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 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 present 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 education, 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.