The Truth on Immigrant Integration
A Glimpse into the Ongoing Crisis of American Identity
One month ago, the Supreme Court temporarily saved portions of President Trump’s travel ban from legal purgatory. Like earlier bouts over terrorism and undocumented immigrants, the ensuing political backlash was as deafening and unproductive as we have come to expect. Yet beyond the verbal clashes, I noted a particular absence: a question that, if asked, could restore meaningful dialogue to these otherwise noxious topics.
In short: what makes an American? Is it language, culture or politics?
In 1939, an Atlantic piece opined that it was patriotism, uniquely defined by “moral and political doctrines,” by a proud past of liberation enshrined in the sacred Constitution. By the 1950s, at the height of the Civil Rights era, Americanism grew to encompass all races and creeds, erasing a centuries-old legacy of racial quotas and bans. Now, however, the answer is unclear. The link that once enjoined citizenship and immigration now ruptures under the weight of America’s partisanship, a grand distraction from the crisis of American identity facing us today.
Take the endless discussions on immigrant assimilation. Some experts believe immigrants are integrating to American society at historically stable rates. Others insist these rates are in free fall. Even among those who agree on the latter, many are split on whether this trend is the product of racism or lax immigration policies.
As for public figures like President Trump, the country is not selective enough with its newcomers. “It’s our right, as a sovereign nation, to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us,” Trump said during a 2016 campaign speech in Phoenix. It thus came as no surprise when he began advocating for the RAISE Act, a recent attempt at cutting legal immigration by half within the next decade.
So all things considered, where does one draw the line in this debate?
Oddly enough, nowhere, though not because of ideology or some confusion over facts. The real culprit here is much more simple: To be an American means different things for different people, extending far beyond race and ethnicity.
“As in war, the outcome of the immigration we are now experiencing is difficult to discern.” This was Brookings scholar Peter Skerry’s chief takeaway in his 2000 article. Among his many insights, Skerry revealed that Americanization is not — and has never been — a smooth, peaceful or even definitive process. Quite the contrary, “assimilation and conflict [historically] go hand in hand,” and like most things, American status and identity can be both lost and gained. This complexity compelled Skerry to urge for a realist understanding of the issue, one that avoided the “melodrama” and “romance” of immigration alarmists and enthusiasts alike.
This means ignoring the cavalcade of baby tweets and terrorism hysteria that clutter social media. But this also requires an honest reflection on facts and American identity, the true heart of the immigration question. Only then will it be clear if today’s assimilation rates are truly similar to preceding generations. But how does one measure integration, much less signs of American identity?
Perhaps it is a question of flag-raising, the proud display of the red, white and blue? This implies it is “un-American” for immigrants to wave the flags of their native countries. But how does this square off with Mexican Americans’ assurances that Mexican flags “demonstrate their culture and not their nationality?” What about dual loyalties, like the Soviet immigrant who waves the American and Ukrainian flags in their Northeast Philadelphia home? When countless natural born citizens fail to display these colors, is it reasonable to hold immigrants to a much higher standard (no pun intended)?
Skeptics may instead point to illegal immigration numbers. Since 1990, the total jumped from 3.5 million to a peak of around 11 million people, making up more than a quarter of the entire foreign-born population (26 percent). But present-day totals have stabilized since 2010, even showing decreases in the number of illegal Mexican immigrants, a demographic that made up as much as 52 percent of illegals in 2014. Even now, President Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration has likely reduced the monthly apprehensions of illegal migrants at the southern border by as much as 70 percent.
Still, do these decades-long increases suggest anything about integration? Not necessarily.
While some reports indicate lower assimilation rates for Mexican and Central American immigrants, they do not control for illegal status. What applies to illegal immigrants likely applies to legal immigrants as well. And while illegal status restricts civic integration, amnesty-defenders like Alfonso Aguilar, an executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, assert that illegal immigrants’ inability to naturalize, not their cultural backgrounds, present the greatest obstacle to assimilation. This stands in stark contrast to critics like Harvard’s Samuel Huntington who warn of a nationwide split into “two peoples, two cultures, and two languages“ if the intensity of Hispanic immigration continues.
Now while flags and discussions of illegal immigration (and even refugees) cannot help solve these questions, there are at least eight measures of integration that can.
1. English proficiency
A common language is the most unifying force known throughout history… More powerful than race, ethnicity, more powerful than common experiences or even religion.
In 2011 Rep. Steve King’s (R-Iowa) pitched this message to Congress in the hopes of passing a bill to nationalize the English language. Although it, like many older (and newer) iterations, failed to pass, King’s comments touched on a major cornerstone of American life. Without a common language to unite disparate cultural and ethnic pockets, the United States would never had survived, much less retained its iconic status as a cultural melting pot.
This explains the skepticism and hysteria many continue to feel over the 1990s boom in Asiatic and Hispanic immigration. In their eyes, English edges closer towards death’s door with each passing day. Huntington even considers this inevitable for parts of the U.S. given recent shifts against monolingualism in the Latino community.
Of course, at first glance these suspicions may feel far-fetched, paranoid and even absurd, but there is some inkling of truth.
Consider a 2009 think tank report by the New York-based Manhattan Institute which found a small increase in the proportion of foreign-born residents with poor or no English skills between 2000 and 2006. The author attributes this to widening immigrant networks that many rely on in lieu of English-speaking ability. Huntingon’s discussion of Miami, the largest Hispanic city in the U.S., captures this point perfectly, describing how Spanish is not just the language spoken in most homes, but also the “principal language of commerce, business, and politics.” Within decades, Cuban and South American immigration allowed Spanish to overtake English as the language of everyday life.
The Manhattan Institute’s report goes even further, finding that along demographics, while the “English skills of Mexican immigrants are lower than those of other immigrant groups, their apparent rate of progress is higher.” Although it fails to elaborate on the reasoning, other studies have already sought to fill the gap, including the excellent 2015 book, The Integration of Immigrants into American Society by the National Academies of Sciences (NAS). This 520-page volume provides detailed findings and academic overviews of every corner of the integration debate, least of all English ability.
In particular, it also finds that immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean demonstrate poorer English skills than other U.S. immigrants. But they are also among the most impoverished, poorly educated and residentially segregated, factors the academic community strongly correlates with decreased integration rates.
To complicate matters further, cross-generational data completely flip these findings on their head; for among second and third generation immigrants of all backgrounds, they learn English at historically-consistent rates, proving once again that assimilation is a long and gradual process. After all, it took the Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans of the 20th century many generations to integrate, despite their European background.
So while the influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants appears to reduce assimilation rates, this may only reflect the historic patterns of first-generation immigrants. As the Boston Globe’s Evan Horowitz informs us: “Right now, there are more first-generation immigrants in America than second-generation Americans. That’s very unusual in American history, and it may well be affecting people’s views of immigration.”
Not every Spanish-speaking enclave will become the next Miami. Multilingual efforts are predicated on preserving one’s cultural heritage, not on English’s destruction. Nor are efforts to preserve English and one’s ethnic language incompatible goals. Only time will tell whether the next generation of immigrants will continue to preserve English’s inextricable link with America’s past.
2. Naturalization
A simple prospect: If more immigrants refuse to naturalize, that may indicate waning interest towards “Americanization.” The NAS report’s findings on this front are lukewarm at best.
When comparing the 1920s to the present, the proportion of naturalized citizens among the foreign-born today is roughly identical (49.5 to 45.8 percent by 2013). On the other hand, while the percentages are similar, the total number of immigrants is not. In 1920, there were 6.6 million unnaturalized immigrants. By 2013, this rose to a staggering 22 million. And even when controlling for illegal immigration, the U.S.’s naturalization rates barely exceed the 15-country OECD average of 61 percent, falling far behind nations like Sweden (82 percent), the Netherlands (78 percent) and Canada (89 percent).
The 21st century has been especially riddled with peaks of highs and lows. Naturalization rates continue to fluctuate despite steady increases in the annual number of citizenship applications. Possible explanations have ranged from illegal immigration, longer waiting periods, and even growing disinterest among legal residents.
Survey-data fortunately provides some semblance of clarity here. Take the Mexican immigrant population. While accounting for 3.9 million of the U.S.’s 12 million legal permanent residents, they naturalize at only half the rate of all non-Mexican immigrants. Several surveys sought to explain this unusual trend.
For example, in a 2013 report by the Pew Hispanic Center, 9 in 10 noncitizen Latinos expressed their interest in becoming U.S. citizens. When asked why they failed to apply, most cited language, financial and administrative hurdles, whereas 26 percent of respondents simply answered that they had no interest in naturalizing. Whether such disinterest came from sheer apathy or an intimate desire to maintain close ties with their native country remains a mystery. Other studies, including a 2009 public opinion survey of immigrant women by New America Media, corroborate these findings, even showing how women continue to drive naturalization in their families.
In all, it is fair to say that the overall picture is neither as dire nor as uplifting as experts like to believe.
3. Socioeconomic status
If immigrants contribute to the economy at least as much as native born Americans, then that may indicate some level of integration. This is where context plays a huge role.
According to the NAS report, “the well-being of immigrants and their descendants is highly dependent on immigrant starting points and…the racial and ethnic groups, the legal status, the social class, and the geographic area…into which they integrate.” Most immigrants arrive to the United States with incomes far below those of the average native-born.
In fact, while a greater percentage of first generation immigrants work compared to the native-born, their poverty rates are significantly higher. Along racial and ethnic categories, these patterns vary wildly, with first generation Hispanics facing the highest poverty rates, while second-generation black and Asian Americans are now beginning to see slow poverty increases. Second and third generation Hispanics, by contrast, make huge leaps in economic progress compared to other second and third generation ethnic groups. The report’s authors assure readers that these discrepancies are not entirely unprecedented. For instance, it took Italian Americans decades to reach wage parity with their Anglo-Saxon compatriots in the 1900s, so time may yet be the great equalizer.
But income and employment aside, socioeconomics encompass so much more than finances. Here one also needs to address patterns of education and crime.
Similar to wages, educational attainment booms for second generation immigrants who “meet or exceed the schooling level of the general population of third and higher generation native-born Americans,” regardless of the educational starting points of their parents. Likewise, ethnic disparities persist. Mexican and Central American immigrants possess the lowest education rates, falling below parity with native-born Americans at less than 10 years of education on average. Researchers attribute this to either practical or cultural differences, but more than likely, this can be explained by financial, legal and linguistic barriers to accreditation. This is very different from the observed trends for Muslim American immigrants, a small minority that boasts levels of wealth and education that equal or exceed those of the average American.
On criminality, politicians and social media outlets often propagate fears that immigration is dangerous, accompanied by explosions of crime and lawlessness. Some go as far as conflating immigrants with refugees. Just over two months ago, several media outlets went ablaze with former-FBI Director James Comey’s admission that 300 of 2000, or 15 fifteen percent of terrorism-related investigations, involved refugees. Some pundits quickly latched onto this news to justify travel bans that would also bar legal visa-holders from Muslim-majority countries. It must be said that any conflation of visa-holders with refugees is intellectually dishonest, but more importantly, the 300 figure does not even begin to capture the realities of the over one million immigrants who arrive each year to the U.S. (much less the totality of FBI terror investigations in general, as noted by the Washington Post).
Indeed, studies from NAS, the American Immigration Council. The Sentencing Project, and the libertarian CATO Institute all agree that legal immigrants of all backgrounds have lower crime rates than their native-born counterparts. Granted, they highlight a leveling off in crime rates across later generations, but this still runs counter to the crime hysteria immigration skeptics purport to find. Even illegal immigrant crime rates, the subject of most media controversy, remains unresolved, with experts embroiled in an endless debate that hopes to make sense of data that by and large is incomplete.
4. Intermarriage
When immigrants marry outside their ethnic and racial blocs, many consider this an American success story. Bridging gaps between otherwise distant communities, intermarriage blurs the color lines and shatters cultural stigmas.
Originally illegal in over 29 states, intermarriage now makes up one in six newlywed couples. In 1980, this figure was a meager 6.7 percent, reflecting older generations’ unease with marrying those across racial and ethnic lines.
But even in today’s post-civil rights era, racial and ethnic considerations continue to dominate immigrants’ (and native-born Americans’) desire to intermarry, with Asian immigrant men and black immigrant women having the lowest intermarriage rates — much lower than those of Hispanic immigrant men and women. Asian immigrant women, by contrast, have among the highest, marrying outside their race in over a quarter of total cases.
Like native-born Americans, immigrants marry primarily within their ethnic and racial circles. People feel far more comfortable dating those of similar backgrounds, a cardinal reason why pan-ethnic unions among Asian, Hispanic and Black communities have recently ballooned in size.
For context, American society is unique in its tendency to highlight and emphasize ethnic differences, often inspiring associations with artificial labels like Hispanic, Latino and Asian American. These pan-ethnic identities allow people of different geographic backgrounds to cluster together, bonding over their shared histories and politics. Oftentimes this happens through socializing at work and at school, a process quite similar to how minorities embrace their own culture.
In a famous 1990s study of undergraduates at UC Berkeley, many Mexican-American students who never considered themselves as “a minority” or “Mexican” before attending the institution began adopting those very same monikers within the first couple years.¹ Simple engagement with culturally-conscious peers revamped these students’ entire worldviews, expanding their cultural membership by invoking pan-ethnic associations. In today’s society, this sort of cultural encouragement among minorities has become the effective norm.
As a result, pan-ethnic unions now account for a sizable portion of recent marriage increases between immigrants and the native-born. Coupled with first-generation immigrants’ tendency to have less out-of-wedlock births and far fewer instances of divorce than native-born Americans,² immigrants’ familial contributions to the United States continue to be especially unique.
5. Residential patterns
Similar to marriage, some experts believe that immigrants who choose to live in diverse American communities make one of the biggest leaps towards integration. In light of America’s racially segregated past, its enduring legacies, and the sporadic effect of gentrification in largely metropolitan areas, this becomes incredibly difficult to prove.
On the one hand, these forces present their own plethora of obstacles. On the other hand, like with education and marriage, people enjoy the comfort of those who are similar to them, self-segregating themselves according to race and ethnicity. This works both ways: Immigrants settle together in tight-knit communities while the native born may migrate out to more homogeneous — typically suburban — neighborhoods. In Huntingon’s recounting of Miami, the city became a central hub for vast swaths of new Central and South American immigrants, allowing them to enjoy its unique cultural and linguistic comforts.
Across the country, this tale is all-too-familiar. Immigrants often join their ethnic immigrant enclaves in the U.S., compounding an already alarming degree of segregation, especially amongst blacks and Hispanics in housing and education. This not only exacerbates residential segregation between immigrants and the native-born (going as far back as 1970), but has also led some immigrant communities to become more stratified than their native counterparts.
Like always, this is further complicated along racial lines. While black immigrants experience the most segregation from the white population, Asian immigrants experience the least. These patterns also vary significantly by location, especially between America’s largest metropolitan areas where most immigrants overwhelmingly reside.
Using census data from the Neighborhood Change Database, a recent Urban Institute report describes how traditionally segregated cities like D.C. and Chicago compare to fast growing cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Las Vegas. Most notably, while immigrants in D.C. and Chicago settled primarily along middle socio-economic status (SES) neighborhoods, immigrants in the latter three cities, who are majority Hispanic, gathered along their respective lower income neighborhoods. As for tech cities like San Jose and Seattle, high and low-skilled immigrants tread divergent paths. High-skilled immigrants take to wealthy, more diverse neighborhoods, while low-skilled workers settle along more segregated, low SES communities.
Though as concerning as these segregation patterns may be, there is a distinction worth making between the intensity of immigration — the likely culprit here — and the “authentic American character” of immigrants themselves. The relationship between these two is inconclusive, though some analysts, like the National Review’s Reihan Salam, insist they are in fact intertwined. For Salam, today’s immigration system has become far too intense and open. “By reducing less-skilled immigration, we could tighten the market for less-skilled labor and increase the likelihood that immigrants will interact with people outside their own ethnic groups,” he said in a 2016 National Review article, adding that “moderately increasing the influx of skilled English-speaking immigrants who command high wages and reducing less-skilled immigration could be complementary strategies.”
To Salam’s credit, there is plenty of room for debate on whether’s today’s immigration rates and restrictions are effective. President Trump certainly seems to agree with his assessment, as evidenced by his support of the controversial RAISE Act.
But as regards the question of immigrant assimilation, however, there is no conclusive evidence that residential segregation independently reduces integration rates. Across multiple city-wide studies, scholars find that socioeconomic indicators and length of residence in the United States — not segregation or place of residence — effectively predict an immigrant’s chance at integration. This makes residential segregation an unreliable measure of immigrants’ authenticity as potential Americans.
6. Multiple citizenships
Before becoming full-fledged citizens, American immigrants are forced to take the oath of allegiance, a pledge that they would renounce all loyalties to foreign nations. Today, this is a largely symbolic ritual. But for most of the 20th century, when fears of foreign agents were par for the course, U.S. officials revoked thousands of Americans’ citizenship, often for crimes like voting in a foreign election, expatriating, supporting questionable ideologies, or enlisting in a foreign military.
By the late 1960s, the government reversed its stance. The seminal 1967 ruling in Afroyim v. Rusk set a general prohibition against the involuntary removal of U.S. citizenship, thereby allowing dual- and multiple citizenship wielders to begin to swell in size.³ Since the government does not keep tabs on multiple citizenship holders, this exact figure remains unknown, with recent estimates placing it anywhere between 494,000 and 5.7 million Americans.
Legal experts believe this trend reflects immigrants’ increasing desire for convenience and patriotism to their countries of origin. Stanley Renshon, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, goes even further, describing why this trend is particularly dangerous for integration:
Multiple citizenship immigrants entering a country whose cultural assumptions are fluid and “contested” will find it harder to assimilate, even if they wish to do so and, in such a circumstance, are more likely to maintain former cultural/country attachments that put at risk development and consolidation of newer cultural/county identifications.
Although unproven, this theory raises two critical questions. First, in today’s globalized world, how relevant are discrete national attachments? And second and most importantly, what distinguishes immigrants with multiple citizenships from natural-born Americans with multiple citizenships?
To date, many unsubstantiated claims assert that dozens, if not hundreds of U.S. government officials possess multiple citizenships. There has also been the widespread media coverage surrounding Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) 2014 renunciation of Canadian citizenship, as well as former Rep. Michelle Bachman’s (R-Minn.) withdrawal of Swiss citizenship in 2012. As far as presidential candidates are concerned, those actions were expected, allowing Cruz and Bachman to present a pure, unadulterated American image to the public. But with such accountability in seemingly short supply for congressman and government staff, it is worth asking how many native-born Americans are multiple citizenship holders themselves and what effect that should have on people’s judgments on immigrants in similar positions.
7. Embodying the “Protestant work-ethic”
In his popular 1996 book Assimilation, American Style, Peter Salins, a professor of political science at Stony Brook University, provides three simple guidelines for judging whether an immigrant has assimilated to American society. Besides the adoption of English and the upholding of American values, Salins — a child of immigrants himself — argues that immigrants should embody the American spirit: They should be disciplined, entrepreneurial and morally upstanding.
Measuring these qualities is not exactly clear-cut, though scholars often do refer to social and economic mobility, specifically one’s ability to improve their economic and social standing. If immigrants that arrive to the U.S. can improve themselves at roughly equal rates to native-born Americans across the same length of time, does this not therefore prove they have the work-ethic of a true-blooded American? This was the logic underlying part of a lengthy 1998 report on California immigrants by the nonprofit RAND Corporation.
Harboring nearly a quarter of the nation’s foreign-born population and one of the highest populations of illegal immigrants, California presents one of the best case studies of how immigration functions. On this subject, The RAND report’s authors analyzed the state’s immigration patterns between 1970 and 1990, concluding that:
Immigrants from most places of origin appear to be attaining full participation in California’s society and economy at least as fast as immigrants have historically done. But the education and earnings of Hispanic immigrants — particularly those from Mexico — remain lower than those of other immigrant groups in both the first and second generations.
Unlike Korean, Japanese and Chinese immigrants who managed to reach wage parity with native-born workers within 10 to 15 years, Hispanic and Mexican immigrants in particular continued to suffer sharp wage and education gaps. As the authors put it, discrimination, lacking education and English skills, wage penalties for illegal workers and even “cultural differences in attitudes toward work” were but some of the possible forces at play here. To this day, the exact reasons remain a mystery.
Yet mystery or not, this is hardly evidence that some immigrants cannot integrate.
Quite the contrary, work ethic can stretch far beyond social and economic success. Borrowing Salins’s own criteria, it can also embody hard work, self-sacrifice, moral standing and entrepreneurial spirit. In these respects, immigrants of all backgrounds excel astronomically.
Not only do they strongly treasure the value of hard work, working at least as hard as the native-born, but they also found more businesses than native-born Americans. As for their virtuous and law-abiding spirit, immigrants’ comparatively low crime rates should shine a beacon of clarity for any skeptical onlooker. Some studies even go as far as claiming that immigrants consume less in social welfare benefits, though this is a serious point of contention for controversial research organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies.
However true that final point may be, what is clear is that immigrants often sacrifice much in comfort, friends and family when coming to the U.S. Some even forgo their entire careers in the face of insurmountable language barriers just so they could secure a decent living for their children. The fact that immigrants continue to drive the nation’s innovative and economic potential in spite of these sacrifices should not be discounted.
8. Pride in American values and identity
What better judge of ”Americanism” is there than patriotism and one’s love for America’s constitution, military and cultural pastimes? In the 1900s, cultural and patriotic assimilation were inseparable from citizenship. Today, these lines are muddled by partisanship.
In the Public Religion Research Institute’s (PPRI) 2016 American Values Survey, an overwhelming 73 percent of Republicans reported that the “growing number of newcomers threatens American customs and values,” compared to only 29 percent of Democrats. A more recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll further found majority support for President Trump’s travel ban on visitors from six Muslim-majority countries. Evidently, cultural anxiety continues to grip vast swaths of America’s white working class, many of whom sided with Trump in the 2016 election to allay those concerns in the first place.
Meanwhile, ideological differences between pro-diversity multiculturalists and pro-nationalist patriots polarize the major parties. Conservatives are especially concerned that modern-day immigrants are thinking notably less “American” than those of ages past — that they no longer prescribe to America’s culture and system of government.
To some extent, such fears have some basis in truth. In a 2013 study by the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., authors John Fonte and Althea Nagai surveyed a national sample of 2,421 citizens consisting of both native-born Americans and naturalized immigrants. Based on their answers to questions on American values and history, the authors concluded that naturalized immigrants held far fewer American exceptionalist views than their native counterparts.
By margins of 20 to 30 percent, naturalized immigrants not only viewed America’s constitution as inferior to international law, but also viewed themselves more as “citizens of the world” than as American citizens. This comes on the top of only 59 percent of naturalized citizens who believe it is very important for America’s future that all citizens understand English, compared to 82 percent of native-born responders. Further still, a mere 44 percent of naturalized citizens believe America should be considered the best country, compared to 65 percent of native-born responders.
Fonte and Nagai also discovered that naturalized citizens’ civic knowledge was poorer than that of the native-born. Granted, this is based on responses to only four questions on American history and government, raising the need for further scholarship; but this may also suggest that the naturalization process, and the U.S. Citizenship exam in particular, fail to adequately educate immigrants on America’s history and politics. If true, then this may reflect poorly on immigrants’ civic engagement as future citizens.
It is also worth noting that the Hudson study is no particular exception. Recent reports from the Pew Research Center and Manhattan Institute all confirm that patriotism is waning among Americans of all stripes and statuses. Most notably, they highlight a rising trend of people self-identifying not as “Americans” but as one’s pan-ethnic and national-origin equivalents (as Latino, Filipino, Chinese American, etc.). In other words, immigrants — including their second-generation offspring — are now more likely than ever to embrace their cultural heritage, maintaining close ties with their countries of origin while adopting an internationalist, globalist view of law and nationality.
Herein lies today’s crisis of American identity: Everyone’s optics differ and yet very few people talk about it.
This trend may or may not raise alarms.
If “Patriotic Assimilation Is an Indispensable Condition in a Land of Immigrants,” as the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez contends in his candidly titled 2016 article, then this presents a complication. On the other hand, it is quite ironic that pan-ethnic identities, monikers that originated in the U.S., are receiving criticism for denigrating American identity. More often than not, these sorts of concerns focus more on labels than the actual implications of their adoption.
Which leads to the most pressing point of all: Immigrants are not actively seeking to undermine American society with their foreign, third-world ways of life. It is easy to find select instances of terrorism and barbarism that support this worldview, but if one was to strip away the fallacious political and racial arguments that often accompany these “cultural cases” against immigration, they would find little evidence of such a widespread threat in the United States.⁴
Simply taking the example of Muslim Americans, not only are they as likely to identify themselves as Americans as other ethnic groups, integrating at roughly similar rates to other immigrants, but they are also politically active, as well as far more privy towards peaceful solutions to military conflicts, vilifying all manner of Islamic extremism. The crimes of a few do not even begin to scratch the surface of the 3.3 million Muslims who live peacefully in the United States.
The Bottom Line
With eight criteria laid out on the table, what can be said about assimilation? Besides naturalization and traditional expressions of American patriotism, integration projections are rather positive. To quote Peter Skerry from earlier, “as an animating force in our communities and in our national life, assimilation is alive and well.”
Or is it? Truth be told, the answer cannot come from politicians, bureaucrats or even experts, but with Americans’ own interpretation of everyday “Americanism.” Herein lies today’s crisis of American identity: Everyone’s optics differ and yet very few people talk about it. Some may prize knowledge of the English language; others may exalt patriotic support for the United States. Whether immigrants are integrating or not simply depends on what Americans value, and these valuations are often implicit, acting as powerful political compasses. But their hidden, undisclosed nature also stifles compromise and the prospect of national self-rediscovery.
Suppose today’s embattled political factions—beyond those of the hard left and right — sought the same policy goals yet squabbled over differences of principle, reducing the government to a state of gridlock. However apt this characterization may be, suppose now that those principles were informed by latent assumptions over American identity, the very same assumptions that guide one’s views on integration. By leaving those thoughts untouched, politicians would continue bickering over frivolous and superficial differences, unaware of the possibility that those assumptions could very well be in line with those of the opposition. Reasons like these are why Americans must resolve their grievances and begin to rekindle some sense of national consciousness.
By virtue of America’s growing size and diversity, there will never be an exact consensus, which is fine. But by ignoring these differences in valuations altogether, Americans open up the all-too-familiar floodgates of partisanship. The ensuing polarization will not only continue to cripple sensible debate on immigration policy, but will further divide the country and muddy the very meaning of Americanism in the 21st century.
Which is why it is perhaps fitting that the answer to this pivotal question may lie in America’s past, at those very values that made the country — despite all its faults — a proud and successful nation of immigrants.
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¹ More info on this study can be found in book form.
² Immigrants’ divorce and out-of-wedlock rates reach parity with the native born across later generations.
³ The law here is complicated with many denaturalization proceedings occurring after Afroyim, but it is nevertheless true that the government began to take a more hands-off approach with multiple citizenship during this time.
⁴ The case for Europe is not as optimistic, as confirmed by a 2015 OECD report on assimilation.
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