Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan. Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success. New York: Public Affairs, 2023.
As we witness the efforts of the Trump administration to carry out their mass deportation policy, this is a good time to review some of the basic facts about immigration. I found this book by economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan very helpful.
They wrote the book to expose some of the most common myths about immigration. They especially wanted to question the unflattering comparison of today’s immigrants to those of an earlier era. Many people seem to think that immigration was once a “rags-to-riches” story, but that more of today’s immigrants get stuck in poverty and put a strain on public resources. They fear that immigrants are failing to learn English and integrate into American culture, reducing job opportunities and wages for other workers, or even becoming a criminal underclass raising rates of violent crime. While some of that may be true in individual cases, most of the evidence does not support these generalizations.
The great strength of this book is that the authors have solid data on which to base their conclusions. They say that “we were able to compile what is the first set of truly big data about immigration.” They did this by getting permission to tap into Ancestry.com’s digitized database of census records. Linking family records from decade to decade and generation to generation enabled them to study both intragenerational and intergenerational economic mobility. (At least they could compare fathers and sons; women were harder to track because they so often changed their last names.)
The researchers supplemented this database with other sources of information, including Social Security and IRS records, interviews from the Ellis Island Oral History Project, and their own interviews and surveys of today’s immigrant families.
Two waves of immigrants
One of the biggest questions the researchers wanted to answer was whether the immigrant experience has changed very much over the past century. To find out, they compared the two biggest waves of immigration in US history—1880 to 1920 and 1980 to today.
Some differences between the two waves were apparent. The earlier wave featured large numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern European countries, such as Italy, Poland and Russia. That was before the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s both reduced the number of legal immigrants and imposed quotas that favored Northern and Western Europe, the places from which earlier generations of Americans had come. After those restrictions were lifted in 1965, immigrant origins shifted to regions with large and growing populations, especially Latin America and Asia.
During the first of the two waves, legal entry was much easier, especially for unskilled laborers. Once the steamship made the ocean crossing faster and cheaper, poor immigrants arrived in large numbers. Although some returned to their native country voluntarily, less than two percent were barred from entry or deported. During the recent wave, legal entry has been more selective, with preference given to immigrants with skills or links to relatives already here. A special provision for refugees fleeing oppression was added in 1980, although it was slow to be implemented. With the demand for legal entry above the supply of legal slots, stopping illegal immigration has been difficult, especially because of the 1000-mile southern border we share with a relatively poor part of the world.
Another difference is that the initial earnings gap between immigrants and the US-born is larger now than it was in the earlier wave. That’s because the United States is now a very wealthy country and most immigrants come from distinctly poorer ones. As we’ll see though, that gap does not prove to be insurmountable once they get here.
The similarities between the waves are as important as the differences. In both cases, the impact of immigration on the percentage of foreign-born in the population has been about the same. It rose to about 14 percent in both eras. Add in the children of the foreign born, and then their children, and we have truly been a nation of immigrant families.
Also in both eras, the rapid increase in the foreign born provoked an anti-immigrant reaction. My impression is that the hostility was worse during the nativist movement of the 1920s, which inspired the most restrictive immigration laws in our history.
Despite the challenges, the immigrant story in both eras is largely one of success and assimilation. The progress was gradual rather than instantaneous, but “the American Dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for Immigrants from Italy and Russia one hundred years ago.”
Dispelling the myths
With regard to economic success, the immigrant story is neither one of rags to riches nor persistent poverty. On the average, the income gap between immigrant and non-immigrant families gets cut in half after twenty years.
Even more noteworthy is the success of the second generation. The children of immigrants have the advantage of being exposed to the domestic economy and culture from an earlier age.
[W]e find that the children of immigrants surpass their parents and move up the economic ladder both in the past and today. If this is the American Dream, then immigrants achieve it—big time.
The researchers focused on second-generation children who grew up with family incomes at the 25th percentile, the point that demarcates the lowest quarter of the distribution. These children were more likely to move up to the 50th percentile (the median income) than US-born children who started out at the same low level. The authors suggest a couple of reasons why immigrant children might surpass US-born children in upward mobility. First, when their families immigrated, they chose to move to cities with job opportunities, while equally poor non-immigrant families were often “rooted in place” in locations with depressed economies. Second, the immigrant children’s initial low incomes might be misleading, since their parents experienced language barriers and other adjustment difficulties that kept their abilities from being fully rewarded. Less disadvantaged by those problems, the children moved briskly ahead.
When children of immigrants are themselves undocumented, their job and income prospects are much more limited. But that applies to only 5% of the children of immigrants, since the vast majority are either citizens born in the US or members of families that entered legally (or received amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act).
Fears that the more recent wave of immigrants are failing to learn English and integrate into US culture have proven to be mostly unfounded. The authors find that ethnic distinctiveness declines rapidly over time, as measured by such indicators as English fluency, residential desegregation, marriage across ethnic boundaries, and the kinds of names parents give their children. “In one generation’s time, we find that it becomes hard to tell apart the children of immigrants from the children of the US born. Both groups are simply American.”
Finally, the connection between immigration and crime has been greatly exaggerated, especially to scare voters into supporting a policy of mass deportation. In general, the researchers find that “immigrants are less likely to be arrested or incarcerated today relative to the US born.” The opposite impression is created by selectively publicizing incidents of immigrant violence, especially gang violence, although the US-born population has its criminal gangs too.
The most thorough study of immigrant crimes rates was based on Texas data. It found that:
…undocumented immigrants were half as likely as the US born to be arrested for violent crimes. For property crimes and drug violations, the gaps between undocumented immigrants and the US born were even larger. (The rates of criminal behavior for legal immigrants were substantially closer to, but still below, the rates for the US born.) Similar patterns have been documented for the country as a whole, albeit with less complete data.
One reason why immigrant crime rates tend to be low is that immigrants in general—and the undocumented in particular—take pains to avoid getting in trouble because of their great fear of deportation.
In my next post, I will tackle the contentious issue of how immigrants impact the US economy and affect the economic prospects of other Americans.
Beneath the Surface 