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Foreword
- Russell Sage Foundation
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Foreword Reynolds Farley THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago no political observer or social scientist predicted that the population of the United States would grow rapidly because of increased immigration, nor that the nation's social and economic structure would change due to the arrival of millions of people from countries around the world. Most demographers agreed that the massive flow of immigrants into this country during the first two decades of this century had ended with the restrictive laws of the 1920s (except for a few groups allowed to enter as a consequence of World War II), but the unforeseen occurred. The United States now receives near record numbers of legal immigrants each year, and the secondgeneration population-those born in the United States with one or both parents born abroad-is now larger than ever before. Among economically developed nations, only Canada and Australia rival the United States in terms of the contribution immigration makes to population change. Only economic growth will be more significant than immigration in shaping social and political trends in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth first century. In times of prosperity, employers will successfully lobby for liberal admission policies while in times of labor surplus, efforrs to curtail immigration will continue to percolate. At all times, those who celebrate the importance of past immigration and current cultural heterogeneity will disagree with those who see immigrants as a threat to American values and culture. The appeal of the United States as a destination for immigrants-especially from Mexico, Latin America, and Asia-is so firmly established that dramatic changes will be required to reduce immigration significantly below the current level of more than one million people who arrive in this country annually. The political and scholarly debate about immigration will focus around several issues of major importance, with far-reaching implications for the country. In this volume, Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWmd have recruited the nation's leading immigration scholars to summarize what is known and what still needs to be investigated about the following questions: • How does immigration contribute to the nation's economic growth and prosperity? Do immigrants bring necessary skills-and strong backs-to the country, so that their presence leads to higher rates of economic growth and, thereby, to better employment opportunities and larger earnings for most Americans? Or is the contribution of immigration to economic growth a modest one? • To what extent do immigrants compete with nativeborn workers for jobs and thus dampen wage increases and raise unemployment rates among the native population ? Are some groups of native-born residents, such as those with limited educational attainments, at risk of job loss in times of high immigration? • How does immigration influence the internal migration of native-born individuals? In other words, does the fact that a high proportion of first generation immigrants settle in just a few ports of entry trigger an out-migration of native-born competitors? Or does the presence oflarge numbers ofimmigrants stimulate economic growth so that the native-born remain where they live while immigrants move there? Does a certain density of non-white immigrants or nonEnglish speakers make a place unappealing to nativeborn persons? • How do immigrants contribute to the financing of local , state, and federal governments, and what costs do they impose upon taxpayers? How much does the estimate ofcontributions and costs change when not only first-generation immigrants are considered but also the contributions and costs of the second and even the third generations? • What is the social and economic trajectory for today's second-generation immigrants? Today's stream of immigrants differs from earlier flows due to the wide range of their educational achievements. Many immigrants , especially those from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America, report few years of schooling, but another large fraction, particularly those from Asia and Africa, report much higher levels of education. xii Foreword Will the children of less-educated immigrants remain toward the bottom of the occupational ladder while children born to highly-educated immigrants prosper? Does this imply that immigration leads to greater economic polarization? • How will immigration affect the nation's political system and its political parties? Immigrants and their children played a crucial role in developing and shaping the major political parties and provided both the candidates and votes that sustained the New Deal and its successors. What will happen when today's immigrants and their children start to play a much larger role in the political process than...