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.