Some Numbers

• Today, the United States has over 46.6 million immigrants, more than any other country in the world. These 46.6 million immigrants represent about 14% of the entire national population.
• By 2065, projections show that there will be 75 million immigrants in the United States.
• Even today, however, in the last five decades between 1965 and 2015, new immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren have accounted for a whopping 55 percent of the country’s population growth.
• And if you account for the children of immigrants while counting their parents, they (we) represent 26 percent of the national population today, with a projected increase to 36 percent in 2065.

Simply put? There are a lot of immigrants in our nation.

Depending on how you view immigration, there are a lot of sides to the story. Immigration either makes or takes jobs. Immigration results in crimes, or perhaps, immigration results in higher educational outcomes. Immigrants cost the country a lot — healthcare, safety, educational, public spending — or immigrants give a lot, with their labor, services, and education. Immigration splits a whole lot of people in a whole lot of directions

Take a look at some other findings, though, and you see the benefit that immigration has on students, especially those most closely linked with the phenomenon.

A Center for Immigration Studies article, written by Josh Wahala, cites the findings of a working paper, written by Umut Ozek and David Figlio, that tracked two million first-, second- and third-generation Hispanic and Asian students in Florida, with the most pressing conclusion being this:

Educational outcomes deteriorate across successive immigrant generations.

In other words, the stronger a generation’s link to immigration, the better that generation tends to perform. First-generation immigrants succeed — at least academically — more so than their children and their children’s children.

First-generation Americans are high-performing students who score above average in their math and reading scores. In short, they perform well in school. They graduate from high school. They go on to college. They behave themselves.

But as time passes and association with immigration frays, academic performance goes down. Ozek and Figlio write that “In particular, we find that first generation immigrants — beyond a transition period — perform better in reading and math tests than do second generation immigrants, and second generation immigrants perform better than third generation immigrants.”

The academic and behavioral decline among successive generations of immigrants is particularly striking because the longer a family has been established in the United States, the more privileges that following generations typically enjoy.

Look at the greater access to resources, financial stability, and better understanding of English and the States as a whole that families enjoy once they’ve been here for years upon years, and you’d expect futures generations of immigrant descendants to do better.

After all, further-removed generations of immigrants typically come from wealthier, more educated households and have “significantly better English skills” than their first-generation counterparts (who outperform them). Ozek and Figlio find that “84 percent of the early entering first generation Hispanics have been categorized as limited-English-proficient at least once since they entered the public school system, in stark contrast to 60 percent for second generation, and 27 percent for third generation.”

For Asian students, writes Wahala, “47 percent of the early entering first generation were once limited in English compared to only 5 percent of the third generation.” He also notes:

“But relative prosperity and fluency with English does not translate into educational achievement.”

Based on their studies of so many students, Ozek and Figlio ultimately conclude that there is “evidence of educational aspirations dissipating across generations.”

Their analyses suggest that the drop-off in educational outcomes is not attributed to the factors that are usually blamed for such declines, like poverty, limited English proficiency, or familial instability. After all, the more established that a family is, the more stable and secure such factors — their proficiency in English, job security, relative financial stability — are. Instead, the drop-off in students’ academic success is because of a withering connection to immigration.

“When school conditions are held constant and the other factors see a relative improvement, the achievement and behavior of later generations still gets worse,” Wahala summarizes. “The findings, taken from a very large and fairly representative sample of current national immigration flows, run counter to the American myth of continual immigrant progress across generations.”

“The students who are underachieving are established Americans.”

Though popular political and public opinions might suggest differently, based on current controversy about the impact of immigration on our national crime statistics and economy and well-being, immigration benefits education. Immigration boosts academic success. Immigration keeps kids in line. Immigration yields good behavior. Immigration conducts strong academic performances.

These metrics of success show that the stronger and more direct an association with immigration, the better the academic success. Immigration, at the end of the day, may be divisive, polarizing, and ever-growing, but it is the very cause of some students’ academic success.