Do Immigrants Transplant Certain Cultural Traits?

Mark Krikorian; Jason Richwine

By Mark Krikorian and Jason Richwine on August 10, 2023

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Summary

Several studies and books have highlighted how migrants, either within one country or from one to another, transmit certain elements of their culture to their descendants rather than fully assimilating to the new culture. This has been observed in the migration of Southerners within the United States, for example, as well as among immigrants coming from abroad.

On this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Jason Richwine, resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, joins host Mark Krikorian to discuss his recent academic journal article on cultural persistence among immigrants and their descendants, specifically examining savings behavior.

In the study, Richwine found strong correlation between the national savings rate in immigrants’ country of origin and the personal retirement savings of immigrants from those countries and their U.S.-born children, even when controlled for factors such as income, age, sex, and education. Interestingly, the savings behavior for the second generation (the children of immigrants) has even stronger correlation with that of the home country.

Richwine explains that cultural persistence has big implications for the current immigration conditions. “If you think about the administration using very legally dubious means to bring in far more immigrants to the United States than Congress ever authorized . . . given what we know about cultural persistence, they are changing the country in the long run, in a way that cannot be undone.”