In the debate over the best way to handle illegal immigration, the hot-button word starts with “a” — amnesty. But Jacob Vigdor, professor of public policy and economics at Duke University and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, focuses on a different “a” word: assimilation. He addressed the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society this year on the topic, “From Immigrants to Americans: Bringing Assimilation Into the Immigration Policy Debate.” Vigdor also discussed the topic with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: First of all, why is assimilation so important to this debate?
Vigdor: Assimilation is all about not necessarily who gets into the country, but what they do once they get here. I think it’s an important thing to think about in this debate because a lot of the concerns that we have about immigration these days have to do not necessarily with who comes to the country, but what those people actually do after they arrive, the kinds of behavior they engage in, whether they learn to speak English, whether they become naturalized citizens. This is what assimilation is about.
Kokai: We’ve had immigrants throughout the history of the United States. We have had assimilation throughout the history of the United States. How have things changed on that front?
Vigdor: Well, if you look over the course of history, the first thing that really strikes you when you look at the record is how similar things are now to the way they were 100 years ago or so. If you look back at the immigrants of the early 20th century, after 20 or 30 years in the United States, about two-thirds of them are naturalized citizens. If you look at immigrants who came into the United States 20 or 30 years ago today, about two-thirds of them are naturalized citizens. So by and large, the process is working very similarly to the way it once did. The difference is that it’s not working equally well for all types of immigrants, and that’s where the real problem is.
Kokai: One of the points that you made in the course of your discussion with the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society is that, in particular, groups that we would expect to have problems because they are illegal immigrants — or undocumented immigrants as some say — they’re the ones who have the most problems with assimilation.
Vigdor: That’s correct. There are two ways you could explain an immigrant who doesn’t fit in, who chooses not to speak English, who chooses not to become naturalized, who chooses to live in an immigrant enclave rather than an integrated neighborhood. They’re doing it because they’re not interested or because they can’t. So there are clearly examples of immigrants who are not assimilating because they’re not interested. In a lot of cases, these are immigrants from developed countries who are just planning on being here a few years.
But it’s very clear that immigrants who are illegal — undocumented, whatever you want to call them — they don’t have quite the same incentive. But even if they want to assimilate, there are barriers in their way. And those barriers are in the form of official policy, which prevents them from taking some of these actions.
Kokai: Some people might say, “So what? Why is it bad that some groups are not assimilating as well as others?”
Vigdor: Any time you hear somebody talking about concerns about the rise of Spanish as America’s second language, any time you hear people concerned about the fact that America is full of a lot of people who aren’t citizens and may not have the best interests of the country at heart, that is a concern about assimilation. And this is the problem. I think there is a lot of evidence out there to show that countries where people share a common language, where people share a common interest in the well-being of the country, these nations function better. And I think as we think about American competitiveness as a nation going forward, we have to be concerned about this.
Kokai: You mentioned that nations or states in which the assimilation progresses better — or where there’s more unity in the language, the work force participation — perform better. And in fact, you said that there is a technical economic term that shows this is, in fact, true.
Vigdor: You bet. We economists talk about ethno-linguistic fractionalization. It’s actually a term that wasn’t invented by economists. It was invented by linguists, who are the natural people who study language. But it’s something we picked up on. The first studies were done in sub-Saharan Africa, where a lot of countries have a lot of political problems and the economic growth is very poor. What a lot of studies have shown is that these indicators of political strength of a country — by political strength, I mean the absence of corruption — if you look at economic growth, those things correlate with the extent to which people speak a common language, the extent to which people envision themselves as members of the same nationality, rather than members of sort of bifurcated ethnic or tribal groups.
And so this evidence has also been shown in the United States as well, that in parts of the country where there is a greater commonality among people — and you can define that in lots of different ways; it could be by education level, it could be by age — where there is commonality, where people feel like they have something in common, economic growth tends to be better. It’s just easier. Just imagine trying to conduct business with someone where you don’t share a common language. It’s more difficult. And this is why language matters. It’s not just some sort of preference for people not to hear “press one for English” on the telephone. This is a real obstacle to doing business, and it’s an obstacle to having a political conversation as well.
Kokai: Part of your presentation also touched on the various means that people have put forward as ways of addressing illegal immigration and pointing out the problems that each of them would create for assimilation. And you offered a different idea. … What is your idea, and why do you think that would work better than the other ideas that have been put forward?
Vigdor: Sure. The simple way to describe it is that my proposal would involve immigrants posting a bond. Right now, to come into the United States legally, the fees associated with that are fairly low — a few hundred dollars for a visa, a few hundred dollars for a green card, a few hundred dollars to go through naturalization. My proposal would involve increasing the price. A ballpark number that I’ve put out there is $10,000, but just imagine a larger number than what we have now. Then also imagine that we’re going to increase the legal avenues toward immigration. Not everybody agrees with that; some people [think] we need to reduce legal immigration.
But this proposal would involve increasing the avenue — widening the avenue you might say — and then the part of it that’s really important in terms of encouraging assimilation would be to offer rebates of this up-front fee. Now that’s why it’s a bond. It’s something that you post up front, and you get a lot of the money back. So you come to the United States, you pay money up front, but then the longer you spend in the United States, provided that you take certain actions, you get the money back. If you become a naturalized citizen, there would not be a fee for that. There would be a rebate. If you come to the United States not knowing how to speak English but you complete a course in conversational English, you get a rebate for that.
If you pay taxes, you get, with your tax refund or as a rebate against your taxes, you can get some of your initial fee back. In the end, what this means is that an immigrant who comes to the United States with the idea of becoming a long-term, permanent resident of the country, at the end of the day, they don’t pay very much. But someone who comes to the United States with the idea of just staying for a little while and making some money, that kind of person is going to be discouraged by this policy.