16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PIMS - Polity Immigration and Society series
- Sprache: Englisch
Immigration is the primary cause of population change in developed countries and a major component of population change in many developing countries. This clear and perceptive text discusses how immigration impacts population size, composition, and distribution. The authors address major socio-political issues of immigration through the lens of demography, bringing demographic insights to bear on a number of pressing questions currently discussed in the media, such as: Does immigration stimulate the economy? Do immigrants put an excessive strain on health care systems? How does the racial and ethnic composition of immigrants challenge what it means to be American (or French or German)?
By systematically exploring demographic topics such as fertility, health, education, and age and sex structures, the book provides students of immigration with a broader understanding of the impact of immigration on populations and offers new ways to think about immigration and society.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 355
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1 The Demography of Immigration
Types of immigration
The demography of immigration
Immigrants and anti-immigrants
Immigrant assimilation and adaptation
2 Assimilation, Adaptation, and Integration
The impact of reception context on immigrant integration
Immigrants as a threat to national identity
3 Immigrants in the Economy
Immigrants in the labor market
Immigration and wage suppression
Labor market displacement and expansion
Labor market assimilation
The informal and secondary labor markets
Entrepreneurship, ethnic economies, and enclaves
4 Immigration and the Environment
The environmental impact of immigrants
Is immigration really harmful to the environment?
Immigrants, in-migrants, and children
Immigration in global perspective
5 The Fertility of Immigrants
Fertility norms
The disruption hypothesis
The selection hypothesis
The interrelation of events hypothesis
The adaptation and assimilation hypotheses
The socialization hypothesis
The legitimacy hypothesis
Immigration and fertility
6 Replacement Migration to Offset Population Aging
Social problems associated with population aging
Can immigration offset population aging?
7 Immigrant Health
Immigrant use of health care
The immigrant health paradox
Salmon bias
The healthy migrant hypothesis
Health transitions
Immigrant diversity and health
8 Educating Children in Immigrant Families
Education and later-life outcomes
Educational attainment
Race and the achievement gap
Immigrants, teachers, and schools
9 Conclusions
Current controversies and directions for future research
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Figures
2.1 US foreign-born population by origin, 1910 and 2010
3.1 Estimates of the US unauthorized immigrant population, 1990–2012, in millions
6.1 Demographic transition model
7.1 Factors impacting immigrant health and mortality
8.1 Percentage of US-born and foreign-born college graduates among the five largest Asian and Latino ethnic groups, 2008
Tables
1.1 Types of immigrants by legal status and motivation to migrate
5.1 Immigrant fertility theories
Text boxes
Legal consequences of unauthorized status in the United States and Europe
New immigrant destinations
Do Latinos constitute a racial group?
Unauthorized immigrants
Do immigrants pay taxes?
Skilled and unskilled workers
Immigration, nativism, and “greenwashing”
Urban sprawl
The Fourteenth Amendment
Universal health care
Immigrant generations
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
v
vi
xi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
Immigration & Society series
Carl L. Bankston III, Immigrant Networks and Social Capital
Stephanie A. Bohon and Meghan Conley,Immigration and Population
Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, and Eveline Reisenauer,Transnational Migration
Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration
Grace Kao, Elizabeth Vaquera, and Kimberly Goyette,Education and Immigration
Nazli Kibria, Cara Bowman, and Megan O’Leary,Race and Immigration
Peter Kivisto, Religion and Immigration
Ronald L. Mize and Grace Peña Delgado,Latino Immigrants in the United States
Philip Q. Yang, Asian Immigration to the United States
Immigration and Population
Stephanie A. Bohon
Meghan Conley
polity
Copyright © Stephanie A. Bohon and Meghan Conley 2015
The right of Stephanie A. Bohon and Meghan Conley to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8900-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bohon, Stephanie.
Immigration and population / Stephanie A. Bohon, Meghan E. Conley.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-7456-6415-6 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-6416-3 (paperback) 1.
Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. 2. Population geography. 3. Demography.
I. Conley, Meghan E. II. Title.
JV6225.B6487 2015
304.8--dc23
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
To the tired, the poor, the huddled, the wretched, and the homeless who have journeyed to US shores for nearly 250 years.
Acknowledgements
No book could be completed without the support of many people. We are indebted to Peter Fernandez and to Michael Jarrett, who died a few months prior to the completion of this project. Their constant encouragement sustained us. We would also like to thank Dr. Jon Shefner and the faculty of the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, who provided considerable instrumental support. We are grateful to the staff at Polity, especially Commissioning Editor Jonathan Skerrett, and Editorial Assistant Elen Griffiths, who gave us guidance on the direction of our writing and patiently handled our lives’ disasters. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Dr. Bridget Gorman (Rice University), Dr. Rebecca Clark (NICHD), and Dr. Carmel Price (Furman University).
1The Demography of Immigration
Reyna works at a grocery store in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains. An immigrant of Turkish descent, she entered the United States about 10 years ago. Although her foreign accent is unmistakable, Reyna speaks fluent English, and she is polite and pleasant to her customers. Having worked her way up from an entry-level position, she is currently training to manage her own store in the grocery’s chain, and she has just purchased her first home.
Much about Reyna’s story epitomizes the classic stereotype of the hardworking immigrant striving for a better life in a new country. At the same time, her story also illustrates today’s complicated global web of international migration, in which place of birth and ethnic identity often differ and immigrants sometimes have experiences of living in three or more countries. For example, Reyna often returns to Turkey to visit relatives, but she was not born in Turkey, nor has she ever lived there. Reyna was born in Germany, where Turks are the largest ethnic minority and comprise about 5 percent of the German population (Şen 2003). Reyna is one of nearly 43 million immigrants living in the United States and one of nearly 49 million Americans who are associated with German–US immigration either by immigrating directly from Germany or by being the descendants of German immigrants. Yet, she is not German. She is one of only a relatively small number of US immigrants of West Asian / Middle Eastern descent (United Nations 2011).
The story of people like Reyna underscores that there is no universal “immigrant experience” in today’s globalized world; rather, there are as many immigrant experiences as there are immigrants. Despite this, there are important trends in immigration, and immigrants share several characteristics. First, many people today live in a country other than the one where they were born. Most of these immigrants reside in the developed world (nearly 128 million in 2009) in the 34 wealthiest countries that comprise the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). OECD countries are home to nearly 60 percent of all immigrants. In fact, about 9 percent of the population of OECD countries is comprised of immigrants, although immigrants comprise only 3 percent of the world’s total population (United Nations 2011). Most immigrants migrate to developed countries from other developed countries; increasingly, however, immigrants are also migrating to developed countries from developing countries (OECD 2007). The developing world is also home to a smaller but still sizable number of immigrants (just over 86 million in 2009: United Nations 2011). This book focuses exclusively on immigration to developed countries, especially emphasizing the United States, which is the world’s biggest immigrant receiver.
Second, immigration typically flows along network lines shaped by cultural, geographic, and historical conditions (Gurak and Caces 1992; McKenzie and Rapoport 2010). Thus, many people from the Middle East immigrate to the European Union, especially France and Germany, but far fewer Middle Easterners immigrate to the United States (Foad 2010). At the same time, many Asian immigrants settle in English-speaking countries, and there are large East and Southeast Asian populations in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia. Network migration also explains why immigrants end up in some parts of a host country instead of others. For example, in the early 1900s, the demand for sheepherders resulted in the migration of many people from the Pyrenees Basque Country of Spain and France to southern Idaho; today, Idaho is home to the largest population of Basque people outside of their homeland (Bieter and Bieter 2004).
Third, immigrants are not the same as those they leave behind (Kennedy, McDonald, and Biddle 2006; Belot and Hatton 2012). The process of immigration is difficult and it requires considerable financial, intellectual, and physical capital, as well as a willingness to take risks. For example, immigrants tend to be slightly better educated than the non-immigrants they leave behind (Feliciano 2005). Also, the further immigrants migrate, the greater the selection effect (ibid.). A selection effect is a term social scientists use to describe groups who behave differently from others because they are different (Jasso 1988; Rumbaut 1997a). Among immigration scholars, selection refers to systematic differences between the group of people from a country who emigrate and those who stay at home. These differences include measurable qualities, such as educational attainment and income, as well as traits that are difficult to quantify, such as ambition, risk-aversion, and optimism. For example, few young people in India have a college education (World Bank 2012), whereas 80 percent of Indian immigrants and their descendants living in the United States do (KewalRamani et al. 2007).
Fourth, differences in the liberalness of immigrant laws results in some countries receiving large populations of immigrants, while other countries are home to relatively few. Germany, for example, hosts as many immigrants (nearly 11 million in 2009) as eight of its border countries (Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Belgium) combined (United Nations 2011). Still, Germany has far fewer immigrants than the United States and Russia (Freeman 2006). The United States – the world’s largest immigrant-receiving country – was home to more than 40 million immigrants in 2010 (Grieco et al. 2012). In contrast, Japan and Korea accept relatively few immigrants (United Nations 2011).
Although the United States has more foreign-born residents than any other country in the world (United Nations 2013), it does not have the highest proportion of immigrants relative to the general population. About 13 percent of US residents are immigrants, outpacing the foreign-born percentages in France and Italy, where immigrants account for 11.1 and 8 percent, respectively, of the total population (Vasileva 2011). Still, more than 16 percent of Germany’s population is foreign-born, while a whopping 42.4 percent of Luxembourg’s population is foreign-born (OECD 2013). In fact, as a percentage of the total population, the foreign-born population of the United States is comfortably in the middle of the OECD countries. Luxembourg, Australia, Switzerland, Israel, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Estonia, Austria, and Sweden all have a greater proportion of foreign-born residents than the United States (ibid.). The biggest immigrant receivers – in terms of their proportion in the general population – are in the Middle East, and some Middle Eastern countries have more immigrants than natives (United Nations 2011). The biggest proportionate receivers are, in order, Qatar (87 percent immigrant), the United Arab Emirates (70 percent), Kuwait (69 percent), Jordan (46 percent), and the occupied Palestinian territory (44 percent).
Types of immigration
Although “immigrant” refers generally to those who live in a country outside of their country of origin, some countries identify a broad array of immigrant statuses. For example, immigrants in the United States can be lawful permanent residents – those who are allowed to reside and work permanently in the United States; conditional permanent residents – those who have applied for, but not yet received, lawful permanent residence; and refugees and asylees. The United States also offers several types of non-immigrant visas – such as student, visitor, and certain employment visas – which temporarily authorize people to study, visit, or work in the country under certain circumstances, but not to remain for long periods of time. In some countries, including the United States, some immigrants have the opportunity to become citizens. This process is known as naturalization.
Immigrants can also be unauthorized or irregular, meaning that they lack permission to be in their host country. The term unauthorized is the official term used by US government agencies; the United Nations uses the term irregular in its publications, but the two terms are synonyms. In 2011, the unauthorized population in the United States totaled an estimated 11.1 million people – including approximately 1 million children under the age of 18 – and comprised 3.7 percent of the total US population (Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker 2012). In contrast, countries in the European Union host approximately 1.9 to 3.8 million irregular immigrants (Morehouse and Blomfield 2011), despite the fact that the European Union is more populous than the United States. The vast majority of unauthorized immigrants in the United States originate from Latin America. As of 2010, approximately 58 percent (6.5 million) of unauthorized immigrants in the United States originated from Mexico, while another 23 percent came from other countries in Latin America (Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker 2012). In contrast, the vast majority of irregular migrants to Europe in recent years have originated from Afghanistan, Albania, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, and Somalia (Morehouse and Blomfield 2011). Although the sending countries have not changed, in recent years, the numbers of unauthorized or irregular status migrants have declined in both the United States and Europe.
Table 1.1 Type of immigrants by legal status and motivation to migrate
Legal status
Authorized
Naturalized
An immigrant who has been granted citizenship in his/her host country
Lawful permanent resident
An immigrant who is allowed to work and reside permanently in his/her host country
Conditional permanent resident
An immigrant who has applied for, but not yet received, lawful permanent residence or asylum
Non-immigrants
Immigrants holding visas to visit, study, or engage in work in their host country for a specified period of time
Unauthorized
Irregular
An immigrant who does not have permission to reside in his/her host country
Motivation
Voluntary
Economic
A person who immigrates for reasons of work
Family reunification
A person who immigrates in order to form a family or to join family members
Involuntary
Refugees
A person seeking shelter in a host country in order to escape political violence, environmental devastation, or other life-threatening conditions
Asylees
A person living in a host country who has been granted permission to do so based on meeting refugee criteria
Trafficked
A person coerced or forcibly taken into a host country for illicit purposes
Countries admit immigrants for three reasons: labor market needs, the perceived value of family reunification, and humanitarian concerns (Cobb-Clark 2003). These criteria are prioritized differently across time and place, so the type and number of immigrants received can differ considerably from country to country and over time. Immigrants contribute to foreign economies by filling vacant jobs. Thus, many countries design immigration policies to give preferential admission to immigrants who can provide labor for jobs that natives cannot fill. For example, many chemists working in the United States, including many who received advanced degrees from US universities, are from countries such as China, Germany, and the Philippines (National Research Council 2007). The majority of immigrants moving from developing to developed countries are economic (or labor) migrants (Martin, Abella, and Kuptsch 2006). These are people whose decision to immigrate is primarily motivated by the desire to improve their economic situation by obtaining a better or higher-paying job. Most immigration between developed countries is also labor migration; transnational corporations may move workers overseas or white-collar workers might take advantage of opportunities abroad in their field.
Legal consequences of unauthorized status in the United States and Europe
In the United States, unauthorized status is largely treated as a violation of civil immigration law, rather than criminal law. This means that unauthorized immigrants may face civil penalties in the form of removal and restrictions on or exclusion from future lawful entry for their unauthorized presence in the United States. However, their unauthorized presence is not in itself a violation of criminal law, and thus it is not subject to criminal penalties. In other words, unauthorized immigrants who are apprehended may be detained and removed (i.e., deported), but they do not face criminal penalties simply as a result of living in the United States with unauthorized status.
In Europe, irregular migration is addressed by individual member states. That is, different countries in Europe have different policies and legal approaches to addressing resident irregular migrants. Austria, for example, offers few opportunities for regularization and deals strictly with irregular migrants, primarily using voluntary repatriation and forced return (deportation) to address its population of irregular migrants. France and Italy have also utilized mass expulsion against their Roma populations (Severance 2010). The Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe (2010) has noted an increase in the criminalization of irregular migrants in the member countries of the European Union, both at border crossings and as a result of their presence.
Most countries recognize that family immigration often occurs in stages, and that it is socially desirable and ethical to reunite family members. Thus, countries admit immigrants for the purpose of family reunification (Suárez-Orozco, Todorova, and Louie 2002; Cobb-Clark 2003). There are many reasons that families become separated during the migration process. Often, one family member is admitted into another country first as an economic migrant, and he or she can use their position, once established, to bring other family members with them. Some people immigrate in order to form families through marriage (DeJong, Root, and Abad 1986).
In the United States, people seeking entry through family reunification are prioritized based on their relationship to the person already living in the country. Generally speaking, the immigration process is quicker and easier for those whose family members are US citizens than for those whose family members are foreign-born and non-naturalized. Additionally, the spouses, minor children, and parents of US citizen adults have priority over siblings and adult children (Hendricks 2008). That is, there are no limits on the number of visas allocated annually to the spouses, minor children, and parents of US citizens. However, there is an annual cap on the number of visas allocated to the adult children and siblings of US citizens; there are also annual limitations on visas allocated to the spouses and children of lawful permanent residents (Bergeron 2013).
Some immigrants must move to survive as a result of conditions in their home country. For example, people may be forced to leave countries experiencing extreme and prolonged economic deterioration, such as double-digit unemployment, in order to provide for themselves and their families. However, these immigrants are usually classified as voluntary labor migrants, rather than economic refugees (Harris 1993). In contrast, those who are displaced from their homes due to political conditions – such as war – or environmental conditions – such as earthquakes or tsunamis – are considered to be involuntary migrants. As of 2008, humanitarian concerns for these immigrants have prompted nations to house more than 15 million foreign-born people (United Nations 2011). When displaced people cross an international border, they are sometimes called refugees or forced migrants (Teitelbaum and Weiner 1995). Asylum is a legal protection granted to refugees by their host country; however, because of national security concerns and political relationships between countries, some involuntary migrants are denied asylum and sent back to their home country, even though this action might lead to their imprisonment, torture, or death (Stanley 1987). Returning refugees to their home country when it is not safe – an action called refoulement – violates international law. Nonetheless, more than half of the refugee-receiving countries monitored by the United Nations were suspected of violating international treaties on non-refoulement in 2005 (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2006).
Since it is not uncommon to deny asylum to some refugees, immigration scholars often distinguish between refugees (i.e., forced migrants) and asylees (i.e., forced migrants whose refugee status is officially recognized by their host country). Although international law establishes criteria for refugees, countries interpret these criteria through different lenses; likewise, the terminology is inconsistently applied. For example, the US government refers to those who have met US asylum criteria as refugees if they apply for asylum from outside of the United States and asylees if they apply for asylum after arriving in the United States or one of its ports of entry (Martin 2010).
A third group of involuntary migrants are those who are brought to a country against their will. In the United States, many African Americans are the descendants of those who were forcibly transported to North America from Africa as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Today, scholars estimate that about 900,000 people living in foreign countries have been trafficked into the sex trade or in forced labor through kidnapping or coercion, although the extent of human trafficking worldwide is difficult to estimate (Gozdziak and Collett 2005). Although this book focuses primarily on voluntary migrants, it is important to note that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary migration is often blurred by political exigencies.
The demography of immigration
Demography is the interdisciplinary study of population change, and population scientists (called demographers) can be sociologists, geographers, economists, biologists, historians, epidemiologists, statisticians, and other social scientists. Although a small subset of demographers holds advanced degrees in demography, most who call themselves demographers are self-labeled. Other scholars who do not self-identify as demographers may be labeled as such because they work as demographers, they publish in demography outlets, or their work is widely used by demographers. This diverse group of scholars is united by a deep interest in demographic processes and (to a much lesser extent) a set of statistical techniques for studying these processes. The demographic processes are the three events – fertility, mortality, and migration – that influence a population’s size or composition.
It may seem odd to talk of a demography of immigration, since migration (which includes population movements between and within countries) is one of the three demographic processes. Certainly, any study of immigration can rightly be called demography. However, the demographic perspective on immigration is distinct from how non-demographers view immigration, in that the demographic perspective focuses on larger trends among immigrant groups, rather than on the experiences of a single immigrant or a small group of immigrants. Demographers also tend to favor quantitative methods of study over ethnographic methods, although some demographers do engage in ethnographic work. Demographers usually prefer objective measures (e.g., years of education completed, age, or place of settlement) over subjective measures, like attitudes or orientations. Thus, when demographers study immigrant assimilation, they often use statistical techniques to examine the magnitude of differences between immigrant groups and natives on measurable outcomes such as annual earnings, type of housing occupancy, or employment rates. Social psychologists, on the other hand, focus more closely on the individual experiences of immigrants as they attempt to negotiate social conditions in their new country.
This book focuses on immigration as a population process, so we present immigration through a demographic lens. As such, we focus on two interrelated points about immigration as demography. First, we consider the role that immigration plays in the understanding of other population processes in which demographers have a paramount interest. These processes include population composition (chapter 2), fertility (chapter 5), aging (chapter 6), and health and mortality (chapter 7). We closely scrutinize these processes and how they are complicated by immigration. Second, we focus on the understanding of immigration and the measurement of how immigrants impact societies based on findings from demographic research. Thus, we also explore topics that interest demographers beyond basic demographic processes, such as immigrant labor (chapter 3), immigrants and the environment (chapter 4), and immigrant education (chapter 8). This is hardly an exhaustive examination of the demography of immigration. However, we hope to provide an overview of the largest topics within demography and the biggest issues related to immigration that can be approached through demographic knowledge.
Immigrants and anti-immigrants
How well immigrants fare in a host country and how well their descendants are accepted in their new land varies greatly from country to country and often depends on where immigrants originate. Some countries, such as Australia, the United States, and Canada, consider themselves a land of immigrants, and new immigrants to these countries can expect to find Australians, Americans, and Canadians who have the same ancestry as they do. However, in many other countries, the ethnic origin of immigrants is very important. For example, Germans make a distinction between Spätausiedler – immigrants who are considered German by ancestry, despite being born in other countries – and Zuwandern (all other immigrants). In Norway, a child born to two immigrant parents is also considered an immigrant.
The United States receives more immigrants than any other nation in the world, and there is a popular saying that everyone comes from somewhere else. It is a common practice among US residents to ask one another where they “came from,” and many will respond with two or three ethnicities (e.g., English-Scots-Irish), often referring to countries they have never visited and about which they know very little. With the possible exception of American Indians, who themselves crossed the Bering Strait from Asia at least 13,000 years ago, there is no such thing as an “ethnic American.” Whereas American Indians currently comprise less than 2 percent of the US population, immigrants have comprised at least 10 percent of the US population for most of the twentieth century and all of the twenty-first (Gryn and Larsen 2010). Most US residents are either immigrants, children of immigrants, or grandchildren of immigrants. In fact, some of the most famous Americans, including Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and Henry Kissinger, were immigrants.
Despite the self-conception of the United States as a “melting pot” and the close connection that nearly all Americans have to their immigrant ancestors, the reality is that many US residents want immigration to be stopped or severely curtailed (Bauer, Lofstrom, and Zimmermann 2000; Haubert and Fussell 2006). The discrepancy between the real value that immigrants provide and the perception of natives that immigrants are harmful is not limited to the United States. There is a sizable and growing body of work on anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe as well (McLaren 2003; Schneider 2008; Hjerm 2009). Across Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States, there is a tendency for residents to over-estimate the number of immigrants in their country and to misidentify many immigrants as unauthorized or irregular (Appave and Laczko 2011). The fact that many countries benefit from immigration while the citizenry reviles immigrants poses a considerable policy challenge. Appave and Laczko (2011: xiii) note:
Societies with a rich diversity of skills and experiences are better placed to stimulate growth through their human resources, and migration is one of the ways in which the exchange of talent, services and skills can be fostered. Yet migration remains highly politicized and often negatively perceived, despite the obvious need for diversification in today’s rapidly evolving societies and economies.
The global recession and rising economic insecurity have contributed to an escalation in immigrant scapegoating. Legislators and policymakers in the United States, for example, have created and implemented a record number of state and local anti-immigrant bills in recent years, including English-only policies for business practices and drivers’ written tests, the criminalization of Sharia law, eligibility verification for state entitlement programs, citizenship verification for the issuance of birth certificates, and citizenship verification for attendance at public colleges and universities, among others. Federal policymakers in the United States have also made several failed attempts to criminalize unauthorized immigration and end birthright citizenship – or the practice of granting citizenship to those born in the United States – for the children of immigrants, a point we discuss further in chapter 5.
Beyond legislative restrictions on immigration, immigrants have also been the targets of violence. In the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has documented an escalation in the number of anti-immigrant hate groups (Beirich 2011). The number of nativist extremist organizations, which actively target individual immigrants and immigrant families, has nearly doubled since 2008, reaching a total of 319 documented groups in 2010 (ibid.). Reflected in this rise in extremist hate groups and anti-immigrant nativism is an increase in the number of violent assaults and hate crimes targeting immigrants – particularly Latinos and Muslims. In Europe, Koopmans and his colleagues (2005) have noted a similar rise in violence against immigrants, particularly those who are racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.
Much of the anti-immigrant sentiment stems from the belief that some groups – usually the most numerous immigrant groups – will never fully fit into their new society, a point we discuss further in chapter 2. However, it is important to note that which immigrant group is considered unassimilable has changed dramatically over the centuries (Kao, Vaquera, and Goyette 2013). Irish, Italians, and Poles were once considered too poorly educated, too unhealthy, and too different to fit into the United States. Today, however, their descendants are “undifferentiated Americans” (Alba 1990), meaning that they are indistinguishable from other white people living in the United States. Much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric about these European immigrants that appeared in newspapers in the early 1900s is now being repeated to describe immigrants from Latin America and Asia, who comprise 53.1 and 28.2 percent of the US foreign-born population, respectively (Grieco et al. 2012), suggesting that immigrant groups often follow a similar path from rejection to acceptance; only the country of origin changes. As Espenshade (1995: 201) notes:
little has changed in how immigrants are perceived. At least since the 1880s, immigrants have been assumed to take jobs away from and to lower wages of native workers, to add to the poverty population, and to compete for education, health and other social services … All that seems to have changed are the origins of migrants and the terms used to describe them.
Despite the fact that the descendants of earlier “unassimilable” immigrants have been completely absorbed into the US mainstream, it is too simplistic to think that Asian and Latino immigrants will follow the same path to absorption in the United States as European immigrants who entered at the beginning of the twentieth century. The 400-year history of Africans and their descendants in the New World – a group brought to the Americas as slaves – suggests that this racial minority has never been fully absorbed into the United States in the same way as Italian, Slavic, Irish, and Greek immigrants. Although African Americans are viewed as fully American, they continue to have lower average levels of income, employment, education, wealth, and occupational status compared to whites, including white immigrants (Shuey and Wilson 2008). The ways in which race and racism complicate the immigrant experience is an important theme that recurs throughout this book.
Immigrant assimilation and adaptation
In 1910, almost a third of all residents in many major US cities were immigrants (Hirschman 2005); then, as now, one of the largest immigrant receiving cities was Chicago. Sociologists at the University of Chicago in the 1920s were greatly interested in the processes by which these immigrants were being absorbed into the native population of the city. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess stand out among these Chicago School scholars who believed that, over time and generations, immigrants would be completely absorbed and indistinguishable from the rest of the US population. In 1921 they published their contact hypothesis, theorizing that immigrant contact and interaction with the native population ultimately results in the acquisition of the language of the host country and intermarriage with host-country natives, resulting in eventual and complete absorption into the mainstream.
Park and Burgess’ (1921) theory, which is now referred to as straight-line assimilation, argues that the process of becoming “American” occurs in four stages: contact, conflict/competition, accommodation, and assimilation. Essentially, immigrants enter a country and have contact with the native population, who respond largely with curiosity. As the immigrant group grows, conflict emerges between native and immigrant groups as they compete for jobs and other scarce resources such as housing. As contact between the two groups continues, however, friendships form, and the native group begins to accommodate immigrants and their children, and eventually the descendants of immigrants lose their ethnic differences and are completely absorbed into the mainstream. Park (1928) acknowledges that the process will be lengthier for some groups than for others. He specifically points to the likely difficulties that Japanese immigrants faced because of the “racial uniform which classifies [them]” (ibid.: 890). Other Chicago School sociologists (especially Wirth 1928; Warner and Srole 1945; Gans 1962) accepted Park and Burgess’ contact hypothesis and elaborated on straight-line assimilation theory over the next half-century.
Sociologists have long considered assimilation to be a multi-faceted process involving several dimensions (see Gordon 1964; Hirschman 1983). These dimensions include cultural, structural, marital, identificational, receptional, and civic assimilation. In other words, immigrants are considered to be fully assimilated when their descendants’ culture, their choice of marital partners, their educational attainment, their earnings, and their occupational prestige are indistinguishable from those of natives. Additionally, immigrants’ descendants are assimilated if they do not experience prejudice or discrimination and there are no power struggles between immigrant and native groups.
Straight-line assimilation suggests that assimilation has occurred when an immigrant group has become assimilated in all of the important dimensions of social life. This is not to say that the descendants of immigrants never exercise their “ethnic options” (Alba 1990; Waters 1990). For example, as many as a million people – many of whom claim some Irish descent – attend Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade each year, wearing T-shirts and buttons that proclaim “Kiss me, I’m Irish!” Few of these people give much thought to their Irish heritage the rest of the year.
Although straight-line assimilation effectively explains the immigrant experience of mostly white and European immigrants who entered the United States in the early 1900s, historical events during the twentieth century radically changed immigration, and these changes forced scholars to re-evaluate the Chicago School views of assimilation. During the mid twentieth century, events such as the Great Depression and two World Wars virtually ended Europe–United States immigration flows, and the enactment of strict immigration policies restricted flows even further. When immigration to the United States resumed after 1965, the new immigrant flows were primarily comprised of Asians and Latinos, shifting the ethnic composition of immigrants.
Post-1965 immigrants to the United States are often called new immigrants, but this label oversimplifies and homogenizes differences in the experiences of immigrants such as those from Mexico and China. Chinese immigrants have been entering the United States since the mid-1880s, and, in fact, halting the flow of immigration from China was the first step that the United States took historically to reduce immigration. Labeling Chinese immigrants as “new” ignores this nearly 200-year history and places newly arriving Chinese in the same group as Chinese Americans who have been in the United States for generations and who may have little in common with newcomers. Similarly, Mexicans have a long history in the United States that belies their “newness.” Some Mexicans settled in the United States long before there was a United States, and some US states, like California and Texas, used to be part of Mexico. Nonetheless, it is commonplace in the United States to use the terms “Latino” and “Asian” synonymously with “immigrant,” especially in places where Latinos and Asians have not traditionally settled. This has created a myriad of difficulties for US-born Latinos and Asians living in states like Arizona, where police are allowed to interrogate people on the suspicion that they are unauthorized immigrants (Campbell 2011).
Because they are racial minorities, Asian and Latino immigrants to the United States are unlikely to have the same assimilation experience as white European immigrants (Louie 2004). Indeed, these two groups demonstrate widely divergent outcomes, particularly with regard to education. Latinos living in the United States have the lowest level of educational attainment and the highest level of both high school and college attrition of all major ethno-racial groups (Kaufman, Alt, and Chapman 2001), while Asians are better educated than non-Latino whites (Williams 2003). Some immigration scholars suggest that these differences result from different immigrant histories (Ogbu 1978, 1991) and different cultural motivations (Takagi 1998; Schuck 2003) that lend themselves to oppositional culture for many Latinos and model minority status for Asians. The concept of an oppositional culture suggests that groups that are discriminated against (including many immigrant groups) disengage from societally accepted means of achieving – like earning a college degree – because they will not receive the same returns on their investment as whites. In contrast, some groups – especially Asian immigrant groups – over-invest in education and other means of human capital accumulation because they fear discrimination (Sue and Okazaki 2009 [1990]). Some researchers have even suggested that Asian immigrants excel because of their attachment to Confucian or other traditional values (see Louie 2004; Kasinitz et al. 2008).
Chua and Rubenfeld (2014) have suggested that the children of Asian immigrants thrive because they are exposed to a “triple
New immigrant destinations
For most of the twentieth century, the majority of immigrants settled in the same places, but over the last three decades, migration streams have changed significantly, and the settlement patterns of immigrants have diversified. Since the 1980s, Latino and Asian immigrants have dispersed throughout the United States to new destinations, particularly in the Southeast and Midwest regions. Based on Census data of the absolute size and growth levels of immigrant populations across multiple destinations in the United States, Singer (2004) has documented the rise of new immigrant gateways throughout the nation. In this typology, those destinations broadly considered to be established gateways have historically higher-than-average rates of immigrant population growth and an overall large immigrant population in absolute numbers. The metropolitan areas that comprise these established gateways include places like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami. In Europe, cities like London are also established gateways.
Emerging gateways, which are now generally referred to as new destinations, are places that have had a low percentage of foreign-born persons until at least the 1970s, as well as a relatively small foreign-born population in absolute numbers, followed by an exponential increase in both the percentage and absolute numbers of the immigrant population after 1980. In the United States, examples of emerging gateways include Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Washington, DC. Most of these metropolitan areas became new gateways for immigrants in the 1990s. In Europe, cities like Madrid are also new destinations.
package” of cultural forces that run counter to what they define as modern American culture. The three elements of this package – a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control – interact to inspire the determination to prove oneself successful through sacrifice and hardship. According to Chua and Rubenfeld (ibid.), this formula explains the success of model groups as varied as Mormons, Jews, Cuban exiles, and immigrants from Asia and certain countries in the West Indies and Africa.
Cultural theories to explain different immigrant outcomes have generally fallen into disfavor as continuing evidence substantiates the primacy of race and class in predicting educational attainment and economic outcomes (cf. Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey 1998; Tyson, Darity, and Castellino 2005; Harris 2011). Research by Louie (2004), for example, demonstrates that Chinese Americans see schools as places where hard work is rewarded. However, despite being at the top of the educational hierarchy (which, in a race-neutral society, should guarantee placement at the top of the occupational hierarchy), few Asians are in the top professional ranks of US corporations.
