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3. New Immigration and the American Nation: A Framework for Citizenship and Belonging
- Temple University Press
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3 New Immigration and the American Nation A Framework for Citizenship and Belonging New Immigration: Trends and Issues Demographic changes in the late-twentieth-century United States indicate that immigration is once again transforming America. Almost one in four Americans , or more than 67 million people, are first- and second-generation immigrants (Portes and Rumbaut 2006:246). Historical relationships between the United States and the sending countries, especially U.S. military, political, economic , and cultural involvement and intervention, together with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, have resulted in unprecedented growth in new immigration. Of the post-1965 immigrants, most have come from Latin America and the Caribbean, with Mexico alone accounting for 28 percent of the total. Another 29 percent have come from Asia and the Middle East (Rumbaut, Foner, and Gold 1999:1259). Newspaper headlines that appeared in the San Francisco Bay Area as the U.S. Census Bureau released data from the 2000 census reflect how these racial and ethnic shifts were transforming the state.1 Like past immigrants, today’s immigrants are more likely to live in metropolitan than rural areas. The foreign-born are concentrated in key urban regions, such as California’s southern corridor from Los Angeles to San Diego; in south Florida and particularly Miami; in the northeastern coastal corridor, including New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.; and in the metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Phoenix, Atlanta, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Seattle (Portes and Rumbaut 2006:43). Nearly 30 percent of the 31.1 million foreign-born population enumerated in the 2000 census made their home in California. The other five states with large concentrations of immigrants were New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey (Portes and Rumbaut 2006:43–47). Places of settlement are initially more dispersed for refugees, whose original destinations in the United States are usually determined by government officials and sponsoring agencies; secondary migration, however, tends to bring about greater ethnic concentration, as 38 Chapter 3 exemplified by the Vietnamese in Orange County, California, and the Hmong in the Central Valley area of California. What is unique about current immigration trends is that more than 44 percent of today’s foreign-born population arrived after 1980, with that number reaching 50 percent among those of non-European origin (Zhou 2001:300). Consequently, the “new second generation” is an overwhelmingly youthful population , consisting mostly of children and adolescents (Zhou 2001:273). In fact, immigrant children and U.S.-born children of immigrants are the fastestgrowing segment of the country’s total population of children under eighteen years of age. By 1997 they accounted for one out of every five American children (Portes and Rumbaut 2001:19). These trends in contemporary immigration patterns stir up a number of concerns among academics as well as the public. One key topic of interest among scholars is adaptation outcomes, that is, understanding differences in educational attainment, occupations, and income between different ethnic groups. Given the sheer numbers of immigrants and their concentration in a few metropolitan regions, immigration scholars are concerned with their socioeconomic integration into dominant American society: Whether this new ethnic mosaic reinvigorates the nation or catalyzes a quantum leap in its social problems depends on the forms of social and economic adaptation experienced by this still young population. (Portes and Rumbaut 2001:xvii) The new second generation is also the site of ethnogenesis, however, where cultural and ethnic reconstruction, and the consequent reshaping of what it means to be an “American,” is taking place. The rise in nativism in the United States during the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century is an acknowledgment of this social process. What the public, and particularly the white public , really wants to know is “whether or not the new immigrants will assimilate into the Euro-American society of the United States, and how that society and culture might change as a result of this incorporation” (Massey 1995:632). Antiimmigrant hysteria is not simply focused on the economic and social implications of large numbers of immigrants; such sentiments also express concern about symbolic and cultural issues, especially those related to language, loyalty, and national identity (Rumbaut 1994:752). Despite the popular belief that “America is a nation of immigrants,” concerns about assimilation are often directed at immigrants from Latin America and Asia and center on the perceived tendency of people of color to place ethnicity above individuality and thus thwart...