funds were they required to replace FMG residents, forcing cutbacks and affecting patient care. FMGs thus not only perform key functions in American medical care—especially in rural and inner-city hospitals serving Medicaid patients and the uninsured working poor—but they also give U.S. medical graduates more options in choosing jobs.^[36]

Concerns about the economic impact of working-class immigrants more often focus on claims that they take jobs away from or depress the wages of native-born workers. Such claims, however, are made in the absence of any evidence that unemployment is caused by immigrants either in the United States as a whole or in areas of high immigrant concentration, or that immigration adversely affects the earnings of either domestic majority or minority groups. To the contrary, recent research studies of both legal and undocumented immigration point to significant net economic benefits accruing to U.S. natives. As a rule, the entry of immigrants into the labor market helps to increase native wages as well as productivity and investment, sustain the pace of economic growth, and revive declining sectors, such as light manufacturing, construction, and apparel (New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami offer recent examples). An influx of new immigrant labor also has the effect of pushing up domestic workers to better supervisory or administrative jobs that may otherwise disappear or go abroad in the absence of a supply of immigrant manual labor. Less-skilled immigrants, paralleling the pattern noted above for FMG professionals, typically move into manual labor markets deserted by native-born workers, who shift into preferred non-manual jobs.^[37] In addition, immigrants, on average, actually pay more taxes than natives, but use much smaller amounts of transfer payments and welfare services (such as aid to families with dependent children [AFDC], supplemental security income, state unemployment compensation, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid). It has been estimated that immigrants "catch up" with natives in their use of welfare services only after 16 to 25 years in the United States. Because of their vulnerable legal status, undocumented immigrants, in particular, are much less likely to use welfare services, and they receive no Social Security income, yet about three-fourths of them pay Social Security and federal income taxes. And because newly arrived immigrants are primarily younger workers rather

than elderly persons, by the time they retire and are eligible to collect Social Security (the costliest government program of transfer payments), they have usually already raised children who are contributing to Social Security taxes and thus balancing their parents' receipts.^[38]

Rather than take jobs away, entrepreneurial immigrants often create them. For example, among Koreans in Los Angeles in 1980, a recent study found that 22.5 percent were self-employed (compared to 8.5 percent of the local labor force), and they in turn employed another 40 percent of Korean workers in their businesses. The 4,266 Korean-owned firms thus accounted for two-thirds of all employed Koreans in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.^[39] In Miami, Cuban-owned enterprises increased from about 900 to 25,000 between the late 1960s and the late 1980s; by 1985 the $2.2 billion in sales reported by Hispanic-owned firms in Dade County ranked that area first in gross receipts among all such firms in the country. A longitudinal survey of Cuban refugees who arrived in Miami in 1973 showed that by 1979, 21.2 percent were self-employed and another 36.3 percent were employed in businesses owned by Cubans. A subsequent survey of Mariel Cubans who arrived in Miami in 1980 found that by 1986 28.2 percent were self-employed and another 44.9 percent were employed by their co-nationals.^[40] In Monterey Park ("Little Taipei"), east of Los Angeles, Chinese immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong—who in 1988 already comprised over half of its 61,000 residents—owned two-thirds of the property and businesses in the city. During 1985 an estimated $1.5 billion was deposited in Monterey Park financial institutions (equivalent to about $25,000 for each city resident), much of it the capital of Hong Kong investors nervous about the impending return of Hong Kong to Mainland China.^[41] And, although not yet rivaling the scale of these ethnic enclaves, a burgeoning center of Vietnamese-owned enterprises has been developed over the past decade in the city of Westminster ("Little Saigon") in Orange County. In all of these cases, immigrants have built "institutionally complete" ethnic communities offering opportunities for advancement unavailable in the general economy. Already Miami and Monterey Park have mayors who are Cuban and Chinese immigrants, respectively.

To be sure, other newcomers in areas of immigrant concentration—especially the undocumented and unskilled immigrant women—are exploited as sources of cheap labor in a growing informal sector that is fueled by foreign competition and the demand for low-cost goods and services in the larger economy. They find employment in the garment industry (in Los Angeles, perhaps 90 percent of garment workers are undocumented immigrants), as well as in electronics assembly, construction, restaurants, domestic service, and a wide range of other informal activities—often at subminimum wages and under conditions that vio-

late federal and state labor laws. In this context the presence of a large supply of cheap labor does keep wages down: the low wages paid to the immigrants themselves, who under their precarious circumstances are willing to accept whatever work is offered. In regions like Southern California there is the added irony that undocumented immigrants are attracted by an economic boom that their own labor has helped to create. IRCA did provide 3 million immigrants with an opportunity to emerge from the shadows of illegality, but at a cost: the new law has had the effect of driving those ineligible for legalization (virtually all post-1981 arrivals) further underground, but without stopping the flow of illegal immigration; it has also led—according to a 1990 report by the General Accounting Office—to increasing ethnic discrimination by employers against legal residents. The new post-IRCA underclass of undocumented (and sometimes homeless) Mexican and Central American workers is increasingly visible, not only in traditional agricultural and horticultural enterprises but especially in dozens of street corners of California cities, from Encinitas to North Hollywood, where groups huddle during the day waiting for job offers from homeowners and small contractors. The situation has bred a new upsurge of nativist intolerance in heavily impacted areas.^[42]

Refugees differ from other categories of immigrants in that they are eligible to receive public assistance on the same means-tested basis as U.S. citizens, and the federal government has invested considerable resources since the early 1960s to facilitate the resettlement of selected refugee groups. Prior to that time, refugee assistance depended entirely on the private sector, particularly religious charities and voluntary agencies. The expansion of the state's role in refugee resettlement roughly parallels the expansion of the American welfare state in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the twelve years from 1963 (when federal outlays officially began) to 1974, domestic assistance to mostly Cuban refugees totaled $2.3 billion; and in the twelve years from 1975 to 1986, aid to mostly Indochinese refugees totaled $5.7 billion, peaking in 1982, when $1.5 billion were expended, and declining sharply thereafter (all figures are in constant 1985 dollars). The lion's share of those federal funds goes to reimburse states and localities for cash and medical assistance to refugees during their first three years in the United States. Public assistance to eligible refugees is conditioned upon their attendance in assigned English-as-a-second-language (ESL) or job training classes and acceptance of employment; it also formally allows these groups (at least during a transition period after arrival) an alternative mode of subsistence outside existing labor markets and ethnic enclaves. However, states have different "safety nets"—levels of benefits and eligibility rules vary widely from state to state—forming a segmented state welfare system in the

United States. For example, AFDC benefits for a family of four in California in the early 1980s were $591 a month (second highest in the country), compared to only $141 in Texas (second lowest); intact families (two unemployed parents with dependent children) were eligible for AFDC and Medicaid in California, but ineligible in Texas; and indigent adults without dependent children were eligible for general assistance in California localities, but not in Texas. Hence, the initial decision to resettle refugees in one state or another affects not only their destinations but their destinies as well. Welfare dependency rates vary widely among different refugee nationalities, and from state to state among refugees of the same nationality. Not surprisingly, the highest rates have been observed among recently arrived, less-skilled, "second-wave" Southeast Asian families with many dependent children in California; still, all research studies of Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees throughout the country have found that welfare dependency (which even in California keeps families below the federal poverty line) declines steadily over time in the United States.^[43]

Language and the Second Generation

A more salient issue concerns the impact of the new immigration on public school systems and their rapidly changing ethnic composition. The issue itself is not new: at the turn of the century, the majority of pupils in many big-city schools from New York to Chicago were children of immigrants. Today, nowhere are immigrant students more visible—or more diverse—than in the public schools of California. By the end of the 1980s, almost a third of California's 4.6 million students in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K–12) in the public schools spoke a language other than English at home; while 70 percent of them spoke Spanish as their mother tongue, the rest spoke over 100 different languages. Yet of California's scarce pool of bilingual teachers, 94 percent spoke only Spanish as a second language, a few spoke various East Asian languages, and there was not a single certified bilingual teacher statewide for the tens of thousands of students who spoke scores of other mother tongues. Table 10.6 summarizes the trend over the past decade in the annual enrollments of language-minority students, who are classified by the schools as either fluent English proficient (FEP) or limited English proficient (LEP). In 1973 there were 168,000 students classified as LEP in the state, and that number doubled by 1980; from 1981 to 1989, as table 10.6 shows, the number of LEP students doubled again to about 743,000, and the number of FEP students increased by over 40 percent to 615,000. The FEP classification marks an arbitrary threshhold of English proficiency, which schools use to "mainstream" students from bilingual or ESL classrooms to regular classes. Indeed, bilingual education in Cali-

fornia largely consists of "transitional" programs whose aim is to place LEP students in the English-language curriculum as quickly as possible. While immigrant children gain proficiency in English at different rates—depending on such extracurricular factors as age at arrival, their parents' social class of origin, community contexts, and other characteristics—very few remain designated as LEP beyond five years, and most are reclassified as FEP within three years.^[44]

In some smaller elementary school districts near the Mexican border, such as San Ysidro and Calexico, LEP students alone account for four-fifths of total enrollments. In large school districts in cities of high immigrant concentration, language minorities comprise the great majority of K–12 students. In 1989, LEP students accounted for 56 percent of total enrollments in Santa Ana schools, 31 percent in Los Angeles, 28 percent in San Francisco and Stockton, 25 percent in Long Beach, and close to 20 percent in Oakland, Fresno, San Diego, and San Jose; the number of FEP students nearly doubled those proportions, so that in districts like Santa Ana's over 90 percent of the students were of recent immigrant

origin. These shifts, in turn, have generally been accompanied by so-called white flight from the public schools most affected, producing an extraordinary mix of new immigrants and native-born ethnic minorities. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest, the proportion of native white students declined sharply from about 65 percent in 1980 to only 15 percent in 1990. To varying degrees, the creation of ethnic "minority majorities" is also visible in the school systems of large cities, including all of the SMSAs listed earlier in table 10.5. While a substantial body of research has accumulated recently on the experience of new first-generation immigrants, relatively little is yet known about the U.S.-born or U.S.-reared second generation of their children, although they will represent an even larger proportion of the American school-age population in years to come.

Until the 1960s, bilingualism in immigrant children had been seen as a cognitive handicap associated with "feeblemindedness" and inferior academic achievement. This popular nostrum was based in part on older studies that compared middle-class native-born English monolinguals with lower-class foreign-born bilinguals. Once social class and demographic variables are controlled, however, recent research has reached an opposite conclusion: bilingual groups perform consistently better than monolinguals on a wide range of verbal and nonverbal IQ tests.^[45] Along these lines, a 1988 study of 38,820 high school students in San Diego—of whom a quarter were FEP or LEP immigrant children who spoke a diversity of languages other than English at home—found that FEP (or "true") bilinguals outperformed both LEP (or "limited") bilinguals and all native English monolinguals, including white Anglos, in various indicators of educational attainment: they had higher GPAs and standardized math test scores, and lower dropout rates. The pattern was most evident for Chinese, Filipino, German, Indian, Iranian, Israeli, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese students: in each of these groups of immigrant children, both FEPs and LEPs exhibited significantly higher GPAs and math (but not English) test scores than did white Anglos. These findings parallel the patterns of educational stratification noted earlier in table 10.4 among foreign-born and native-born adults in the United States. Remarkably, two groups of lower-class LEP refugees—the Cambodians and the Hmong—had higher GPAs than native whites, blacks, and Chicanos. White Anglos (but not blacks and Chicanos) did better than some other language minorities, whether they were classified as FEP or LEP—Italians, Portuguese, Guamanians, Samoans, and "Hispanics" (predominantly of Mexican origin)—almost certainly reflecting intergroup social class differences. And among students whose ethnicity was classified by the schools as black or Hispanic—with the lowest achievement profiles overall in the district—FEP bilinguals outperformed their

co-ethnic English monolinguals.^[46] Research elsewhere has reported similar findings among Central American, Southeast Asian, and Punjabi Sikh immigrant students, and separate studies have found that Mexican-born immigrant students do better in school and are less likely to drop out than U.S.-born students of Mexican descent.^[47]

The idea that bilingualism in children is a "hardship" bound to cause emotional and educational maladjustment has been not only refuted but contradicted by every available evidence; and in a shrinking global village where there are thirty times more languages spoken as there are nation-states, the use of two languages is common to the experience of much of the world's people. But pressures against bilingualism in America—as reflected today by the "U.S. English" nativist movement and the passage of "English Only" measures in several states—are rooted in more fundamental social and political concerns that date back to the origins of the nation. As early as 1751, Benjamin Franklin had put the matter plainly: "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?" The point was underscored by Theodore Roosevelt during the peak years of immigration at the turn of the century: "We have room but for 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." It is ironic that, while the United States has probably incorporated more bilingual people than any other nation since the time of Franklin, American history is notable for its near mass-extinction of non-English languages. A generational pattern of progressive anglicization is clear: immigrants (the first generation) learned survival English but spoke their mother tongue to their children at home; the second generation, in turn, spoke accentless English at school and then at work, where its use was required and its social advantages were unmistakable; and with very few exceptions their children (the third generation) grew up as English monolinguals.

For all the alarm about Quebec-like linguistic separatism in the United States, the 1980 census suggests that this generational pattern remains as strong as in the past. It counted well over 200 million Americans speaking English only, including substantial proportions of the foreign-born. Among new immigrants who had arrived in the United States during 1970–80, 84 percent spoke a language other than English at home, but over half of them (adults as well as children) reported already being able to speak English well. Among pre-1970 immigrants, 62 percent still spoke a language other than English at home, but the overwhelming majority of them spoke English well: 77 percent of the adults and 95 percent of the children. Among the native-born, less than 7 percent spoke

a language other than English at home, and over 90 percent of them (adults as well as children) spoke English well. More detailed studies have confirmed that for all American ethnic groups, without exception, children consistently prefer English to their mother tongue, and the shift toward English increases as a function of the proportion of the ethnic group that is U.S.-born. To be sure, immigrant groups vary significantly in their rates of English language ability, reflecting differences in their levels of education and occupation. But even among Spanish speakers, who are considered the most resistant to language shift, the trend toward anglicization is present; the appearance of language loyalty among them (especially Mexicans) is due largely to the effect of continuing high immigration to the United States. For example, a recent study of a large representative sample of Mexican-origin couples in Los Angeles found that among first-generation women, 84 percent used Spanish only at home, 14 percent used both languages, and 2 percent used English only; by the third generation there was a complete reversal, with 4 percent speaking Spanish only at home, 12 percent using both, and 84 percent shifting to English only. Among the men, the pattern was similar except that by the second generation their shift to English was even more marked.^[48]

English proficiency has always been a key to socioeconomic mobility for immigrants, and to their full participation in their adoptive society. It is worth noting that in the same year that Proposition 63 (the initiative declaring English as the state's official language) passed in California, more than 40,000 immigrants were turned away from ESL classes in the Los Angeles Unified School District alone: the supply of services could not meet the vigorous demand for English training. Indeed, English language dominance is not threatened in the United States today—or for that matter in the world, where it has become already firmly established as the premier international language of commerce, diplomacy, education, journalism, aviation, technology, and mass culture. What is threatened instead is a more scarce resource: the survival of the foreign languages brought by immigrants themselves, which in the absence of social structural supports are, as in the past, destined to disappear.

Given the immense pressure for linguistic conformity on immigrant children from peers, schools, and the media, the preservation of fluent bilingualism in America beyond the first generation is an exceptional outcome. It is dependent on both the intellectual and economic resources of parents (such as immigrant professionals) and their efforts to transmit the mother tongue to their children, and on the presence of institutionally complete communities where a second language is taught in schools and valued in the labor market (such as those found in large ethnic enclaves). The combination of these factors is rare, since most immi-

grants do not belong to a privileged stratum, and immigrant professionals are most likely to be dispersed rather than concentrated in dense ethnic communities. Miami may provide the closest approximation in the United States, but even there the gradual anglicization of the Cuban second generation is evident. Still, the existence of pockets where foreign languages are fluently spoken enriches American culture and the lives of natives and immigrants alike.^[49]

The United States has aptly been called a "permanently unfinished society," a global sponge remarkable in its capacity to absorb tens of millions of people from all over the world. Immigrants have made their passages to America a central theme of the country's history. In the process, America has been engaged in an endless passage of its own, and through immigration the country has been revitalized, diversified, strengthened, and transformed. Immigrant America today, however, is not the same as it was at the turn of the century; and while the stories of human drama remain as riveting, the cast of characters and their circumstances have changed in complex ways. In this chapter, I have touched on a few of the ways in which the "new" immigration differs from the "old." But a new phase in the history of American immigration is about to begin. New bills have been introduced in Congress once again to change immigration policies—to reduce or eliminate some of the legal channels for family reunification, to increase quotas for "brain drain" and "new seed" immigrants, to allocate special visas for immigrant millionaires who will invest in job-producing businesses, to rescind the "employer sanctions" provisions of the last law, to grapple with the sustained flow of undocumented immigrants, to consider whether persons from newly noncommunist states in Eastern Europe and Nicaragua are eligible for refugee status—and the debate remains surrounded by characteristic ambivalence. The "new" immigration of the post–World War II period was never simply a matter of individual cost-benefit calculations or of the exit and entry policies of particular states, but is also a consequence of historically established social networks and U.S. economic and political hegemony in a world system. The world as the century ends is changing profoundly—from Yalta to Malta, from the Soviet Union to South Africa, from the European Economic Community to East Asia and the Arab world, from the East-West Cold War to perhaps new North-South economic realignments and Third World refugee movements—and new bridges of immigration will likely be formed in the process. For the future of immigration to America, as in the past, the unexpected lies waiting.^[50]