The 60 million immigrants and their children who have settled in the
United States since the 1960s now account for a full one-fifth of the
population. They come from virtually every country in the world and range
-- in background and socioeconomic level -- from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
to the unassuming, unskilled men now taking over as day laborers in every
region of the country. Their number alone all but guarantees that they
will transform America. But so far most people are still unsure what form
that transformation will take -- and whether it will be for good or for
ill.
Even for those whose profession is studying the new Americans, the diversity
of the group makes it a kind of Rorschach test: You can read almost anything
you want into this vast and varied population. Optimists look at their
ambition and energy -- the Indian engineer or the mom-and-pop merchants
transforming inner-city neighborhoods -- and forecast a golden future.
Pessimists fixate on those with the lowest skill levels -- the Mexican
farmhand with the sixth-grade education -- and see only trouble ahead,
for both the newcomers and the rest of us.
Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut are among the most highly regarded
sociologists studying the new immigrants, a prolific team whose ideas
and research have influenced just about everyone else working in the field.
Some dozen years ago, after completing an important book on the first
generation of newcomers, they realized in an inspirational flash that
the people who really matter for the future are in fact the new arrivals'
children. After all, those who made the trip from the old country are
by definition transitional. It is their offspring, the second generation,
whose successes and failures will set the mold for their ethnic groups,
determining patterns that will last for generations to come.
More than a decade and many millions of dollars later, Portes and Rumbaut
have completed several stages of what is still the definitive study of
the second generation: an ongoing look at some 5,300 teenagers in San
Diego and Miami. This massive research project, known as the Children
of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, or CILS, has generated six books and
countless articles by its two architects, their students, and others.
It's a seminal work. But even so, reading the latest book, Legacies:
The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, it's hard not to feel
that immigrant America is still something of an enigma, reflecting nothing
so much as the preconceptions of those who try to predict its future.
The best way to understand Legacies is as two books -- one an interpretation,
the other a digest of data from the field. And though the two are not
necessarily at war, their emphasis and implications are somewhat different.
The report from the field brings lots of good news, much of it buried
deep in this dense, scholarly volume. The families of the teenagers studied
are mostly of modest means, but they tend to be hard-working and stable,
what were once called solid working-class people. Though they often settle
in bleak minority neighborhoods and some of their children flirt -- or
worse -- with underclass ways, on the whole the second generation is an
inspirational success story. In both Miami and San Diego, in the ninth
grade and later in the 12th, immigrant children work harder than their
native-born classmates. (They average two hours of homework a night compared
with the "normal" 30 minutes.) They also aspire to greater achievement,
get better grades, drop out less (between a third and half as often) and
expect only the best of their adopted country. (Nearly two-thirds believe
that hard work and accomplishment can triumph over prejudice, and about
the same proportion say there is no better country than the United States.)
Perhaps most important, virtually all are adapting linguistically: Though
nine out of 10 speak a foreign language at home, by the end of high school
98 percent speak and understand English well, and 88 percent prefer it
to their parents' mother tongue. If what matters is trajectory, by any
measure they are outperforming their parents and appear to be set on just
the kind of upward course that would spell success in America.
What this happy tale papers over is a vast diversity among groups -- widely
different scores, aims, and outlooks on just about every question a sociologist
could think of asking. Some 80 percent of Filipinos live in intact families;
among West Indians, the distressing figure is just half that. Nearly 90
percent of Chinese parents expect their children to finish college; only
55 percent of Mexicans do. The Hmong do far more homework than anyone
else -- two and three times what Hispanic kids manage. Nearly 45 percent
of Latino youth sometimes use Spanish with their friends; less than 5
percent of any Asian group use an Asian language. And twice as many Vietnamese
as Cuban youth show symptoms of serious depression. The list of variables
goes on and on, and the disparities are startling, even within categories
like Hispanic or Asian-American that many native-born naively think of
as monolithic -- to the point that any effort to generalize about the second
generation looks at best half true and inevitably unreliable.
Still, Portes and Rumbaut are determined to do just that. It's not that
they don't recognize immigrant diversity. They do. Indeed, Portes invented
the term "segmented assimilation," which other sociologists
now use to explain different groups' different outcomes. But he and Rumbaut
remain convinced that a single theoretical model can explain all the variation,
and -- even more startling -- that there is a single, "right"
way for all foreign children to adapt to American life: paradoxically,
by delaying assimilation. In the authors' view, the happiest and
most successful of the second generation are not those who quickly learn
American ways, who switch from their parents' language to English and
fit in seamlessly at school, but rather those who grow up under the umbrella
of an ethnic community, nurtured by old-country customs and traditional
mores.
The theory behind this prescription makes some intuitive sense: Kids
who become too American too fast risk in effect outgrowing their parents,
opening themselves to loneliness, depression, delinquency, poor school
performance, and all that comes with it, while those who grow up guided
by parental nurturing and discipline generally go on to do well. Nor in
the last analysis are Portes and Rumbaut anti-assimilation: They see this
interim phase, which they call "selective acculturation," as
just that -- a phase -- and they expect the third generation, if not the
second, to metamorphose into full-fledged Americans.
The problem, as Portes and Rumbaut's own data show, is that in practice
less assimilated children don't always do better. They enjoy little or
no advantage over the more assimilated when it comes to school effort
or dropout rates -- perhaps the two most important variables in the life
of a new American teenager. The Mexican second generation, one of the
nationalities whose children remain closest to their parents, shows by
far the poorest outcomes on all measures of school success. And even Miami's
Cuban youth, whose often middle-class, educated families tend to have
been in the United States for many years, frequently seem as hobbled as
they are buoyed by the tightly knit, Spanish-speaking ethnic enclave in
which they live. Something about this upbringing appears to dull their
ambition, and a surprising percentage drop out of high school, taking
low-level jobs in the Cuban community rather than beating a new path into
the bigger, scarier world that is the American mainstream.
The authors discount much of this evidence or explain it in other ways,
focusing instead on issues like "self-esteem" and its correlation
with academic performance -- and in the end they remain adamantly convinced
that any path other than the one they recommend is harmful to immigrant
children. To them, rapid acquisition of English is "language loss,"
what others see as fitting in is "premature Americanization,"
and the most effective methods of teaching English and American values
are so much "forced-march acculturation."
Of course, for most immigrant children the jury is still out. Those who
participated in the CILS study are only now entering adult life, moving
from home and school to the far more fateful decisions ahead. For some,
no doubt, the Portes-Rumbaut prescription is the right one: a nurturing
family orbit, the enveloping ethnic enclave, bilingualism, and a healthy
dose of skepticism about American culture. Still, as any student of immigration
knows, change and growth, and the loss that comes with them, are an inevitable
part of the assimilation process -- and in the end all the gradualism in
the world may not effectively cushion the shocks. Besides, given the deep
diversity that Portes and Rumbaut themselves report in second-generation
America, it's hard to believe that any one path is the best or only answer
for every immigrant child.
Portes and Rumbaut are surely right about one thing: By the third and
fourth generation, immigrant families lose their trademark drive -- the
energy and entrepreneurialism that brought them here in the first place
and that propels them upward wherever they settle. This isn't a tragedy;
it merely means they are becoming more American. But it does suggest that
the second generation faces a special window of opportunity.
Not all will succeed -- or certainly not to the same degree. Some will
succumb to the pathologies of their inner-city neighborhoods, allowing
peer pressure to deter them from accomplishment. Others, even if they
outstrip their parents, will still find themselves stuck on the bottom
rungs of the American socioeconomic ladder. But if the good news in the
CILS study carries over in any measure into adult life, there can be little
doubt that the lion's share will end up making the most of what the United
States has to offer -- benefiting themselves and their families but also
the rest of us.
