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Introduction: Who They Are and Why They Come
In Guadalajara, Juan Manuel Fernandez worked as a mechanic in his uncle's repair shop making the equivalent of $150 per month. At thirty-two and after ten years on the job, he decided it was time to go into business on his own. The family, his uncle included, was willing to help, but capital for the new venture was scarce. Luisa, Juan's wife, owned a small corner grocery shop; when money ran out at the end of the month, she often fed the family off the store's shelves. The store was enough to sustain her and her children but not to capitalize her husband's project. For a while, it looked as if Juan would remain a worker for life.
Today Juan owns his own auto repair shop, where he employs three other mechanics, two Mexicans and a Salvadoran. The shop is not in Guadalajara, however, but in Gary, Indiana. The entire family--Luisa, the two children, and a brother--have resettled there. Luisa does not work any longer because she does not speak English and because income from her husband's business is enough to support the family. The children attend school and already speak better English than their parents. They resist the idea of going back to Mexico.
Juan crossed the border on his own near El Paso in 1979. No one stopped him, and he was able to head north toward a few distant cousins and the prospect of a factory job. To his surprise, he found one easily and at the end of four months was getting double the minimum wage in steady employment. A1most every worker in the plant was Mexican, his foreman was Puerto Rican, and the language of work was uniformly Spanish. Three trips from Gary to Guadalajara during the next two years persuaded him that it made much better sense to move his business project north of the border. Guadalajara was teeming with repair shops of all sorts, and competition was fierce. "In Gary," he said, "many Mexicans would not get their cars fixed because they did not know how to bargain with an American mechanic." Sensing the opportunity, he cut remittances to Mexico and opened a local savings account instead.
During his last trip, the "migra" (border patrol) stopped him shortly after crossing; that required a costly second attempt two days later with a hired "coyote" (smuggler). The incident put a stop to the commuting. Juan started fixing cars out of a shed in front of his barrio home. Word got around that there was a reliable Spanish-speaking mechanic in the neighborhood. In a few months, he was able to rent an abandoned garage, buy some equipment, and eventually hire others. To stay in business, Juan has had to obtain a municipal permit and pay a fee. He pays his workers in cash, however, and neither deducts taxes from their wages nor contributes to Social Security for them. All transactions are informal and, for the most part, in cash.
Juan and Luisa feel a great deal of nostalgia for Mexico, and both firmly intend to return. "In this country, we've been able to move ahead economically, but it is not our own," she says. "The gringos will always consider us inferior." Their savings are not in the bank, as before the shop was rented, but in land in Guadalajara, a small house for his parents, and the goodwill of many relatives who receive periodic remittances. They figure that in ten years they will be able to return, although they worry about their children, who may be thoroughly Americanized by then. A more pressing problem is their lack of "papers" and the constant threat of deportation. Juan has devised ingenious ways to run the business, despite his illegal status, but it is a constant problem. A good part of his recent earnings is in the hands of an immigration lawyer downtown, who has promised to obtain papers for a resident's visa, so far without results.
At age twenty-six, Nguyen Van Tran was a young lieutenant in the army of the Republic of South Vietnam when a strategic retreat order from the ARVN high command quickly turned into the final rout. Nguyen spent three years in communist reeducation camps, all the while attempting to conceal his past as a skilled electronics technician. He finally got aboard a boat bound for Malaysia and after two more years in a refugee camp arrived in Los Angeles in 1980. He had neither family nor friends in the city, but the government provided some resettlement aid and the opportunity to improve his English. At the end of a year, he had secured a job in a local electronics assembly plant, which brought in enough to support himself and his wife and child.
Seeing this plant double in a single year, Nguyen realized the opportunities opening up in electronics. He enrolled in the local community college at night and graduated with an associate degree in computer science. He pooled his savings with another Vietnamese technician and a Chinese engineer and in 1983 launched his own firm. Two years later Integrated Circuits, Inc., employed approximately three hundred workers; most were not Asians, but undocumented Mexican women. By 1985, the company sold about $20 million worth of semiconductors and other equipment to the local IBM plant and other large firms. ICI has even started its own line of IBM-compatible personal computer, the Trantex, which has sold well so far in the local market.
Nguyen, who is chairman of the company, sports a mustache, a sleek Mercedes, and a brand new name, George Best. Perhaps for fear of the "protection gangs" re-created by former Vietnamese policemen in Los Angeles, he has kept a low profile within the Vietnamese community. The name change is part of this approach. "Mr. Best" is not particularly nationalistic, nor does he dream of returning to Vietnam. He attributes his remarkable five-year ascent to hard work and a willingness to take risks. To underline the point, he has hung a large portrait of himself in his community college graduation gown behind his oversize desk. He and his wife are already U.S. citizens. They vote Republican, and he has recently joined the local chamber of commerce.
Lilia Gonzalez-Fleites left Cuba at fifteen, sent alone by her formerly wealthy parents, who remained behind. The Catholic Welfare Agency received her in Miami, and she went to live with other refugee children in an orphanage in Kendall, Florida, until released to an aunt. She finished high school promptly and married, without her parents' consent, her boyfriend from Cuba, Tomas. There was little work in Miami, and the young couple accepted an offer from the Cuban Refugee Center to resettle them, along with the rest of Tomas's family, in North Carolina. Everyone found work in the tobacco and clothing factories except Lilia, whom Tomas kept at home. At eighteen, the formerly pampered girl found herself a cook and maid for Tomas's entire family.
By sheer luck, the same order of nuns who ran her private school in Havana had a college nearby. Lilia used her school connections to gain admittance with a small scholarship and found herself a part-time job. Those were hard years, working in one city and attending school in another. Tomas and Lilia rarely saw each other because he also decided to return to school while still working.
At age thirty-nine, Lilia is today a successful Miami architect. Divorced from Tomas, she has not remarried, instead pursuing her professional career with single-minded determination. When Cuban refugees finally abandoned their dreams of return, Lilia entered local politics, affiliating with the Republican party. She ran for state office in 1986 but was defeated. Undaunted, she remained active in the party and became increasingly prominent in south Florida political circles. More than an immigrant success story, she sees herself at the beginning of a public career that will bridge the gap between the Anglo and Cuban communities in south Florida. Her unaccented English, fierce loyalty to her adopted country, and ability to shift easily between languages and cultures bodes well for her political future.
After finishing medical school, Amitar Ray confronted the prospect of working ad honorem in one of the few well-equipped hospitals in Bombay or moving to a job in the countryside and to quick obsolescence in his career. He opted instead for preparing and taking the Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) examination, administered at the local branch of the Indo-American Cultural Institute. He passed it on his second attempt. In 1972, there was a shortage of doctors in the United States, and U.S. consulates were directed to facilitate the emigration of qualified physicians from abroad.
Amitar and his wife, also a doctor, had little difficulty obtaining permanent residents' visas under the third preference of the U.S. immigration law, reserved for professionals of exceptional ability. He went on to specialize in anesthesiology and completed his residence at a public hospital in Brooklyn. After four years, nostalgia and the hope that things had improved at home moved the Rays to go back to India with their young daughter, Rita. The trip strengthened their professional and family ties, but it also dispelled any doubts as to where their future was. Medical vacancies were rare and paid a fraction of what he earned as a resident in Brooklyn. More important, there were few opportunities to grow professionally because he would have had to combine several part-time jobs to earn a livelihood, leaving little time for study.
At fifty-one, Amitar is now associate professor of anesthesiology at a midwestern medical school; his wife has a local practice as an internist. Their combined income is in the six figures, affording them a very comfortable life-style. Their daughter is a senior at Bryn Mawr, and she plans to pursue a graduate degree in international relations. There are few Indian immigrants in the mid-sized city where the Rays live; thus, they have had to learn local ways in order to gain entry into American social circles. Their color is sometimes a barrier to close contact with white middle-class families, but they have cultivated many friendships among the local faculty and medical community.
Ties to India persist and are strengthened through periodic trips and through the professional help the Rays are able to provide to colleagues back home. They have already sponsored the immigration of two bright young physicians from their native city. More important, they make sure that information on new medical developments is relayed to a few selected specialists back home. However, there is little chance that they will return, even after retirement. Work and new local ties play a role in this, but the decisive factor is a thoroughly Americanized daughter whose present life and future have very little to do with India. Rita does not plan to marry soon; she is interested in Latin American politics, and her current goal is a career in the foreign service.
After a lapse of half a century, the United States has again become a country of immigration. In 1990, the foreign-born population reached 19.8 million or 7.9 percent of the total. Although a far cry from the situation eighty years earlier, when immigrants accounted for 14.7 percent of the American population, the impact of contemporary immigration is both significant and growing. Numerous books and articles have called attention to this revival and sought its causes--first in a booming American economy and second in the liberalized provisions of the 1965 immigration act. A common exercise is to compare this "new" immigration with the "old" inflow at the turn of the century. Similarities include the predominantly urban destination of most newcomers, their concentration in a few port cities, and their willingness to accept the lowest paid jobs. Differences are more frequently stressed, however, for the "old" immigration was overwhelmingly European and white; but the present inflow is, to a large extent, nonwhite and comes from countries of the Third World.
The public image of contemporary immigration has been colored to a large extent by the Third World origins of most recent arrivals. Because the sending countries are generally poor, many Americans believe that the immigrants themselves are uniformly poor and uneducated. Their move is commonly portrayed as a one-way escape from hunger, want, and persecution and their arrival on U.S. shores as not too different from that of the tired, "huddled masses" that Emma Lazarus immortalized at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The "quality" of the newcomers and their chances for assimilation are sometimes portrayed as worse because of their non-European past and the precarious legal status of many.
The reality is very different. The four previous cases, each a composite of real life experiences, are certainly not representative of all recent immigrants. Clearly, not all newcomers are doctors or skilled mechanics, and fewer still become politicians or millionaires. Still, these are not isolated instances. Underneath its apparent uniformity, contemporary immigration features a bewildering variety of origins, return patterns, and modes of adaptation to American society. Never before has the United States received immigrants from so many countries, from such different social and economic backgrounds, and for so many reasons. Although pre-World War I European immigration was by no means homogeneous, the differences between successive waves of Irish, Italians, Jews, Greeks, and Poles often pale by comparison with the current diversity. For the same reason, theories coined in the wake of the Europeans' arrival at the turn of the century have been made obsolete by events during the last decades.
Increasingly implausible, for example, is the view of a uniform assimilation process that different groups undergo in the course of several generations as a precondition for their social and economic advancement. There are today first-generation millionaires who speak broken English, foreign-born mayors of large cities, and top-flight immigrant engineers and scientists in the nation's research centers; there are also those, at the other extreme, who cannot even take the first step toward assimilation because of the insecurity linked to an uncertain legal status.
This book describes that diversity. Many of the countries from which today's immigrants come have one of their largest cities in the United States. Los Angeles' Mexican population is next in size to those of Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara. Havana is not much larger than Cuban Miami, and Santo Domingo holds a precarious advantage over Dominican New York. This is not the case for all groups; others, such as Asian Indians, Laotians, Argentines, and Brazilians, are more dispersed throughout the country. Reasons for both these differences and other characteristics of contemporary immigrant groups are not well known--in part because of the recency of their arrival and in part because of the common expectation that their assimilation process would conform to the well-known European pattern. But immigrant America is a different place today from the America that emerged out of Ellis Island and grew up in the tenements of New York and Boston.
The Origins of Immigration
Why do they come? A common explanation singles out the 1965 change in American immigration law as the principal factor. According to this view, today's immigrants come because they can, whereas before 1965 legal restrictions prevented them from doing so. Although the 1965 law certainly explains qualitative and quantitative changes in immigration during the last three decades, it is an insufficient explanation. Not everyone in even the major sending countries has immigrated or is planning to do so. Compared to the respective national populations, those who decide to migrate generally represent a minuscule proportion. The question can thus be reversed to ask not why many come, but why so few have decided to undertake the journey, especially with difficult economic and political conditions in many sending countries.
Moving to a foreign country is not easy, even under the most propitious circumstances. It requires elaborate preparations, much expense, giving up personal relations at home, and often learning a new language and culture. Not so long ago, the lure of higher wages in the United States was not sufficient by itself to attract foreign workers and had to be activated through deliberate recruitment. Mexican immigration, for example, was initiated by U.S. growers and railroad companies who sent recruiters into the interior of Mexico to bring needed workers. By 1916, five or six weekly trains full of Mexican workers hired by the agents were being run from Laredo to Los Angeles. According to one author, the competition in El Paso became so fierce that recruiting agencies stationed their employees at the Santa Fe bridge, where they literally pounced on immigrants as they crossed the border.
The question then remains, What are the factors motivating some groups but not others to seek entry into the United States at present? The most common answer is the desperate poverty, squalor, and unemployment of many foreign lands. Two authors offer this somber assessment:
We call the poorest countries of the world "developing countries," as though the use of a progressive adjective could make a country progressive. But the overwhelming evidence is that most of these countries are not "developing" countries but "never-to-be-developed" countries. Most of the world's poor will stay poor for our lifetimes and for several generations to come, and there is nothing the developed nations can do to alter this fact.
They go on to argue that as these countries "sink into squalor, poverty, disease, and death," their poor will seek to migrate en masse to the United States and other developed countries to escape these terrible conditions. Other less alarmist accounts tend to share the same basic view of migration as a consequence of foreign destitution and unemployment.
These statements are made despite a mounting body of evidence that points in the exact opposite direction. Consider legal immigration. The proportion of professionals and managers among occupationally active immigrants consistently exceeds the average among U.S. workers. During the last two decades, immigrant professionals represented around 33 percent of the total, at a time when professionals and managers ranged between 17 and 27 percent of the American labor force. Although the gap may be somewhat exaggerated by the available immigration data, other sources confirm that recent immigrants are as well represented as the native-American population at the higher educational and occupational levels. For 1990, the census reported the percentage completing four or more years of college as 20.3 percent for natives and 20.4 percent for the foreign born; the number in professional specialty occupations was about the same for both groups: 12 to 14 percent. For this reason, the gap in median household incomes in favor of the native born did not exceed U.S. $2000 in that year, despite the fact that over 40 percent of the foreign born had been in the United States for ten years or less.
But even if legal immigrants represent a select group from most sending countries, what about the illegals? The evidence here is more tentative because of the difficulty of investigating a surreptitious flow. However, the available studies coincide on two points: The very poor and the unemployed seldom migrate, either legally or illegally; and unauthorized immigrants tend to have above-average levels of education and occupational skills in comparison with their homeland populations. More important, they are positively self-selected in terms of ambition and willingness to work.
Mexico is the source of over 95 percent of unauthorized aliens apprehended in the United States during the last two decades. Although the socioeconomic origins of most immigrants are modest by U.S. standards, they consistently meet or surpass the average for the Mexican population. Illiteracy among Mexican unauthorized immigrants has been estimated at between 3 and 10 percent, at a time when the figure for Mexico as a whole was 22 percent. At the other end, those with at least some secondary education have been estimated by four different studies to hover around 30 percent while only 21 percent had reached similar schooling in the Mexican population. Contrary to the stereotype of Mexican immigrants as overwhelmingly impoverished peasants, up to 48 percent of the unauthorized have been found to originate in cities of twenty thousand or more, in comparison with 35 percent of all Mexicans.
During the 1970s, around 45 percent of Mexican workers made their living from agriculture; a study of apprehended illegals estimated a similar proportion, 49 percent, but another of former illegals who had regularized their situation reduced it to 18 percent. White-collar and urban skilled and semiskilled occupations employed between 35 and 60 percent of unauthorized immigrants prior to their departure from Mexico; these occupations absorbed approximately 30 percent of the Mexican population in comparable years. All studies coincide in that few of these immigrants were unemployed in Mexico, the figure hovering around 5 percent. As one author states, "the findings indicate that it is not the lack of jobs, but of well-paid jobs, which fuels migration to the U.S."
Even more conclusive findings come from research in the Dominican Republic, another important source of illegal immigration. Several independent studies conclude that Dominicans who migrate internationally, including those without documents, are more likely to come from the cities, have much higher levels of literacy, be relatively more skilled, and have lower levels of unemployment than the Dominican population as a whole. Among those from rural areas, migrants come predominantly from the sector of medium to large farmers rather than from the landless peasantry.
The main reason the poorest of the poor do not migrate across international borders is that they are not able to. In Mexico, "those at the very bottom of the local income distribution are not likely to migrate to the States because they lack even the resources needed to cover the costs of transportation and fees charged by the smugglers." In the Dominican Republic, "there are major legal and financial barriers that prevent the poor from migrating ... reports suggest that it costs several thousand dollars to be provided with papers and smuggled out of the country." Studies of Haitian unauthorized migration also report that it costs thousands to buy passage aboard barely seaworthy craft bound for south Florida.
But if migrants do not come to escape unemployment or destitution, why do they come? Why, in particular, should middle-class professionals and skilled workers embark on a costly journey, sometimes surreptitiously, and sacrifice work, friends, and family back home? The basic reason is the gap between life aspirations and expectations and the means to fulfill them in the sending countries. Different groups feel this gap with varying intensity, but it clearly becomes a strong motive for action among the most ambitious and resourceful. Because relative, not absolute deprivation lies at the core of most contemporary immigration, its composition tends to be positively selected in terms of both human capital and motivation. The United States and the other industrialized countries play a double role in this process. First, they are the source of much of the modern culture of consumption and of the new expectations diffused worldwide. Second, the same process of global diffusion has taught an increasing number of people about economic opportunities in the developed world that are absent in their own countries.
It is thus not surprising that most of today's immigrants, even the undocumented, have had some education and come from cities, for these are precisely the groups most thoroughly exposed to life-styles and consumption patterns emanating from the advanced world. These are also the groups for whom the gap between aspirations and local realities is most poignant and among whom one finds the individuals most determined to overcome this situation. Educated and skilled workers and small farmers are generally better informed about employment opportunities abroad than the illiterate and the destitute. Those at the bottom of the social structure not only lack the means to migrate, but often the motivation to do so because they are less exposed to the lure of consumption styles in the developed nations and are less aware of the work opportunities in them.
The form that this gap takes varies, of course, across countries and social groups. For skilled workers and small farmers, migration is the means to stabilize family livelihoods and meet long-desired aspirations--a car, a TV set, domestic appliances of all sorts, additional land and implements. For urban professionals, it provides a means of reaching life standards commensurate with their past achievements and to progress in their careers. Seen from this perspective, contemporary immigration is a direct consequence of the dominant influence attained by the culture of the advanced West in every corner of the globe. The bewildering number and variety of today's immigrants reflect this worldwide reach and the vision of modern life and individual fulfillment that goes with it.
Back in the nineteenth century, the United States was a growing industrializing country that needed labor; but because its life standards were not a global model and its economic opportunities were not well known, it had to resort to deliberate recruitment. Thus, the vaunted "pull" of U.S. wages had to be actualized by American migration agents sent to Mexico, Ireland, southern Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian empire to apprise people of the "better meals and higher wages" available for work in the eastern canal companies, the western railroads, and later on in industry.
The enormous variety of today's immigrants and the fact that they come spontaneously rather than through deliberate recruitment reflect the attraction of American life-styles and their gradual conversion into a world standard. Immigrants do not come to escape perennial unemployment or destitution in their homeland. Most undertake the journey instead to attain the dream of a new life-style that has reached their countries but that is impossible to fulfill in them. Not surprisingly, the most determined individuals, those who feel the distance between actual reality and life goals most poignantly, often choose migration as the path to resolve this contradiction.
Immigrants and Their Types
Within this general picture, there are significant differences in migration goals and their relative fulfillment. Any typology implies simplification, but it is useful at this point to present a basic classification of contemporary immigrants to organize the upcoming analysis of their process of adaptation. Each basic type is represented by several nationalities; conversely, a national group may include individuals representing different types. These are distinguished by a series of common characteristics of socioeconomic origin and reasons for departure that tend to be associated with different courses of adaptation once in the United States.
Labor Migrants
Manual labor immigration corresponds most closely to popular stereotypes about contemporary immigration. The movement of foreign workers in search of menial and generally low paid jobs has represented the bulk of immigration, both legal and undocumented, in recent years. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 was aimed primarily at discouraging the surreptitious component of this flow while compensating employers by liberalizing access to legal temporary workers. A decade later, Proposition 187, an initiative passed by the California electorate in 1994, sought to discourage undocumented immigration by barring illegal aliens from access to public services. We discuss the intent and effectiveness of these two measures in chapter 8. For the moment, it suffices to note the principal ways manual labor immigration has materialized in recent years.
First, migrants can simply cross the border on foot or with the help of a smuggler or overstay a U.S. tourist visa. In official parlance, illegal border crossers have been labeled EWIs (entry without inspection); those who stay longer than permitted are labeled visa abusers. In 1993, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) located 1.33 million deportable aliens, of which 1.29 million were EWIs. Predictably, the overwhelming majority of illegal border crossers--97 percent--were Mexicans.
A second channel of entry is to come legally by using one of the family reunification preferences of the immigration law (left untouched, for the most part, by the 1986 reform and reaffirmed by the Immigration Act of 1990). This avenue is open primarily to immigrants who have first entered the United States without legal papers or for temporary periods and who have subsequently married a U.S. citizen or legal resident. Marriage automatically entitles the immigrant to a legal entry permit; spouses of U.S. citizens are given priority because they are exempt from existing quota limits. A study of 822 legal Mexican immigrants arriving during 1973-74 found that about 70 percent of respondents had lived in the United States prior to legal entry, most for periods of six months or more. Forty-eight percent of this sample came with visas granted to spouses of U.S. citizens; another 45 percent came under the quota as spouses of U.S. legal residents. In 1987, the situation was not very different: Of the 72,351 legal Mexican immigrants arriving in that year, 50,793 (70.2 percent) were exempt from quota limits as spouses, children, or parents of U.S. citizens; an additional 16,632 (23.0 percent) came as spouses or close relatives of citizens or legal residents. By 1993, an identical 93 percent of the 69,784 legal Mexican immigrants who arrived in that year entered under family preferences or as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. An additional 56,777 were also legalized in 1993 under IRCA's amnesty provisions, of whom 69 percent were immediate family members who entered as "legalization dependents" under a provision of the Immigration Act of 1990.
The last avenue is to come as a contract laborer. There was a provision in the 1965 immigration act for the importation of temporary foreign laborers when a supply of "willing and able" domestic workers was not available. This provision was maintained and actually liberalized by the 1986 reform. In both cases, the secretary of labor must certify that a labor shortage exists before Immigration authorizes the entry of foreign workers. Because the procedure is cumbersome, especially in the past, few employers sought labor in this manner. An exception is the sugar industry in Florida, for which "H-2" workers, as they are labeled because of their type of visa, have become the mainstay of its cane-cutting labor force. They come after a selection process in Jamaica and other West Indian countries, live in company barracks during the harvest, and return home immediately after its end. Contract workers are also found in lesser numbers throughout the Eastern Seaboard working in the fruit orchards of Georgia and the Carolinas and in the shade tobacco crop of Connecticut. During the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, approximately twenty thousand H-2 workers per year have been imported, primarily from the West Indies.
The principal magnet drawing foreign manual workers to the United States is undoubtedly the level of U.S. wages relative to those left behind. At $4.25 an hour, the U.S. minimum wage is approximately six times the prevailing one in Mexico, which is, in turn, higher than most in Central America. The actual wage many U.S. employers pay their foreign workers exceeds the legal minimum and is significantly higher than that available for skilled and even white-collar work in Mexico and other sending countries. This is why relatively well-educated and skilled foreigners are willing to accept these frequently harsh jobs. To them, the trek to the United States and the economic opportunities associated with it often represent the difference between stagnation or impoverishment and attainment of their life's goals.
Whatever their motivation, however, immigrants could not come if there were not a demand for their labor. That demand is strong and growing. Employers value immigrant workers' diligence, reliability, and willingness to work hard for low pay. They argue that American workers are either unavailable or unwilling to perform hard menial jobs. Garment contractors, small electronics firms, and other employers of immigrants have further argued that they would have to close their doors or move abroad if this labor supply were cut off.
This demand is fueled by the favorable position in which employers find themselves. There are no recruitment or other costs in hiring immigrant laborers because they come on their own and bear all the dangers and expenses of the journey. Until recently, there were no legal costs either because the law specifically exempted employers from any liability for hiring illegal aliens. Although the 1986 immigration reform has altered this situation, a number of loopholes still facilitate access to immigrant laborers, regardless of their legal status. In addition, the new law itself has expanded channels for the legal importation of temporary workers.
Under these conditions, it is not surprising that manual labor immigration has continued and grown from year to year. This flow does not represent an "alien invasion," as some authors have called it, because an invasion implies moving into someone else's territory against their will. In this instance, the movement is very much welcomed, if not by everyone, at least by an influential group--namely, the urban employers and rural growers who have come to rely on this source of labor. The match between the goals and aspirations of foreign workers and the interests of the firms that hire them is the key factor sustaining the movement from year to year.
A more appropriate conclusion than the "alien invasion" notion is that labor immigration occurs because there is a strong demand for it. Immigrants are regarded as superior workers for the performance of certain tasks, especially those Americans accept only unwillingly. The men and women who come under these circumstances find in the modest entry jobs available on this side of the border the means to fulfill expectations blocked in their own countries. Some do stay and attempt to carve a new life in America. Many return, however, because although U.S. wages are higher, the "yield" of these wages in terms of consumption, investments, and social status is often greater back home. Having accumulated enough savings, most immigrants seek to reestablish or gain a position of social respectability, a goal more easily accomplished in their home communities. Manual labor immigration is thus not a one-way flow away from poverty and want, but rather a two-way process fueled by the changing needs and interests of those who come and those who profit from their labor.
Professional Immigrants
A major preference category of the U.S. visa allocation system is reserved for "members of the professions of exceptional ability and their spouses and children." This category provides the main entry channel for the second type of immigrants. Unlike the first, these come legally and are not destined to the bottom layers of the American labor market. Labeled "brain drain" in the countries of origin, this flow of immigrants represents a significant gain of highly trained personnel for the United States. In 1993, 109,760 persons classified as professionals and managers arrived as permanent residents; the main contributors included mainland China (13,954), the Philippines (11,164), India (10,210), Great Britain (5,508), and Taiwan (4,708). The overall number and the principal contributors changed little during the 1980s. However, since 1992, under the new provisions of the Immigration Act of 1990, the number of these visas tripled the level that had been the annual norm for the previous twenty-five years.
Foreign professionals and technicians seldom migrate because of unemployment back home. The reason is that they not only come from the higher educational strata, but that they are probably among the best in their respective professions in order to pass difficult entry tests, such as the ECFMG examination for physicians, or to attract U.S. job offers. The gap that generally makes the difference in their decision is not the invidious income differential between prospective U.S. salaries and those at home. Instead, it is the gap between available salaries and work conditions in their own countries and those regarded there as acceptable for people with their education.
Professionals who earn enough at home to sustain a middle-class standard of living and who are reasonably satisfied about their chances for advancement seldom migrate. Those threatened with early obsolescence or who cannot make ends meet start looking for opportunities abroad. A fertile ground for this type of migration are countries in which university students are trained in advanced Western-style professional practices, but then find the prospects and means to implement their training blocked because of poor employment opportunities or lack of equipment.
Because they do not come to escape poverty, but to improve their careers, immigrant professionals seldom accept menial jobs in the United States. However, they tend to enter at the bottom of their respective occupational ladders and to progress from there according to individual merit. This is why, for example, foreign doctors and nurses are so often found in public hospitals throughout the country. But in recent years, a number of foreign professionals--primarily of Asian origin--have had to turn to other pursuits because of new entry barriers to their respective careers in the United States. Common alternatives have been small business or even the unregulated practice of their profession while awaiting better times. Despite these difficulties, these immigrants' economic success has been remarkable. For example, immigration from India during the last two decades has been heavily skewed toward university-educated professionals and technical personnel. In 1990, the median household income of Indian immigrants was $48,320--$18,000 above the median for the U.S. population and $20,000 above the figure for the foreign born, despite the fact that almost 60 percent of these immigrants had been in the United States ten years or less.
An important feature of this type of immigration is its inconspicuousness. We seldom hear reference to a Filipino or an Indian immigration "problem," although there are over one million Filipinos and over five hundred thousand Indians living in this country. The reason is that professionals and technicians, heavily represented among these nationalities, seldom form tightly knit ethnic communities. As the case of Amitar Ray and his family exemplifies, professional immigrants are among the most rapidly assimilated--first because of their occupational success and second because of the absence of strong ethnic networks that reinforce the culture of origin. However, assimilation in this case does not mean severing relations with the home country. On the contrary, because successful immigrants have the means to do so, they attempt to bridge the gap between past and present through periodic visits and cultivating family and friends left behind. During the first generation at least, a typical pattern is the attempt to juggle two different social worlds. Although this is a difficult and expensive task, many foreign professionals actually succeed in it.
Entrepreneurial Immigrants
Near downtown Los Angeles there is an area approximately a mile long where all commercial signs suddenly change from English to strange pictorial characters. Koreatown, as the area is known, contains the predictable number of ethnic restaurants and grocery shops; it also contains a number of banks, import-export houses, industries, and real estate offices. Signs of "English spoken here" assure visitors that their links with the outside world have not been totally severed. In Los Angeles, the propensity for self-employment is three times greater among Koreans than among the population as a whole. Grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations, liquor stores, and real estate offices are typical Korean businesses. They also tend to remain within the community because the more successful immigrants sell their earlier businesses to new arrivals.
A similar urban landscape is found near downtown Miami. Little Havana extends in a narrow strip for about five miles, eventually merging with the southwest suburbs of the city. Cuban-owned firms increased from 919 in 1967 to 8,000 in 1976 and approximately 28,000 in 1990. Most are small, averaging 8.1 employees at the latest count, but they also include factories employing hundreds of workers. Cuban firms are found in light and heavy manufacturing, construction, commerce, finance, and insurance. An estimated 60 percent of all residential construction in the metropolitan area is now done by these firms; gross annual receipts of Cuban manufacturing industries increased 1,067 percent during a recent ten-year period.
These areas of concentrated immigrant entrepreneurship are known as ethnic enclaves. Their emergence has depended on three conditions: first, the presence of a number of immigrants with substantial business expertise acquired in their home countries; second, access to sources of capital; third, access to labor. The requisite labor is not too difficult to obtain because it can be initially drawn from family members and then from more recent immigrant arrivals. Sources of capital are often not a major obstacle either, because the sums required initially are small. When immigrants do not bring them from abroad, they can accumulate them through individual savings or obtain them from pooled resources in the community. In some instances, would-be entrepreneurs have access to financial institutions owned or managed by co-nationals. Thus, the first requisite is the critical one. The presence of a number of immigrants skilled in what sociologist Franklin Frazier called "the art of buying and selling" can usually overcome other obstacles to entrepreneurship. Conversely, their absence tends to confine an immigrant group to wage work even when enough savings and labor are available.
Entrepreneurial minorities are the exception in both turn-of-the-century and contemporary immigrations. Their significance is that they create an avenue for economic mobility unavailable to other groups. This avenue is open not only to the original entrepreneurs, but to later arrivals as well. The reason is that relations between immigrant employers and their co-ethnic employees often go beyond a purely contractual bond. When immigrant enterprises expand, they tend to hire their own for supervisory positions. Today Koreans hire and promote Koreans in New York and Los Angeles, and Cubans do the same for other Cubans in Miami, just as sixty years ago the Jews of Manhattan's Lower East Side and the Japanese of San Francisco and Los Angeles hired and supported those from their own communities.
A tightly knit ethnic enclave is not, however, the only manifestation of immigrant entrepreneurship. In other cities, where the concentration of these immigrants is less dense, they tend to take over businesses catering to low-income groups, often in the inner cities. In this role as "middleman minorities," entrepreneurial immigrants are less visible because they tend to be dispersed over the area occupied by the populations they serve. Koreatown in Los Angeles is not, for example, the only manifestation of entrepreneurship among this immigrant group. Koreans are also present in significant numbers in New York City, where they have gained increasing control of the produce market, and in cities like Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, where they have progressively replaced Italians and Jews as the principal merchants in low-income inner-city areas. Similarly, roughly two-thirds of Cuban-owned firms are concentrated in Miami, but they are also numerous in other cities such as Los Angeles and Jersey City. The percentage of firms per thousand Cuban population is actually higher in these secondary concentrations than in Miami.
The rise of ethnic enclaves and middleman minorities is generally fortuitous. There are no provisions so far in the U.S. immigration law to encourage foreign businessmen to come here, except as visitors. Congress is currently considering a provision that will grant U.S. residence to a limited number of foreign capitalists who invest in sizable job-creating enterprises. However, no explicit entry preference exists for small immigrant entrepreneurs with little or no capital, and none is likely to be implemented in the future. In general, entrepreneurial minorities come under preferences designated for other purposes. Koreans and Chinese, two of the most successful business-oriented groups, have availed themselves of the employment-based preference categories for professionals and skilled workers and, subsequently, of the family reunification provisions of the 1965 and 1990 immigration laws. Cubans came as political refugees and were initially resettled in dispersed localities throughout the country. It took these refugees more than a decade after initial arrival to start regrouping in certain geographic locations and begin the push toward entrepreneurship.
Refugees and Asylees
The Refugee Act of 1980, signed into law by President Carter, aimed at eliminating the former practice of granting asylum only to escapees from Communist-controlled nations. Instead, it sought to bring U.S. policy into line with international practice, which defines as a refugee anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution or physical harm, regardless of the political bent of his or her country's regime. In practice, however, the United States during the Reagan administration continued to grant refugee status to escapees from communism, primarily from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, while making it difficult for others fleeing non-Communist regimes such as Guatemala and El Salvador. The granting of asylum has significant advantages over other alternatives. The central difference is that while refugees have legal status, the right to work, and can avail themselves of the welfare provisions of the 1980 act, those denied asylum have none of these privileges and, if they stay, are classified as illegal aliens.
Being a refugee is therefore not a matter of personal choice, but of governmental decision based on a combination of legal guidelines and political expediency. Depending on the relationship between the United States and the country of origin and the international context of the time, a particular flow of people may be classified as a political exodus or as an illegal group of economically motivated immigrants. Given past policy, it is thus not surprising that there are few escapees from rightist regimes living legally in the country. Major refugee groups have arrived, instead, after the Soviet army occupation of Eastern Europe, after the rise to power of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and after the takeover by Communist insurgents of three Southeast Asian countries. Ironically, after the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the number of refugees admitted actually grew--once again due to foreign policy interests, and once again largely from the same source countries.
In 1993, a total of 127,343 refugees arrived and were admitted for legal residence in the United States. Of these, 37,604 or 30 percent came from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; Cuba accounted for another 9 percent; the Soviet Union, Poland, and Romania combined represented 39 percent; and Afghanistan and Ethiopia added another 5 percent. Iran and Iraq--the only major non-Communist sources of refugee migration--accounted for 5 percent. Admissions from the Communist or former Communist world still represented about 90 percent of the total in this year.
Major refugee groups living at present in the United States thus tend to share strong anti-Communist feelings, although they are different in many other respects. Their entry into the American labor market, for example, has been heterogeneous, paralleling and even exceeding the diversity among regular immigrants. Political refugees are found today in low-paid menial work, as is the case with many Cambodians, Laotians, Afghans, Ethiopians, and 1980 Mariel Cubans. They are also found at the higher end of the labor market, in prominent and well-paid professional careers, as is often the case with Eastern Europeans and Iranians. Others have veered toward business and self-employment after giving up hopes of returning to their countries. Cubans in south Florida and increasingly the Vietnamese, concentrated in Orange and Los Angeles counties, have followed this route. Finally, there is even the option of remaining out of work, made possible by the welfare provisions of the 1980 refugee act. Asian refugees with little education and work skills are commonly found in this situation.
The official label of refugee conceals differences not only between national groups but within each of them as well. Two categories are generally found in most refugee flows. First, there is an elite of former notables who left because of ideological and political opposition to their countries' regimes. They tend to be among the earlier arrivals and usually have little difficulty validating their claim of political persecution. Second, there is a mass of individuals and families of more modest backgrounds who left at a later date because of the economic exactions and hardships imposed by the same regimes. Depending on the relationship between their home country and the United States, they can be classified as bona fide refugees or as illegal aliens. This diversity in the origins of refugees and the interaction between the earlier elite arrivals and subsequent cohorts goes a long way toward explaining each group's economic and social adaptation. We examine the particulars of each case in the following chapters.
Overview
In 1995, well over a hundred foreign countries and possessions sent immigrants to the United States. Aside from basic statistical data supplied by INS and the Census Bureau, little is yet known about most of these groups. Tracing their evolution and patterns of adaptation is a task well beyond the scope of this book. Instead, we delineate the basic contours of contemporary immigration by focusing on major aspects of the adaptation experience. The emphasis throughout is on diversity in both the immigrants' origins and their modes of incorporation into American society. The typology outlined in this chapter serves as the basic organizing framework as we follow immigrants through their location in space, their strategies for economic mobility, their efforts at learning a language and a new culture, their decision to embrace the country as naturalized citizens, and their struggle to raise their children in America and, inevitably, as Americans.
Although there are significant differences within each major type of immigration, there is reason to believe that manual labor migrants, foreign professionals, entrepreneurial groups, and refugees share a number of characteristics with others in a similar position. In other words, immigrants from different nations who enter the United States as professionals and find positions in their fields tend to have more similar adaptation experiences than those typical of immigrant laborers from their respective countries. As in all typologies, empirical reality registers exceptions and combinations. Refugees and university-trained professionals may become entrepreneurs and the latter, if unsuccessful, may turn to manual wage labor. The category of refugee is particularly problematic because, as seen previously, it is not an economic mode of incorporation but a political status, validated by an explicit decision of the U.S. government. Yet despite their internal diversity, refugees possess certain common characteristics that set them apart from other immigrants. Subsequent chapters clarify the nature of these characteristics.
A description of present-day immigration and its diversity would be incomplete if not supplemented by a discussion of what all this means for the host society. Is it good or bad for the United States that so many foreigners from so many different countries are arriving at present? Should the country move decisively to prevent or restrict at least some of these flows? Alternatively, should it continue to maintain, as in the recent past, one of the most liberal immigration policies in the world? Our reply to these questions will be generally optimistic. Overall, immigration has been and will continue to be positive for the country both in terms of filling labor needs at different levels of the economy and, more important, injecting into society the energies, ambitions, and skills of positively selected groups. Qualifications exist, and we discuss them. But in our view, they do not detract from this general assessment.
The political debate about immigration in the United States has always been marked by vigorous calls for restriction. The most ardent advocates of this policy are often children and grandchildren of immigrants who wear their second-generation patriotism outwardly and aggressively. This position forgets that it was the labor and efforts of immigrants--often the parents and grandparents of today's restrictionists--that made much of the prosperity of the nation possible. Even the fiercest xenophobes have had a hard time arguing that turn-of-the-century groups such as Italian and Polish peasants or the much attacked Chinese and Japanese had a long-term negative effect on the country. Instead, these now successful and settled groups are presented as examples, but exception is taken to the newcomers. There is irony in the spectacle of Americans who bear clear marks of their immigrant origins being among the most vocal adversaries of continuing immigration. Consequences of heeding their advice would be serious, however. Although regulation and control of the inflow from abroad are always necessary, suppressing it would deprive the nation of what has been so far one of its main sources of energy, innovativeness, and growth.