The New Immigrant Challenge

By Linda Chavez

In order to explore answers to these questions, the Center for Equal Opportunity sponsored a series of seminars and conferences on immigration. Most of the essays in this book are taken from presentations at those events, including a debate between authors Joel Kotkin and Peter Brimelow that appears in the second section. The Kotkin-Brimelow debate occurred at a conference in San Francisco in April 1994, which was co-sponsored by the Pacific Research Institute and the Manhattan Institute. We have also included new and reprinted essays from other writers who deal with important issues that were not directly addressed at the Center's meetings. Finally, we have included a compilation of factual information on the size, distribution and social and economic indicators for the immigrant population in the United States, gathered by Stephen Moore of the CATO Institute and John J. Miller, Vice President of CEO. In all, 18 contributors present their views on immigration and its effect in American society.

Part of what fuels the renewed interest in immigration is no doubt the sheer size of the immigrant population, which has risen dramatically in the last 30 years. But there is also a sense that immigrants today may be less malleable than those who came early in the century, during the country's last large influx. The challenge of adding millions of new, possibly unmeltable ethnics seems to many Americans too heavy a burden to assume at a time when the nation is struggling to define what constitutes American identity and to include more than 30 million black Americans in the full social, political, and economic mainstream. Nor do some immigrant advocacy groups make the task easier by pressing for entitlements for public education and other services in native languages; access to the voting booth in local elections, even before immigrants become naturalized citizens; affirmative action preferences in employment and higher education; and myriad social programs and benefits, not just for legal residents but for illegal aliens as well.

Some of these policies, unpopular enough when championed on behalf of American-born blacks and Hispanics, are all the more unpalatable when proposed on behalf of immigrants. What's more, many native-born Americans say they feel lost in urban communities with large immigrant enclaves, where English is rarely heard on the streets or seen in storefronts.

On the other hand, many of these complaints echo the panicky voices heard so often in the past. Americans have always questioned immigrants' ability and willingness to join the cultural mainstream. But assimilation is an ongoing, even generational process. Italians met a good deal of native hostility when they first arrived in large numbers around the turn of the century, but today nobody loses much sleep over their assimilative capacity. Few people realize that it actually took Italian Americans until 1970 to catch up with the rest of the country in terms of educational attainment. Immigrant assimilation, while desirable, clearly demands a measure of patience on the part of natives-who in the meantime can benefit economically from immigrants' entrepreneurial spirit and readiness to accept jobs that most natives would refuse.

The anti-immigrant backlash that produced California's proposition 187 to restrict health, education, and welfare benefits to illegal aliens-which won by nearly 20 percent of the vote, warns us that a growing segment of the population will not tolerate further expansion of the welfare state. It is easy enough to blame racism and xenophobia for the popularity of Proposition 187, but the facts are more complicated. Immigration in the 1990s presents new challenges, not because this generation's immigrants are predominantly Hispanic and Asian rather than European; or because they lack the skills or motivation to work; or because they refuse to assimilate. Rather, the America to which these new immigrants come is a very different society than that which greeted the Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians, and Greeks of earlier periods.

The Americanization era--which encouraged previous immigrants' quick assimilation through sometimes cruel methods--is long gone, replaced by state-supported multiculturalism. The demand for strong immigrant backs to build new industries and cities is past, supplanted by the need for technological expertise and cushioned by a safety net for those who lack the skills to compete for the new, more demanding jobs. Whether or not Hispanic and Asian immigrants, who make up the bulk of the current flow, will transcend the challenges of this new era is the subject of the following essays.

The authors offer a range of views, from the essential optimism of Ron K. Unz, Richard Rodriguez, Reed Ueda, Francis Fukuyama, Michael Fix, and Joel Kotkin to the more pessimistic appraisals of Nathan Glazer, George Borjas, Michael Lind, Peter Skerry, and Peter Brimelow. Alejandro Portes, Ruben Rumbaut, and Stephan Thernstrom describe the role and importance of ethnicity in the current immigration climate, while Louis Winnick deals with the question of illegal immigration and Lawrence H. Fuchs with what policy changes are necessary to cope with the present immigration. America's premier immigration historian, Oscar Handlin, sets the scene for the book with an original essay on America's newest immigrants.