Immigration Hotline

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Are immigrants assimilating?

Current immigrants — especially Mexicans — are less assimilated than those 100 years ago, a study released Tuesday found.

However, the pace of assimilation over the past 25 years is higher than in previous waves, said the study by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York.

“The nation’s capacity to integrate new immigrants is strong,” said Jacob Vigdor, an associate professor of Public Policy Studies and Economics at Duke University who authored the study.

But the progress “is not present for all groups and in particular, it’s not present among some of the Latin American immigrants that are at the heart of the immigration debate these days,” he added.

The study uses Census data going back more than a century to measure assimilation through various indicators such as English-learning, employment, home ownership, rates of marriage to native-born people, child bearing, naturalization, educational attainment, military service and many others.

Based on these factors, the study creates an assimilation index ranging from 1 to 100, with 100 being complete assimilation.

Currently, immigrants collectively have an assimilation rate of 28. In 1900, it was above 50.

Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center, a non-partisan research group in Washington, said that the index was flawed as a measure of assimilation.

“Assimilation is a process that takes place over time and over generations. They’re not measuring that,” he said.

In addition, Passel said that the snapshot of immigrant assimilation is weighed heavily towards new immigrants who are clearly going to be less integrated into the larger society. In addition, he said that the study fails to take into account that 30 percent of current immigrants are in the United States illegally, which is vastly different than a century ago.

Read more here.

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