Go to the First Chapter of "The New Second Generation"

IMMIGRANT AMERICA: A Portrait (second edition)
By Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut
University of California Press. 421 pp. $40; Paperback, $14.95

Go to the First Chapter of "Immigrant America"

Go to Chapter One

Making It In the U.S.A.

In 1974 the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Leonard E. Chapman, a growling former Marine general, promised to open up a million good jobs for American citizens if Congress would let him seal the border and carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants. Twenty years later in California, Gov. Pete Wilson promised voters that if the state didn't have to spend any money on illegal immigrants it could put a computer on every desk in every public school.

The public-policy debate on immigration has shifted from employment to social services, from anxieties about losing jobs to concerns that public spending on immigrants deprives Americans of their due. And now these worries encompass all immigrants, legal and illegal, as was evident last summer when Congress passed a law to keep all the foreign-born, including naturalized U.S. citizens in some cases, from getting welfare.

This shift reflects changes in an immigrant population that has grown not only much larger but also more permanent and more complete. The newcomers are no longer just a first-generation vanguard of young adults looking for jobs. Now there is also a second generation. These children of immigrants, who were either born here or came at a young age, need schooling, health care and much else. Their future will reveal whether the United States still has the magic to make immigrants a source of strength.

Alejandro Portes, chair of the sociology department at the Johns Hopkins University, was among the first important scholars of immigration to recognize that the children of the foreign-born represent a distinct and crucial subject matter. He helped marshal the funding and the collaborators for a series of major studies that are reported in The New Second Generation, a collection of essays.

Whether they are examining the lives of rich Cubans in Miami or poor Mexicans in San Diego, the authors conclude that immigrant youths are all learning English and adapting to their new land. But what kind of Americans will they become? Portes argues at the very beginning of the volume that the nation has a lot riding on the answer: "This puzzle is whether today's children of immigrants will follow their European predecessors and move steadily into the middle-class mainstream or whether, on the contrary, their ascent will be blocked and they will join children of earlier black and Puerto Rican migrants as part of an expanded multiethnic underclass."

Sheer numbers alone ensure that the outcome will have a huge impact on the nation. Sometime in the late 1990s the size of this second generation will surpass the 28-million mark set by the children of European immigrants in the 1940s. Even after conducting surveys, case studies and statistical analyses of all sorts, the authors are cautious about predicting a fate for the second generation because every piece of research uncovers the potential for diverse and unpredictable results. For example, social status is not a clear indicator of the tendency to assimilate. The children of poor immigrants often retain a strong ethnic identity, especially when they feel discriminated against here. But the children of affluent immigrants also often adopt a strong national-origin identity because they see their parents's homeland as a source of pride.

The picture becomes especially complicated when various authors describe instances of "downward assimilation." In these cases immigrant children abandon their parents' language and customs, learn English and become thoroughly Americanized but with such disastrous results as criminality and unemployment. Living in America's inner cities, they have adapted to the world around them. Meanwhile other children, even from the same national origins, sometimes do better when they retain a stronger immigrant identity.

The essays in The New Second Generation are written more colloquially than papers for an academic journal, but they are nonetheless a little heavy on sociological jargon, which could easily have been explained to make the volume more accessible. In addition, this book primarily reports on research, and readers looking for bold judgments and prescriptions will come away frustrated.

One broad conclusion, however, does emerge clearly from these studies: The future of the second generation will be determined by what they encounter here as much as, if not more so, by the skills and cultures that the first generation brought from abroad. As Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at Michigan State University, says at the conclusion of an essay on the difficulty of becoming an adult and becoming an American at the same time, "in the final analysis, it is the crucible without that shapes the crucible within."

The interplay between the character of the newcomer and the context of the new land gets much broader treatment in Immigrant America: A Portrait. This classic work by Portes and Rumbaut, first published in 1990, has been updated and expanded in a new edition.

Viewing the current era of immigration as a highly varied process rather than an event, the authors examine the major elements of that process, such as occupational adaptation and language acquisition. A theoretical framework and an abundance of up-to-date statistical material are provided for each topic. The writing is professorial, but the book provides an invaluable overview.

Portes and Rumbaut openly proclaim their assessment that "overall immigration has been and will continue to be positive for the country," and sometimes they seem to be at pains to make that case. Immigrant America's major weakness lies in a tendency to overemphasize the significance of the Indian physicians, Korean businessmen and others arriving with more education than the U.S. average. Despite their considerable contributions, these newcomers are substantially outnumbered by the Cambodian refugees, the Mexican laborers and others who arrived with fewer skills than the native-born. For better or worse, the public-policy challenges are created by those on the low end.

The only real disappointment in this second version of Immigrant America is a new concluding chapter that offers analysis and suggestions on those policy challenges. Neither of the authors has much background in this area either as a scholar or as a practitioner, and compared to the rest of the book this chapter is thinly researched and loosely argued. They suggest, for example, that the United States could battle illegal immigration by taking the money now used to track down illegal immigrants here and giving it to nongovernmental organizations for economic-development projects in Mexico. After so masterfully developing the complexity of this subject, it is a shame that they end the new edition on a simplistic note.

Roberto Suro, a deputy editor for the national desk of The Washington Post, is the author of a forthcoming book on immigration.