Often described as a nation of immigrants, the United States had a foreign-born population of 12.4 percent in 2005. Before the 19th century, however, people rarely used the term immigrant. Instead, the foreign-born came as settlers, pioneers, slaves, or indentured servants.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 first established a centralized process for becoming a citizen, originally open to any free white individual who could demonstrate residence in the country for 2 years. In the mid-19th century, the short-lived Know-Nothing movement emerged as a reaction to a surge in immigration, particularly of Irish Catholics after the potato famine of 1845-1851. No national legislation, however, was enacted in response. Immigration was, for the most part, welcomed as a route to national development until the late 19th century. This changed with the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese from entering the country and excluded those already in the country from naturalization. From this point forward, who could and could not “become an American” was regulated at the national level. The immigrant became a distinct legal, as well as social, category.
Historically, two major peaks occurred in the foreign-born population as a percentage of the total population. According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, 9.7 percent of the population was foreign-born in 1850, rising to 14.8 percent in 1890 and 14.7 percent in 1910. Midcentury, the proportion of foreign-born plummeted, representing just 5.4 percent of the total population in 1960 and 4.7 percent in 1970. Since the 1970s, however, the number of foreign-born has risen rapidly. Estimated at more than 35.6 million in 2005, there are now more than twice as many immigrants than at any time before 1980. In addition to the increasing numbers of foreign-born people, there are significant trends in their ethnic and racial composition. In 1910, 87.4 percent of immigrants came from Europe. In 2005, 31 percent of foreign-born arrived from Latin America, 36 percent from Asia, and just 16 percent from Europe.
The gender and age cohorts of immigrants to the United States also varied over the past 100 years. Earlier immigrants were primarily male; in 1910 there were 131.2 males per 100 female immigrants. By 1960, this trend reversed, and in 1970 there were just 84.4 males per 100 female immigrants. The proportion of male immigrants rose again by 1990, with 95.8 males per 100 females, a pattern that continued through 2005. Similarly, the age distribution of the immigrant population shifted over time. In 1910, 5.7 percent of immigrants were under age 15 and 8.9 percent were over age 65. In 1940, less than 1 percent of immigrants were under age 15 and 18 percent were over age 65. By 1990, 7.5 percent of immigrants were under age 15 and 13.6 percent were over age 65.
Scholars analyze the determinants of migration to understand these changing demographic patterns, such as the shift from fewer female migrants in the early 1900s to many more females than males in the 1970s. Researchers also examine the experiences of immigrant groups and their offspring in relation to nonimmigrant populations. They may consider how race and ethnicity shape immigrants’ experiences of adaptation and mobility, how an influx of young immigrants impacts the educational system, or how the changing profile of older immigrants affects social security and health care institutions.
Causal Factors in U.S. Immigration
Theoretical approaches to understanding the determinants of immigration include neoclassical economics, world-systems theory, the household strategies models, and social network analysis.
Neoclassical Economics
Neoclassical economic approaches to migration consider the wage differentials between foreign countries and the United States as the root cause of an individual’s decision to migrate. Immigrants are often labor migrants; they may be rational actors who weigh the costs and benefits of a move abroad. Immigrants may base their decisions on push and pull factors, the former referring to the causes of economic hardship which make survival in the home country difficult and the latter referring to potential economic opportunity in the United States. As such, fluctuations in immigration can relate to labor markets. For example, expansion of the railroads in the West, starting in the 1860s, provided jobs for Asian and Mexican immigrants before Chinese immigrants and other Asians were barred from entry. More recently, the increasing entrance of women into formal labor markets since the 1970s created job opportunities in child care for many female immigrants.
Immigration patterns also necessarily relate to labor markets in immigrants’ countries of origin. In many African countries, for example, civil war and ethnic conflict since the 1980s left professionals with few opportunities for advancement. They often sought work in the United States where they received a greater return for their human capital. In other countries, such as the Philippines and in parts of India, the number of highly educated female nurses exceeded the demands of their national health care systems; many have found work in this expanding U.S. industry since the 1970s.
World-Systems Theories
In the real world, a pure relationship between economic hardship and opportunity is rare. Instead, economic decisions are embedded in social and political structures that may mitigate or intensify hardships and may create or dampen opportunities. A world-systems perspective analyzes the political structures underlying immigration and examines the relations between nations that contribute to creating these structures.
Immigration law and regulation is one key factor that influences migration patterns. For example, the National Origins Act of 1921, which restricted immigration from different countries according to a quota system, and its abolition in 1965 explain the drop in immigration to the United States in the mid-20th century. The abolition of the act also helps explain the greater diversity in the ethnic and racial composition of immigrants since 1965.
Inclusion or exclusion of potential immigrants is also intimately tied to international politics, particularly in the post-World War II era when the United States created refugee and political asylum provisions. For example, Cubans, whose Communist leader Fidel Castro has challenged U.S. intervention in the region since 1959, receive a warm welcome and resettlement support. However, during the 1980s, immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador, where the United States backed the national governments amid civil war, were routinely denied political asylum. Religious leaders in the United States then illegally provided sanctuary for many Central Americans; their successful challenges to immigration law led to a 1990 provision for political asylum for El Salvadorans and Guatemalans.
U.S. military presence in a country may also spur immigration, particularly by women. The War Brides Act of 1945 allowed GIs to sponsor their foreign-born wives and children, sparking an increase in Korean and Japanese immigration midcentury. Many women from El Salvador first came to the United States in the 1980s as domestic workers for foreign diplomats stationed in their country during the conflict. Today the second largest Salvadoran community is in Washington, D.C.
Household Strategies
In contrast to external imbalances of power, the household migration strategy perspective considers the dynamics within families that shape immigration. Originally, household strategy models were relatively one-dimensional, assuming that families deployed specific members as part of a unified family migration strategy. For example, at the turn of the 20th century, Italian men often left wives and children behind when they immigrated to maintain, and at times increase, the family’s holdings via remittances, reducing the risks involved in uprooting the entire family. In contrast, Irish families often sent young unmarried women between 1880 and 1920 to work in domestic service to supplement family income, because inheritance practices limited marriage pools within Ireland.
Today, scholars suggest more complicated household strategy models by tracing the ways power imbalances within families affect decisions to migrate. These scholars argue that a unified family migration strategy may not exist and that migration may not benefit all members of a household equally.
For example, some suggest that because Mexican men generally have more decision-making power than do women in their families, the male breadwinner primarily makes the decision to migrate. Other scholars describe the ways that women from Latin America and the Caribbean actively convince their families to support their moves abroad in order to escape abusive situations at home.
Social Networks
Social networks also shape patterns of immigration. Because the social network is considered as an independent causal factor, social network analysis is a powerful reminder of the ways that informal structures within and between communities and families influence the face of immigration. For example, in recent years, Mexicans living in the United States constituted about 30 percent of the entire foreign-born population, by far the largest immigrant group. Mexican immigration is largely shaped by social networks now institutionalized in migrants’ communities of origin.
Consequences of U.S. Immigration
Research on the social consequences of immigration usually pertains to one of three areas: immigrants’ experiences of adaptation and assimilation, mobility of immigrant populations, and relationships between immigrant communities and nonimmigrant groups.
Adaptation and Assimilation
At the beginning of the 20th century, the principal stance on immigration was that the United States was a melting pot and that immigrants needed to assimilate to U.S. culture to be successful. Social campaigns during this period often strove to teach immigrant women how to make their families more “American.” When immigrants lived in neighborhoods dominated by co-ethnics, enclaves were considered a source of social disorganization that undermined modern development.
By the end of the 20th century, the melting pot paradigm gave way to one of multiculturalism. Rather than a site of social disorganization, ethnic enclaves are now viewed as a source of social support for immigrants. They provide the necessary networks to locate employment and housing. Membership in religious organizations with co-ethnics is one of the primary sites of civic participation among immigrants upon arrival. Ethnic enclaves are also important sources for entrepreneurship, the major means for mobility for some new immigrants. Self-employment rates are particularly high for well-educated Korean and Middle Eastern immigrants, although they may not depend on co-ethnics for business, instead acting as economic intermediaries in other ethnic minority neighborhoods. Yet for other members of immigrant groups, the ethnic enclave can become the principal site of exploitation by co-ethnics. This is particularly true for undocumented workers in Chinatowns across the country, who often must depend on informal, unregulated, and low-wage economic opportunities from co-ethnics.
Recent scholarship examines the increasingly important ways that transnational ties shape immigrant experiences in the United States. From this perspective, immigrants maintain social, political, and economic ties with communities of origin. Transnational studies may involve political ties (hometown associations), economic ties (remittances), technology, cultural identity, or family relationships. The transnational perspective shows that in a globalized world, immigrants’ adaptation to life in the United States is intricately linked to the lives of those in their countries of origin.
Mobility
Perhaps the best way to gauge the success of immigrants’ adaptations to life in the United States is to study the lives of the second generation, that is, the fate of the children of immigrants. Given the great demographic shifts between the primarily European stock of the earlier waves of immigrants and the influx of immigrants of color since the 1960s, mobility among the children of today’s immigrants is particularly indicative of the ways race and ethnicity shape the social structure of the United States.
Among the many factors considered in gauging mobility in the second generation are language acquisition, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status. Despite public concern to the contrary, findings suggest that by the second and third generations, proficiency in English is uniform among children of recent immigrants, much as was the case among the earlier waves of European immigrants. Findings based on other indicators of mobility, however, are mixed. On the one hand, when second-generation immigrants are isolated in ethnic enclaves in inner cities, upward mobility is far less likely. In other cases, immigrant youth may maintain their identity as foreigners to distinguish themselves from minority nonimmigrants.
One of the most important research findings on mobility among second-generation immigrants is that experiences typically differ between and within various groups, a process known as “segmented assimilation.” For example, comparative studies of second-generation youth in New York and Los Angeles show that children of different genders and racial/ethnic backgrounds may have vastly different experiences.
Relationships Between immigrants and Nonimmigrants
A third aspect of the consequences of U.S. immigration is interethnic relationships. Scholars from the Chicago School of sociology at the turn of the century mapped the social ecology of the city as a means of depicting the relationships between immigrant and nonimmigrant groups. Until recently, immigrant settlement patterns have not varied greatly. In urban areas like Chicago, most arrived to ethnic enclaves in the city and only those immigrants who were upwardly mobile, or their children or grandchildren, moved to the suburbs following scenarios of white flight. Moreover, Latino/a and Asian populations were once concentrated in California and in the Southwest. Cubans and other Caribbean immigrants settled in Florida and in the Northeast. In some areas, immigrants worked as migrant farmworkers. For the most part, though, the study of immigrant incorporation was a study of urban communities.
In recent decades, however, immigrants have dispersed rapidly throughout the continental United States, living in rural, urban, and suburban communities. Immigrants, many of them undocumented, have become a major cause of conflict at many of these new destinations. Their presence is associated with various social problems including concentrations of day laborers, bilingual education, health care for the uninsured, and more. Minutemen militia groups have formed at the southern U.S. border with Mexico to try to keep out immigrants. Some municipal governments have passed local ordinances to prevent immigrants from settling in their towns. The
“English only” movement has gained strength. Many fear that these tensions put immigrants’ human rights at risk; stories of women and children illegally trafficked into the United States illustrate the ways immigrants may be victimized in the underground economy associated with immigration.
Recently, concerns over terrorism, heightened after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, fueled rising tensions over the roles and rights of immigrants in the United States and increased pressures to regulate and monitor immigrants’ activities.
Bibliography:
- Foner, Nancy. 2000. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, ed. 2003. Gender and U.S. Immigration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Kasinitz, Philip, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters, eds. 2004. Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage.
- Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Light, Ivan and Steven Gold. 2000. Ethnic Economies. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
- Massey, D., J. Durand, and N. Malone. 2002. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in the Era of Economic Integration. New York: Russell Sage.
- Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbaut. 1990. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Rumbaut, Ruben G., ed. 2001. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Suarez-Orozco, Carola and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco. 2001. The Children of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Zuniga, Victor and Ruben Hernandez-Leon, eds. 2005. New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States. New York: Russell Sage.
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