Immigrants Americanizing, Study Finds

The largest group of immigrants to the United States since the beginning of the century is embracing the nation’s lifestyle by the millions--buying homes, speaking English, becoming citizens and intermarrying at surprisingly high rates, according to a new study of national census data.

Commentators brought together by the report’s sponsors at a forum Tuesday in Los Angeles called the conclusions consistent with the ethnic transformation of Southern California.

Immigrants, said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission, are buying into the American dream.

Opponents of high immigration said the report was a selective data snapshot that failed to take into account considerable evidence of so-called ethnic balkanization, or fracturing along ethnic lines.

The study found that immigrants--mostly from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean--are adjusting to life in the United States in much the same way as newcomers from Europe did earlier in the century.

Relying on U.S. Census data, the study focused on four measures of assimilation: citizenship, home ownership, English acquisition and intermarriage. All were found to be on the rise among immigrants and their children.

“Contemporary immigrants overwhelmingly do what newcomers have always done: slowly, often painfully, but quite assuredly, embrace the language, cultural norms, and loyalties of America,” said Gregory Rodriguez, the study’s author and a research scholar at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy.

More than three-quarters of immigrants spoke English proficiently within 10 years of arrival, the study found, and more than 60% owned their homes within 20 years. By the third generation--the grandchildren of immigrants--one-third of Latinas had married non-Latinos, and 41% of Asian American women had non-Asian spouses.

In the last quarter-century, more than 7 million immigrants have become U.S. citizens, by far the most in any 25-year period, officials say.

The study’s upbeat conclusions are encapsulated in its title, “From Newcomers to New Americans: The Successful Integration of Immigrants Into American Society.” It was commissioned by the National Immigration Forum, the leading pro-immigration advocacy group in Washington.

The study argues that the polyglot immigrant life of such places as Southern California should not be interpreted as a rejection of U.S. culture. Assimilation has historically been gradual, experts say.

“The assimilation process has been more or less sanitized and mythologized to depict a process that never was--that somehow immigrants came off a boat and dropped all the symbols and norms that made their lives meaningful,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum.

Critics said the report simplified the assimilation process in an effort to build congressional support for expanded entry quotas and amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.

“Assimilation is not a question of having a job or knowing the lyrics to Madonna’s songs,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that seeks to reduce the number of new arrivals.

Today, with burgeoning numbers of low-skilled, ill-educated immigrants, some predict the formation of a permanent underclass, with high welfare dependence, rather than an assimilated middle class.

“There’s no evidence that most of today’s immigrants have the skill sets suited for a postindustrial, Information Age, superpower economy,” said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national group seeking to limit immigration.

What policymakers must do, according to Stein and others opposed to today’s high immigration rates, is declare a pause in new entries, allowing time for today’s immigrants and their children to join society properly. They point out that the mass immigration of the early 1900s was followed by a 40-year period in which immigration was sharply curtailed.

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Benchmarks for Immigrants

A new study from a pro-immigrant group uses census data to show that the current wave of immigrants is assimilating well into American society. The report looks at four key indicators: naturalization, home ownership, English acquisition and intermarriage.

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SOURCES: National Immigration Forum, 1996 U.S. Census, 1994 Current Population Survey.