Newest Immigrants Assimilating as Fast as Previous Ones, Report Says

New York Times

By Julia Preston

September 21, 2015

Newest Immigrants Assimilating as Fast as Previous Ones, Report Says

The newest generations of immigrants are assimilating into American society as fast and broadly as the previous ones, with their integration increasing over time “across all measurable outcomes,” according to a report published on Monday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Immigrants’ education levels, the diversity of their jobs, their wages and their mastery of English improved as they lived for more time in the United States, and the gains were even greater for their American-born children, the report concluded.

“The force of integration is strong,” said Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard who led the panel of 18 immigration scholars who wrote the more than 400-page report. “However we do it, we are good at it,” she said.

The report is an effort by scholars not engaged in politics to summon the latest research to address many contentious issues in the increasingly heated immigration debate. It is the first major report by the national academies on the integration of immigrants since a similarly sweeping overview in 1997. Its timing is linked to the 50th anniversary in October of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 1965 legislation that abolished restrictive national quotas and opened legal immigration to all countries.

The study was initiated at the request of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, a federal agency, and the National Science Foundation as well as private foundations. The scholars drew on their own work and also conducted a wide-ranging review of recent research by others.

Professor Waters said the report should allay fears that recent immigrants committed crimes more frequently than Americans, that they were generally in poor health and burden public health care systems, or that they were failing to learn English.

“The desire on the part of immigrants to learn English is very high,” Professor Waters said the researchers found. Concerns that the latest generation of immigrants is seeking to impose its languages on American society “is not something people should be worried about,” she said.

The report looked at 41 million foreign-born people — including about 11.3 million immigrants here illegally — and their children born in the United States, about 37 million Americans. Taken together, the two generations include one in four people in this country. English language learning “is happening as rapidly or faster now than it did for earlier waves of mainly European immigrants in the 20th century,” the report found.

Many immigrants — about 85 percent of the foreign-born — speak a language other than English at home. For 62 percent of them, that language is Spanish. But many of those immigrants speak English proficiently outside the home. Many already knew English when they arrived, the report found; about 50 percent of the foreign-born say they speak English “very well” or “well,” while only 10 percent say they do not speak English at all.

By the third generation, most immigrant children speak only English, the report found.

In a finding the scholars called surprising, the report says foreign-born adults and children are healthier in general than Americans. They are less likely to die from cancer or heart disease, and have fewer chronic illnesses and lower rates of obesity.

On education, the researchers found “strong intergenerational progress,” with the second generation equaling their peers among native-born Americans.

But educational achievement varied widely among different national groups, because of a significant population of highly skilled and educated foreigners, mainly from Asia, who have come in recent years. Almost one-quarter of immigrants have college degrees.

Those from Mexico and Central America started with “exceptionally low levels of education,” the report said. While their children “progress a great deal relative to their parents,” they do not reach the levels of their American peers.

On crime, the report found that over all, immigrant men 18 to 39 were incarcerated at about one-fourth the rate of American men in that group. “Cities and neighborhoods with greater concentrations of immigrants have much lower rates of crime and violence” than similar places without immigrants, the report said.

Professor Waters said the alarm raised over immigrants and crime, after the recent murder of a tourist on a San Francisco pier by an illegal immigrant, had been raised with every influx of immigrants. “We’ve always been worried that immigrants increase crime, and it has never been true for the first generation,” she said.

However, there is evidence the crime rate is increasing as immigrants become assimilated, rising to match the rates of native-born Americans. “If this trend is confirmed, it may be an unwelcome aspect of integration,” the researchers wrote.

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