Whether you think federal limits on immigration should be tight or loose, whether the government should do more or less to tackle illegal immigration, you’re likely to agree it’s a good thing when the immigrants who are here assimilate well into the surrounding society. That’s a topic of interest to Jacob Vigdor, associate professor of public policy studies and economics at Duke University and author of the Index of Immigrant Assimilation, released by the Manhattan Institute. He discussed the index 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, tell us, what does this index, based on some research you’ve done, tell us about assimilation of immigrants to the United States?
Vigdor: What we’ve tried to do is track the assimilation of immigrants, their similarity with the native-born population, going back more than 100 years to 1900. What we’ve found is, the progress that immigrants make these days compared to the progress of immigrants 100 years ago, is fairly strong in most cases, but not all.
Kokai: You’re saying it’s strong. How do you measure that?
Vigdor: What we do is, we’re looking along three dimensions. There is an economic dimension, a civic dimension, and a cultural dimension. So we look, starting when immigrants first arrived in the United States – the Census Bureau will capture these people during Census enumerations – and we see how well are they doing economically. Have they become naturalized citizens? Can they speak English? Have they adopted some of the other cultural patterns of the native-born population? So we had to see how much progress they make over time. We see them when they first arrive. We see them after a few years. And what we found, especially in recent years, immigrants, when they first arrive, are very distinct from the native-born population, but then as they spend a few years in the United States, they make a lot of progress.
Kokai: And this has happened at a greater pace than in the past?
Vigdor: The pace is faster. If you look at the immigrant population as a whole, the pace is faster than it was 100 years ago, but not every group is exhibiting the same pace.
Kokai: You mentioned that at the top, and I was going to get back to that. There [is] one group that stands out: people from Mexico.
Vigdor: That’s right. And if you think about the immigration policy debates we’re having these days, Mexican immigrants – that’s the largest group by a wide margin – it’s roughly one out of every three immigrants in the United States are born in Mexico. That group is assimilating more slowly than most other groups today and the groups that we have historical information on – the Italians and the eastern European immigrants of 100 years ago.
Kokai: What information do you have about the ways in which Mexicans are assimilating more slowly? In what ways are they at a slower pace than some other immigrants?
Vigdor: It’s interesting, because a lot of people focus on language as their indicator of assimilation, and it’s true the Mexicans aren’t showing a lot of progress in learning English, but then again, immigrants of other nationalities aren’t, either, so it’s not necessarily the language that makes the Mexican immigrants stand out. It’s the other dimensions. It’s the economic progress and the civic progress that we don’t see in the Mexican population. They’re not moving up the economic ladder very rapidly. They don’t become naturalized citizens at a very high rate.
Kokai: Does your research point to reasons why?
Vigdor: There are really two explanations for it, and both of them are probably true to some extent. One explanation is that Mexican immigrants – because they come here primarily for economic reasons and they have a strong expectation of going home some day – they don’t have quite the same incentive to try to fit in, to try to become a naturalized citizen. And they’re, by and large, less educated than a lot of the native-born population, and that cuts off some of their economic progress as well. The other explanation is that, even for those Mexican immigrants who want to fit in, to blend in and become more assimilated, they can’t if they’re not legal residents of the United States. If you’re illegal, then you can’t become a naturalized citizen, and there are certain avenues of economic improvement that are completely shut off to you. So even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. And the other question is, maybe they don’t want to.
Kokai: So some people are going to hear us speaking and they’ll say, what does that mean? What do you think this information should lead to, in terms of policy changes or policy ideas?
Vigdor: What we don’t intend the index report to do is settle the debate, saying that this side is right and the other side is wrong. The immigration debate, to a large extent, involves values. There is the question of enforcement of existing laws, and there’s the question of the reality of the fact that there is this strong economic incentive for immigration to occur. Depending on what your values are, one side or the other in the debate might sound better. What we’re hoping to do is provide something that looks like objective information, and we have no particular agenda with putting this information forward. We’d like to inform the debate. I think what it does point out is that there is a problem here. If you’ve been listening to and following the political races this year, immigration is an issue that’s fallen off the table a little bit, largely because people don’t want to deal with it because it is an issue that divides people a lot, and if you want to make a political sound bite that sounds good to everybody, you can’t take one side or the other because you’re going to make somebody mad. And what we’re trying to emphasize here is, hey, this is what the status quo looks like in the United States, and there are certain aspects of the status quo that are troubling. It is troubling that we have a large immigrant population here that is not assimilating, that they are not adopting the cultural, economic, or civic patterns of the native-born population. This is not something that anybody would really tell you that they want. So there are two ways out of it, really. Some people will go for one way, and some will go for the other. A compromise would be great if we could actually get these people to the same table to talk about it, but the message here is that, let’s continue the conversation, because the other option is to stop talking about it, accept the status quo, which has some real problems with it.
Kokai: What would be some of the problems if we continue on this pace of having most immigrants assimilating pretty well, better than they have in the past, but Mexican immigrants continuing to lag behind, even as they are the largest immigrant group?
Vigdor: It’s a problem from both perspectives, so if you are of the opinion that we need to have tighter enforcement of the borders, then the evidence that these Mexicans are not assimilating – this sort of feeds that concern to some extent. It says, look, these people are getting in, but once they’re here, they can’t fit in the way these more successful immigrant groups have, and so that’s a problem. From the other perspective, the illegal immigrants who are not assimilating well, by virtue of the fact that they are not here legally, they can’t come to use the court system, they don’t have the full set of rights that an ordinary resident would have, so in the shadows of the labor market they are a vulnerable population. So whether you are of the opinion that they all need to go home, that we need to modify our laws to accept the economic reality that they’re here, there is a problem with the way that they are living and that they’re not fully entitled to the same privileges that the rest of us are, and that’s not the kind of society that most people want to live in, I don’t think.
Kokai: Do you get the sense that the problem that you identify causes the sort of circular issue – that people who are concerned about immigrants are concerned to some extent because they’re different, and because of the way the policy is set up now, those who are different are having a harder time becoming similar to the rest of the society, and it just feeds on itself.
Vigdor: I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s a big component of the concern these days. A lot of people draw parallels between what’s happening now and what happened back about 90 to 100 years ago with the debates over immigration policy then. The problem is more severe in a lot of respects now. Immigration has grown more rapidly over the past 15 years than it did in the period between 1900 and 1920, and we have this issue that back in the early part of the 20th century, immigrants came from all over the place. They spoke lots of different languages, and they tended to all concentrate on learning English because they needed a common language. Now there is a set of immigrants here in the early 21st century where half the immigrants come speaking Spanish, and there are networks of Spanish-speaking immigrants in almost every major American city. So they don’t necessarily have to learn English to get by. And that does create some tension.