THE NEW AMERICANS, edited by Mary Waters and Reed Ueda, 736 pp., Harvard University Press, $45
CONGRESS may have failed to pass President Bush’s controversial immigration reform bill, but the immigrants are going to keep coming.
The numbers alone are staggering. More than 35 million of today’s U.S. residents, or close to 13 percent of the population, are foreign born. Global economic realities, most importantly among them our need for a steady stream of foreign workers to keep our economy growing, attract 1.5 million more every year. And unless we figure out a way to repeal the laws of geography, demography and economic supply and demand, this flow will continue into the foreseeable future – an all but ineluctable reality of our era.
“The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965” (edited by Mary Waters and Reed Ueda) tries to grapple with this fact and its far-reaching consequences in a one-volume encyclopedia: 59 essays, 20 of them general and theoretical, the rest portraits of particular national or ethnic groups. The editors and authors are all academics, mostly of the same school of thought: generally pro-immigrant, mildly multiculturalist, somewhat assimilationist (though most avoid that word). The book is a useful primer; at once a wealth of information and a telling snapshot of current academic opinion on that all-important topic, assimilation.
Are today’s immigrants becoming Americans as generations did before them? Alarmists, largely on the right, exaggerate the potential threat: the empirical evidence doesn’t suggest – not even close – that we face the prospect of a permanent underclass or of Balkanization along the lines of, say, the former Yugoslavia or even Canada and Quebec.
Still, the stakes could hardly be higher. By 2050, 25 percent of Americans will be Hispanic, and if they’re not fully integrated – fully productive, each living up to his or her full potential, fully secure in a sense of belonging, fully loyal – we as a nation will be in trouble. We simply can’t afford to fail – can’t afford an ethnically coded caste barrier between the “knowledge class” and the backward “working poor.”
This is not the central theme of what is, after all, an encyclopedia, and the editors make no argument about anything beyond the centrality of immigration in our day. So no single chapter brings together the data on assimilation. Yet these numbers are scattered throughout the book.
The chapter on language, for one, is written as a lament – how sad that so few in the second generation hold onto the language of their parents. Still, if you search, you find the good news hidden beneath the gloomy argument: Though 47 million Americans live in households where a language other than English is spoken, virtually everyone in the second generation (98 percent) speaks and understands English well; by the third generation, eight in 10 young people speak only English.
So too with the chapter on education: The argument is about reasons for failure and shortcomings. And yes, there are dark spots – nationalities that are lagging and need help. But most of the data is deeply encouraging: In almost every group, an upward trajectory from first to second generation. Consider college completion, not just for high-achieving nationalities (41 percent of first-generation Chinese have a degree, 76 percent of their kids do), but also those in the middle and at the low end of the rankings (19 percent of Vietnamese newcomers have diplomas compared to 55 percent of their children; 5 percent of first-generation Salvadorans but 21 percent of those born here).
And so it goes: Read about intermarriage, ethnic politics, even ethnic media. There’s good news in every chapter – less separatism and more inclusion than you expect. There’s also a new spirit among many of the authors: a hopeful interest in assimilation and a fresh, encouraging effort to find ways to talk about it.
Because that’s where we have to start. Right now, though this is arguably the most important challenge facing the nation, we don’t even have a word for it and can’t agree on what’s required. We need to be doing more – much more – to make it happen.
We need more English classes. We need to guide newcomers toward becoming citizens. We need to help them help themselves – navigating the system, putting down roots, getting their kids to college, getting ahead. “The New Americans” isn’t exactly a call to action – it isn’t meant to be. But vocabulary and ideas help, and it’s a useful start.
Tamar Jacoby is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.