Immigrants' economic assimilation

Economic integration is “the process by which immigrants accumulate job experience in the U.S. labor market as their tenure in the host country increases,”¹²

and scholars have primarily measured it by comparing the wages and incomes of first- and later-generation immigrants. The dominant approach, the human capital tradition, relies mostly on analyses of wages and annual earnings and attempts to isolate the individual characteristics of immigrants—such as educational credentials, language skills, and time spent in the United States—that determine successful integration in the U.S. labor market.

Barry Chiswick optimistically concluded from a cross-sectional comparison of immigrant and native earnings that most immigrants would achieve economic parity with U.S. natives within one generation, even if their skills were lower on arriving. George Borjas, however, found evidence in a longitudinal analysis of “declining immigrant quality”—widening differences between immigrants and natives' skills among successive cohorts of immigrants. From this he concluded that immigrants might never achieve economic parity with natives, or at least that it would take more than one generation to do so.¹³

Those practicing new sociological approaches criticize studies based on the human capital model for relying exclusively on a neoclassical theory of immigration causes and rational action decision making at the expense of theoretical frameworks that are equally or more explanatory. These include the new economics of migration, social network theory, world systems theory, and cumulative causation theory. Some also criticize the human capital orientation for its failure to account for the influence of social and cultural contexts on the economic outcomes of immigrants, or to explain the differences that remain between workers of different ascribed characteristics but similar “skill levels.” For example, Chiswick's work assumes stability in economic growth, immigrants' educational characteristics, and host society's reception (none of which have been stable since the late 1970s), and underplays unequal wage growth profiles for comparably skilled men of Asian, Hispanic, and other origins. Similarly, Borjas's work seems to ignore period conditions and the selective effects of emigration and systematically underplays the effect of labor demand; that is, declining immigrant quality may result from a fall in the wages of unskilled workers, not a decline in the “quality” of incoming immigrants.¹⁴

In this way, new sociological approaches attempt to include receiving labor market characteristics in analyses of immigrants' economic assimilation.

Others scholars focus on modes of incorporation, further showing how individual attainment depends on reception contexts as well as individual characteristics.¹⁵

Modes of incorporation comprises government policy toward immigrants, particularly state-defined immigrant categories used as the basis for granting benefits; civic society and public opinion toward immigrants, defined as prejudice toward immigrant groups; and the presence, size, and organization of the coethnic community.¹⁶

Overall, immigrants' individual characteristics affect their incorporation into the U.S. labor market. Yet the U.S. economy demands and rewards immigrants' skills differently at the national and local levels, and their treatment by U.S. natives and society also affects their incorporation. Thus scholars need to delineate clearly the context of immigrants' pathways through the labor force, paying greater attention to variation in reception contexts at subnational levels. If immigrants with similar characteristics and skills are faring differently across the country, then traditional models of immigrant attainment based solely on individualistic analyses of immigrants' characteristics are insufficient.

Economic impact on U.S. natives

Does immigrants' incorporation positively or negatively affect native workers? The findings are mixed. At the national level the economic impact of immigrants on natives is minimal; quantitative studies of national data consistently fail to find large effects of native displacement, although they do find negative wage and employment effects on other immigrants.¹⁷

In contrast, at the local level, qualitative studies often find evidence of immigrant workers displacing native ones, particularly those who are least skilled and are concentrated in the same urban centers as immigrants. Employers sometimes prefer immigrant workers.¹⁸ Yet this research too is contradicted by findings that immigrants replace rather than displace native workers, that is, that they fill jobs that natives do not want, are no longer willing to do, or have abandoned for better economic opportunities.¹⁹

These contradictory findings may be compatible for three reasons. First, their methodologies differ. Economic researchers use methods such as production functions, geographic area studies, and natural experiments, which themselves may yield different results,²⁰

while qualitative studies often focus on sites of employment where immigrants are concentrated and displacement more likely. Second, displacement among certain subgroups of workers may not show up in aggregate data; the gains from immigration may be largest for groups who own resources that complement immigrant labor (usually employers), while the costs largest for groups that compete against immigrant labor (usually African Americans); the two may balance each other out in aggregate data.²¹ The third reason has to do with the next subfield of immigrant economic incorporation research.

Immigrants' impact on macroeconomic labor market growth

In substitution-replacement studies just discussed, immigrants' effects on natives are measured in terms of jobs. However, even without displacing natives in certain jobs, immigrants' presence might increase unemployment rates or widen wage gaps, producing distributional, rather than absolute, effects. It might also depress entrepreneurship among displaced groups, encourage emigration out of areas where immigrants are concentrated, or decrease the quality of jobs or unionization rates.²²

Therefore we need to measure immigrants' economic impact by other indicators, such as unemployment rates, wage distributions, entrepreneurship rates, national wealth, national productivity levels, or the quality of jobs.

However, research findings here are also contradictory. One study finds that high rates of immigrant entrepreneurship accompany rather than depress African American entrepreneurship,²³

while another finds “support for both views of the impact of immigration: that immigrants take low-skill jobs formerly held by natives and that immigrants also help push natives upward in the occupational stratification system.”²⁴ Research also shows that “an influx of immigrants is not a necessary condition to weaken blacks' control of government employment within certain niches,” and that unionization activity would have fallen even in the absence of immigration.²⁵ Overall, immigrants have both positive and negative effects on U.S. workers and the economy; these effects tend to cancel each other out at the aggregate level, but are pronounced in some localities. Thus the particular features of local economies—for example, their occupational mixes, workforces' skill profiles, economic histories, and rates of union activity—not only influence immigrants' economic attainment across local labor markets; they also mediate the ways in which immigration affects native workers across local labor markets. This is consistent with the call for more attention to variation in reception contexts at subnational levels in research on immigrants' economic assimilation.

Immigrants' fiscal impact on government services and tax structures

At the aggregate national level, immigrants do not use a disproportionate share of government services; they pay sufficient taxes to outweigh the benefits they receive.²⁶

However, the general public and many employees of agencies who are called upon to provide services to immigrants continue to claim that immigrants are “public burdens” at rates disproportionate to natives. These contradictory positions are reconciled by recognizing that the geographic concentration of immigrants in certain states and metropolitan areas, combined with the federal structure of social service distribution and tax collection, creates a gap between the benefits of immigration (which accrue mainly to the federal government through taxes) and its costs (which accrue mainly to the state and local governments who provide immigrant services). Thus the size and concentration of immigrant communities at state and local levels influence the fiscal impact of immigrants on government services and tax structures.

Sociostructural and sociocultural assimilation

The first two are immigrants' structural assimilation (measured by residential location, intergroup contacts, English language ability, and intermarriage rates)²⁷

and immigrants' cultural assimilation (measured by ethnic identification and feelings of “social distance” from other groups).²⁸ We see the influence of the human capital tradition in scholars' attempts to isolate the individual characteristics of immigrants that determine integration in U.S. society. For example, time spent in the United States increases immigrants' structural assimilation in terms of language acquisition, but not necessarily their cultural assimilation in terms of ethnic identification.

The new sociological traditions are visible in scholars' attention to structural and contextual factors, such as the receiving labor market and immigrants' group-level traits. This new scholarship shows that successful incorporation is not inevitable and that when assessing immigrants' prospects for incorporation, the experiences of African Americans and other native minority groups must be considered alongside recent changes in U.S. society. For example, concern over “second-generation decline”—the possibility that children of some new immigrant groups will not achieve upward mobility like that of their European predecessors—has been formalized into segmented assimilation theory.²⁹

The theory predicts downward mobility for some, not only due to lack of individual resources but also to structural features of immigrant populations, such as their proximity to resource-poor minorities in large cities, and contextual factors, such as disfavor by majority-group U.S. natives and “oppositional” cultures among proximate minority youth.

Effects on social structure and cultural identity

The question of how new immigrants will affect American constructions of race and racial hierarchies leads us into the other two subfields of immigrant sociocultural research: immigrants' effects on American conceptions of race and intergroup hierarchy),³⁰

and immigrants' effects on national, regional, and local cultural identity. Diverse immigrants are complicating established American hierarchies—especially the historical black-white binary—as well as labor markets; further complications arise from increases in multiracial identification and intermarriage. Thus many scholars are speculating about the future of the American racial order, predicting everything from a “rainbow coalition of color” among minority groups and nonwhite immigrants to a more populist class-based vision organized around economic inequality, a reconsolidation of whiteness, an “ordinal” form of racial hierarchy based largely on skin color differences, a vision of race attuned to nativity differences, or “black exceptionalism,” in which competition between almost-whites and blacks intensifies.³¹

Furthermore, increasing immigration raises questions about the meaning and boundaries of national identity—as has happened throughout Western Europe against the backdrop of increasing Muslim immigration, and in the United States against the backdrop of increasing immigration from Spanish-speaking Latin America.³²

Immigrants' individual characteristics do influence their incorporation into the hierarchies and identities of U.S. society. But we must develop more clearly the social and contextual determinants of this incorporation, including such things as the size of and demographic composition of destination locale, the relative power of groups and their migration status, class interests, existing cultural boundaries and identities, and local housing markets and educational and opportunity structures.³³

This parallels the call for more attention to structural and contextual factors in immigrant economic incorporation research. To the extent that these factors can explain patterns in immigrants' social and cultural incorporation paths, traditional models that focus solely on the merits (or shortcomings) of individual immigrants are insufficient.

Electoral participation

Immigrants' electoral participation is measured by naturalization rates, voter turnout, financial contributions, attendance at political rallies, and employment in political parties or by candidates. Most research examines naturalization and voting rates, because naturalization is “a basic political act” for immigrants, voting is “the emblematic form of political participation in a participatory democracy,” and both are relatively easy to track with available data.³⁴

Latin American immigrant groups have the lowest naturalization rates,³⁵ and immigrants participate in electoral politics at lower rates than their native-born counterparts, as do Latinos and Asian Americans compared to blacks and whites (although taking the numbers of noncitizens into account reduces this racial gap).³⁶ Immigrants, once naturalized, continue to participate in electoral politics at lower rates than natives, depressing their political clout; however, some studies show naturalized immigrants participating at similar or higher rates than native-born members of their own racial group.

Although results vary across studies and groups, show curvilinear effects, or show weaker effects for immigrants than natives, the same individual factors that increase electoral political participation among all Americans—namely age, education, and economic resources—generally do so for immigrants too. Education increases immigrants' naturalization and voting rates. Wendy K. Tam Cho argues this is because education and age “socialize” immigrants into greater participation in the U.S. political system.³⁷

Sex and marital status exhibit inconsistent effects, although some studies find that immigrant women are more likely to naturalize than men, married immigrants are more likely to naturalize than nonmarried ones, Latin American women are more likely to naturalize and vote than either Latin American men or women from other regions of origin, and Asian American women exhibit very low rates of political participation.

Scholars agree that, beyond these individual variables, others specific to the immigrant experience must be added to models examining immigrants' electoral behavior, including: foreign-born status, citizenship status, English language ability, length of time spent in the United States, age at migration, place of education, region or country of origin, generational status, and ties to the home country. In general, length of time spent in the United States increases immigrants' electoral participation, as do English language proficiency and younger age at migration. Those educated abroad tend to participate less, though ties to the home country exhibit either negative or no effects.

The literature in this subfield also shows that immigrants' individual characteristics affect their political incorporation, and researchers are guardedly optimistic that the electoral participation of their descendants will catch up to that of natives over time. Still, immigrants' group-level characteristics also matter. Race/ethnicity often influences immigrants' electoral behavior even after controlling for other variables; sometimes specific national- or regional-origin differences remain.³⁸

For example, Mexican immigrants are less likely to naturalize than others, after controlling for other variables.³⁹ And even though generational status frequently increases immigrants' electoral participation, Karthick Ramakrishnan and Thomas Espenshade find declining voter turnout between long-term naturalized Latin American immigrants and later-generation Latinos, and between second- and third-generation Asian Americans—patterns that differ from those of whites and blacks. Similarly, others have found declining voter turnout between naturalized black and Latino immigrants and their later-generation counterparts, suggesting that blacks and Latinos (but not whites or Asians) may be experiencing a political variant of downward assimilation.⁴⁰ In sum, gaps in political participation by race or ethnicity, or regional and national origin, may persist over time. More optimistically, different groups may participate unequally in the U.S. political system, even if their participation rates increase over time along with their socioeconomic status. In this view, naturalization reflects “an individual relationship with the state” more so than nationality.⁴¹

Structural or institutional factors also influence immigrants' electoral behavior. For example, Congress establishes immigration and naturalization policies, and noncitizenship produces an “absolute bar” to immigrants' electoral participation. More subtly, in the 1980s inconsistent bureaucratic treatment among INS offices created discrepancies in naturalization rates along regional and national origin lines.⁴²

Structural and institutional factors include incentive structures affecting immigrants' electoral behavior. A “neutral if not sometimes hostile [INS] bureaucracy” discouraged Hispanic immigrants from naturalizing in the 1970s and 1980s; in the 1990s, however, changes in INS rules and fees, and anti-immigrant policies enacted in California, increased immigrants' incentives to naturalize and vote.⁴³

Variation in state voter registration requirements also matter; Latino immigrants are less likely to naturalize in U.S. states that impose a registration cutoff before an election, that drop voters from the rolls for not voting, and (surprisingly) that allow mail-in ballots. Registration cutoff impositions do not significantly affect Latin American immigrants' voting rates, perhaps because the 1993 Motor-Voter Act standardized state variance among them.⁴⁴ U.S. immigration policy and voter registration requirements also affect Asian Americans, whose “low overall voting levels do not reflect apathy, but are mostly due to lack of satisfaction with the citizenship and voter registration requirements.”⁴⁵

Finally, opportunities for holding dual citizenship, engaging in transnational activity, and returning to the home country affect immigrants' electoral behavior, although results are mixed in the literature and warrant more research. Philip Yang finds that the possibility of return to one's country of origin is negatively related to naturalization; the shorter the distance between the United States and the country of origin, the less likely an immigrant is to naturalize.⁴⁶

Yet Michael Jones-Correa finds that dual nationality laws are positively related to Latin American immigrants' naturalization and voting rates in the United States, most likely because they avoid the psychological cost of having to renounce one's previous nationality.⁴⁷

Contextual factors also affect immigrants' electoral behavior. Immigrants from socialist countries are more likely to naturalize than immigrants from nonsocialist ones, suggesting that economic and political controls in sending countries affects immigrants' subsequent electoral behavior in the United States. Political refugees are also more likely to naturalize than labor migrants, as are immigrants who leave their countries for political reasons, no matter what their status when they enter the United States. Thus immigrants motivated by wars, revolution, or religious persecution to leave their home countries also are more politically active.⁴⁸

Ramakrishnan and Espenshade find that in the United States state political culture—measured by averaging states' histories of voter turnout—significantly affects the voting patterns of both naturalized and later-generation immigrants.⁴⁹

In contrast, Jones-Correa finds no effect of state voter turnout on Latin American immigrants' naturalization and voting rates.⁵⁰ More broadly, national political culture affects immigrants' political behavior. The fact that “today's immigrants enter a more culturally relaxed, multicultural, and perhaps less prejudiced society, in which the black struggle for justice has ended many aspects of institutionalized discrimination against minorities” has increased opportunities for immigrants' political participation, especially at the local level.⁵¹ The rise of panethnicity since the 1960s has also changed the political environment. Being part of a recognized minority group has its drawbacks, of course, but the advantages include receiving expanded political support under the 1975 amendments to the Voting Rights Act. Other scholars argue, however, that post-1965 civic culture, which emphasizes group separateness over traditional American liberal universalism, limits rather than expands immigrants' incorporation into the U.S. polity.

Either way, if patterns in immigrants' electoral participation can be explained as some function of these structural/institutional or contextual factors, at any level of analysis, then traditional models of immigrant political participation based solely on individualistic analyses of immigrants' characteristics are helpful yet insufficient. Only comparative research, especially at the state and local levels where structural/institutional and contextual factors vary, can help determine whether (or not) they play a role in immigrants' electoral political participation. If they do, the next questions for research are how, to what degree, and why. For example, as institutional agents of incorporation, political parties should strongly affect whether and how new immigrants are incorporated into politics.⁵²

However, several scholars have questioned this claim. According to this view, not only have the capacities of political parties declined in their capacities over the past century, but also they have only actively incorporated immigrants under competitive situations, while contemporary party politics, especially at the state and local levels, is increasingly noncompetitive. Many scholars worry in fact that current immigrants are negatively affected by the absence of political bosses and party machines.⁵³ One study of Latinos in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Miami found that political institutions only mobilized those in Miami;⁵⁴ “established native minority politicians are quite unlikely to promote the political mobilization of new immigrant groups,” primarily because “political establishments … benefit little from mobilizing and empowering marginal groups. Only under certain circumstances, such as a breakdown of the dominant coalition or a crisis of its capacity to govern combined with rapid demographic and economic changes that may undermine its social base, will some part of the political establishment find it to its advantage to mobilize merging nationality groups.”⁵⁵ Even at the national level, Jones-Correa worries that most Latinos do not live in key competitive swing states and so are not likely to be mobilized by either major political party during presidential campaigns. Other immigrant and ethnic groups that are smaller or more closely identified with one party than Latinos are even less likely to.⁵⁶

Still, political parties could play a major role in increasing immigrant political participation. Mobilization by a political party predicts more voter registration, consistent turnout, and, among Asian Americans, political participation beyond voting. When political parties contact Latinos, electoral participation increases significantly. Especially in Miami, “the presence of strong political party organizations seems to have had a substantial impact on Latino voter registration and turnout.”⁵⁷

That the absence of a strong partisan political system in Los Angeles produces a depoliticized and fragmented political environment with fewer channels for containing intergroup conflict than in New York further suggests that party structures can affect immigrants' political behavior.⁵⁸

Finally, local demographic composition is another contextual factor that influences immigrants' political behavior, although the evidence on just how is contradictory.⁵⁹

Coethnic concentration is generally a positive influence on Asian naturalization rates and the election of Asian immigrant municipal officials; the larger an immigrant group's size and the greater its concentration in urban areas, the more likely it is that its members will naturalize.⁶⁰ Similarly, living in a predominantly Anglo neighborhood discourages legal Mexican immigrants' intentions to acquire U.S. citizenship but increases the probability of their actually doing so—suggesting that lower coethnic concentration levels give Mexican immigrants a more negative perception of U.S. society, but also higher levels of U.S. information.⁶¹ Yet some studies show that Hispanic concentration in majority-minority districts reduces voter turnout, perhaps because they “need not vote at high rates to have a coethnic elected.”⁶²

Ramakrishnan and Espenshade find little effect either way of coethnic residential concentration on immigrants' voting rates, suggesting that other factors (such as high poverty and noncitizenship rates) are driving low voter turnout in places where Hispanics are concentrated.⁶³

In Los Angeles County, “living amidst large numbers of immigrants clearly dampened the turnout rate among registered voters in the 1996 presidential election,” while “turnout rates among registered voters in immigrant areas [of New York City] were somewhat higher, all other things being equal.” The authors attribute part of this difference to the balance between immigrants and natives and between major racial groups. In Los Angeles, whites dominate the political landscape, the native stock is comprised primarily of whites and blacks, and both whites and blacks are predominantly of native stock; these patterns reinforce interethnic conflict along the lines of nativity. In New York, by contrast, both the immigrant and native populations are racially diverse, so that “differences in immigrant heritage cut across racial and ethnic distinctions rather than reinforce them.”⁶⁴ These differences in demographic composition between New York and Los Angeles, particularly among the eligible electorate, create different incentives for the dominant group to form coalitions with new immigrants.

Again, if patterns in immigrants' electoral participation can be explained as some function of structural/institutional or contextual factors, including variation in political party mobilization, immigrant and coethnic concentration levels, or racial and ethnic composition, traditional models of immigrant political participation based solely on individualistic analyses of immigrants' characteristics are helpful yet insufficient. Only comparative research that is designed to take these factors into account and test for their effects empirically will advance the research agenda

Nonelectoral participation

Immigrants' nonelectoral participation is measured by lobbying, litigation, petitioning, protesting, boycotting, civil disobedience, contacting public officials and the media, working with neighbors in noncampaign group-related community work, and joining institutions such as labor unions, churches, or voluntary associations and nonprofit groups. Clearly this sort of participation is multifaceted: it illustrates how people engage with their neighbors;⁶⁵

it may indirectly affect elections by changing others' opinions;⁶⁶ and it may encourage electoral participation. For example, participating in community organizations may foster important civic skills.⁶⁷

Nonelectoral politics is especially crucial to immigrants' political mobilization since, as a group, they are disproportionately excluded from electoral politics by U.S. naturalization laws and face an additional “cost” to voting compared with natives. Consequently, immigrants may rely more extensively on nonelectoral forms of political activity to express their interests. Nonelectoral institutions may also simply be the most likely places where immigrants learn about the political system and are exposed to opportunities for participation.⁶⁸

Finally, expanding our interpretation of immigrants' political incorporation it to encompass all the ways that immigrants try to express their interests or exert their power helps capture the range of ways immigrants engage in U.S. political and civic life.⁶⁹ After all, even though noncitizens participate less in nonelectoral political activities than citizens, their participation is not insignificant, and in some cases it resembles that of their native-born counterparts.⁷⁰

As with electoral participation, scholars have focused primarily on individual characteristics that affect immigrants' nonelectoral political behavior. Generally, the same variables increase immigrants' electoral and nonelectoral participation, although age does not increase the latter among noncitizens or some minority groups. For example, education matters more for voting than for nonelectoral behavior among Asian Americans, yet income is positively related to their participation in various nonelectoral activities. And while Latinos participate less in nonelectoral activities than both whites and blacks, it is primarily due to differences in education and income levels, not ethnicity.⁷¹

Immigrant-specific variables also affect immigrants' nonelectoral behavior; “as with the electoral activities, controlling for citizenship of Latinos and Asians greatly reduced the disparity between their [nonelectoral] activity rates and those of whites and blacks.”⁷²

In other studies, citizenship seems less important; Louis DeSipio found no effect of U.S. citizenship on Mexican and Cuban Americans' involvement in community organizations or parental involvement in schools, while in another study, once other factors are considered, “citizens are no more likely to participate than noncitizens in activities beyond voting that do not require citizenship.”⁷³ However, percentage of life spent in the United States increases nonelectoral activity among Cuban immigrants and Cuban Americans, and among Latinos and Asian Americans, length of stay in the United States increases working in groups, registering to vote, and voting. Also consistent with a human capital approach to immigrant nonelectoral participation, English language ability increases working in groups, contacting officials, and voting.⁷⁴ Finally, among Asian Americans, foreign-born status decreases nonelectoral activity (but not voting), U.S. place of education increases both voting and nonelectoral participation, and previous political activity increases nonelectoral participation in the United States.⁷⁵

Considering structural factors, some scholars argue that immigrants' political behavior is influenced more by the openness of American politics than their individual characteristics. For example, Evelyn Savidge Sterne argues that “old” German and Scandinavian immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century were incorporated into the polity faster than “new” southern and eastern European ones in the early twentieth century in part because they entered a polity in which most immigrants could vote and the political culture was still “vibrant and accessible.” “New” immigrants, in contrast, entered the country when land was scarcer, available jobs were dangerous and poorly paid, new restrictions on immigrants' right to vote were being imposed, and the political culture had become “distant and bureaucratic.”⁷⁶

Related contextual factors that affect political action include the existence and strength of labor unions, churches, and voluntary organizations in immigrants' locales. These institutions work in parallel to party machines; immigrants can develop the skills to participate in nonelectoral activities even when barred from formally participating in parties or when parties have little incentive to incorporate them. For example, although American membership in unions has been declining, unionizing among immigrant workers in the service sector has been comparatively intense.⁷⁷

Similarly, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans involved with organizations vote at higher rates than those who are not, and the effect of organizational memberships is greater among Hispanics than among Anglos. And although the effect of church membership on immigrants' political participation is not clear, church attendance seems to be positively related to both electoral and nonelectoral participation among Hispanics (especially the former) and increases Asian Americans' electoral (but not nonelectoral) participation.⁷⁸

As in the past, churches and voluntary organizations may be particularly important for female immigrants' political participation. Building on findings that gender structures immigrants' organizational activity, Jones-Correa found that women have more contact with American governmental institutions, especially through their children, and are “disproportionately represented as the appointed mediators between [American] governmental institutions and other immigrants.”⁷⁹

DeSipio, however, seriously questions the power of any of these institutions to significantly incorporate immigrants into the polity today, arguing that “the infrastructure of ethnic-community-based institutions that facilitated naturalization in earlier eras is largely absent in today's immigrant communities.”⁸⁰ If political parties are not actively working to incorporate new immigrants and if most politics at the state and local levels are noncompetitive, whether (or not) nonelectoral institutions such as unions, churches, and voluntary organizations are incorporating immigrants is of utmost significance.

Impact on established groups, structures, and processes

Scholars have focused on the determinants of immigrants' political participation at the expense of larger questions about how immigrants affect the U.S. polity or other established groups. Nevertheless, the question remains: as immigrants enter the United States and start to naturalize, vote, and participate, how will they affect the behavior of political parties, political elites, and governing coalitions? Will immigrants encourage political institutions and actors to incorporate them or to exclude them? Will they encourage competition or cooperation and coalition building, especially among minority groups?⁸¹

In Miami, for example, Cuban economic and political gains have eclipsed those of African Americans, intensified interethnic conflict, and fueled the latter's sense of displacement.⁸² In other cities also, immigration is complicating the relationships among racial groups as well as within them. Yet on the whole, the political changes in governing regimes, ethnic alliances and competition, and urban politics being produced by current immigration “remain understudied and little understood,” especially outside central cities or certain states.⁸³

The increasing number of foreign-born individuals living in the United States without full political rights raises questions about the representation of their interests in a “working” liberal democracy. Issues of political inequality, national political and civic identity, and regional and local identity are becoming more pressing as the number of immigrants in the United States expands, and as the number of places where U.S. natives live and interact with them grows too.⁸⁴

Region

Past European immigrants settled predominantly in the Northeast and Midwest, past Mexican and Asian immigrants, in the West. With the exception of Florida and Illinois—and considering Texas as part of the Southwest—current immigrants settle predominantly in the Northeast and West. These broad settlement patterns call for more comparisons across the four regions; they also call for comparisons between the Northeast and West (established regions of settlement among current immigrants) versus the Midwest and South (new regions of settlement among current immigrants).

For example, regional comparisons may be useful indicators of different reception contexts. General Social Survey (GSS) data illustrate that citizens living in the Midwest are more receptive to immigrants than those living in the South Atlantic region and in large metropolitan areas of California and Texas.⁸⁶

In addition, both Benjamin Deufel and David Griffith find less proactive reactions to immigrants in their Southern than Midwestern field sites, which they attribute to some combination of regional differences in economic growth (higher in the South than the Midwest), population loss (higher in the Midwest than the South), racial homogeneity of the local population (higher in the Midwest than the South) and civic vitality (higher in the rural Midwest than the rural South).⁸⁷ To the extent that “red” and “blue” states are also divided along crude regional lines, and that immigrants adapt to their local political culture, broad differences in political cultures and ideologies may also influence how are socialized into political activity across regions; likewise, it may influence how U.S. natives respond to them across regions.

However, William Frey suggests a different breakdown of “region” because 2000 census data show “a fading of [rural-suburban-urban] local cultural boundaries in favor of increasing sharp regional ones,” and that “these new regional divisions are being shaped by very different immigration and domestic migration flows.” Immigrants are concentrated in and dominate population growth in the “melting pot” states of California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey. In contrast, whites and blacks have dominated population growth in the “New Sunbelt” states of the South Atlantic and Pacific West (despite increasing levels of Hispanics and Asian Americans there too), while other northeastern and midwestern states and a few southern and western states lagging in population growth are the least racially diverse and have witnessed little Hispanic or Asian American population growth. Consequently, Frey argues, “while the Melting Pot region provides the intensity, ethnic diversity, and close contact that used to be associated only with cities, the New Sunbelt offers a quieter setting, large lot sizes, and local control that have always attracted people to suburbs, and […] large swaths of the Heartland region now replicate the older, more conservative rural areas of the past.”⁸⁸

Essentially this conceptualization of “regional” differences in American lifestyles and political cultures is based on “regional” differences in economic structure and demographic composition. Consistent with the trend toward contextualism, to the extent that economic structure and demographic composition affect how immigrants are incorporated into local labor markets, social groups, and local political systems, we may see differences in immigrants' incorporation paths across these three “regions”.

State

Immigrants may also be strongly affected by smaller-scale influences. In an ongoing research project,⁸⁹

I find that residence in North Carolina sometimes matters more to immigrants' experiences than being in the “South” or another new immigrant destination state. Ashley (a pseudonym), director of the foreign-language interpreter certification program run by North Carolina's Administration of the Courts (AOC), reports that while North Carolina's court system is undergoing serious financial strain that affects its ability to hire and pay interpreters, Virginia's financial crisis is even worse:

By this logic, immigrants living in North Carolina and Virginia encounter different reception contexts as measured by the availability of certified court interpreters; David Griffith makes a similar argument in terms of labor law enforcement.⁹⁰

Other respondents point out the same thing concerning educational context of reception, since state departments of education have some jurisdiction over the design and implementation of their own education policies. Alma (a pseudonym), the only immigrant member of the North Carolina State Board of Education, maintains that North Carolina has created a more receptive educational context to schools than have some other southern states:

Interstate comparisons may be especially important in the political realm, where “the federal structure of the U.S. political system places state governments in a major—some would even say primary—role as policymakers and political institutions in the domestic arena of U.S. government” and where “local governments … are created and shaped by state governments.”⁹¹

For example, there are certainly reasons to think that the experiences of immigrants living in north Florida will resemble those of their counterparts just across the state line in south Georgia. At present both states are witnessing significant economic growth, and consequently, immigration. Likewise, federal policy currently requires public elementary schools to enroll immigrant children regardless of their legal status no matter where they live.⁹² Yet Florida is a competitive swing state at the national and state levels, while Georgia is noncompetitive and solidly Republican at the national and state levels (despite the presence of some majority Democratic counties at the local level). In this way, we might expect to see significant differences in immigrants' political incorporation across the FL-GA state line. Ramakrishnan and Espenshade and Jones-Correa have taken an important step to include measures of state political culture in analyzing immigrant political incorporation, as has Jones-Correa in including state-level variation in voter registration requirements.⁹³ In contrast, research on economic and sociocultural immigrant incorporation tends to focus either on the aggregate national level or the micro-local level; this is one way in which research on politics is ahead of research on economic or social contexts.⁹⁴

Some immigrant incorporation research in all three disciplines examines traditional immigrant-receiving states (California, New York, Texas, and so forth) or compares one with the others (to gauge the effect of California's anti-immigrant legislation and climate during the 1990s, and so forth), but more comparisons among traditional immigrant-receiving states could be helpful. In addition, grouping states according to their immigration histories could be useful since Roberto Suro and Sonya Tafoya find that comparing “traditional Latino settlement states” with “new Latino settlement states” highlights important differences in Latinos' neighborhood residential patterns that affect their social environments.⁹⁵

Their analysis could be expanded to other immigrant and minority groups, and other potential differences. Grouping states according to their demographic characteristics, particularly their percentages of immigrants or other minority groups, could also prove useful for conceptualizing state-level reception contexts since these are considered to be important contextual factors affecting immigrant incorporation.⁹⁶

Rodney Hero suggests two additional possible comparisons: between states' political ideologies, measured by residents' self-identification on a liberal-conservative continuum, and between political cultures, measured as individualist/moralist/traditionalist, which may affect minority groups' political success. He speculates that states with moralist political cultures (with their presumed concern for the collective good) will be most conductive to minority political influence, that states with traditionalist political cultures (with their focus on maintaining the status quo) will be most detrimental to it, and that states where residents self-identify as more liberal will lie somewhere in between.⁹⁷

Hero addresses only the political ideologies and cultures of states with large Latino populations, but one could also explore their possible influence in all states or among various groups of immigrants.

Metropolitan status

Immigrants may also be influenced by reception contexts within states. For example, GSS data show that citizens living in metropolitan areas are more receptive toward immigrants than are their nonmetropolitan counterparts, and state-level survey data from Minnesota and North Carolina find more negative public opinion toward immigrants in rural than in urban areas.⁹⁸

I have found that living in a rural area or a small town rather than a large city often matters more to immigrants' experiences and opportunities than being in the “South” or in North Carolina. For example, Diana, a Puerto Rican corrections officer in eastern North Carolina, argues that racial profiling likely differs between urban and rural areas:

Ashley also reports a more negative context of reception in rural than urban North Carolina as measured by the availability of certified court interpreters. Compared to the dense metropolitan areas in the central Piedmont part of the state, rural areas in the eastern part of the state face a serious dearth of certified court interpreters; in fact, as of 2003–4 only one state-certified Spanish interpreter resided east of Interstate 95. Ashley maintains this is because the rural east has fewer “qualified” bilingual people to become certified, and also because the certification program is only offered in Raleigh. Regardless of the reasons, immigrants residing in the rural east benefit from far fewer resources than those in the urban Piedmont, a distinction that other scholars studying immigration in rural areas uphold in various service arenas.⁹⁹

On the other hand, several respondents in my research report better opportunities and treatment by Americans outside cities. One is Inés, an immigrant from Medellín, Colombia:

Respondent:

Bedford is a very small town. I come from a very big city…. Or like, the difference was very big. Arriving to such a small town. But since the moment that I stepped off that plane, you don't know how much I liked it! I loved coming to this country, and when I arrived here to Bedford, I loved Bedford. The town fascinated me. I loved it…. The town, the town's form, the people are so nice. Everyone said hello to me, and no one knew me yet, and everyone said hello to me. I loved that… .

Interviewer:

In your experience, are there any differences you see or have heard of between Americans who live in the South of the United States and Americans who live in other parts of the United States?

Respondent:

I would say it's the fact that this is a small town…. I think you have more opportunity in small towns that they don't give you in cities. In large cities, there are too many Hispanics. There are too many problems…. And I think coming to these small towns is a lot better. Even more so when you have small children. (Inés, Bedford County)

As these responses show, while metropolitan status may indeed be important for conceptualizing reception contexts, it is not yet clear to what degree or in what direction. For example, Lourdes Gouveia, Miguel Carranza, and Jasney Cogua found that “while it is true that nonmetropolitan communities tend to suffer from an even more serious lack of institutions and programs responding proactively to new immigration [in Nebraska], … attitudes that could hinder or facilitate incorporation did not always line up neatly along this urban-rural divide.”¹⁰⁰

That observation echoes my respondents' complex and often contradictory views.¹⁰¹

Comparisons by metropolitan status may even be good indicators of reception context in traditional immigrant destinations. Might we expect the experiences of immigrants living in rural New York to better resemble those of their counterparts in rural Minnesota or Alabama than Manhattan? With their “distinctive spatial layout and politics,” could suburbs' political cultures or structures differ enough from those in central cities to change our understanding of how immigrants fit into local politics,¹⁰²

and could those in nonmetropolitan areas be equally distinctive? Among other things, immigrants' dispersal into suburbs and rural areas throughout the country provides a chance to study their political incorporation in places likely to be more conservative or dominated by the Republican Party than in major central cities. We could imagine, for example, that immigrants' political experiences would differ between metropolitan San Francisco and rural Tennessee.

Yet so far most immigrant incorporation research has been conducted in the major metropolitan areas, including the most informative studies on the “second generation”¹⁰³

and Latin and Asian American political participation. While representative of 91 percent of Latinos, the 1989–90 Latino National Political Survey (LNPS) only includes Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans living in 40 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas”;¹⁰⁴ while representative of 37 percent of Asian Americans, the 2001–1 Pilot National Asian American Political Survey (PNAAPS) only includes Asian Americans in particular parts of five metropolitan areas.¹⁰⁵ Comparisons of immigrant incorporation across (and among), central cities, suburbs, and rural areas will help gauge how well or poorly established findings correspond to immigrants' experiences outside urban centers. Most importantly, we need to know where new immigrants are experiencing the greatest material hardship, where they have the fewest chances for upward mobility, and where they are confronting the most prejudice from natives. Are their economic prospects worst in dilapidated urban centers or in forgotten rural areas (compared to suburbs)? Is prejudice against them strongest in central cities (where their neighbors may be primarily disenfranchised members of nonwhite racial minority groups), in rural areas (where their neighbors may be the most unfamiliar with immigrants), or in suburbs (where their neighbors may be primarily class-conscious whites)?¹⁰⁶

Finally, demographic composition will likely factor into all of these comparisons. How might immigrants fare differently in areas where a single racial group dominates versus in those where no group does? What about places where there are more versus fewer immigrants or coethnics, or more or fewer African Americans? In my research, some Hispanic respondents report that fewer coethnics in eastern North Carolina makes adaptation more difficult, but others—like Felipe, a “1.5-generation” immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, whose family migrated to North Carolina via Chicago in the early 1990s—report precisely the opposite:

And Davíd, an immigrant from Medellín, Colombia, speculates that larger numbers of African Americans increase black-Hispanic conflict in the South: “Like I said before, I feel the blacks don't like us. And that it is worse than with the whites.” These are just two examples of how variation in demographic composition may influence the course of immigrant incorporation across the country. According to Felipe, rural new destination areas with low levels of immigrant/coethnic concentration ease the English language acquisition process compared to major immigrant-receiving cities. According to Davíd, who resides in a majority-black county in eastern North Carolina, intergroup tensions are intensified by the larger number of African Americans residing in the U.S. South compared to other regions of the country. However, comparative research on how demographic composition affects immigrants' experiences outside traditional immigrant-receiving cities is still in its infancy. Felipe and Davíd's responses represent two out of many competing (and still contested) hypotheses; the broad patterns have yet to be mapped out in any definitive way.