RealClear Books & Culture, July 19, 2022
Over the last decade, economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan have conducted innovative research into the history of immigration to the United States. How disappointing then that their new book, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success," is less an explication of that research than it is an advocacy brief, rife with enthusiastic rhetoric and simplistic arguments for expanding immigration.
The authors make three major claims. First, immigrants from the Great Wave (1880 to 1920) generally did not live out the romantic, rags-to-riches storylines that became part of Ellis Island lore. Instead, the most significant progress occurred in their children’s generation. Second, the children of today’s immigrants appear to be on the same path of assimilation. Third, immigration does not harm the labor market prospects of Americans.
Only the first claim withstands scrutiny. In following individual Great Wave immigrants through Census data, Abramitzky and Boustan show that many were never in “rags” at all. Immigrants from wealthy countries such as the UK and Germany, along with Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, tended to be skilled workers who took well-paying jobs. By contrast, ethnic Poles, Italians, and others were typically poor upon arrival, and although their earnings gradually increased throughout their careers, they rarely achieved the “riches” part of the rags-to-riches story.
The children of poorer immigrants did make impressive gains, rising out of poverty and toward the middle class. The children of more recent immigrants have also advanced, but it is here that Abramitzky and Boustan begin overstating their case. For although all immigrant groups make progress, the improvement is not uniform across nationalities, and gaps persist over the long term. Perhaps the starkest example is the status of Mexican Americans, who constitute approximately one quarter of all immigrants living in the U.S. today. An analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth shows that the grandchildren of Mexican immigrants are still only half as likely as the grandchildren of European immigrants to complete college, and their test scores and incomes similarly lag behind.
Abramitzky and Boustan acknowledge differential achievement but do not seem to have internalized the problem. “Newcomers today are just as quick to move up the economic ladder as in the past” is simply not an adequate reassurance when the largest immigrant group in the U.S. over the past four decades has experienced notably lower achievement.
The authors’ claims about cultural integration are another case of rose-tinted simplicity. Yes, almost all children of immigrants learn to speak English as one of their languages, but the unusual persistence of Spanish in the Hispanic third-generation is concerning, especially given the lower social capital associated with linguistic diversity. Increasing promotion of bilingualism will only exacerbate the problem.
And while the authors have other interesting data about, for example, immigrants giving their children American names, such measures barely scratch the surface of culture. The historian David Hackett Fischer has shown that American settlers from different parts of England exhibited cultural divisions – from social structures to attitudes toward liberty – that persist to the present day. Later waves of immigrants arrived with differences in civic values that have never disappeared either. The idea that mass immigration will not change the nature of American culture – or that any changes that do occur must be positive – is unsupportable.
Finally, Abramitzky and Boustan insist that immigration does not harm the economic prospects of low-skill Americans, but that claim cannot be reconciled with the academic research – including their own. A burgeoning literature shows that when immigrants move to high-employment areas of the U.S., they crowd out natives from taking the same opportunities. For example, one recent paper found that wages initially declined in Miami after an influx of Cuban refugees, but then wages returned to normal partly because low-skill workers moved away from (or declined to move to) the city. The same phenomenon was observed in reverse when the U.S. restricted immigration in the 1920s. According to two recent studies – one of which was co-authored by Abramitzky and Boustan – industrial jobs that would have gone to new immigrants from Europe were instead filled by rural migrants from other parts of the U.S. and North America.
The book acknowledges the effect of importing foreign labor on internal migration but fails to grapple with the implications. In 2000, 83 percent of native-born men without a college degree were in the labor force during their traditional working years (ages 18 to 64). Today that number is 75 percent. Surely some of those missing native workers could be convinced to rejoin through active recruitment. Instead, a steady flow of foreign workers helps employers and the broader society brush aside the problem of men without work, along with all the social ills it engenders.
Failing to grapple with the real downsides of immigration is characteristic of "Streets of Gold." The book is useful for those who wish to put an academic sheen on immigration advocacy, but readers expecting a balanced presentation of the data will have to look elsewhere.