6. Once Again,
Strangers on Our Shores
Mary C. Waters
Americans have a fundamental ambivalence about immigration. We are a nation of immigrants, yet racism and xenophobia are constitutive parts of our national psyche. Although we voice warm feelings about our immigrant ancestors, we see the present crop of immigrants as unworthy or even as demonic others, and the United States has a long history of trying to restrict immigration.
The current debate on immigration perfectly embodies this ambivalence. In the nearly four decades since the Hart-Celler immigration reforms opened the doors to non-European immigration, the largest flow in the nation's history has profoundly transformed U.S. society. For some the new immigrants, like the ones that preceded them, are a noble testimony to the success of the American experiment and the character of the immigrants who have fashioned it. Immigrants are seen as strengthening the best in American traditions, revitalizing decaying neighborhoods and stagnant industries and adding new talents and energies to the U.S. civic culture.
For others, however, this influx is nothing short of a disaster that displaces native workers, swells the minority "underclass, " and exacerbates racial and ethnic conflict. Many Americans find particular cause for concern in the "nonwhite" character of the recent immigrants who have increasingly come from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In 2000, 51 percent of the foreign born were from Latin America and the Caribbean,
Few people argue, at least out loud, that past immigration was bad for America. Instead the current debate hinges on the question of how today's immigrants differ from earlier ones. Restrictionists usually make two distinctions between the post-1965 immigrants and the earlier waves of European immigrants. First, arriving after the rise of the welfare state, today's immigrants are not encouraged to work as hard as previous immigrants, who did not enjoy such government help. Second, the immigrants themselves are different because we are now admitting racially different groups into a society that no longer advocates assimilation.
But evidence suggests that both these claims are exaggerated. When political refugees are taken out of the equation, working-age immigrants are no more likely to use welfare than working-age natives. A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Urban Institute concluded, "There is no reputable evidence that prospective immigrants are drawn to the United States because of its public assistance programs." In any event recent welfare reform legislation restricts access to welfare among legal immigrants.[1]
Meanwhile, the argument that nonwhite immigrants are less likely to assimilate than European immigrants simply ignores the intensity of turnof-the-century beliefs that southern and central European "races" were genetically inferior to the northern and western European groups who came to the United States in earlier times and composed the "core American culture." In a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times on June 22, 1913, William Ripley, a Harvard economics professor, deemed "the hordes of new immigrants" to be "a menace to our Anglo Saxon civilization"; these hordes were producing a "swarthy and black eyed primitive type population."[2]
The weakness of the restrictionists' comparisons does not mean we should abandon that methodological instinct. Indeed, the experience of European immigrants and their descendants was irrevocably shaped by two conditions that no longer apply for current immigrants: the hiatus in immigration between the depression and 1965 and the economic growth and social mobility that characterized the American economy between World War II and the 1970s.[3] These changes speak powerfully to the question of whether today's immigrants will be absorbed in the same way that earlier waves of immigrants were.
The immigrants from Europe who arrived between 1880 and 1920 are an assimilation success story. As their children and grandchildren rose
Yet these immigrants achieved their progress in an era in which further immigration from Europe was cut off abruptly and in which in the years after World War II America saw rising income equality and sustained economic growth that benefited the middle and working classes. Today's immigrants arrive in a different milieu. There is no sign that the constant new supply of immigrants will be suddenly cut off. And since the mid-1970s the United States has seen rising income inequality and declining or stagnant real wages—especially for the working and lowermiddle classes.
THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF IMMIGRATION
The so-called Great Pause in immigration in the 1920s and the restrictions that effected it halted the flow of European immigrants for three generations. That sharp break cut off the supply of raw materials for ethnicity—so that what it came to mean to be Jewish or Italian or Polish in the United States principally reflects what happened in the United States subsequently.[5] In the absence of appreciable numbers of new arrivals successive generations of acculturated Americans, not unassimilated greenhorns, became the majority among the new ethnics. Today most Italian Americans or Polish Americans are second, third, and fourth generation. They did not cease being Italian or Polish and become just plain "Americans." But their ethnicity became less intense and increasingly intermittent, voluntary, even recreational. If some still enjoyed ethnic holidays or special foods, their ethnicity rarely determined their occupation or residence. As more and more of the later generations of white ethnics intermarried, their ethnic identity became even more attenuated, and individuals felt increasingly free to choose whether to identify with their mother's or father's or grandmother's or grandfather's ethnic origins.[6] As a result the vast majority of Italian Americans live in neighborhoods that are not predominantly Italian American. As fewer new immigrants from Italy arrived, the nation's Little Italys gradually
New immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia face different circumstances. Given the continual stream of immigration, the members of these various immigrant communities will vary greatly in their level of assimilation, and the meaning of being Korean American, Mexican American, or Dominican will not diminish in quite the linear fashion experienced by earlier European immigrants.[7] Although some will undergo marked assimilation, they will be replaced by new individuals who will keep the ethnic group "fresh." Ethnic neighborhoods will not shrink and become quaint shrines to an earlier way of life but will remain vibrant new neighborhoods, even when the same people do not stay in them. The third-generation Chinese American who intermarries, moves to the suburbs, achieves social mobility, and develops a merely "symbolic" identity as Chinese American will be replaced by a first-generation Chinese American who lives in Chinatown, speaks little English, and lives a visibly rich ethnic Chinese lifestyle.
This replenishment powerfully shapes not just the immigrants' quest to define their identity but also the way immigrants present their collective self to outsiders and, thus, public opinion about immigration. Simply put, the visible aspects of the ethnic group—speaking a language other than English, occupational specialization, residential concentration—will not be diluted, and it will strike the average American that the new immigrants are not assimilating as the European immigrants did in earlier times, even though a great deal of assimilation is taking place among second-and third-generation Asians, West Indians, and Latinos.
Language provides a good example of this mismatch between perception and reality. Complaints about immigrants who refuse to learn "our" language, resentful anecdotes about voting signs in Spanish, and efforts to certify English as the hallowed language have all been a staple of talk radio and politicking. Meanwhile, the rushing stream of new immigrants ensures that many people in Los Angeles and Miami speak only Spanish. And this will happen despite irrefutable evidence that the new immigrants are rapidly acquiring English—sometimes in the course of a single generation. In a recent study of Miami and San Diego, Portes and Schauffler found only 1 percent of the second-generation youth they studied knew little or no English; 73 percent reported they are able to speak, understand, read, and write English "very well" and another 26 percent "well." In effect, even in Miami, the city in the United States where it is
This ethnic replenishment has another effect that obscures underlying assimilation: it gives rise to population projections that heighten fears about the changing racial composition of the United States and generate well-known predictions that whites will soon become a minority throughout the country. But all these forecasts assume no intermarriage and no change in ethnic identity. They assume that Mexicans, for example, will always marry other Mexicans and that all of their descendants will identify as Mexican.
If people at the turn of the century had made similar estimates of the future numbers of Jews, Italians, and Slavs, they would have missed the actual trajectory of those immigrants' progeny. And indeed fears about unassimilable immigrants and soaring population were directed at the Italian, Jewish, and Polish parents and grandparents of those who now worry about "their" unassimilable immigrants. In the last century the Irish were seen as a "race" apart from other European groups, and cartoons portrayed them as apes. If blacks were called "smoked Irish, " the Irish in turn were dubbed "niggers turned inside out."[9] They were also stereotyped as ignorant criminals and fecund child bearers who lacked discipline and good family values. Surely it would have been difficult to predict how popular, how quintessentially American, such a denigrated group would become in the next century.
Actually, the growth of the Irish from 4.5 million immigrants to 40 million Irish Americans by the 1980 census happened not because the allegedly fecund Irish were too different culturally to assimilate but precisely because they were able to assimilate.[10] The Irish had high rates of intermarriage with other white groups, and the offspring of those marriages tended to favor "Irish" as their preferred identity. And if turn-of-the-century projections had radically underestimated the Irish, similar forecasts would have failed to predict the decline in the boundaries separating white ethnic groups or that differences between southern and central European immigrants and northern and western European immigrants would gradually become a moot point. In all these cases groups such as Italians and Poles and Greeks, once seen as racially distinct, now intermarry to such a great extent with other white European groups that they are virtually indistinguishable. As Richard D. Alba reports, "In 1990 census data, more than half (56 percent) of whites have spouses whose ethnic backgrounds do not overlap with their own at all.… Only one-fifth
Even though the demography of current Caribbean, Latin American, and Asian immigrants will be more complex than the earlier generation's, significant intermarriage and identity changes are already occurring among the descendants of these immigrants. Rates of intermarriage have been growing since 1960 for all groups, even for those defined as "racial" groups.[12] Although it is still the case that only a small proportion of marriages by whites are with nonwhites and Hispanics (2 percent), the rate of increase in recent decades has been dramatic; "in 1960 there were about 150, 000 interracial couples in the United States. This number grew rapidly to more than one million in 1990. When marriages with Hispanics are added the intergroup marriages totalled about 1.6 million in 1990."[13] Although greater than 93 percent of whites and of blacks marry within their own groups, only 70 percent of Asians and of Hispanics do so. Black-white intermarriages are still the least prevalent, but among younger people there is evidence of dramatic change. Alba reports that "10 percent of 25 to 34 year old black men have intermarried, most with white women."[14]
Because immigration is ongoing, there may be two stories to tell about the new immigrants—one a story of new arrivals and the replenishment of ethnic culture, the other a story of quiet assimilation into a blended culture. But if the second story is obscured by the first, there could be growing public support for restricting immigration.
One might counter that the fluidity of white ethnic categories contrasts with the seemingly impermeable boundaries of race that Mexican, Korean, and Jamaican immigrants encounter in the United States. But those who believe that current immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean are less "assimilable" than those from European countries may be committing two important errors. First, as complaints about the Hebraic and Celtic "races" remind us, the legal and social systems of racial classifications in the United States are fluid, the product of a complex and contingent process, and subject to change over the coming decades. At the least, as intermarriage blurs the boundaries between groups, our ideas of what constitutes a "race" will change accordingly, just as they did with the Irish and Jews.
Those who fear the new immigrants will not assimilate commit a second error: they mistakenly assume the cultures of non-European groups
CHANGES IN THE ECONOMY AND SECOND-GENERATION DECLINE
The second major difference between contemporary and previous immigrants is economic. The children and grandchildren of the European immigrants who arrived in the peak years of immigration around 1900 benefited from the spectacular expansion of the U.S. economy between 1940 and 1970. As Barry Bluestone has summarized, "In the U.S. real average weekly earnings grew by 60 percent between 1947 and 1973. Median family income literally doubled.… And over the same period personal wages and family incomes became tangibly more equal.… Along with growth and greater equality, poverty declined across the nation."[16]
The existence of manufacturing jobs offering security and good pay meant that blue-collar workers with a high school degree or less could attain a stable middle-class lifestyle, as a rising tide really did lift all boats. By the 1980s the descendants of southern and eastern European immigrants and northern and western European immigrants had achieved economic parity.
This level of economic growth and widening opportunities was not sustained after the early 1970s. During the final decades of the twentieth century the restructuring of the U.S. economy from manufacturing to services was accompanied by rising inequality between rich and poor, especially in the nation's urban centers. The result has been described as an hourglass economy, with many jobs for highly skilled workers in professional services and information processing and many unskilled low-level jobs. The unionized blue-collar manufacturing jobs that supported middle-class lifestyles have become scarce. One result has been to increase
These disparities intensified in the 1980s, when the average real wages of male high school dropouts fell by 18 percent, and male high school graduates suffered a nearly 13 percent loss in real earnings. Only men with a master's degree or more registered an increase in inflation-adjusted earnings, and college graduates' earnings stayed about the same. This happened partly because all the employment growth in the economy during the 1980s came in the services sector, where wages polarized between high school dropouts and college graduates four times faster than in goods-producing industries.[18]
This new economy poses tough challenges for the children of unskilled immigrants no less than for native-born Americans who lack college degrees. Both face a generational erosion of real family income relative to their parents. Simply achieving their parents' low level of education will yield diminishing returns in earnings. As a result, to achieve a middleclass lifestyle the second generation must vault from their parents' lower-level service jobs and education to a completed college education. The unforgiving economy of today means that current second generations must accomplish in one generation what it took the Irish, Italians, and Poles several to accomplish. In the absence of well-paying blue-collar jobs for those without a high school diploma, the current second generation is climbing a ladder on which the middle rungs are missing, as historian Joel Perlmann has put it.[19]
These circumstances have played havoc with the ethnic bargain enjoyed by white ethnic immigrants. Their experience suggested each succeeding generation would become more similar to native-born Americans. Whatever the psychic costs of shedding identity for the third and fourth generation descendants, assimilation offered the substantial economic rewards of upward mobility.
Today's second-generation immigrants are no longer assured of this payoff, as Herbert Gans warned in the early 1990s. He outlined several possible outcomes for the second generation, including an ironic version of "Americanization": the children of immigrants—especially of parents who have not escaped poverty—refuse the low level, poorly paid jobs of their parents and, in their economic slide, begin to look increasingly like those poor young whites, blacks, and Hispanics who reject low-wage jobs.
Another possibility is an equally ironic form of refusing to assimilate. Instead of "becoming American" by adopting negative attitudes toward school, opportunity, and hard work, the children of immigrants embrace their parents' ethnic community and values and end up doing better. The people who have secured an economically viable ethnic niche acculturate less than did the European second and third generation, and those without such a niche escape dead-end immigrant and other jobs mainly by becoming persistently jobless Americans.
Race further complicates the relationship between the ethnic bargain and economic decline for immigrants of color. In their study of second-generation children in Miami and San Diego, Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut identified a pattern in which those groups who come with strong ethnic ties, access to capital, and fewer ties to U.S. minorities—Koreans and Chinese—experience "linear" ethnicity. The orbit of ethnic networks helps transmit parental authority, traditional values, and access to job opportunities. As a result resistance to acculturation ends up providing better opportunities for their second generation.[21]
In another pattern second-generation youth whose parents lack the ability to provide jobs develop an "adversarial stance" toward white society similar to that of many American minorities and may even come to identify with them. Immigrants may thus lose their ethnic distinctiveness only to become indistinguishable from native blacks or Latinos. For them assimilation may mean joining the street culture of the urban ghetto.
In striking contrast to Chinese and Korean children, Haitians feel pressured by black American peers to adopt "black culture" in school and to identify as blacks rather than as Haitians or West Indians. The peer culture imparts a skeptical view of upward mobility and school success. Portes and Zhou discern a similarly sad fate for members of the second generation who cast their lot with America's minority groups: "Children of nonwhite immigrants may not even have the opportunity of gaining access to the white mainstream, no matter how acculturated they become. Joining those native circles to which they do have access may prove a ticket to permanent subordination and disadvantage."[22]
Portes and Zhou's findings have been replicated for other ethnic immigrants. Suarez-Orozco found that successful Central American immigrant children maintained a dual frame of reference.[23] They contrasted their experiences in the United States with their experiences at home and developed an immigrant attitude toward school that helped them to do
I found something similar among second-generation West Indian youth in New York City. Students from middle-class backgrounds were likely to maintain ties to their parents' ethnic identities and to resist identifying as black Americans. Poor and working-class youth in segregated neighborhoods were far more likely than their middle-class counterparts to reject their parents' stress on West Indian heritage and to strongly identify as black Americans. These identities were closely related to perceptions of racism in American society. Those who believed that discrimination blocked their way developed more oppositional theories of how to "make it" and tended to identify with American black youth. The type of identification was highly correlated with levels of educational success and thus future prospects.[26]
One final twist of the racial dynamic complicates the story. Intensifying the payoff to "ethnic" rather than "minority" identification, membership in cohesive ethnic enclaves has a positive impact not just on the aspirations of job seekers but on the perceptions of the employers who consider hiring them. After all, employees also use the identity of "notnative minority, " which functions to reassure employers about the work habits of immigrants. As the employers articulate it, the newcomers are much more willing to accept lesser jobs, for their frame of reference is the situation they left back home, not the American context used by American minorities for comparison.
Several recent studies have attempted to measure this odd form of "racial" discrimination that works in favor of immigrants of color, in which white employers take their immigrant status to be more important than their nonwhite status. In a survey of hiring practices among Chicago area employers, Kirschenman and Neckerman found that employers strongly preferred immigrants over inner-city blacks.[27] Kasinitz and Rosenberg found the same preference among employers in the Red
But will the children of immigrants continue to enjoy these advantages? Will the second generation still be able to tap into the social networks that provide access to jobs and reassure employers? Will they resist the same disdain toward low-level service jobs that native minorities feel? Will potential employers see them as racial minorities and pass them over for employment in favor of even newer immigrants, perhaps from their parents' country of origin? Will they be more successful than native minorities in staying in school through college? For now, the answers to all these questions are pending.
Becoming an American includes learning about American racial attitudes and prejudices. Although Latin American and Caribbean first-generation immigrants may not see themselves in terms of U.S. racial categories, the second generation probably will, at least in part. Many Dominicans in New York are dark-skinned and would be classified as black by most Americans. These immigrants often label themselves white because in the Dominican Republic to be partly white means to be non-black.[30] Will the children of these immigrants adopt the American view and identify as black? What impact will the way others see them have on the way the children of the immigrants see themselves? Some researchers argue that whether immigrants see themselves as "ethnics" or "minorities" will influence political and social outcomes for the group.[31] It is quite possible that as the second generation experiences racial discrimination, it may embrace a black identity and adopt an oppositional identity.
At present the evidence on outcomes for the second generation, based as it is on ethnographic case studies and small-scale surveys, is sketchy. The question of how much second-generation decline there is awaits more systematic survey research. Yet the question of decline directs our attention to the intersection of two major problems in current American society—rising income inequality combined with constricting opportunities for the least educated and continuing racial discrimination and racial exclusion.
However uncertain the prospects of our newest Americans, the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities, as well as their entanglement in broader forces of economic opportunity and labor-market access, make this much clear: if the culture of current immigrants and their children does matter
Ironically, recent attempts to restrict the access of immigrants to the social welfare safety net may produce the very conflicts restrictionists claim to want to prevent. The most radical proposals deny schooling, and even citizenship, to the children of illegal immigrants. By creating separation and exclusion—thereby ensuring a lack of assimilation and second-generation decline—such policies pose a serious threat to social cohesion in the United States.
NOTES
1. Poor immigrants are actually much less likely than poor natives to use welfare; about 16 percent of poor immigrants receive cash assistance, compared to 25 percent of poor natives. See Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Urban Institute, "Immigrants and Welfare, " Research Perspectives on Migration (Sep./Oct. 1996): 3.
2. Cited in Thomas Muller, Immigrants and the American City (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 40.
3. Douglas Massey was the first to choose these two factors as the most important historical differences between the experiences of European immigrants who arrived at the turn of the century and more recent immigrants. See his "The New Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States, " in American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Nancy Denton and Stewart Toldnay (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2002), 75–98. Although Massey explores the impact of these changes on the meaning of ethnicity, I concentrate here on the possible impacts of these changes on support for immigration restrictionism and on the future outcomes of the second generation.
4. Stanley Lieberson and Mary C. Waters, From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988).
5. See Massey, "New Immigration."
6. Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Richard D. Alba, Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985).
7. Massey, "New Immigration, " 18.
8. Alejandro Portes and Richard Schauffler, "Language Acquisition and Loss among Children of Immigrants, " in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race,
9. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41.
10. See Michael Hout and Joshua Goldstein, "How 4.5 Million Irish Immigrants Became 40 Million Irish Americans: Demographic and Subjective Aspects of the Ethnic Composition of White Americans, " American Sociological Review 59 (Feb. 1994): 64–82.
11. Richard D. Alba, "Assimilation's Quiet Tide, " Public Interest (spring 1995): 13.
12. Gary Sandefur and Trudy Mckinnell, "American Indian Intermarriage, " Social Science Research (1986): 347–71; Akemi Kikumura and Harry L. Kitano, "Interracial Marriage: A Picture of the Japanese Americans, " Journal of Social Issues 29 (1973); Harry L. Kitano, L. K. Chai, and H. Hatanaka, "Asian American Interracial Marriage, " Journal of Marriage and the Family 46 (1984): 179–90; Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Belinda M. Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, "New Trends in Black American Interracial Marriage: The Social Structural Context, " Journal of Marriage and the Family 52 (Feb. 1990): 209–18; Claudette Bennett and J. Gregory Robinson, "Racial Classification Issues Concerning Children in Mixed Race Households" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., 1993).
13. Roderick Harrison and Claudette Bennett, "Racial and Ethnic Diversity, " in State of the Union: America in the 1990s, vol. 2, Social Trends, ed. Reynolds Farley (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), 165.
14. Alba, "Assimilation's Quiet Tide, " 17.
15. Muller, Immigrants and the American City, 245.
16. Barry Bluestone, "The Inequality Express, " American Prospect 20 (winter 1995): 82–83.
17. Ibid., 83.
18. Ibid.
19. Remarks at the Jerome Levy Institute of Bard College Conference on the Second Generation, Bard College, New York, Oct. 25, 1997.
20. See Herbert J. Gans, "Second-Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of the Post-1965 American Immigrants, " Ethnic and Racial Studies 15, no. 2 (1992): 173–93.
21. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). See also Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants, " Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1993): 74–97.
22. Portes and Zhou, "New Second Generation."
23. Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, "‘Becoming Somebody’: Central American Immigrants in U.S. Inner-City Schools, " Anthropology and Education Quarterly18 (1987): 287–99.
24. Margaret Gibson, Accommodation without Assimilation: Sikh Immigrants in an American High School (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
25. Eugenia Matute-Bianchi, "Situational Ethnicity and Patterns of School Performance among Immigrants and Nonimmigrant Mexican Descent Students, " in Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities, ed. Margaret Gibson and John Ogbu (New York: Garland, 1991).
26. Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
27. Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman, "We'd Love to Hire Them, but—The Meaning of Race for Employers, " in The Urban Underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul Petersen (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991), 203–34.
28. Philip Kasinitz and Jan Rosenberg, "Missing the Connection? Social Isolation and Employment on the Brooklyn Waterfront, " working paper of the Michael Harrington Institute, Queens College, Queens, New York, 1994.
29. Muller, Immigrants and the American City.
30. Sherri Grasmuck and Patricia Pessar, "First and Second Generation Settlement of Dominicans in the United States: 1960–1990, " in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America, ed. Silvia Pedraza and Rubén Rumbaut (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1996).
31. Peter Skerry, Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (New York: Free Press, 1994); Robert C. Smith, "Doubly Bounded Solidarity: Race and Social Location in the Incorporation of Mexicans into New York City" (paper presented at the Social Science Research Council, Conference of Fellows, Program of Research on the Urban Underclass, June 1993).