Copyright EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via AN: 817344 ; Prof. Alejandro Portes, Prof. Rubn G. Rumbaut.; Immigrant America : A Portrait Account: loyola 2014. University of California Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Immigrant America A Portrait Fourth Edition Revised, Updated, and Expanded Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut U ni v ersi t y of C alifor ni a Pr ess EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Immigrant America EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Immigrant America A Portrait Fourth Edition Revised, Updated, and Expanded Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut U ni v ersi t y of C alifor ni a Pr ess EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its ­activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and ­institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Portes, Alejandro, 1944– author. Immigrant America : a portrait / Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut. — Fourth edition, revised, updated, and expanded.    pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-27402-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)   isbn 978-0-520-95915-6 (ebook) 1. Immigrants—United States—History. 2. United States—Emigration and immigration—History. 3. Americanization—History. I. Rumbaut, Rubén G., author. II. Title. jv6450.p67 2014 304.8’73—dc23 2014018276 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 10 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper). EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use To Patricia and Irene EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Preface to the Fourth Edition Preface to the Third Edition Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Acknowledgments for the Fourth Edition Acknowledgments for the Third Edition Acknowledgments for the Second Edition Acknowledgments for the First Edition ix xiii xvii xxi xxv xxvii xxxi xxxiii xxxvii xxxix 1. The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration 1 2. Theoretical Overview 48 3. Moving: Patterns of Immigrant Settlement and Spatial Mobility 80 Making It in America: Education, Occupation, and Entrepreneurship 112 From Immigrants to Ethnics: Identity, Citizenship, and Political Participation 161 4. 5. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 6. Language: Diversity and Resilience 214 7. Growing Up American: The New Second Generation 258 8. Religion: The Enduring Presence 306 9. Conclusion: Immigration and Public Policy 371 Notes References Index EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 395 419 475 Illustrations Plates follow pages 148 and 348 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Evolution of the foreign-born population of the United States / 25 Changing labor markets / 28 Deportations from the United States, 1965–​2009 / 33 The foreign-born population in the United States by county, 2000 / 88 The foreign-born in the United States as a percentage of total county population, 2000 / 89 States and metropolitan areas of immigrant concentration, 2010 / 90 Concentration and diversification, 2010 / 91 Annual incomes by nationality and different human capital and gender profiles / 146 Monthly earnings by nationality and different human capital and gender profiles / 147 Transnational connections of Chinese immigrant organizations / 181 Population change by race/ethnicity in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas, 2000–​2010 / 206 Population by race/ethnicity / 207 ix EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use x  |  Illustrations 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. Percentage of persons who spoke a language other than English at home, by county, 2000 / 222 English fluency of immigrants by age at arrival, education, and decade of arrival, 2010 / 234 Language shift and bilingualism by generation / 239 Dimensions of non-English language proficiency by generation / 240 Language retention and acquisition among immigrant groups / 245 Types of language adaptation and their social-psychological correlates / 248 Regressions of annual earnings on levels of bilingualism among young adults in Southern California / 251 Type of immigration, social context of settlement, and predicted community and linguistic outcomes / 253 The racial identities of children of immigrants / 274 Educational aspirations and expectations of children of immigrants, selected nationalities / 276 Immigrant parents’ concern with negative influences on their children, 1996 / 278 Paths of mobility across generations / 280 Determinants of educational attainment of children of immigrants in early adulthood, 2002–​2003 / 292 Determinants of occupational attainment of children of immigrants in early adulthood, 2002–​2003 / 293 Determinants of upward assimilation among children of immigration in early adulthood, 2002–​2003 / 293 Religion and immigrant incorporation: Interaction effects / 312 Religiosity of forty-four selected countries and per capita gross domestic product / 315 Frequency of religious attendance by birth cohort and nativity / 317 Religious affiliation in the second generation / 324 Religious attendance in the second generation / 325 Downward assimilation by religion in the second generation / 327 Downward assimilation by frequency of religious attendance / 328 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Illustrations  |  xi 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. Religious affiliation and indicators of downward assimilation in the second generation / 329 Frequency of religious attendance and indicators of downward assimilation in the second generation / 329 Frequency of religious attendance and indicators of downward assimilation in Los Angeles / 335 Religion and its types across generations / 337 The immigration policy disconnect / 377 Immigrant labor and the native class structure / 380 Alternative political scenarios of immigration: A typology / 382 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Tables 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. Decennial immigration to the United States, 1880–​1919 / 4 Percentage of foreign-born among white male gainful workers, ten years of age or older, 1910 / 7 Mexican immigration to the United States, 1881–​1950 / 14 Proportion urban: White, native white, and foreign-born white / 16 Immigration and the American labor force, 1900–​1935 / 19 The Bracero Program and clandestine migrant apprehensions, 1946–​1972 / 20 A typology of contemporary immigrants to the United States / 30 The H-1B program, 2008–​2009 / 39 Top six states by size of the foreign-born population, 1990, 2000, and 2010; top ten states by percent growth of the foreign-born, 1990 to 2010 / 92 States of principal settlement of the ten largest foreign-born groups, 2010 / 93 Metropolitan destinations of the ten largest new legal immigrant groups, 2011 / 95 Metropolitan destinations of the five major refugee groups admitted in 1987, 1993, 2001, and 2010 / 99 Destinations of major immigrant nationalities obtaining legal permanent residence in selected years / 102 xiii EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xiv  |  Tables 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. Educational attainment of principal immigrant nationalities in 2010 / 114 Educational attainment of U.S. immigrants age twenty-five and older, 2010, by region of birth and last decade of arrival / 117 Immigrant groups with highest proportions of college-educated persons in the United States in 2010 and characteristics of countries of origin / 120 Labor-force participation and professional specialty occupations of selected immigrant groups, 2010 / 123 Principal countries of emigration by category of admission, 2010 / 125 Self-employment among selected immigrant groups, 2010 / 128 Minority firm ownership and indicators of firm performance, 2007 / 130 Median annual household incomes and poverty rates of principal immigrant nationalities and regions of origin, 2010 / 133 Determinants of adult immigrant economic outcomes / 144 Naturalizations for selected countries and regions, 2002–​ 2011 / 184 Median years of U.S. residence, by year of naturalization and region of birth, 1995–​2011 / 187 Rates of U.S. naturalization for immigrants who arrived before 2005, by national origin, 2010 / 188 The Spanish-origin vote in the Southwest / 195 Self-reported race of children of immigrants and their parents, by national origin groups, 1995–​1996 / 205 Types of immigrants in the United States and their political orientations / 208 Determinants of political transnationalism among Latin American immigrants / 210 Language diversity in the United States, 1980 –​2010 / 220 Percentage of population who speak a non-English language at home, by states and metropolitan areas, in rank order, ca. 2010 / 224 Main languages spoken in the United States and nativity of speakers, ca. 2010 / 225 Language spoken at home and related social characteristics for the largest immigrant groups and the native-born, 2010 / 228 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Tables  |  xv 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. English-speaking ability of immigrants from largest source countries, 2010 / 230 Ability to speak English “very well” by age at U.S. arrival, decade of arrival, and highest education attained, among selected immigrant groups who speak a language other than English at home, 2010 / 232 The new second generation at a glance, 2008 / 265 Human capital, modes of incorporation, present situation, and expectations of immigrant parents, 1995–​1996 / 267 The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study: First and follow-up student surveys / 272 Fluent bilingualism as an indicator of selective acculturation in adolescence: Family and psychosocial effects / 283 Effects of selected predictors on the early educational attainment of second-generation students / 285 Assimilation outcomes across generations, ca. 2000 / 289 Adaptation outcomes of children of immigrants in early adulthood, 2003 / 291 Religious identification in the United States, 1972–​2002: Current religion by period, cohort, generation, and education / 316 Net relationships of religious affiliation and participation with major adaptation outcomes in the second generation / 330 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Preface to the Fourth Edition This book, a study of the odysseys of millions of newcomers from all over the world to the United States, has itself been an odyssey. We began work on the first edition of Immigrant America, our portrait of a rapidly evolving and permanently unfinished reality, in the 1980s. Over the ensuing decades each new edition of this book—​as summed up in its prefaces of 1990, 1996, and 2006—​has sought to depict and explain major changes in the size, composition, and forms of U.S.-bound international migration flows; the immigrants’ patterns of settlement and modes of incorporation in the American economy, polity, and culture; and the societal reaction to these newcomers and their children. Each edition has seen the introduction of entirely new chapters—​on the second generation, religion, immigration policies—​and the revision, expansion, and thorough updating of all others, the book itself changing to reflect a world on the move. This fourth edition is no exception, although in two respects—​the addition of the opening chapters on history and theory—​it differs notably from its predecessors. We seek in these new chapters to fill a vacuum noted in the course of teaching the book at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Rather than beginning with vignettes and a typology of contemporary immigrants to illustrate the diversity of their class and national origins and their contexts of exit and reception, we start with an analysis of three distinct phases spanning the last 134 years: (1) the Great European Waves of the period from 1880 to 1930, which accomxvii EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xviii   |   Preface to the Fourth Edition panied the American industrial revolution and reached a historic zenith in 1910, when 14.7 percent of the total population was foreign-born, and ended with the triumph of restrictionist legislation; (2) a period of retrenchment from 1930 to 1970, which spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and its aftermath, reaching a historic nadir in 1970, when only 4.7 percent of the population was foreign-born; and (3) a period of rebound from 1970 to the present, which remains the focus of the book—​an era of economic restructuring, widening economic inequality, and the sharply increased migration of low-wage laborers, professionals, entrepreneurs, refugees, and asylees, combining to reach a foreign-born total of forty million by 2010. Migration during this new era grew by more than a million a year, ending with the Great Recession and unprecedented state persecution of millions of undocumented immigrants. This state policy included the creation of a vast network of immigrant detention centers and historic deportation levels, even as unauthorized migration decreased to net zero. One leitmotif of the book is the counterpoint between the widespread demand for immigrant labor by different sectors of the American economy and the activities of nativists and xenophobes across the three successive phases of U.S.-bound immigration. Indeed, throughout successive chapters we look to the historical record to place present concerns in a broader comparative context. History does not repeat itself, but it does echo. The second chapter adds a needed theoretical anchor for the rest of the book. To be sure, there is no comprehensive theory of international migration, but we systematically review a wide range of theories organized into four major categories: (1) those that seek to explain the determinants of the origins of migration, (2) those that examine its continuation and directionality, (3) those that address the problematics of migrant labor, and (4) those that focus on the patterns of migrant settlement and adaptation. We aim to show how these theoretical considerations, from classic studies to competing contemporary emphases, apply to the condition of different immigrant minorities and their descendants—​and we incorporate them in subsequent chapters as we examine their patterns of settlement (and the emergence of “new destinations”), economic and political adaptation, resilient and emergent ethnicities, language and religion, transnationalism and assimilation, and intra- and intergenerational change. Our final chapter aims to lay out the basis for a sound understanding of the origins of contemporary immigration and for viable policies regarding it. Here we dissect the disconnect between the public percep- EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Preface to the Fourth Edition   |   xix tion of immigration, as reflected at the surface level of policy debates and shifting currents of public opinion, and the underlying realities rooted in the political economy of the nation and in the historical linkages between the United States and immigrants’ countries of origin. Two prevailing ideologies toward immigrants that resonate with the general population—​to exclude them or assimilate them—​seldom succeed in their intended goals, leading instead to a host of policy contradictions and resulting in tensions and unintended consequences. The social sciences have not been very good at predicting specific major events—​the literature is littered with failed grand predictions—​but we can anticipate with reasonable confidence other phenomena, steady states, and trends, which we spell out in some detail. The importance of alternative outcomes will largely determine the extent to which the nation will be able to maintain its economic viability and political leadership in a changing global system. As long-term participant observers of immigration, we have seen changes cascade, not trickle, in each of the preceding decades. But while immigrant America continues to change, as does the world that spawns it, the goal that originally inspired this book, and the fruitful collaboration that has now spanned three decades, remains the same, and evergreen: to grasp the diversity and underlying structures of a new age of migration, to make reasoned sense of complex and controversial issues, and to make our living portrait of immigrant America accessible to both the specialist and a general public eager to cut through stereotype and cliché to learn about the newest members of American society. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Preface to the Third Edition We began to write this book more than twenty years ago—​between the Mariel boat lift and the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, at a time of “compassion fatigue” and heightened concern over undocumented immigration from Mexico, in the heyday of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement and of less visible flows of tens of thousands of escapees from murderous wars in Central America who were not deemed bona fide political refugees in the context of the Cold War. Not long before, in 1970, the U.S. Census had found that the foreign-born accounted for only 4.7 percent of the total population—​the lowest proportion since 1850, when it first recorded the country of birth of U.S. residents. But in the preface to the first edition, we noted that after a lapse of half a century, this “permanently unfinished” society was being transformed yet again by immigration. We had already been systematically studying the phenomenon for years—​indeed, we had lived it—​but we could not foresee with precision just how “unfinished” a society it was, or how transformed it would become, or how dramatically the larger world would change. In this third edition, we bring this extraordinary story up-to-date. Immigration is a transformative force, producing profound and unanticipated social changes in both sending and receiving societies, in intergroup relations within receiving societies, and among the immigrants themselves and their descendants. Immigration is followed predictably not only by acculturative processes on the part of the immixxi EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xxii  |  Preface to the Third Edition grants but also by state policies that seek to control the flows and by varying degrees of nativism and xenophobia on the part of established residents, who may view the alien newcomers as cultural or economic threats. And immigration engenders ethnicity—​collectivities who perceive themselves and are perceived by others to differ in language, religion, “race,” national origin or ancestral homeland, cultural heritage, and memories of a shared historical past. As we show in this book, their modes of incorporation across generations may take a variety of forms—​some leading to greater homogenization and solidarity within the society (or within segments of the society), others to greater ethnic differentiation and heterogeneity. Each edition of Immigrant America has reported the results of the latest decennial census. In 1980, the foreign-born population totaled 14.1 million, or 6.2 percent of the national total; by 1990, it had grown to 19.8 million (7.9 percent); by 2000, to 31.1 million (11.1 percent); and as of this writing, to approximately 37 million (12.5 percent) and growing by more than a million per year. More immigrants came in the 1980s than in any previous decade but one—​1901–​1910, the peak years of mass migration from Europe when the foreign-born population reached 14.7 percent of the U.S. total; and more immigrants came in the 1990s than in any other decade—​a total that may be surpassed in the present decade, adding to the largest immigrant population in history. More consequential still, as we elaborate in these pages, is the commensurate growth of the second generation of their children born and raised in the United States, who are rapidly becoming a key segment of the American society and workforce in the twenty-first century. While the sheer numbers and rates of growth are impressive, the dynamics of immigration and incorporation processes and policies do not take place in a vacuum but must be understood in the complex contexts of global historical change. Ten years ago, in the preface to the second edition, we pointed to such large-scale changes and events as the end of the Cold War and the first Persian Gulf War; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Mexican economy; and the passage of new laws, multinational agreements, and the normalization of relations with the governments of Vietnam and Cambodia (but not with Cuba), among others. Since that time, the world has changed again, in ways that have profoundly affected the contexts of reception of newcomers to the United States—​particularly in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, heightened domestic security concerns, the passage of the PATRIOT Act (and pending legisla- EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Preface to the Third Edition  |  xxiii tion to further tighten immigration controls, declare English as the official national language, and even build a fence across the U.S.-Mexico border), and the reorganization of the U.S. immigration and naturalization bureaucracy within a new Department of Homeland Security. But we also discern the continuity of other patterns that give predictability and structure to immigration flows and adaptation processes, including the sustained demand for immigrant labor by U.S. employers, the enabling presence of social networks of family and friends, the strong tradition of American religious pluralism, and the overriding significance of historical ties between the United States and the countries that account by far for its principal immigrant communities today. In this third edition, we have transformed the book to take into account the profound changes in immigrant America over the past decade. Every chapter has been thoroughly revised, expanded, and updated to reflect the latest available national and regional information, including the 2000 U.S. Census and the most recent Current Population Surveys. We have added sections addressing such topics as patterns of incarceration and paradoxes of acculturation. Where appropriate, we make use of new survey data, including the results of the recently completed third wave of our Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which followed for more than ten years a panel representing scores of immigrant nationalities on both coasts of the United States from adolescence to early adulthood. We have added several new chapters, from an opening chapter that aims to humanize the object of our study through a set of engaging but factual stories; to a new and overdue chapter on religion and immigration, a central topic neglected by the research literature until recently; and a concluding chapter that examines the clash of dominant ideologies and public debates about immigrant exclusion and assimilation with the history and political economy of U.S. immigration, and that suggests alternative policies for both the first and second generations grounded on a firmer grasp of underlying realities. We seek to make reasoned sense of complex and often controversial issues and to make our portrait of immigrant America at the dawn of a new century accessible not just to specialists but to a general audience whose understanding of today’s immigrants can be clouded by media clichés, popular stereotypes, and a new climate of fear. As in the previous editions, the purpose of this book will be fulfilled if the reader finds here a stimulus to gain additional knowledge about the newest members of American society. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Preface to the Second Edition Six years have passed since we completed, in January 1989, the manuscript for the first edition of Immigrant America. In that brief span, the world changed—​and so did immigrant America. The Cold War ended, yet refugee admissions increased significantly; a massive amnesty program for three million formerly unauthorized immigrants was implemented; the Immigration Act of 1990 increased regular immigrant visas by 40 percent over the levels reached in the 1980s; and despite a variety of official efforts to stem the flow, undocumented immigration has not only grown but diversified since 1989. From the collapse of the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s to the collapse of the Mexican economy at mid-decade; from the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990 and the 1993 North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement to the normalization of relations with the governments of Vietnam and Cambodia; from the ill-fated voyage of the Golden Venture, the smuggling ship carrying Chinese immigrants that ran aground off the coast of New York, to the interdiction of thirty thousand Cuban balseros in the Florida Straits and the reversal of a favorable thirty-year U.S. policy toward Cuban émigrés; from Tiananmen Square to the Persian Gulf War to the U.S. interventions in Somalia and Haiti; all of these are but bits and pieces of a larger set of forces that—​ alongside the sustained demand for immigrant labor by U.S. employers, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policies and public opinion, the enabling presence of social networks of family and friends—​have had substantial if often unintended repercussions for immigration flows and policies. xxv EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xxvi   |   Preface to the Second Edition The vertiginous pace of recent historical change requires that we bring our analysis up-to-date, a task that has become all the more compelling in view of the sharply politicized and increasingly acrimonious public debate on immigration issues in the 1990s. Indeed, the past several years have witnessed not only an acceleration of immigration flows into the United States—​the twenty million foreign-born persons counted by the 1990 U.S. Census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, and admissions during the 1990s appear certain to eclipse the record set in the first decade of this century—​but also an intensification of public alarm and nativist resistance to it, exacerbated by the prolonged recession of the early 1990s and capped by the passage in 1994 of Proposition 187 in California, home to fully a third of the nation’s immigrants. As a result, immigration has risen to the top of the policy agenda and become a salient campaign issue in the 1996 presidential elections. Accordingly, we have revised the text to reflect the latest available evidence, making extensive use of the wealth of new data from the 1990 census, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and other sources from a rapidly accumulating research literature through the mid-1990s. The result is a thorough updating of the book; most of the several dozen tables and figures in the first six chapters are new or have been wholly revised, as is their accompanying text. Moreover, two new chapters have been especially written for this second edition. Chapter 7 examines the new second generation of children of immigrants now coming of age in American cities, a vastly understudied topic that nonetheless is key to a serious understanding of the long-term consequences of contemporary immigration for American society. Chapter 8 concludes with an effort not only to critically assess the sometimes paradoxical effects of present policies but also to confront and to specify the policy implications of our own analysis, placing our findings in historical perspective and seeking to tease out the complex dynamics of U.S.-bound immigration. Throughout, we maintain our original analytical approach, focusing on immigration as a process, not an event, and on the diversity of today’s immigrants—​their social origins and contexts of exit and their adaptation experiences and contexts of incorporation. We noted in the preface to the first edition that we sought to grasp at once the diversity and the underlying structures of the new immigration, and to make it accessible to a broader audience whose understanding of today’s immigrants can be clouded by common media clichés and widespread stereotypes. That was and remains the aim of this book. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Preface to the First Edition America, that “permanently unfinished” society, has become anew a nation of immigrants. Not since the peak years of immigration before World War I have so many newcomers sought to make their way in the United States. Each year during the 1980s, an average of six hundred thousand immigrants and refugees have been legally admitted into the country, and a sizable if uncertain number of others enter and remain without legal status, clandestinely crossing the border or overstaying their visas. The attraction of America, it seems, remains as strong as ever—​as does the accompanying ambivalence and even alarm many native-born Americans express toward the newest arrivals. Unlike the older flows, however, today’s immigrants are drawn not from Europe but overwhelmingly from the developing nations of the Third World, especially from Asia and Latin America. The heterogeneous composition of the earlier European waves pales in comparison to the current diversity. Today’s immigrants come in luxurious jetliners and in the trunks of cars, by boat, and on foot. Manual laborers and polished professionals, entrepreneurs and refugees, preliterate peasants and some of the most talented cosmopolitans on the planet—​all are helping reshape the fabric of American society. Immigrant America today differs from that at the turn of the century. The human drama of the story remains as riveting, but the cast of characters and their circumstances have changed in complex ways. The newcomers are different, reflecting in their motives and origins the forces xxvii EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xxviii   |   Preface to the First Edition that have forged a new world order in the second half of this century. And the America that receives them is not the same society that processed the “huddled masses” through Ellis Island, a stone’s throw away from the nation’s preeminent national monument to liberty and new beginnings. As a result, theories that sought to explain the assimilation of yesterday’s immigrants are hard put to illuminate the nature of contemporary immigration. Certainly much has been said and written about the newest inflows, in both the popular and the academic media, and nonspecialists are beginning to get glimpses of the extraordinary stories of ordinary immigrants in the contemporary American context. Missing still is an effort to pull together the many strands of our available knowledge about these matters, to grasp at once the diversity and the underlying structures of the new immigration, and to make it accessible to a general public. Such is the aim of this book. A subject as complex and controversial as recent immigration to the United States cannot, of course, be exhaustively considered within the scope of this or any other single volume. Nor is it our purpose to pre­ sent the results of original research, to assess systematically the myriad impacts of post–​World War II immigration on American institutions, or to cover in any significant depth the trajectories of each of the scores of national groups that are in the process of becoming, with or without hyphens, the newest members of American society. Instead, we have sought to comb through a vast literature and to offer a synthesis of its major aspects in a way that is both comprehensive and comprehensible. Throughout, our focus on today’s immigrants is on the diversity of their origins and contexts of exit and on the diversity of their adaptation experiences and contexts of incorporation. Although the emphasis is on contemporary trends, the discussion seeks to understand present realities in historical perspective and in the context of competing theories of immigrant adaptation. The book consists of seven chapters. “Who They Are and Why They Come” is the basic issue addressed in chapter 1, and a typology of contemporary immigrants that serves to organize the subsequent analysis of their processes of economic, political, social, cultural, and psychological adaptation is proposed. Chapter 2, “Moving,” examines their points of destination and patterns of settlement, and the formation and function of new ethnic communities in urban America. Chapter 3, “Making It in America,” looks at the incorporation of immigrants in the American economy and seeks to explain their differences in educa- EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Preface to the First Edition   |   xxix tion, occupation, entrepreneurship, and income within specific contexts of reception. That is, the economic adaptation of immigrants needs to be understood not merely in terms of their resources and skills but as it is shaped by specific government policies, labor market conditions, and the characteristics of ethnic communities. Chapter 4, “From Immigrants to Ethnics,” analyzes immigrant politics, including the underlying questions of identity, loyalty, and determinants of current patterns of naturalization among newcomers who are “in the society but not of it.” Chapter 5, “A Foreign World,” switches lenses to focus on the psychology of immigrant adaptation, looking at the emotional consequences of varying modes of migration and acculturation, the major determinants of immigrants’ psychological responses to their changed circumstances, and immigrant patterns of mental health and help seeking in different social settings. Chapter 6, “Learning the Ropes,” proceeds to a detailed discussion of English acquisition, the loss or maintenance of bilingualism across generations, and new data on the educational attainment of diverse groups of young immigrants in American public schools. The concluding chapter seeks to clarify the origins of that most controversial segment of today’s immigration—​the illegals—​and to assess how this inflow and its recorded counterpart are likely to affect the nation in years to come. This, then, is a portrait of immigrant America in the waning years of the twentieth century. Like any portrait, selective in its hues and brushstrokes, it is an interpretation of a subject too rich and elusive to be rendered in a single picture. Our goal has been not to reach exclusively colleagues and specialists but rather a broader audience whose understanding of today’s immigrants can be clouded by common media clichés and widespread stereotypes. If the reader finds in this book a challenge to these prevailing views and a stimulus to gain additional knowledge about the newest members of this society, its purpose will have been fulfilled. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Acknowledgments for the Fourth Edition This fourth edition of Immigrant America is dedicated to our spouses, Patricia and Irene, without whose selfless support and encouragement, now counted in decades, the effort to transform this book would not have been possible. We owe a special debt of gratitude to our editor at the University of California Press, Naomi Schneider, who enthusiastically welcomed the idea to bring about this new edition. Naomi has been both our editor and friend for many years, and we are happy to have been able to deliver on her kind and timely invitation. From the first edition to the fourth this book has been graced by dozens of original photographs taken over the past thirty years by Steven J. Gold of Michigan State University. A prominent scholar of immigration and ethnicity, Steve is also among the preeminent visual sociologists of his generation, and his images vividly depict, in ways that words and figures cannot, the extraordinary diversity of this nation of immigrants. Several of the chapters in this new edition draw on primary data gathered from two large-scale surveys: the latest wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) and the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) study, both supported by major grants from the Russell Sage Foundation. We are deeply indebted to Eric Wanner, the former president of the Russell Sage Foundation, and to the foundation’s board, without whose support neither of these research projects would have been possible. xxxi EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xxxii   |   Acknowledgments for the Fourth Edition The work of updating several of the chapters with the latest available data was supported in part by Portes’s graduate assistant at the University of Miami, Adrienne Celaya, and by his secretary at the same institution, Mary Cano. In their respective spheres, both dedicated many hours to the complex tasks of updating and integrating the material going into this edition. Rumbaut also greatly appreciates the indispensable technical assistance provided at key junctures by Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. At Princeton, Portes depended on the talent, efficiency, and stamina of Christine Nanfra, whose tasks included typing and editing endless versions of each successive chapter and assembling the final manuscript for delivery to the University of California Press. Christine qualifies as a third (silent) coauthor of this book, for it was she who brought it to fruition through sustained dedication and unflagging support. Last, but not least, we owe a major debt to the readers of prior editions of this book, in particular the instructors and students who have used it in both graduate and undergraduate courses over the years. The encouragement of many of our colleagues and former students played a decisive role in nudging us along the arduous road to bring forth a new updated and expanded edition. We can only hope that its publication meets, at least in part, their high expectations. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut Princeton and Irvine October 2013 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Acknowledgments for the Third Edition As noted in the preface, successive editions of this book have dovetailed with each of the last three decades and the changes in immigration and global society that they have brought about. This third edition, appearing in the midst of the first decade of a new century and a new millennium, has had to address the multiple changes in the form and content of immigration brought about by sweeping transformations of the global system. Patient readers of this and prior acknowledgment pages will also note that each edition has been preceded and supported by major empirical projects: the first, by Portes’s study of Mariel Cuban and Haitian entrants in South Florida and by Rumbaut’s study of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees and their children in Southern California in the 1980s; the second, by the first two panels of Portes and Rumbaut’s Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), focused on the new second generation, which followed a sample on both coasts of the United States representing a number of different nationalities. This third edition is no exception, as it draws heavily on the third and final survey for the same study (CILS-III), completed after a decade-long span from the original one, at a time when our respondents had reached early adulthood. As with past editions, our debts of gratitude for the present one are mainly due to those who made this final study possible. We thank Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF), who embraced the idea of this new survey from the start, and to the RSF’s board, who xxxiii EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xxxiv   |   Acknowledgments for the Third Edition provided the funds to make it possible. After data collection for the CILS-III survey was completed, RSF first and then the National Science Foundation provided vital support for analyzing the data and bringing results to publication. These data provide the core of chapter 8, dealing with the new second generation (formerly chapter 7), are extensively used in chapter 9 on immigrant religion, and inform our final conclusions and policy recommendations. As with prior waves of the same study, the CILS-III survey was conducted in tandem in two regions of the country, South Florida and Southern California. The South Florida panel, centered in Miami, was directed by William Haller who, with skill and tenacity, led the effort to track and reinterview thousands of respondents to a successful conclusion. Haller was supported by a team of interviewers housed at the Institute for Public Opinion Research (IPOR) of Florida International University. We are indebted to IPOR’s director, Hugh Gladwin; its assistant director, Ann Goraczko; and their staff for the skill and perseverance in conducting fieldwork for the study. Patricia Fernández-Kelly led an ethnographic field team to Miami that carried out detailed interviews with fifty-five respondents stratified by age, socioeconomic status, and nationality. The team included Bill Haller, Lisa Konczal, and Salih Eissa. Materials from this ethnographic module are used extensively in chapters 8 and 9, and we draw on them for our final policy conclusions. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to Patricia and Bill without whose skills and commitment the extensive and demanding fieldwork for the study would not have been completed. The Southern California segment of the project, centered in San Diego, depended on the indispensable collaboration of a staff led by Linda and Norm Borgen. Their work in tracking, locating, and surveying respondents not only in Southern California but throughout the United States was exceptional, and it was followed by their conducting 134 indepth, open-ended interviews with a diverse subsample of CILS respondents. This last effort was supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. After completion of fieldwork, Golnaz Komaie, Charlie V. Morgan, Sheila J. Patel, and Karen J. Robinson at the University of California, Irvine, and Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., also provided valuable research assistance. The authors benefited from a summer fellowship at Oxford University in 2000 for Alejandro Portes, where the idea of going ahead with a new CILS survey began to take form; and from yearlong stays by EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Acknowledgments for the Third Edition    |   xxxv Rubén Rumbaut at the Russell Sage Foundation, where he was a visiting scholar in 1997–​1998, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2000–​2001. The latter fellowship was generously supported by the Hewlett Foundation. In addition to CILS-III, a revised chapter on linguistic acculturation and a new chapter on immigration and religion for the present edition incorporate data from the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) survey supported by another major grant from the Russell Sage Foundation. Rumbaut has served as principal investigator for this project, along with Frank Bean and a team of collaborators that includes Susan Brown, Leo Chávez, Louis DeSipio, Jennifer Lee, and Min Zhou. A number of colleagues have generously given of their time to read and comment on various chapters of this edition. We thank, in particular, Jen’nan Ghazal Read, Louis DeSipio, and Frank Bean at the University of California, Irvine; Min Zhou at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Patricia Fernández-Kelly, Douglas S. Massey, and Miguel Angel Centeno at Princeton University. As with prior editions, the photos included in the present one come from the archives of Steven J. Gold of Michigan State University. A prominent scholar of immigration and ethnicity, Steve has distinguished himself by combining his research and scholarship with a passion for photography. His keen sociological eye is revealed in these photos that, in manifold ways, put “faces” to the ideas and figures discussed in the text. The publication of this book by the University of California Press marks the continuation of a productive two-decade relationship sustained thanks to our longtime editor, Naomi Schneider. She has provided unfailing support to the idea of preparing this revised and expanded edition and has given us needed encouragement to overcome the obstacles and challenges in its path. A dear friend, Naomi has our gratitude for her faith in us and in this project. Last but not least, Barbara McCabe at Princeton University typed and organized successive drafts of each chapter, organized the bibliography, and readied the other ancillary materials required for bringing the book into production. Another dear friend and longtime collaborator, Barbara distinguishes herself for her efficiency, her serenity under stress, and the charm with which she discharges the most demanding duties. The book is dedicated to the memory of our immigrant mothers, Eulalia and Carmen, to whom the first two editions were dedicated EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xxxvi   |   Acknowledgments for the Third Edition while they were still with us. In these last lines, we wish to acknowledge as well our wives, Patricia and Irene, who, along the many years that it took to complete the empirical study and then the book, sustained us with their devotion and their strength. To them our love. Alejandro Portes Princeton University Rubén G. Rumbaut University of California, Irvine April 2006 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Acknowledgments for the Second Edition This new edition has relied extensively on original research carried out during the 1990s by the authors. In particular, since 1989 we have collaborated on a continuing study of children of immigrants in Southern California and South Florida—​the largest such survey to date—​results from which form the core of chapter 7. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation (889.503), the Spencer Foundation, and the National Science Foundation (SBR 9022555), which jointly made this study possible. We are very much indebted to the administrators, principals, and teachers and staff of scores of secondary schools in the San Diego Unified School District and the Dade County and Broward County school districts for their unstinting cooperation throughout the various phases of data collection. We are grateful as well for the generous assistance extended to us by the sociology departments of San Diego State University, Florida International University, Michigan State University, and the Johns Hopkins University, through which the study has been conducted. In San Diego, we have benefited from the extraordinary commitment and competence of our research staff, especially James Ainsworth, Linda Borgen, Norm Borgen, Kevin Keogan, and Laura Lagunas. We appreciate as well the work of a team of over two dozen interviewers fluent in Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, and other Asian languages representative of the immigrant families that have setxxxvii EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xxxviii   |   Acknowledgments for the Second Edition tled in the San Diego area. While the mix of languages is less diverse in South Florida, the effort and capabilities of our research staff there are no less noteworthy. Our colleague Lisandro Pérez, who directed fieldwork in that area from the start, deserves much credit for the success of this challenging research program. So does his Florida International University team of Liza Carbajo, Ana María Pérez, Victoria Ryan, and the trilingual team of interviewers who took the final stage of the survey to successful completion. At Johns Hopkins, Richard Schauffler, Dag MacLeod, and Tomás Rodríguez were responsible for data entry and editing and the management of data files. Their dedicated and professional work made possible the timely analysis of survey data for inclusion in this new edition. We also appreciate the comments on the new chapter 7 by Guillermina Jasso, Aristide Zolberg, Charles Tilly, Douglas Massey, and Patricia Fernández-Kelly. In addition, chapters 5 and 6 have been revised to reflect more recent research supported by grants awarded to Professor Rumbaut, respectively, by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bureau of Health Care Delivery, Division of Maternal and Child Health, for a study of infant health risks and outcomes among low-income immigrants, carried out in collaboration with Professor John R. Weeks of San Diego State University; and by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, for a study of school contexts and educational achievement among language-minority immigrant students in San Diego city schools. Their support is gratefully acknowledged. Additional original photography was contributed specifically for this new edition by Steven J. Gold, to whom we are once again greatly indebted. The images captured by his camera in communities throughout the country illustrate the diversity of immigrant America today. Finally, we owe a special debt of gratitude to our editors at the University of California Press, Naomi Schneider and William Murphy, who gave us unfailing support during the preparation of this new edition, and to Angie Decker at Johns Hopkins, who is really the key person without whose dedication and effort in assembling disparate text corrections, references, maps, and tables, the final manuscript could not have been produced. We can only hope that the contents of this new edition are up to the quality of her work. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Acknowledgments for the First Edition In the years since we first conceived the idea of this book, many unexpected events have affected its progress. As often happens, its execution proved far more time-consuming and difficult than originally planned. However, we have had the support of many people and institutions along the way. In California, Chanthan S. Chea, Duong Phuc, Vu Thanh Thuy, and Prany Sananikone gave a first powerful impulse to the project by organizing field visits to the Vietnamese and Cambodian business communities of San Diego and Santa Ana. These experiences persuaded us that there was here an unwritten human story, different from that depicted in official statistics and media reports, that needed to be told. Tong Vang supplemented these visits with interviews and translations of views of Hmong refugees, some of which are included in chapter 5. Much of the writing took place while Portes conducted field surveys of recently arrived Mariel Cubans and Haitian refugees in South Florida. Data from these projects and qualitative observations garnered while conducting them have been extensively used in the book. For financial support to implement these surveys, we acknowledge the Sociology Program of the National Science Foundation (grant #SES-8215567), of the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-41502), and the Sloan Foundation (87–​4-15). In Miami, the president of Florida International University (FIU), Modesto Maidique; the dean of the Arts and Sciences School, James Mau; and the chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department, Lisandro Pérez, deserve our thanks for making available xxxix EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use xl   |   Acknowledgments for the First Edition the facilities of the institution and for their unwavering support during the months of fieldwork. The close ties of this project with FIU also involved many members of its faculty, in particular Douglas Kincaid, Anthony Maingot, Mark Rosenberg, and Alex Stepick. Together with the previously cited officials, they helped us unravel the intricacies of ethnic relations in Miami and the distinct characteristics of its different foreign communities. Stepick and his wife, Carol Dutton Stepick, directed three successive surveys of post-1980 Haitian refugees. Their close ties with leaders of the Haitian community and their dedication and patience made possible the successive completion of each stage under unusually adverse conditions. The parallel Cuban surveys were led by Juan Clark of MiamiDade Community College. The expertise of Clark and his team of interviewers made it possible to gain access and obtain reliable data from a large sample of Mariel refugees, a group afflicted at that time by numerous difficulties of adaptation. We have also made extensive use of results from two large surveys of recently arrived Southeast Asian refugees conducted by Rumbaut in Southern California. For financial support, we acknowledge the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (#HD15699), the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (#100–​86–​0214), and the San Diego State University (SDSU) Foundation. Kenji Ima of SDSU was the co-investigator in one of these studies. Both owe much to the commitment and ability of a staff of Indochinese interviewers and translators recruited from the refugee communities of San Diego. Many colleagues have helped us by reading and commenting on various chapters. At Hopkins, we thank Andrew Cherlin, William Eaton, Patricia Fernández-Kelly, and Melvin Kohn for their valuable input. At SDSU, we acknowledge the advice of Richard L. Hough, John R. Weeks, and James L. Wood. Elsewhere, Charles Hirschman, Leif Jensen, Ivan Light, Silvia Pedraza-Bailey, Peter J. Rose, Rubén D. Rumbaut, Marta Tienda, and William A. Vega also read and commented on several parts of the manuscript. All have our deep appreciation but are exempted from any responsibility for the contents. Original photography was contributed specifically for this book by several individuals, adding a visual dimension to our portrait of immigrant America in ways that mere words cannot. We wish to thank Estela R. García and Luis E. Rumbaut for scenes of immigrant communities in Miami and Washington, D.C., Steven J. Gold for his photos of diverse immigrant groups in California and along the Mexican border, Erica EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Acknowledgments for the First Edition    |   xli Hagen for her portraits of Southeast Asians awaiting resettlement to the United States in various refugee camps in Thailand, and the San Diego Union and Michael Franklin for his photos of Mexican migrant farmworkers in Southern California. At the University of California Press, Naomi Schneider adopted the idea of the book as her own and has given it indispensable encouragement. We are thankful to her, as well as to the press’s reviewers, who provided numerous useful suggestions. Anna Stoll not only typed multiple versions of each chapter but coordinated the many tasks required by the supporting field projects and the various stages of the manuscript. Thanks to her diligence and competence, the idea of this book has become reality. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Chapter 1 The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration Maricopa County, Arizona, was not a good place to be in the first years of the twenty-first century if you were foreign and of brown skin. A child of Italian immigrants retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration and then turned county sheriff unleashed a veritable campaign of terror against Latin American immigrants, aiming to make the county as inhospitable to them as possible. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was enthusiastically egged on by a white electorate composed largely of retirees from northern states who could not see any contradiction between their hiring of Mexicans and Guatemalans as nannies, maids, and gardeners and the persecution to which Sheriff Joe subjected them.1 Repeatedly elected by Maricopa citizens, Arpaio devised ever more refined ways of punishing Mexicans and Central Americans unlucky enough to find themselves in Phoenix, Tempe, or the rural areas of the county. Although not all of them came surreptitiously across the border, Arpaio and his men acted as if they all were illegal. Brown-skinned people in Maricopa were guilty until proven innocent. Finally, in December 2011, the Federal Justice Department released a report claiming that “Sheriff Joe Arpaio harasses, intimidates and terrorizes Latinos and immigrants, and he’s been doing it for years.”2 Sheriff Joe stated that he would not go down without a fight, but faced with the prospect of a massive federal lawsuit, his reign of terror may be coming to an end. The antics of Joe Arpaio in southern Arizona highlight a leitmotif found throughout the history of immigration to America. Although the 1 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 2   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration words at the base of the Statue of Liberty speak of an open country welcoming the poor and wretched of the earth, realities on the ground have been very different. As in Maricopa, foreigners who fuel the local economy with their labor, not only as urban servants but as hands in the fields, have been consistently persecuted by the authorities and denounced by nativists as a threat to the nation. As noted by a number of authors, this peculiar American waltz between labor demand and identity politics has repeated itself in every major period of immigration dating back to colonial days. As we will see, the contradiction between welcoming foreign workers and demonizing their languages and cultures has been more apparent than real, having played into the hands of a number of actors. Sheriff Arpaio’s repeated election in Maricopa happened for a reason, as he represented the linchpin of a de facto functional immigration policy. Unraveling these and other riddles of the peculiar relationship between immigration and the development of American society and economy is the goal of this book. We begin the story with the great waves of immigration accompanying the American industrial revolution. The Great European Wave, 1880–​1 930 Political Economy As shown in table 1, more than twenty-three million immigrants came to the United States during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth. Certainly, not all of them stayed; many eventually returned home or even engaged in a back-and-forth movement depending on the ups and downs of labor demand on both sides of the ocean. As many as half of certain peasant-origin groups, such as the Southern Italian contadini, went back at some point, while more than 90 percent of eastern European Jews left their places of origin never to return.3 Be that as it may, the sediment that these human waves left over time was substantial enough to cause significant changes in the demography of the receiving nation. By 1910, the foreign-born accounted for 14.7 percent of the American population and for 22 percent of those living in urban places. As Simon Kuznets and Brinley Thomas showed in detail, the great waves of European immigration were, by and large, the product of the transatlantic political economy. If conceived as a system, this economy generated enormous synergy among its complementary parts. Beginning in England at the start of the nineteenth century, the advance EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   3 of European industrialization continuously uprooted peasant masses whose economic livelihood was rendered precarious by advances in capital-intensive agriculture and whose only alternative was migration, either to industrializing cities or abroad. As Kuznets states: The shift from Great Britain and Ireland to Germany and the Scandinavian countries, and then to Italy and Eastern Europe, follows the trail of the industrial revolution in Europe. It at least suggests that immigration to the United States provided a welcome alternative to population groups displaced by revolutionary changes in agriculture and industry; and thus facilitated, in no small measure, the course of industrialization in the European countries. This migration may thus be viewed as an adjustment of population to resources, that in its magnitude and the extent to which it adapted itself to purely economic needs has few parallels in history.4 On the other side of the Atlantic the European waves were not well received by everyone, but they were welcomed by a politically decisive class, namely, capitalists bent on breaking the hold of independent craftsmen and skilled workers so as to meet the demand of a vast market for cheap manufactures. This was no easy feat. As Rosenblum notes, Tocquevillean democracy in America was grounded on independent small producers whose determination to avoid lifelong wage slavery led to a proliferation of enterprises whose craftsmen-owners freely and personally interacted with their journeymen. These, in turn, planned to found their own enterprises in due time.5 This tradition went hand in hand with the settlement of a vast frontier by independent farmers, whose demand for agricultural implements and manufactured goods created a comfortable synergy with the products of small-scale industrial shops. The challenge for the rising class of capitalist manufacturers was how to break this synergy so that markets could be expanded at home and abroad. As Brinley Thomas demonstrated, immigration prior to the 1870s preceded indicators of economic development such as railway construction and demand for bituminous coal: “That was the pioneering phase when a comparatively small nation was engaged in subduing a continent and the rate of expansion was conditioned by the arrival of new labor. . . . Moreover, the railways could not have been built without the gangs of laborers, many of them Irish, recruited in the East and transported to the construction camps.”6 After 1870, however, the causal correlation reversed itself, and indicators of economic development started to precede mass migration. This is the moment when the “pull” of American wages, advertised by paid recruiters sent to Europe, began to make its mark among Italian EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 674,061 671,783 Ireland Scandinaviac German Empire 267,660 3,995 15,186 Italy Spain Portugal Greece 1,807 1,380 Turkey in Europe Southern Europe 5,842 182,698 — 314,787 42,910 152,604 1,445,181 Romania Russiag Eastern Europe Othere Austria-Hungary Poland Central Europe Otherd 48,193 810,900 France 5,248,568 United Kingdomb N 0.3 0.1 5.1 25,874 9,189 603,761 12,732 3,547 —f —f 6,808 450,101 52 534,059 107,793 86,011 579,072 35,616 390,729 405,710 0.1 3.5 — 6.0 0.8 2.9 27.5 0.9 12.7 12.8 328,759 3,694,294 100.0a 15.5 N % 0.7 0.2 16.3 0.3 0.1 0.2 12.7 —f 14.5 2.9 2.3 15.7 1.0 10.5 11.0 8.9 100.0 1890–1899 % 1880–1889 Decennial Immigration to the United States, 1880–1919 Total immigration Table 1. 1.4 4.0 0.4 5.9 4.2 5.7 100.0 % 65,154 24,818 1,930,475 145,402 61,856 57,322 1,501,301 34,651 2,001,376 0.8 0.3 23.5 1.8 0.8 0.7 18.3 0.4 24.4 Not returned separately 112,433 328,722 67,735 488,208 344,940 469,578 8,202,388 N 1900–1909 1.6 2.7 1.0 3.8 2.6 5.8 100.0 % 82,489 53,262 1,229,916 198,108 71,179 13,566 1,106,998 27,180 1,154,727 1.3 0.8 19.4 3.1 1.1 0.2 17.4 0.4 18.2 Not returned separately 101,478 174,227 60,335 238,275 166,445 371,878 6,347,380 N 1910–1919 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 0.1 0.1 —f 0.5 40,943 11,191 2,038 31,480 734i 0.5 0.1 0.1 0.9 —f 0.1 0.9 0.6 22,011 100,960 31,188 123,650 171,837 66,143 Source: Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, 1920, 324–25; cited in Kraut, The Huddled Masses, 21. aTotals are rounded to nearest percent as in census report. bEngland, Scotland, Wales. cNorway, Sweden, Denmark. dNetherlands, Belgium, Switzerland. eBulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro. fLess than one-tenth of one percent. gIncludes Finland and boundaries prior to 1919. hIncludes Canada. iImmigrants from British North America and Mexico not reported from 1886 to 1893. jIncludes Jamaica. kIncludes Tasmania and New Zealand. 7,271 6,643 Other 2,233 27,323 2,405 3,098i —f 33,775 23,963 9.4 1.3 68,673 492,865 —f 1,098 Australiak Other Countries Central and South America West Indiesj Mexico British North Americah America Other Turkey in Asia Asia 0.3 1.2 0.4 1.5 2.1 0.8 10,414 11,280 55,630 120,860 185,334 708,715 109,019 89,568 0.2 0.2 0.9 1.9 2.9 11.2 1.7 1.4 6   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration and eastern European peasants whose economic existence was rendered increasingly precarious by industrialization in their own countries. As table 1 also shows, southern and central Europeans progressively displaced migrants from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia, as major sources of U.S.-bound migration. Their massive arrival led to a radical transformation in the composition of the American working class, from independent and quasi-independent craftsmen and journeymen to unskilled workers. Naturally, the native working class vigorously, and often violently, resisted the changes engineered by industrial capitalists. Better than any other movement, the Knights of Labor exemplified this resistance. The phenomenal rise in the membership of this order and the bitter struggles that ensued coincided with a rise in factory production that became generalized by the 1880s. The Knights grew in membership from about 104,000 in July 1885 to more than 702,000 one year later: “The idea of solidarity of labor ceased to be merely verbal, and took on flesh and life; general strikes, nation-wide boycotts, and nation-wide political movements were the order of the day. Although the upheaval came with the depression, it was the product of permanent and far reaching changes which had taken place during the seventies and the early eighties.”7 The Knights were, in the end, unsuccessful. The master-journeyman relation was gone forever and, with it, the social basis for democratic equality and self-reliant individualism that were founding elements of the American republic. European migration did not change the fundamental pillars of American society—​its elites, its class structure, or its constitutional order; what it accomplished was to alter the demographic composition of the population and, along with it, the character of the American working class. Henceforth, workers became dependent on trade unions rather than independent ownership as their sole basis for having a “voice” in their nation’s political process.8 European migration accelerated to such an extent that it made the causal order between capitalist development and population displacement uncertain. While originally promoted by capitalist firms through deliberate recruitment to staff the incipient factory system, the movement produced such an abundance of cheap unskilled labor as to trigger new waves of technological innovation to take advantage of it, in the process burying forever the independent artisan class. As Thomas concluded: “The massive inflow into the United States of cheap labour from Southern and Eastern Europe coincided with technical innovations calling for a ‘widening’ of the capital structure. The changing tech- EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   7 Table 2 Percentage of Foreign-Born among White Male Gainful Workers, Ten Years of Age or Older, 1910 Occupation Percentage Total 24.7 Professional, technical, and kindred workers 15.6 Farmers and farm managers 12.8 Managers, officials, and proprietors, except farm 26.4 Clerical and kindred workers 10.9 Sales workers 18.0 Craftsmen, foremen, and kindred workers 29.6 Operatives and kindred workers 38.0 Service workers, including private household 36.8 Farm laborers and foremen 8.4 Laborers, except farm and mine 45.0 Source: Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children: 1850–1950, 202; cited in Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers, 77. nique in the expanding industries entailed minute subdivision of operations and a wide adoption of automatic machines worked by unskilled, often illiterate men, women, and children. After 1900, the new supply of manpower was so abundant that firms using the new techniques must have driven out of the market many old firms committed to processes depending on human skill.”9 As shown in table 2, male immigrants around 1910 were overwhelmingly concentrated in the bottom rungs of the occupational ladder. While illiterate or poorly educated first-generation migrants were pretty much stuck at the bottom of that ladder, prospects for the better educated and, especially, for the children born in America were much brighter. As it kept growing, the new industrial economy generated multiple economic opportunities accessible to those with a modicum of education. A universal public-education system opened the doors for such positions to second-generation youths. Naturally, it was the children of earlier immigrant waves—​primarily the British, German, Scandinavian, and Irish—​ who benefited most from such circumstances. They needed a continuous supply of unskilled Italians, Poles, and other eastern European workers to keep fueling a mass industrial economy that was propelling them to positions of ever greater wealth and prosperity.10 This is a fundamental reason why nativist reactions against the southern and eastern EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 8   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration European waves and the consequent identity politics were kept in abeyance until the third decade of the twentieth century. Identity Politics Despite the extraordinary synergies in the transatlantic political economy between Europe and North America, the mass of peasant immigration from Catholic countries of the European periphery could not but awaken sentiments of rejection and hostility among the native-born. Such sentiments and the resulting anti-immigrant mobilizations accumulated over time as the mass of foreigners extended throughout the national territory and as the economic “mobility machine” fueled by their labor slowed down in the wake of World War I. In chapter 5 we will examine in detail the interplay between nativist discrimination and identity politics during this period. The main point here is that the interplay between the economic basis of immigration and the cultural reaction to it was definitely evident during those years. Anti-immigrant sentiment was fueled by a conjunction of groups that saw the relentless flow of foreigners as a direct threat. First, skilled native workers and their organizations were pushed aside by the onslaught of unskilled migrant labor. While the Knights of Labor put forward an ideology of universal brotherhood among all workers and of radical transformation of the capitalist factory system, realities on the ground continuously undermined that ideology and put the confrontation between skilled natives and illiterate foreign peasants into sharp focus.11 Second, there was a general malaise among the native population at being surrounded by a sea of foreign faces, accents, and religious practices and at finding themselves increasingly cast as “outsiders in their own land.” Nativist reactions took multiple forms, from violent attacks and lynching of foreigners to organized campaigns to Americanize them as quickly as possible. In March 1911 the White League, a New Orleans organization akin to the Ku Klux Klan, lynched eleven Italian immigrants accused of conspiring to murder the city’s police chief. Six were about to be released after being found not guilty. Their dark Mediterranean features undoubtedly contributed to their instant indictment by the mob. Commenting on the incident, the Harvard intellectual Henry Cabot Lodge characterized it not as a mere riot but as a form of revenge, “which is a kind of wild justice.” He characterized the earlier acquittals as “gross miscarriages of justice,” since the Italians were undoubtedly active in the Mafia.12 EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   9 Cabot Lodge’s stance reflected the third set of forces in favor of nativist radicalism: the concern among American intellectuals that so many foreigners would dilute the moral fiber of the nation and the integrity of its institutions. In an academic environment dominated by the social Darwinist evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and the “science” of eugenics, the intellectual and moral inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans was taken for granted and their capacity for eventual assimilation into American culture widely questioned. The statistician Richard Mayo Smith warned that “the thing we have to fear most is the political danger of the infusion of so much alien blood into our social body that we shall lose the capacity and power of self-government.”13 Similarly, in his 1926 volume Intelligence and Immigration psychologist Clifford Kirkpatrick argued against expecting much progress among immigrants through the reform of school programs because “definite limits are set by heredity, and immigrants of low innate ability cannot by any amount of Americanization be made into intelligent American citizens capable of appropriating and advancing a complex culture.”14 Under the intellectual zeitgeist of the time and the leadership of such public thinkers, the restrictionist movement gathered momentum. The movement was reinforced by three major forces in the economic infrastructure. First, as noted by Thomas, the progressive closure of the frontier and the slowing down of the industrialization process began to limit the “economic engine” propelling native workers and members of the second generation on the backs of foreign labor. The mass of newcomers progressively ceased to be the backbone of a segmented labor market and became a source of direct competition for natives.15 Second, the minority of educated immigrants with union and party experience in Europe and the Americanized second generation mobilized against capitalist exploitation, becoming, in many regions, the backbone of the union movement. The enthusiasm of industrialists for foreign labor cooled significantly when confronted with such unexpected resistance. Immigrants with industrial backgrounds were those who contributed primarily to the first radical cohorts in America: “The spirit of a disciplined, intelligent, and aggressive socialist army was typified by the organized working-class movement of Germany. The leaders of this mighty force were deeply respected at home and abroad. It was men trained in such a movement who tried to build up a duplicate in the United States.”16 Events back home also contributed to the radicalization of certain immigrant nationalities, such as Russian Jews and Slavs. As Fine noted, EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 10   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration “almost two-thirds of the members of the Workers’ (Communist) Party were born in countries which were either part of the old Russian empire or inhabited by Slavs.”17 The horrors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York stimulated labor militance in the needle trades. As a result, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, each of which had a largely Jewish, Italian, and Polish membership, developed into two of the strongest labor unions in the United States.18 Thus, the fundamental function of immigrant labor to American industrialism, which included not only supplementing a scarce domestic labor force but disciplining it through strike-breaking and the acceptance of poor working conditions, gradually weakened. The stage was set for the search by capitalist firms of a new source of pliable labor to replace increasingly militant immigrants and their descendants. The identification of this alternative labor source represented the third economic force buttressing the restrictionist movement that finally triumphed in the mid-1920s. As we will see in the next chapter, the activation of the massive black labor reserves in the American South provided the impulse for the emergence of a split labor market in industry, marked by major differences in pay and work conditions between white and black workers. Descendants of former slaves, previously confined to a stagnant agricultural life in the South, were actively recruited by the likes of the Ford Motor Company as early as 1916. The recruitment process was similar to that previously used among southern Italian and eastern European peasants, and the purpose was the same—​to supply large manufacturing industries in the American Northeast and Midwest with an abundant, cheap, and unorganized labor source. Because this source was also unskilled, the policy of encouraging southern black migration was accompanied by the acceleration of capital-intensive techniques in manufacturing. With this strategy capitalist firms attempted, and largely succeeded, in breaking the power of the trade unions. From 1920 to 1929 union membership dropped by almost two million. In 1933 it stood at fewer than three million, a precipitous decline from the peak years before World War I.19 The final victory of radical nativism with the enactment of restrictive legislation by the U.S. Congress in 1924 was, to a large extent, the outcome of the withdrawal of support for immigration by forces in the American economy that had previously supported it. First, natives and members of the second generation shifted attitudes, regarding further immigration as an obstacle and not as a propeller of their own upward EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   11 mobility. Second, the pivotal capitalist class lost enthusiasm for the foreign labor supply as it became progressively organized. This withdrawal of support accelerated when firms found in southern black peasants a new major source to replace and, if necessary, discipline an increasingly restless white labor force. Political Economy and Identity in the West The size of European immigration after 1890 and the attention bestowed on it by politicians, academics, and the public at large commonly blocked from view what was happening at the other end of the land. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexico ceded to its northern neighbor almost half of its territory after its defeat in the Mexican-American War. The physical size of the new acquisition was enormous, comprising the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The need to integrate these territories into the economy of the nation and the vast opportunities it created generated a strong demand for new labor, to be sourced from west and south. Gold came first. The California Gold Rush of 1848 to 1855 saw adventurers of every stripe attempt the difficult journey west, going as far as the Magellan Strait at the tip of South America to reach the new promised land. The need for labor in the mines led to the first transpacific recruitment system, with paid contractors sent to southern China, in particular the greater Pearl River Delta region around present-day Jiangmen, in search of contract workers. The system was largely responsible for the first appearance of Chinese migrants on American shores.20 The great difficulties of reaching the Pacific Coast and the need to integrate the vast new territories provided the necessary impetus for transcontinental railroad construction in the subsequent decades. Two great railroad companies—​the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific—​stood in need of massive supplies of labor that could not be sourced from the east, especially after the tracks left Iowa and Nebraska to start climbing the Rocky Mountains. Labor for this enormous enterprise came ­primarily from southern China through a massive expansion of the recruitment system. The two railroad companies, racing east from Sacramento, California, and west from Omaha, Nebraska, finally met in Promontory, Utah, in 1869.21 Chinese workers whose hands had built mile after mile of track suddenly became redundant. A few returned home, but most stayed because EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 12   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration they had not accumulated enough money to pay the costs of the return passage and buy land. They first turned to California agriculture, but their appearance in the fields triggered a furious reaction among natives who regarded the Chinese as semihuman. Chinese immigration was described as “a more abominable traffic than the African slave trade” and the immigrants themselves were depicted as “half civilized beings who spread filth, depravity, and epidemic.”22 The weak Qing Dynasty could do little for its nationals abroad, and the rising xenophobia in California and elsewhere culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively ended this labor flow. Chinese laborers were pushed out of California farms and ranches and forced to find refuge in tightly knit urban communities that formed the precursors of today’s Chinatowns. Hand laundries and cheap restaurants became the means of survival for this confined “bachelors society” where the ratio of men to women reached a remarkable 26:1 in the 1930s.23 With Chinese laborers out of the land and California agriculture in full bloom, a new source of field labor had to be found. For some time after the mid-1880s, the Hawaii sugar industry had sourced its demand for cane cutters in Japan. The flow now reached the mainland, where the renowned discipline and frugality of Japanese workers made them welcome by California ranchers and farmers, at least for a while. Trouble started to brew when landowners realized that the Japanese coupled these virtues with a strong desire to buy land and farm on their own. In 1900, for example, forty Japanese farmers owned fewer than five thousand acres of California’s land. By 1909, however, about six thousand Japanese were farming under all sorts of tenancy, controlling more than 210,000 acres.24 As Ivan Light has pointed out, “So long as the Japanese remained willing to perform agricultural labor at low wages, they remained popular with California ranchers. But even before 1910, the Japanese farmhands began to demand higher wages . . . worse, many Japanese began to lease and buy agricultural land for farming on their own account. This enterprise had the two-fold result of creating Japanese competition in the produce field and decreasing the number of Japanese farmlands available.”25 Faced with such “unfair” competition, ranchers turned to the eversympathetic state legislature. In 1913 the first Alien Land Law was passed, restricting the free acquisition of land by the Japanese. This legal instrument was perfected in 1920 when Japanese nationals were forbidden to lease agricultural land or to act as guardians of native- EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   13 born minors in matters of property. Driven from the land, the Japanese had no choice but to move into cities, just as the Chinese had done before. They did not huddle, however, in the same restricted areas but fanned out in diverse forms of self-employment. By 1919, almost half of the hotels in Seattle and 25 percent of the grocery stores were owned by Japanese migrants. Of Japanese men in Los Angeles, 40 percent were self-employed, operating dry-cleaning establishments, fisheries, and lunch counters. A large percentage of Japanese urban businesses were produce stands that marketed the production of the remaining Japanese farms.26 The anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobic measures pushed by nativists in the West thus ended up depriving its farms and other businesses of any source of Asian labor, while turning those migrants who stayed into urban entrepreneurs. Farms, ranches, and cities kept growing, however, and the question was what new labor flow could be engineered to replace the departed Chinese and Japanese. Western businessmen borrowed a page from their eastern counterparts by turning south. While northeastern industrialists tapped the large black labor reserves in the former Confederacy, California and Texas ranchers went to Mexico. In both cases the method was the same: deliberate recruitment through economic incentives. By 1916 the Los Angeles Times reported that five or six weekly trains full of Mexican workers hired by the agents were being run from Laredo. According to Mario García, the competition in El Paso became so aggressive that recruiting agencies stationed their Mexican employees at the Santa Fe Bridge, where they literally pounced on the immigrants as they crossed the border.27 As seen in table 3, Mexican immigration surged after 1910 as a consequence of these developments—​a flow that was intensified by the turmoil of the decadelong Mexican Revolution. Free access to Mexican labor conflicted, however, with the increasing exclusionary mood back east. The history of immigrant regulation from the end of World War I to the Great Depression is a case study of governmental efforts to reconcile seemingly incompatible demands through legislative compromise and administrative regulation. Direct attempts by western ranchers and growers to beat back restrictionism at the federal level were defeated. In 1918, however, an exception to the ban on illiterates was granted by Congress in favor of immigrants from Mexico and Canada. The 1924 National Origins Act again exempted Mexico and other Western Hemisphere countries from the quota imposed on the Europeans. In 1929 a Supreme Court decision upheld an earlier administrative decree EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 14   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration Table 3 Mexican Immigration to the United States, 1881–1950 N (000s) % of total immigration 1881–1890 2 .04 1891–1900 1 .02 1901–1910 50 .60 1911–1920 219 3.80 1921–1930 459 11.20 1931–1940 22 4.20 1941–1950 61 5.90 Decade Source: Portes and Bach, Latin Journey, 79. Table compiled from annual reports of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. declaring workers who commuted between residences in Mexico and jobs in the United States to be legal immigrants.28 In effect, through various loopholes and administrative devices, the federal government endeavored to keep the “back door” of immigration open to Western capital, while closing it to new southern and eastern European migrants. For reasons we have already seen, Europeans had ceased to be a preferred source of unskilled industrial labor, but while their replacements could be sourced from domestic labor reserves, the same was not the case in the West. There, foreign workers, this time from south of the border, continued to be in high demand for many years as the human instruments to fuel an expanding economy. Mexican migration possessed another convenient feature: its cyclical character. Because the border and their home communities were relatively close, Mexican migrants found reverse migration a much easier enterprise than did Europeans or Asians. Indeed, the normative behavior among Mexican male workers was to go home after the harvest or after their contract with railroad companies had expired. This practice, together with the predominantly nonurban destinations of the Mexican labor flow, reduced its visibility, making it a less tempting target for nativist movements of the time than the Italians and Poles. That honeymoon period was short-lived, however, as we will see shortly. While the history of U.S.-bound immigration before the 1930s evidenced few parallels between the eastern and western regions, a decisive feature was common to both: the conflicting interplay between political EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   15 economy and identity politics. Growing industrial and agricultural economies consistently demanded and received immigrant labor flows, while the presence of many foreigners inevitably triggered a nativist backlash. That reaction was prompted by the perception of immigrants as labormarket competitors and as sources of social and cultural fragmentation, as well as by the behavior of some foreign groups that sought to assert their labor rights and their rights to self-employment in America. When that happened, the protective hand of the employer class quickly withdrew, leaving the newcomers to their own fate. Early Twentieth-Century Migration and Social Change The literature on international migration generally makes a great deal over the changes that such flows wreak in the host societies, often proclaiming that they “transform the mainstream.”29 These assertions confuse impressions at the surface of social life with actual changes in the culture and social structure of the receiving society. While major immigration movements, such as the great transatlantic and transpacific waves before and at the start of the twentieth century, can have great impact on the demographic composition of the population, it is an open question whether such changes also lead to transformations in more fundamental elements of the host nations. In the case of the United States it is clear that, despite much handwringing by nativists of the time, the value system, the constitutional order, and the class structure of American society remained largely intact. Native white elites kept firm control on the levers of economic and political power, and existing institutions, such as the court system and the schools, proved resilient enough to withstand the foreign onslaught and to gradually integrate newcomers into the citizenry. It is a commonplace that assimilation is a two-way street, with both the host society and foreign groups influencing each other. In the American case, however, the process was definitely one-sided, as existing institutions held the upper hand. Eventually, children and grandchildren of immigrants began ascending the ladder of the American economy and the status system, but to do so, they had first to become thoroughly acculturated, learning fluent English and accepting the existing value system and normative order. It is important at this point to distinguish between the structural significance and the change potential of migrant flows. There is no question that the great early twentieth-century migrations had enormous struc- EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 16   |   The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration Table 4 Proportion Urban: White, Native White, and Foreign-Born White Year White (%) Native white (%) Foreign-born white (%) 1940 57.5 55.1 80.0 1930 57.6 54.5 79.2 1920 53.4 49.6 75.5 1910 48.2 43.6 71.4 1900 42.4 38.1 66.0 1890 37.5 32.9 60.7 1870 28.0 23.1 53.4 Source: Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers, Table 6.2. tural importance for the American economy. They were the sine qua non for the industrial revolution of the time, and this was, from the point of view of white American elites, almost their sole raison d’être. That effect did not so much change American society as reinforce its existing structures of wealth and power. The actual social transformations wrought in the fabric of society by these flows came largely as unanticipated consequences of their numbers and their cultural backgrounds. As shown in table 4, places of destination of Europeans were overwhelmingly urban. Foreigners lived in cities at far higher rates than natives did, triggering a veritable urban explosion. The overall effect was to shift the social and political center of gravity of the nation from the countryside to the cities, especially those in the Northeast and Midwest.30 Thanks to the great European waves, the United States became an overwhelmingly urban country. Aside from its social and cultural ramifications, this transformation had an important political consequence. Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are apportioned on the basis of number of persons in each district and state rather than the number of citizens. As Tienda puts it: “The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that: ‘Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole numbers of persons in each state.’ . . . That all persons residing in the United States are counted, but only citizens are permitted to vote in national elections, presumes that the right to representation is more fundamental than the right to exercise the franchise.”31 The six major immigrant-receiving states gained sixteen seats in the EBSCOhost - printed on 1/9/2024 7:16 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration    |   17 House between 1900 and 1910, signaling a significant shift in political influence that directly threatened mostly rural states. Not surprisingly, representatives of those states strongly supported a restrictionist stance, adding their voices to the chorus of those endorsing the conclusions of the 1911 Dillingham Commission Report to Congress to the effect that “immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are intellectually inferior and unworthy of naturalization.”32 Despite these voices, the balance of votes in the House did shift in favor of increasingly urbanized and immigrant-receiving states. While the House of Representatives is certainly not the only locus of national political power, it is an important one. Hence, the combination of sheer numbers with U.S. constitutional provisions led to a direct transformation of immigrant settlement patterns into political influence. That influence was not exercised by the immigrants themselves but by native politicians in the migrant-receiving states. As we will see in chapter 5, it would take some time for the children and grandchildren of migrants to come into their own in the American political process. Immigration’s other major effect was to transform the cultural landscape through the massive arrival of believers in other creeds. Over time, European immigrants and their descendants gave up their languages, and many elements of their culture, but not their religions. As a consequence, an overwhel...
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