The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (93 page)

War refugees. It bears emphasizing that until this law was passed, Western

Hemisphere immigration had been unrestricted, largely at the behest of Amer-

ican agribusiness; and in fact, as Aristide Zolberg (1995, p. 155) has pointed out, the legislative history of the 1965 Act `ìndicates very clearly that the objective was to deter the growth of black and brown immigration'' from Latin America

and the Caribbean, while increasing that from Southern and Eastern Europe. For

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that matter, the 1965 law had nothing to do with determining, for instance, the

huge Cuban exile flows of the early 1960s, or the even larger Indochinese refugee flows that would follow much later in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. What is

more, the most important consequences of the 1965 Act, notably the rapid

growth of previously barred immigration from Asian and African countries in

the Eastern Hemisphere, were largely unintended.

The law does matter, of course: it influences migration decisions, regulates the migration process, and constitutes a key context of reception shaping the incorporation of newcomers, especially their right to full membership and future

citizenship. Thus, the right of an immigrant to become a US citizen through

naturalization was legally restricted on racial grounds until 1952. The first

federal naturalization law of 1790 gave that right only tò`free white persons,''

and a revised law in 1870 extended it to persons of African descent or nativity.

Moreover, the original native inhabitants of the continent were presumed to bè`loyal to their tribes'' and not granted United States citizenship until 1924. Most Asian immigrants were excluded from access to American citizenship until the

McCarran±Walter Act of 1952. Asian Indians had been able to naturalize on the

grounds that they were Caucasians until the US Supreme Court, in a 1923 case,

decided that they would no longer be considered white persons. The Chinese

were removed from the classes of `àliens ineligible for citizenship'' upon the

repeal of the (1882) Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, when China and the USA

were Second World War allies. In all of these instances and many more, the law,

backed up by the public force of the state, provides a source of political capital unavailable to residents without legal standing (see Aleinikoff and Rumbaut,

1998). But it cannot control historical forces or determine the size or source of migration flows.

International migrations are rooted in historical relationships established

between the sending and receiving countries ± rooted in colonialism, war and

military occupation, labor recruitment, and economic interaction ± through

which migration footholds are formed, kinship networks expand, remittances

(in the tens of billions of dollars annually) sent by immigrants to their families abroad link communities across national borders, and all of this turns migration into a social process of vast transformative significance, for both countries of origin and of destination, and one sustained by factors that extend beyond the

realm of government action or the economic impulses that originally generated

it. To be sure, migration pressures as a result of global inequality can only mount in a world that is more and more a place with a declining proportion of rich

people and a growing proportion of poor people. Today, the biggest such devel-

opment rift in the globe is located along the 2,000±mile USA±Mexico border,

and indeed the longest, largest, and most continuous labor migration anywhere

in the world is that from Mexico to the United States. The National Population

Council predicted in 1999 that as many as eight million more Mexicans will

migrate north of the border by 2020 unless Mexico manages to create one

million jobs per year to meet population growth. But even in this paradigmatic

instance the story is not reducible to a neoclassical economic function of wage

differentials, employer demand, and labor supply.

Immigration and Ethnicity

397

While today's immigrants come from over 150 different countries, some

regions and nations send many more than others, despite the equitable numerical

quotas provided to each country by US law since 1965. Indeed, fewer than a

dozen countries account for the majority of all immigration to the USA. One

pattern, a continuation of trends already under way in the 1950s, is clear:

immigration from the more developed countries has declined over time, while

that from less developed countries has accelerated. However, among the less

developed countries, the major sources of legal and illegal immigration are

located in the Caribbean Basin ± in the immediate periphery of the USA ± or

are a handful of Asian nations also characterized by significant historical ties to the USA. In fact, immigrants from Mexico and the Philippines alone account

for a third of the total. These two countries share the deepest structural linkages with the USA, dating to the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars in the

nineteenth century, and a long history of dependency relationships, external

intervention, and (in the Philippines) direct colonization, as well as decades of active agricultural labor recruitment by the USA ± of Mexicans to the Southwest, Filipinos to plantations in Hawaii and California ± that preceded

the establishment of family networks and chain migrations. The extensive US

military presence in the Philippines has also fueled immigration through

marriages with US citizens stationed there, through unique arrangements

granting US citizenship to Filipinos who served in the armed forces during the

Second World War, and through recruitment of Filipinos into the US Navy.

Tellingly, in their analysis of spouse-immigrant flows, Jasso and Rosenzweig

(1990) found that the most powerful determinant of the number of immigrants

admitted as wives of US citizens was the presence of a US military base in the

country of origin. Geopolitical factors thus shape the marriage market in immi-

grant visas, a vivid example of the connection between macro- and microsocial

structures.

American foreign policy in the transformed post-Second World War world,

notably the doctrine and practice of global communist containment, is itself a

key factor in explaining several of the most sizable migrations from different

world regions ± indeed, in effectively helping to create the conditions that

generated the flows in the first place (see Zolberg et al., 1989). During the

Cold War this included direct US involvement in ``hot'' wars in Korea, Vietnam,

Laos, Cambodia, and Central America, and interventions in Guatemala, Iran,

Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere ± all of which, not coincidentally,

are among the leading source countries of contemporary immigrants and refu-

gees. Among the most numerous recent European arrivals have been (former)

Soviet Jews and Poles, admitted mainly as political refugees, like other groups

from communist countries. Emigration connections forged by US intervention

and foreign policies were also a common denominator in the exodus of the

Chinese after the 1949 revolution (and more recently in the issuance of immi-

grant visas to tens of thousands of Chinese students in the USA after the events of Tienanmen Square in 1989), and Iranians after the 1978 revolution. Indeed,

immigrants from the four communist countries figuring most prominently in

American foreign policy ± Cuba, Vietnam, China, and the (former) Soviet Union

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RubeÂn G. Rumbaut

± accounted in 1997 for nearly one-sixth of the total US foreign-born population (exceeded only by Mexico and the Philippines). In short, contemporary immigration to the USA and the creation and consolidation of social networks that

serve as bridges of passage have taken place within this larger historical context and cannot be adequately understood outside of it, or reduced to a cost±benefit

economic calculus of individual migrants or to the immigration laws of par-

ticular states.

The size and source of new immigrant communities in the USA today are thus

directly if variously related to the history of American military, political, economic, and ± pervasively ± cultural involvement in the major sending countries,

and to the linkages that are formed in the process which (often unintentionally) open a surprising variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. Ironically,

immigration to the United States ± and the pluralization of American ethnicity

± may be understood as a dialectical consequence of the expansion of the nation

to its post-Second World War position of global hegemony. As the United States

has become more deeply involved in the world, the world has become more

deeply involved in America ± indeed, in diverse ways, it has come to America

(Rumbaut, 1994). As such, American pluralism today is not and cannot be

construed as solely an internal matter of intergroup relations, of purely domestic concern; it is also fundamentally international and transnational in its nature

and scope, and reflects the US role in the world.

Contemporary Immigration and Ethnic Stratification

Stratification

A widespread point of view in the contentious debate about the new immigration

is that it constitutes, relative to those who came in earlier decades, à`declining stock'' of less educated and more welfare dependent populations, partly because

of its national origins, and partly because of putatively nepotistic family reunification preferences in US law (Borjas, 1990). This latter contention has been

rebutted by recent research that shows that immigrants who are admitted

through family ties are as successful in their economic contributions as those

who come under employment preferences (see Rumbaut, 1997). Furthermore,

the fact that most immigrants to the USA since the 1960s have come from

comparatively poorer nations does not mean that the immigrants themselves

are drawn from the uneducated, unskilled, or unemployed sectors of their

countries of origin. In fact, a substantial proportion of contemporary immigrants exceed the human capital of native workers by a wide margin, especially in

education (Portes and Rumbaut, 1996). These highly educated, professional or

managerial immigrants are more likely to speak English, to live in the suburbs,

and to accommodate tòÀmerican ways'' ± and `ìnvisibly'' at that, meaning that

they are not publicly perceived as à`problem.'' Available occupational data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) ± indicating the number

employed as professionals, executives, and managers at the time of immigrant

admission ± show that over the past three decades, well over two million

immigrant engineers, scientists, university professors, physicians, nurses, and

Immigration and Ethnicity

399

other professionals and executives and their immediate families have been

admitted into the USA. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, one-third of all

legal immigrants worldwide to the USA (excluding dependents) were high-status

professionals, executives, or managers in their countries of origin ± a higher

percentage than that of the native-born American population ± despite the fact

that the overwhelming majority of immigrants were admitted under family

preferences over this period (Rumbaut, 1997).

Still, there are very sharp differences in the class, and `èthclass'' (Gordon,

1964), character of contemporary immigration to the USA. In fact, the diversity

of contemporary immigration is such that, among all ethnic groups in America

today, native and foreign-born, different immigrant nationalities account at once for the highest and the lowest rates of education, self-employment, home ownership, poverty, welfare dependency, and fertility ± as well as the lowest rates of divorce and of female-headed single-parent families, and the highest proportions of children under 18 residing with both natural parents. These differential

starting points, especially the internal socioeconomic diversification of particular waves and ``vintages'' within the same nationalities over time, augur differential modes of incorporation and assimilation outcomes that cannot be extrapolated

simply from the experience of earlier immigrant groups of the same nationality,

let alone from immigrants as an undifferentiated whole.

Table 27.2 ranks the principal US immigrant groups by their proportion of

college graduates among adults aged 25 and older, and compares them to native

racial-ethnic groups on various indicators of socioeconomic status (as of the last census). The foreign-born as a whole had the same proportion of college graduates (20 percent) as the native-born population, as well as an equivalent rate of labor force participation and self-employment. They were, however, more likely

than natives to be poor and to work in low status jobs. But decontextualized

data at this level of analysis conceal far more than they reveal, although that is often the level at which arguments about the supposedly ``declining stock'' of

new immigrants are made. It is worth repeating that, by far, the most educated

and the least educated ethnic groups in the USA today are immigrants, a reflec-

tion of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical contexts. Disaggregated by region and country of birth, the huge differences

among them are made clear, underscoring the fact that these groups cannot

sensibly be subsumed under pan-national, one-size-fits-all, made-in-the-USA