August 12, 2006

IT'S DEJA-VU ALL OVER AGAIN

The Realities of Immigration (Linda Chavez, Commentary, July/August, 2006)

Contrary to popular myth, immigrants have never been particularly welcome in the United States. Americans have always tended to romanticize the immigrants of their grandparents’ generation while casting a skeptical eye on contemporary newcomers. In the first decades of the 20th century, descendants of Northern European immigrants resisted the arrival of Southern and Eastern Europeans, and today the descendants of those once unwanted Italians, Greeks, and Poles are deeply distrustful of current immigrants from Latin America. Congressman Tom Tancredo, a Republican from Colorado and an outspoken advocate of tighter restrictions, is fond of invoking the memory of his Italian immigrant grandfather to argue that he is not anti-immigrant, just anti-illegal immigration. He fails to mention that at the time his grandfather arrived, immigrants simply had to show up on American shores (or walk across the border) to gain legal entry. [...]

Of equal weight among foes of immigration are the cultural changes wrought by today’s newcomers, especially those from Mexico. In his book Who Are We? The Challenges to National Identity (2004), the eminent political scientist Samuel P. Huntington warns that “Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830’s and 1840’s.” Others have fretted about the aims of militant Mexican-American activists, pointing to “El Plan de Aztlan,” a radical Hispanic manifesto hatched in 1969, which calls for “the control of our barrios, campos, pueblos, lands, our economy, our culture, and our political life,” including “self-defense against the occupying forces of the oppressors”—that is, the U.S. government.

To be sure, the fantasy of a recaptured homeland exists mostly in the minds of a handful of already well-assimilated Mexican-American college professors and the students they manage to indoctrinate (self-described “victims” who often enjoy preferential admission to college and subsidized or free tuition). But such rhetoric understandably alarms many Americans, especially in light of the huge influx of Hispanic immigrants into the Southwest. Does it not seem likely that today’s immigrants—because of their numbers, the constant flow of even more newcomers, and their proximity to their countries of origin—will be unable or unwilling to assimilate as previous ethnic groups have done?

There is no question that some public policies in the U.S. have actively discouraged assimilation. Bilingual education, the dominant method of instruction of Hispanic immigrant children for some 30 years, is the most obvious culprit, with its emphasis on retaining Spanish. But bilingual education is on the wane, having been challenged by statewide initiatives in California (1998), Arizona (2000), and Massachusetts (2004), and by policy shifts in several major cities and at the federal level. States that have moved to English-immersion instruction have seen test scores for Hispanic youngsters rise, in some cases substantially.

Evidence from the culture at large is also encouraging. On most measures of social and economic integration, Hispanic immigrants and their descendants have made steady strides up the ladder. English is the preferred language of virtually all U.S.-born Hispanics; indeed, according to a 2002 national survey by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation, 78 percent of third-generation Mexican-Americans cannot speak Spanish at all. In education, 86 percent of U.S.-born Hispanics complete high school, compared with 92 percent of non-Hispanic whites, and the drop-out rate among immigrant children who enroll in high school after they come here is no higher than for the native-born.

It remains true that attendance at four-year colleges is lower among Hispanics than for other groups, and Hispanics lag in attaining bachelor’s degrees. But neither that nor their slightly lower rate of high-school attendance has kept Hispanic immigrants from pulling their economic weight. After controlling for education, English proficiency, age, and geographic location, Mexican-born males actually earn 2.4 percent more than comparable U.S.-born white males, according to a recent analysis of 2000 Census data by the National Research Council. Hispanic women, for their part, hold their own against U.S.-born white women with similar qualifications.

As for the effect of Hispanic immigrants on the country’s social fabric, the NRC found that they are more likely than other Americans to live with their immediate relatives: 88.6 percent of Mexican immigrant households are made up of families, compared with 69.5 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 68.3 percent of blacks. These differences are partially attributable to the age structure of the Hispanic population, which is younger on average than the white or black population. But even after adjusting for age and immigrant generation, U.S. residents of Hispanic origin—and especially those from Mexico—are much more likely to live in family households. Despite increased out-of-wedlock births among Hispanics, about 67 percent of American children of Mexican origin live in two-parent families, as compared with 77 percent of white children but only 37 percent of black children.

Perhaps the strongest indicator of Hispanic integration into American life is the population’s high rate of intermarriage. About a quarter of all Hispanics marry outside their ethnic group, almost exclusively to non-Hispanic white spouses, a rate that has remained virtually unchanged since 1980. And here a significant fact has been noted in a 2005 study by the Population Reference Bureau—namely, that “the majority of inter-Hispanic children are reported as Hispanic.” Such intermarriages themselves, the study goes on, “may have been a factor in the phenomenal growth of the U.S. Hispanic population in recent years.”

It has been widely predicted that, by mid-century, Hispanics will represent fully a quarter of the U.S. population. Such predictions fail to take into account that increasing numbers of these “Hispanics” will have only one grandparent or great-grandparent of Hispanic heritage. By that point, Hispanic ethnicity may well mean neither more nor less than German, Italian, or Irish ethnicity means today. [...]

In 1918, at the height of the last great wave of immigrants and the hysteria that it prompted in some circles, Madison Grant, a Yale-educated eugenicist and leader of the immigration-restriction movement, made a prediction:

The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian, and the Jew. . . . The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners, just as he is today being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals, and while he is being elbowed out of his own home, the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.

Today, such alarmism reads as little more than a historical curiosity. Southern and Eastern European immigrants and their children did, in fact, assimilate, and in certain cases—most prominently that of the Jews—they exceeded the educational and economic attainments of Grant’s “colonial stock.”

Present-day restrictionists point to all sorts of special circumstances that supposedly made such acculturation possible in the past but render it impossible today. Then as now, however, the restrictionists are wrong, not least in their failure to understand the basic dynamic of American nationhood. There is no denying the challenge posed by assimilating today’s newcomers, especially so many of them in so short a span of time. Nor is there any denying the cultural forces, mainly stemming from the Left, that have attenuated the sense of national identity among native-born American elites themselves and led to such misguided policies as bilingual education. But, provided that we commit ourselves to the goal, past experience and progress to date suggest the task is anything but impossible.

As jarring as many found the recent pictures of a million illegal aliens marching in our cities, the fact remains that many of the immigrants were carrying the American flag, and waving it proudly. They and their leaders understand what most restrictionists do not and what some Americans have forgotten or choose to deny: that the price of admission to America is, and must be, the willingness to become an American.


Posted by Peter Burnet at August 12, 2006 7:36 PM
Comments

Great piece. I applaud Commentary for publishing it. (Wonder if she submitted it to NatlRev prior.)

Posted by: Jim in Chicago at August 12, 2006 8:52 PM

I read somewhere this week that several Historically Black Colleges are recruiting Hispanic students. Probably the only way to achieve something close to gender parity.

Posted by: ghostcat at August 12, 2006 9:05 PM

I read it a while back and it's an excellent article. Ms. Chavez stakes out a commonsense position that I think most Americans can agree to: The necessity to make immigration as legal a process as possible while also granting those mostly law-abiding illegal immigrants already here the opportunity to make up for their past transgression against our laws and become American citizens.

The bottom line is that the basic decency of most Americans makes any large-scale expulsion of illegal immigrants a non-starter. Many people might think it's a good idea until the New York Times runs an article about the Colorado high school 4.0 student and gifted athlete who is now on her way back to Mexico with her family.

My one nagging fear is that the government may not be able to handle the large influx of people requesting a pathway to citizenship. As Peter B has pointed out, the current system is a bad bureaucratic joke.

Ms. Chavez also deserves commendation for this line:

To be sure, the fantasy of a recaptured homeland exists mostly in the minds of a handful of already well-assimilated Mexican-American college professors and the students they manage to indoctrinate (self-described “victims” who often enjoy preferential admission to college and subsidized or free tuition).

Exactly. I don't think most Mexican immigrants are harboring any serious revanchist thoughts. We give way too much credit to the screwballs who propound that nonsense.

Posted by: Matt Murphy at August 12, 2006 10:18 PM

Jim in Chicago:

Despite certain disagreements, I don't generally harbor negative feelings towards NR like some people on this site. I do have to note, however, that they appear incapable of coming up with a coherent program on the immigration issue.

They stated in their magazine a while back that the issue of tightening the border should be separated from the issue of providing a pathway for citizenship. The latest issue of their magazine proposes the same legislative separation but goes on to suggest that the citizenship issue be brought up a few years from now. Maybe Mr. Derbyshire wasn't in the room when the latter opinion was drawn up?

Posted by: Matt Murphy at August 12, 2006 10:26 PM

Peter:

Excerpt.

Posted by: oj at August 12, 2006 11:33 PM

Jim in Chicago:

Excuse me...I should have noted that in the first opinion I cited, NR proposed that we drop, for a long time, the idea of creating a pathway for legal citizenship. I'm not sure what good they believe this will do.

Posted by: Matt Murphy at August 13, 2006 3:50 AM

Linda Chavez is great. Too bad Bush didn't stick by her. Oh well.

Anyway this is a very well written article not full of the usual hyperbole this issue provokes. Linda only skipped over it lightly, but Hispanic men haven't been contaminated with the feminist world view of how men should behave. They work hard and take care of their families. We need more men like that. They're in short supply right now.

Posted by: erp at August 13, 2006 11:30 AM
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