Social Science Research Council

From Items
Volume 50/ Numbers 2-3/ June-September 1996

A conference on international migration to the United States

by Josh Dewind and Charles Hirschman

Immigration has become one of the most controversial public policy issues in American society with politicians, the media and citizen advocacy groups making a variety of claims about the forces that are driving international migration and the consequences of immigration for American society. Many of these claims are contradictory about the most elementary knowledge regarding immigration, as well as the relative wisdom of alternative policies. Immigrants are said to be taking American jobs and driving down wages, in particular adversely affecting poor African Americans and Latinos; but they are also said to be taking jobs Americans do not want and to be rejuvenating urban neighborhoods. The diversity of immigrants' cultural backgrounds is claimed to be enriching American culture, but then also to be diluting the traditional meaning of being an American.

Immigration policy debates are creating a cacophony of calls for conflicting policy measures: controlling the borders with strict legal enforcement versus opening the borders to promote freedom of trade and movement; capping legal immigration versus expanding family reunification, the entry of skilled workers and admission of refugees; limiting immigrants' access to public services versus preserving the right and social value of educating the children of undocumented immigrants. These are just some of the issues in the air and on the airwaves as the US Congress debates legislative alternatives that would regulate immigration and limit the access of immigrants to government services.

National and international public policy issues, especially controversial ones, can stimulate social science research because they generate public interest and often attract new resources. There is, however, a danger that responding to the details of the immediate situation and to the concerns, assumptions, or arguments of vocal policymakers and advocacy groups may divert social scientists from research and analysis that will contribute to more fundamental public understandings. Social scientists have a responsibility to clarify the nature of central issues, explain their origins and outcomes, and identify their wider social contexts and ramifications. While not aimed at resolving policy disputes, this use of social science can potentially contribute to the public's ability to assess the goals, consistency and long-term implications of policy options being debated.

With an awareness of both the potential difficulties and complementary relation between the social sciences and public debates, the SSRC, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, established a Committee on International Migration in 1994 to address the fundamental issues influencing immigration to the United States. The committee is expected to reach beyond contemporary policy debates to provide clear theoretical and empirical understandings of the factors and processes that shape international migration and its social consequences.

The first activity of the committee was to take stock of the theoretical and empirical base of contemporary immigration study. Although the initial focus has been on the contemporary American experience, there is an explicit concern with understanding the present situation through comparisons both with the past and with other parts of the world. The stock-taking took place at a conference held on Sanibel Island, Florida, from 18 to 21 January, 1996. Titled “Becoming American/America Becoming,” it emphasized the goal of exploring how immigration transforms both immigrants and American society. With the objective of advancing interdisciplinary theories that can explain the origins, processes, and outcomes of US immigration, the committee commissioned leading scholars to survey and assess current understandings of a number of broad themes which, when taken as a whole, would constitute an overview of the field of immigration studies.

This article attempts to distill some of the central themes, theoretical perspectives, and potential contributions to public understanding that became the focus of lively debates at the conference. Given their central nature for understanding the implications of immigration for American society and culture, the issues and points of view examined here are likely to orient future study of US immigration well into the 21st century.

Theory-building

Responding to the conference's goal of advancing the development of immigration theory, the conference's keynote speaker, Alejandro Portes argued that the empirical studies, elemental typologies and conceptual frameworks that comprise much of the field's scholarship do not by themselves attain the level of theory. In prescribing standards for constructing more encompassing and powerful theoretical models, he identified intellectual elements that, when combined with one another, can raise their explanatory powers to a theoretical level. This process begins with descriptive case studies that, when compared in terms of similarities and differences, can be helpful in identifying more general problems that merit explanation. Identification of possible explanatory factors can then become the basis for theoretical propositions, which, when linked with other predictive statements, can become the basis for elaborating theoretical explanations.

After warning unwary scholars of some pitfalls to be encountered in the "delicate enterprise" of theory-building within the field of immigration studies, Portes recommended against attempts to construct an all-encompassing macro-level theory to explain migration outcomes, and argued instead for efforts focused on developing mid-range theories that can draw on the burgeoning wealth of historical and contemporary research. He then offered a "sampler of themes" which he felt could yield new theoretical insights: transnational communities, second-generation adaptation, households and gender, and states and state systems. Each of these and additional topics became a focus of the conference discussions.

Causes of migration: linking explanation to policy

The uneasy tie between scholarly theory and the design of government policies that are intended to restrict undocumented immigration provided a backdrop for the discussion of a paper on the origins of migration, "What's Driving Mexico-US Migration," by Douglas S. Massey and Kristin E. Espinosa. Drawing upon individual, household, community, and macro-economic data collected through ethnographic and survey research in 25 sending communities in Mexico, Massey and Espinosa measured the relative contribution of the various explanatory factors employed by five competing theoretical models to predict the course of migration to the United States. The major factors and corresponding theoretical models evaluated included the costs and benefits central to neoclassical economics, access to credit markets of the "new economics," sectorial labor demands of segmented labor market theory, network ties of social capital theory and foreign investments of world systems theory. The authors’ analysis concluded that Mexican migration patterns correlated most closely with factors emphasized by the social capital and new economics theories, that is, factors central to processes of social and human capital formation and of market consolidation.

One part of the conference discussion focused, sometimes with skepticism, on the suitability of some of the more than 40 individual factors that Massey and Espinosa selected to represent particular theories. Some participants went further in questioning whether such a factorial analysis could provide adequate measures of the explanatory contributions of theories conceived at different levels of analysis. Nevertheless, the comprehensive and comparative approach was recognized as a source of insight into the strengths and weaknesses of each theoretical model. Another part of the discussion focused on the lack of consideration that legislative debates give to the factors and processes that Massey and Espinosa found most determinative of the size and direction of migration flows. Ironically, the authors argued, current US immigration and economic aid policies that are intended or expected to reduce illegal migration (e.g., visa restrictions, employer sanctions, legalization of undocumented immigrants, denial of social services, and free trade) inadvertently amplify the effect of the factors and processes found most responsible for stimulating migration. Legislators anxious to control undocumented immigration, the authors argued, should reevaluate neoclassical notions prevailing in Washington and give more attention to alternative social science perspectives.

Immigrants and civic culture

Shifting from the origin of migration to the incorporation of immigrants, Gary Gerstle's paper, "European Immigrants, Ethnics, and American Identity, 1880-1950," described how pictures of immigrants’ civic incorporation painted by past scholars were colored by the normative values of emancipation or constraint that they attached to assimilation and pluralism. The conference discussion of contemporary incorporation focused instead on the relative contributions of transnationalism and the values implied by cosmopolitanism, both of which are at odds with past views based on geographic and conceptual boundaries of national culture. Underlying the discussion were these questions: Do such international perspectives of immigrant incorporation provide explanations closer to the experience of contemporary immigrants and are they any freer of normative bias?

The conceptual contributions of "transnationalism," defined as applying to the simultaneous incorporation of migrants into sending and receiving societies, met with both criticism and elaboration. The concept was described as being so inclusive as to fail to discriminate between significant and insignificant international ties or impacts on migrants. Further, the significance of a transnational framework itself was questioned with the claim that transnationalism will turn out to be a short-term phenomenon that will not impede assimilation and that the concept, therefore, will have no long-term relevance.

Nevertheless, other participants viewed a transnational framework as providing new insights into the ambiguities of immigrant incorporation, such as the multiple identities of immigrants and the limits of their participation in democratic processes. Similarly, the framework of transnationalism introduces new issues about the interest of sending states in expanding their definitions of civic membership in order to maintain ties with nationals who have emigrated to the United States. The discussion concluded with a recognition of the need to specify further the conception of transnational "citizenship" and to determine the prevalence of transnationalism not only among contemporary immigrants but also among past immigrants and their offspring. Expressing the uncertainty regarding the outcome of such research, one participant asked, "What does it mean that the Mayor of Jalisco, Mexico, owns a burrito stand in Southern California?"

Standards of citizenship and xenophobia

David Plotke's paper on "Immigration, Political Incorporation, and Citizenship" asked why many Americans are perturbed by the low rate of voting among immigrants when barely a majority of qualified citizens vote themselves. "After all," he asked rhetorically, "what harm can two million more non-voters cause?"

Of course immigrant groups must often overcome exclusionary barriers in order to establish a political voice. This has been true historically, despite a popular myth that political patronage machines smoothly incorporated immigrants. Today, in contrast, many citizens who have easy political access choose not to vote and fewer are active in political organizations. Given the limited control that the average voter has over what candidates he or she can vote for, the more general question is, how open American political institutions are to influence by either immigrants or the native-born. The most significant political activities of immigrants and the native-born may take place outside the electoral system.

Issues regarding native-born citizens' suspicions regarding immigrant citizenship help set the context for examining the nature of anti-immigrant sentiment in general. Why is anti-immigrant sentiment growing today? Is it comparable to 19th- and early 20th century-nativism? Contemporary examples of xenophobia cited most frequently were from California. Writing on "Race, Immigration, and the Rise of Nativism in Late Twentieth Century America," George Sanchez closely examined the 1994 Los Angeles riots and reporting about them to illustrate the tendency of Americans to reduce the physical and cultural variations of immigrants into monolithic racial identities, with the result that racial biases become turned against the immigrants.

Understanding nativism, defined as an irrational antipathy toward the foreign-born, requires that it be distinguished analytically not only from racism but also from what some discussants termed citizens' rational or legitimate concerns regarding the material and cultural impact of large numbers of immigrants. Calls for immigration restrictions that have been aimed at maintaining a predominantly white society and a "traditional" Euro-American culture were described as both racist and nativistic. However, restrictionist measures to protect Americans from job displacement were viewed by some participants as rational responses to real threats. Nativism was then described as arising when citizens irrationally exclude immigrants in order to solve material problems that the immigrants have not caused.

The impact and economic progress of immigrants

While there was considerable agreement in defining nativism as an irrational solution to a real problem, there was little consensus regarding social scientists' attempts to determine whether immigrants actually have an adverse economic impact on native-born Americans, particularly on low-skilled African Americans. Although a thorough survey of national economic studies by Rachael Friedberg and Jennifer Hunt, in their paper "Immigration and the Receiving Economy," concluded that immigrants have an insignificant adverse impact on the wages and employment of the native-born, this conclusion was hotly contested. "Why is it that social scientists find so little effect," asked one participant, "yet public opinion is driven by the opposite perception?" One explanation was that the categories of information in national data sets, notably the US Census, are inadequate to reveal industrial and occupational competition. Another explanation was that significant correlation of immigration with unemployment and wage reductions occurs in local labor markets where, it was asserted, "uneducated immigrant peasants do compete with black high school dropouts." Further, what might seem an "insignificant" adverse impact for the majority might constitute a "severe" impact for some African Americans and members of other minority groups who already face high rates of unemployment and poverty.

Skeptics countered that local labor markets may not be an appropriate unit of analysis in a national economy. That is, unemployment in the garment industry of Memphis can be caused by an expansion of the industry in Los Angeles. It is not the influx of immigrants, others proposed, but the international restructuring of production and trade that shapes labor markets. Another view held that segmentation of the labor market limits direct competition between first-generation immigrants and the native-born, but that competition begins when the children of immigrants move into new labor markets.

The long, unresolved nature of this debate was placed into a broader perspective when a participant asked why the entry of immigrants into the labor market arouses more concern than the entry of women or the children of the baby boom whose large numbers and labor market impacts dwarf that of immigrants. The implied answer -- that the impact of the native-born is different from that of the foreign-born -- moved the question away from whether the fear of immigrants' economic impact was rational or irrational to an inquiry into the acceptability or legitimacy of any group's impact on the social and economic opportunities of other groups.

Another discussion began with the unresolved issue of economic mobility by immigrant groups. Is mobility facilitated by incorporation into the mainstream economy or through self-employment and reliance on ethnically-based economic relations? The argument focused on whether immigrants disproportionately engage in self-employment as a means to increase their earnings or to circumvent blocked access to employment. Arguing for a broader approach to understanding immigrant economic incorporation and mobility, a paper by Marta Tienda and Rebeca Raijman titled "Forging Mobility: Immigrants' Socioeconomic Progress in a Low-Wage Economy," used a case study of Mexican immigrant engagement to propose a typology that would recognize multiple job holding and participation in more than one economic sector, be it formal or informal, mainstream or ethnic. While most participants acknowledged the contribution that such conceptual flexibility offered in matching the varying adaptability of immigrants to economic opportunity, they lamented that researching such adaptive strategies was nearly impossible with available data sets, which generally report only one job and exclude information about the informal economy. More extensive ethnographic research will be needed to explore the full contributions of this framework.

Gender and households

While a paper on "The Role of Gender, House-holds, and Social Networks in the Migration Process" by Patricia Pessar assessed the most important immigration scholarship related to each of these topics, most of the discussion focused on gender. While the paper persuasively argued for research on the experiences of both men and women and their relations with one another, again the discussion focused more narrowly on the impact of gender on women compared to their class, national origin, and racial status.

Attention was given to the cultural, class, and racial backrounds or contexts that determine whether female migrants find employment and assimilation to be emancipating from traditional patriarchal constraints. While some participants considered the impact of cultural backgrounds, others cautioned against establishing cultural typologies and rankings as a means for carrying out such analyses lest they become a vehicle for discrimination, for example, against groups with relatively high proportions of poor female-headed households. In addition to women's social backgrounds, it was argued that the context of employment, within the mainstream economy or an ethnic enclave, for example, would also influence whether labor market incorporation leads women to greater independence or constraint.

To the extent that female immigrants identify American culture as supportive of a new and desirable independence, they would be more likely to embrace assimilation. This tendency might run counter to a traditional maternal role of women raising their children into their family's culture. A consensus seemed to emerge that an analysis of assimilation from the perspective of gender, of both first and second generations, was needed. Assimilation: new wine in old bottles?

As children of post-1965 immigrants come of age, the extent to which they have or will become "Americanized" is to be determined. In this context, models of the assimilation process that explained past processes attain renewed relevance. The need to place these processes into a new conceptual context was emphasized in the discussion of an assessment of "The Assimilation of Immigrant Groups: Concept, Theory and Evidence" by Richard Alba and Victor Nee. The challenge today, according to one participant, was to answer the question, "assimilation from what and into what?" Valuable as the notion of assimilation may be in setting benchmarks for measuring immigrants' cultural change, discussants cautioned against repeating stereotypical portraits of static immigrant and American cultures. Like native-born Americans, immigrants of different regional, class, racial and ethnic backgrounds have distinct cultural backgrounds compared to compatriots; and, further, their cultural beliefs and practices are evolving. The problem is linking a recognition of the dynamic group cultural processes with contemporary notions of assimilation.

The relation between contemporary assimilation and cultural diversity differs from earlier periods in key ways. There is increased racial and cultural diversity resulting from immigration from non-European nations. There is also the increased role of the state in providing protections against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. As a result, the extent to which immigrants fight to retain their cultures, the nature of those fights, and the responses of the native-born may now be qualitatively different from the past. Language retention is a good example. Similarly, the breakdown of the earlier ideal that there is a single "American" identity into which immigrants can assimilate and the growing recognition of diverse identities might now result in immigrants being forced to assimilate more narrowly into particular racial or ethnic segments of the American social hierarchy.

As "straight line" assimilation into a single, inclusive identity is no longer expected of immigrants, scholars have begun to identify distinct modes of incorporation and to search for theories that can predict their outcomes. Systematic comparison of America's special immigrant, racial, and ethnic history with other receiving countries' notions of national identity and membership was suggested as a means for disentangling determining factors and for elaborating explanatory theories.

Intergroup relations

Differing patterns of conflict and harmony between immigrant, class, racial, and ethnic groups in American cities suggest the need for a comparative urban typology based upon explanatory variables. The focus on Los Angeles in a paper on "Immigration Reform and the Browning of America: Tensions, Conflict, and Community Instability" by James H. Johnson, Jr., Walter C. Farrell, Jr., and Chandra Guinn, complemented papers examining intergroup relations in other urban settings, such as New York City and Houston. Variables considered for an urban typology included the size and racial/ethnic composition of immigrants, local structures of economic opportunity, relative integration or segregation of public culture and spaces, cross-group political alliances in politics, and the like. An alternative approach would comparatively examine how conflicts in particular cities reach the public sphere and become emblematic of intergroup relations. One reason that local conflicts have an electoral dimension in New York City but less so in Los Angeles may be related to residential patterns. In New York there is a relatively high presence of whites in or near minority neighborhoods whereas there is greater residential segregation in Los Angeles County. Another factor may lie in differing political cultures. Unlike New York, Los Angeles does not have a hegemonic racial and ethnic political elite, so power and policies may be more likely to involve continuous inter-group competition. National politics may also contribute to differing levels of urban conflict and harmony. Participants noted that some concentrations of immigrants, such as the undocumented in southern California, do not have effective representation in the Congress, which leads to non-responsive policies. How to compensate cities for the burdens of rapid growth of immigrant populations is an issue for national policies designed to diminish local conflict situations.

Conclusion: theory and public understanding

The committee used the conference's closing session to assess the contribution of the preceding three days of discussion, especially asking whether fundamental theoretical issues had been clarified and whether directions for both the field and the committee had been identified. The participants reiterated their concern about exploring further the potentials for different forms of engagement between the social sciences and public enlightenment, particularly with regard to policy development. There was general agreement that the contribution of social science to public understandings would be advanced by theories placing contemporary U.S. debates into broader spatial and temporal contexts.

Touching on relations between the social sciences and public policy, Alejandro Portes cautioned at the conclusion of his keynote address that, "The pressures for 'policy-relevant' results should not distract us from the painstaking development of concepts and propositions that alone can advance social science knowledge and provide a sound basis for both public understanding of immigration and policies that do not backfire on their original goals." While conference participants seemed confident that their research and theories can contribute to immigration debates, they were less certain about how to structure collaboration with citizen groups and legislators in ways that will complement and not compromise scientific activities. How can the immediate and, perhaps, relatively short-term concerns of policy advocates be attended to in a manner that does not divert from the challenge to develop broad and long-term theoretical understandings? Similarly, through what fora and media can the theoretical insights of social scientists inform the values and advocacy interests of policymakers and their public constituencies?

The potential contributions of historical and regional comparisons in broadening the scope of social science theory were cited throughout the conference. Participants pointed out that historical comparisons could be particularly helpful in explaining contemporary immigrant incorporation. It was suggested that comparing the historical relation between the formation of white ethnic groups and the racial identity of African-American internal migrants could shed light on the contemporary segmented incorporation of immigrants of color. A comparison of past and contemporary commitments to transnational economic and social networks was proposed as a means of elucidating the processes and extent of immigrant incorporation into contemporary civic life. Historical comparisons were also proposed as one way of initiating a systematic exploration of the nature of gendered relations between male and female immigrants, both within households and in public spheres. In each of these cases, historical comparisons were seen not only as benefiting contemporary scholarship and policy debates but also as raising new reinterpretations of U.S. immigration history. Such comparisons would also play a role in bringing together the the analytical perspectives of historians and other social sciences.


A similar interest was expressed in undertaking systematic regional and cross-national comparisons. Such comparisons were expected to broaden the applicability of basic concepts of research and analysis, to identify explanatory variables for differences and similarities, and to test the general applicability of theories developed in the U.S. context. Inter-regional comparisons within the United States were proposed as a means to redress the disproportionate focus on the experiences of white European ethnic groups on the East Coast - a view not particularly insightful for explaning Hispanic and Asian immigration on the West Coast. Comparisons between urban centers were proposed as a means to explain both the different outcomes of members of the same nationality group and similar outcomes between distinct nationality groups.

Among the topics most often cited as suitable for international comparisons were those regarding incorporation into civic life and the origins and nature of xenophobia. Comparing patterns of racial and ethnic identity formation in states where the opportunities for structural incorporation and demands for assimilation into a national identity vary may help to disentangle the complicated relation between race and ethnic identity formation and segmented assimilation for immigrants of color in the United States. Similarly, comparisons of the incorporation and exclusion of immigrants in other nations which are racially and ethnically homogeneous could help disentangle factors shaping anti-immigrant sentiment, the segmented incorporation of immigrants into the American social hierarchy, and relations between native-born and immigrant groups.