America Becoming Racial Trends and Their Consequences: Volume I (2001) / Chapter Skim
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7. Contemporary Immigration and Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity
7. Contemporary Immigration and Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity
Pages 200-242
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From page 200... ...
(3) What opportunities and challenges have new immigrants and their offspring faced as they converge in America's largest urban centers, and will they be able to advance socioeconomically if they follow the path taken by earlier European immigrants?
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Eligible aliens who qualified under this requirement but applied after the 350,000 limit was met, and aliens who performed labor in perishable agricultural commodities for at least 90 days during the year ending May 1,1986, were eligible for Group II temporary resident status. Adjustment to permanent resident status is essentially automatic for both groups; however, aliens in Group I were eligible on December 1, 1989, and those in Group II were eligible one year later on December 1, 1990.
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From page 202... ...
This trend suggests a more steady rate of growth today than in the past, and indicates that contemporary immigrants are more likely than their earlier counterparts to stay in the United States permanently (Warren and Kraly, 1985; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1997~.
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From page 203... ...
Because of the high visibility of so many immigrants of Mexican origin, and because of the geographic concentration, undocumented immigration has become a highly publicized and contested policy issue in California. Fourth, compared to immigration then, today's inflows are made up of a higher proportion of refugees and those seeking asylum.2 From 1946 to 1995 i.e., in the 50 years after World War II ended more than 3 million refugees and people seeking asylum were granted lawful permanent-resident status through various legislation.
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Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1997~. In sum, lower rates of emigration, higher numbers of undocumented immigrants and refugees or people seeking asylum, and the larger pool of potentially permanent immigrants among nonimmigrants suggests the complexity of contemporary immigration.
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Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1997~.3 The top five sending countries from 1981 through 1995 were Mexico, the Philippines, China/Taiwan, the Dominican Republic, and India, compared to Italy, Austria/Hungary, the Soviet Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom during the first two decades of the century. Mexico alone accounted for more than one-fifth of the total legal admissions since the 1980s.
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From page 206... ...
The image of the poor, uneducated, and unskilled "huddled masses," used to depict the turn-ofthe-century European immigrants, does not apply to today's newcomers. The 1990 Census attests to the vast differences in demographic characteristics, levels of education, occupation, and income by national origins (Table 7-1~.
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From page 207... ...
In fact, the 1965 Act and its subsequent amendments set the first-ever cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, restricting immigration from the Americas, especially Mexico, which had been under way since the 1920s (Massey, 1995~. Figure 7-2 shows that immigration from the Americas (not including Canada)
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From page 208... ...
Foreign investment disproportionately targets production for export, taking advantage of raw material and cheap labor in developing countries. Such development results in tremendous internal rural-urban migration, predominantly of low-skilled and female laborers coming from the rural economy to urban industrial centers, which in turn causes underemployment and displacement of the urban work force.
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labor market have come from abroad. The needs of business,
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The infusion of the educational systems with globalization in many developing countries notably India, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan has given rise to a sizeable professional class. Many members of this emerging middle class are frustrated by uneven economic development and rigid opportunity structures in their homelands that devalue their human capital worth; in addition, many feel powerless to make changes because of repressive political systems.
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From page 211... ...
anti-CommuTABLE 7-2 Top 10 Countries of National Origin for Refugees and Asylees Granted Permanent Resident Status, 1946 to 1995 1946-1960 1961-1995 Country of % of Country % of Birth Number Total of Birth Number Total Poland 159,852 22.7 Vietnam 560,888 23.5 Germany 99,493 14.1 Cuba 532,394 22.3 Hungary 61,826 8.8 Soviet Union 209,953 8.8 Italy 61,299 8.7 Laos 179,047 7.5 Yugoslavia 54,571 7.7 Cambodia 123,436 5.2 Soviet Union 44,131 6.2 Iran 54,501 2.3 Latvia 38,205 5.4 Romania 49,213 2.1 Greece 28,692 4.1 Poland 44,278 1.9 Lithuania 27,263 3.9 Thailand 41,260 1.7 Romania 16,237 2.3 Yugoslavia 35,247 1.4 Top 10 countries 591,569 83.8 Top 10 countries 1,830,217 76.7 European countries 668,129 94.7 European countries 543,443 22.8 All countries 705,718 100.0 All countries 2,385,267 100.0 SOURCE: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (1997: Table 32~.
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Hence, there has often been divergence between the sociological and bureaucratic or official criteria for refugee or eligibility status, which has in turn produced great conflict. The admission of Cubans, Southeast Asians, Russians, and Nicaraguans as refugees, and the simultaneous exclusion of Haitians, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans, are perfect examples.
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From page 213... ...
These microstructural ties and potentially vast social networks have become a powerful force perpetuating migration. Networks are also established by legitimate institutions that assist migrants and potential migrants, by underground organizations that emerge to reap profits from a lucrative black market, and by humanitarian organizations established to aid both legal and undocumented immigrants (Massey et al., 1993~.
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Next, describe patterns of spatial concentration in five of the largest metropolitan regions New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago.4 As the different national-origin groups converge in particular urban centers, these urban centers are in turn impacted by the arrival of newcomers. OLD AND NEW "ELLIS ISLANDS" Ellis Island in New York, where the Statue of Liberty stands, is the historic gateway for millions of European immigrants, who made New York City their new home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 4These are census Bureau designated PMSAs "Primary Metropolitan statistical Areas' rather than cities proper.
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Table 7-3 lists statistics for the top 10 national origins of immigrant groups in five metropolitan areas. New York, which received primarily European immigrants at the turn of the century, has now become the center for Caribbean immigrants.
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It is also less diverse in class status because of the strong correlation between national origins and skill levels of the newcomers. The dominance of Cubans in Miami is a different story.
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Like Miami, San Francisco is also a much smaller metropolitan area. Though no single national-origin group is dominant, the Asian presence is impressive, making up more than 40 percent of the immigrant population.
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DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSFORMATION IN URBAN PORTS-OF-ENTRY The diversity of contemporary immigrants, and their geographic concentrations, have a profound effect on both old and new "Ellis Islands" with significant bearing on the changing dynamics of racial and ethnic relations. lust 30 years ago, America's urban landscape, including the areas with high immigrant density, was predominantly White and culturally homogeneous.
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Foreign born refers to first generation; second generation refers to U.S.-born persons with at least one foreign-born parent; and third generation refers to U.S.-born persons with U.S.-born parents.
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in Los Angeles are visibly represented. THE CHANGING DYNAMICS OF RACE AND ETHNICITY A more critical aspect of these demographic changes is the effect the arrival of non-European immigrants has on racial and ethnic relations in the various new "Ellis Islands." Since the 1970s, a massive influx of nonWhite immigrants into America's largest urban centers, and a concurrent out-migration of non-Hispanic Whites from these areas, has made ethnicity more salient, posing new challenges to all Americans White, Black, and U.S.-born of Asian or Hispanic ancestry and to the newcomers themselves who are striving to become accepted as Americans.
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From page 221... ...
These patterns of differentiation and bifurcation are primarily caused by the drastic economic restructuring of America's urban labor markets simultaneously with rapid growth in immigration. Uneducated and poor Blacks have been trapped in the inner city, where ladders of social mobility have disappeared and where entry to low-skilled jobs is barred by employer discrimination and immigrant employment networks (Waldinger, 1996; Wilson, 1996~.
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From page 222... ...
What is more threatening is that Blacks, especially the educated class, suddenly find their hard-won occupational niche suddenly shared by immigrant minorities (Waldinger, 1996~. "Foreigners" in Their Own Land Americans of Asian and Hispanic Ancestry U.S.-born children and grandchildren of Asian and Hispanic ancestry have also felt the intense cultural and social impact of contemporary immigration, especially those already "assimilated." Suddenly they are confronted with the renewed image of themselves as "foreigners." Their American identity is now questioned because they look like these newcomers who do not fit the old characterization of "American" as "an European or the descendant of an European" (De Crevecoeur,1782~1904~)
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Unlike earlier labor migrants of Asian or Hispanic origin, who were mostly sojourners with every intention of eventually returning to their homelands, the new immigrants tend to regard America as their permanent home and make concerted efforts to assimilate socioeconomically. However, new immigrants, middle class and working class alike, are almost always regarded as "foreigners," sometimes even rejected by U.S.-born coethnics as "FOB" (fresh-off-the-boat a derogatory term referring to newcomers from third-world countries)
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. Southeast Asian workers were more than twice as likely as other workers to be economically inactive; the higher rate of nonparticipation in the labor force among Southeast Asian refugees was the result of their lack of education, English proficiency, job skills, measurable economic resources, and access to employment networks through preexisting ethnic communities (Rumbaut, 1995; Zhou and Bankston, 1998~.5 However, Mexican workers who were most handicapped of all immigrant groups by the lack of skills and English proficiency had the highest labor-force participation rate (95.7 percent)
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women stayed out of the labor force, but more than 33 percent of Mexican and Southeast Asian women did. Among those in the labor force, the majority were underemployed, regardless of race/ethnicity; however, West Indian women had a much lower rate of underemployment than all other groups.
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Partial employment, or low-wage employment, is usually inadequate for sustaining a decent living, much less for moving up the socioeconomic ladder. These two types of underemployment affect Mexican immigrants disproportionately.
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As immigrants gain labor-market experience, many are able to advance within and across industries to better-paying positions and even to self-employment (fortes and Zhou, 1992, 1996; Zhou, 1992~. Thus, the long-term scenarios of underemployment being either an alternative means to upward social mobility or a dead-end job trapping immigrants at the starting point, or pushing them further toward the bottom, are not mutually exclusive.
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Once in the United States, non-Whites are racialized into a highly stratified system that imposes a minority status, with all its accrued disadvantages. Descendents of European immigrants became White as they shed their imposed "racial" minority status and "melted" into the middle-class mainstream.
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. As I have discussed earlier, the structural changes associated with massive immigration during the past three decades, along with the shifts in the economy, local cultures, and neighborhoods, create diverse receiving contexts quite different from the ones taken for granted by classical assimilation theorists.
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The U-curve, though always observable, nonetheless assumes a different form in each of the immigration regions. Los Angeles looks especially distinct, with a disproportionately large population of secondgeneration children, and a disproportionately low population of secondgeneration elders, making for a very peculiar looking "U." Miami again resembles Los Angeles, differing only in the relative weight of elderly immigrant offspring, most of whom are undoubtedly migrants from the colder climates of the Northeast and the Midwest.
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From page 233... ...
This finding indicates that first-generation disadvantages are strongly associated with ethnicity, spatial concentration of ethnic groups, and major socioeconomic factors, and that controlling for these factors reduces the negative impact of foreign birth. Third, the effects of ethnicity are consistent with prior research, in that they consistently favor Asian-origin groups and penalize other minority groups.
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The question is open as to whether new immigrants and their offspring will follow the path of their European predecessors. In terms of the direction of intergenerational mobility, the distinctions between the earlier European immigrants and the contemporary newcomers may not be as sharp as they appear.
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From page 235... ...
If the social environment surrounding immigrant children is rich in resources, and if its goals are consistent with those of the immigrant family, then ethnic resources may be relatively less important, but they may still count. For example, many middle-class immigrant parents move into affluent White neighborhoods, send their children to schools attended primarily by White students from similarly or more affluent socioeconomic backgrounds, and still insist on enrolling their children in weekend or afterschool ethnic schools, or involving them in ethnic, religious, or cultural activities.
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Although there is a strong anti-intellectual streak in American youth culture at all socioeconomic levels, the rejection of academic pursuits is especially intense among members of minority groups, who are more likely than members of the majority to identify school administrations with oppressive authority, to perceive their entry into the middle class as almost impossible, and to be in schools where learning is strongly discouraged by peers. Lowered chances for mobility create frustration and pessimism for all American youth, but these emotions are most strongly felt by those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.
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CONCLUSION The significant differences between contemporary immigration and turn-of-the-century European immigration necessitate a reconceptualization of the phenomenon and the development of alternative theories of immigration and immigrant adaptation. Contemporary immigration in the United States has resulted from the interplay of macro- and microstructural factors operating cross-nationally, rather than unilaterally.
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As there are poor Whites who have never attained middle class, it should not be a surprise that some immigrant children may not make it either. Certainly, we cannot expect all immigrant children to excel equally in a society as unequal as ours.
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International Migration Review 31~4~:826-874. Chiswick, B
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International Migration Review 31~4~:893-922.
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Portes, ed. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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International Migration Review 28~4~:795-820. 1996 Immigrant families at risk: Factors that undermine chances of success.
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