It is well known by now that immigration is changing the face of America. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the number of foreign-born persons in the United States surged to 28 million in 2000 and now represents 12 percent of the total population, the highest figures in a century. In New York City, 54 percent of the population is of foreign stock -- that is, immigrants and children of immigrants. The figure increases to 62 percent in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and to an amazing 72 percent in Miami. All around us, in these cities and elsewhere, the sounds of foreign languages and the sights of a kaleidoscope of cultures are readily apparent. But the long-term consequences are much less well known.
A driving force behind today's immigrant wave is the labor needs of theAmerican economy. While those needs encompass a substantial demand for immigrantengineers and computer programmers in high-tech industries, the vast majority oftoday's immigrants are employed in menial, low-paying jobs. The reasons whyemployers in agribusiness, construction, landscaping, restaurants, hotels, andmany other sectors want this foreign labor are quite understandable. Immigrantsprovide an abundant, diligent, docile, vulnerable, and low-cost labor pool wherenative workers willing to toil at the same harsh jobs for minimum pay have allbut disappeared.
The same agribusiness, industrial, and service firms that profit from thislabor have extracted from Congress ingenious loopholes to ensure the continuedimmigrant flow, both legal and undocumented. Most notable is the requirement,created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, that employers mustcertify that their employees have proper documents without having to establishtheir validity. Predictably, an entire industry of fraudulent papers has emerged.Would-be workers at construction sites and similar places often are told to go get "their papers" and return the following day. Through such subterfuges, firmsdemanding low-wage labor have continued to receive a steady supply, thusguaranteeing their profitability.
Defenders of this free flow portray it as a win-win process: Immigrantsseeking a better life and the businesses that need their labor both gain.Opponents denounce it as a kind of invasion, as if employers did not welcomethese workers. But this debate sidesteps a more consequential one: What becomesof the children of these immigrants? Business may think of them as nothing butcheap labor -- indeed, that's why many business groups support pure braceroprograms of temporary "guestworkers." But the vast majority of these immigrantswant what everyone else wants: families.
So the short-term benefits of migration must be balanced against what happensnext. The human consequences of immigration come in the form of children born totoday's immigrants. Immigrant children and children of immigrants already number14.1 million -- one in five of all Americans aged 18 and under -- and that figureis growing fast. A large proportion of this new second generation is growing upunder conditions of severe disadvantage. The low wages that make foreign workersso attractive to employers translate into poverty and inferior schooling fortheir children. If these youngsters were growing up just to replace their parentsas the next generation of low-paid manual workers, the present situation could goon forever. But this is not how things happen.
Children of immigrants do not grow up to be low-paid foreign workers but U.S.citizens, with English as their primary language and American-style aspirations.In my study with Rubén G. Rumbaut of more than 5,200 second-generationchildren in the Miami and San Diego school systems, we found that 99 percentspoke fluent English and that by age 17 less than a third maintained any fluencyin their parents' tongues. Two-thirds of these youths had aspirations for acollege degree and a professional-level occupation. The proportion aspiring to apostgraduate education varied significantly by nationality, but even among themost impoverished groups the figures were high.
The trouble is that poor schools, tough neighborhoods, and the lack of rolemodels to which their parents' poverty condemns them make these lofty aspirationsan unreachable dream for many. Among Mexican parents, the largest group in our survey as well as in the total immigrant population, just 2.6 percent had acollege education. Even after controlling for their paltry human capital, Mexicanimmigrants' incomes are significantly lower than those of workers with comparableeducation and work experience. Similar conditions were found among other sizableimmigrant groups such as Haitians, Laotians, Nicaraguans, and Cambodians.Children born to these immigrants are caught between the pitiful jobs held bytheir parents and an American future blocked by a lack of resources and suitabletraining. Add to this the effects of race discrimination -- because the majorityof today's second generation is nonwhite by present U.S. standards -- and thestage is set for serious trouble.
The future of children growing up under these conditions is not entirelyunknown, for there are several telling precedents. Journalistic and scholarlywritings concerning the nearly five million young inner-city Americans who arenot only unemployed but unemployable -- and the more than 300,000 young men ofcolor who crowd the American prison system -- commonly neglect to mention thatthis underclass population did not materialize out of thin air but is the humanaftermath of earlier waves of labor migration. The forebears of today's urbanunderclass were the southern-black and Puerto Rican migrants who moved to theindustrializing cities of the Northeast and Midwest in the mid-twentieth centuryin search of unskilled factory employment. They too willingly performed thepoorly paid menial jobs of the time and were, for that reason, preferred byindustrial employers. Yet when their children and grandchildren grew up, theyfound the road into the American middle class blocked by poverty, lack oftraining, and discrimination. The entrapment of this redundant population inAmerican inner cities is the direct source of the urban underclass and thenightmarish world of drugs, gangs, and violence that these cities battle everyday.
Children of poor immigrants are encountering similar and even more difficultconditions of blocked opportunity and external discrimination. In thepostindustrial era, the American labor market has come to resemble a metaphorichourglass, with job opportunities concentrated at the top (in professional andtechnical fields requiring an advanced education) and at the bottom (in low-paidmenial services and agriculture). New migrants respond by crowding into thebottom of the hourglass, but their children, imbued with American-styleaspirations, resist accepting the same jobs. This means that they must bridge inthe course of a single generation the gap between their parents' low educationand the college-level training required to access well-paid nonmenial jobs. Thosewho fail, and there are likely to be many, are just a step short of the samelabormarket redundancy that has trapped descendants of earlier black and PuertoRican migrants.
Assimilation under these conditions does not lead upward into the U.S. middleclass but downward into poverty and permanent disadvantage. This outcome is notthe fault of immigrant parents or their children but of the objective conditionswith which they must cope. All immigrants are imbued with a strong success drive-- otherwise they wouldn't have made the uncertain journey to a new land -- andall have high ambitions for their children. But family values and a strong workethic do not compensate for the social conditions that these children face.
Parents' educational expectations are quite high, even higher than theirchildren's. Expectations vary significantly by nationality, but among all groups,50 percent or more of parents believe that their offspring will attain a collegedegree. Yet the resources required to achieve this lofty goal -- parentaleducation, family income, quality of schools attended -- often are not there. Thedifferences found among immigrant nationalities are illustrated in charts 1 and2, which show the wide disparities in parents' income and education and in theirchildren's attendance at poor inner-city schools. Groups that comprise thelargest and fastest-growing components of contemporary immigration, primarilyMexicans, have the lowest human-capital endowments and incomes, and theirchildren end up attending mostly inner-city schools.
Effects of these disparities do not take long to manifest themselves in theform of school achievement and the probability of dropping out of school.Parental education and occupation are consistently strong predictors ofchildren's school achievement. Each additional point in parental socioeconomicstatus (a composite of parents' education, occupation, and home ownership)increases math-test scores by 8 percentile points and reading by 9 points inearly adolescence (after controlling for other variables). Living in a familywith both parents present also increases performance significantly and reducesthe chances of leaving school. Growing up in an intact family and attending asuburban school in early adolescence cuts down the probability of dropping out byhigh school by a net 11 percent, or approximately half the average dropout rate(again controlling for other variables).
Differences in academic outcomes are illustrated in chart 3, which presentsmath-test scores and school-inactivity rates of immigrants' children, againbroken down by nationality. While the correlation is not perfect, the groups withthe lowest family incomes and educational endowments -- and highest probabilityof attending inner-city schools -- also tend to produce the most disadvantagedchildren, both in terms of test scores and the probability of achieving ahigh-school diploma.
At San Diego's Hoover High, there's a group that calls itself theCrazy Brown Ladies. They wear heavy makeup, or "ghetto paint," and reservederision for classmates striving for grades ("schoolgirls" is the Ladies' labelfor these lesser beings). Petite Guatemalan-born Iris de la Puente never joinedthe Ladies, but neither did she make it through high school. The daughter of agardener and a seamstress, she has lived alone with her mother for several years,since her father was deported and did not return. Mrs. de la Puente repeatedlyexhorted Iris to stay in school, but her message was empty. The pressure of workkept the mother away from home for many hours, and her own modest education andlack of English fluency did not give her a clue how to help Iris. By ninth grade,the girl's grade-point average had fallen to a C and she was just hanging inthere, hoping for a high-school diploma. When junior year rolled around, it wasall over. "Going to college would be nice, but it was clear that it was not forme," Iris said. Getting a job, no matter how poorly paid, became the only option.As far as the immigrant second generation is concerned, it simply is not truethat "where there's a will, there's a way." No matter how ambitious parents and children are, no matter how strong their family values and dreams of making it inAmerica, the realities of poverty, discrimination, and poor schools becomeimpassable barriers for many. Like Iris de la Puente, these youths find that thedream of a college education is just that. The same children growing up in innercities encounter a ready alternative to education in the drug gangs and streetculture that already saturate their environment. The emergence of a "rainbowunderclass" that includes the offspring of many of today's immigrants is anominous but distinct possibility.
The short-term economic benefits of immigration are easy to understand andequally easy to appropriate by the urban firms, ranches, and farms that employthis labor, ensuring their profitability. Absent heroic social supports, thelong-term consequences are borne by children growing up under conditions of severe disadvantage and by society at large. If the United States wants to keepindulging its addiction to cheap foreign workers, it had better do so with fullawareness of what comes next. For immigrants and their children are people, notjust labor, and they cannot be dismissed so easily when their work is done. Theaftermath of immigration depends on what happens to these children. The prospectsfor many, given the obstacles at hand, appear dim.
Check out the Politics of Family special page, with links, articles and web-exclusive features!
