At the end of last summer, one of the Bush administration’s major initiatives was amnesty for Mexican illegal immigrants in the United States. The presidents of America and Mexico seemed all but in love, and borders appeared about to dissolve.
Now, a year later–after the shocks of Sept. 11 and the war on terrorism–where does the question of the mammoth Mexican immigration to the United States stand? How can Americans understand the character and threat (and, sometimes, blessing) of such an unprecedented new invasion?
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According to the Center for Immigration Reforms, in the absence of far more direct immigration controls than we have now, Mexican immigration will only increase exponentially. “So far,” says Steven Camarota of the center, “there is no evidence that declining fertility in Mexico has influenced outmigration at all, even though in 1960, Mexicans were having seven children per family and in 2000, 2.75 children per family. In 1970, there were less than 800,000 Mexicans in America, and by 2000, there were 9 million–an 11-fold increase.”
Perhaps the most disturbing new finding by the center and other groups is the worsening of educational attainment by Mexican immigrants in America.
Studies show that among these immigrants, two-thirds lack a high school education (compared to 10 percent among the American mainstream); only 9.7 percent of Mexicans have some college education (compared to 28.6 percent mainstream); 66 percent of Mexicans here live near the poverty level, and 29 percent at the poverty level (compared to figures of 28 percent and 10 percent mainstream). In all categories of welfare use, Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal, have far higher uses of welfare than mainstream Americans.
Particularly discouraging is the fact–underlined in these new studies by the center, The Nixon Center, the College of William and Mary and others–that these figures only barely decrease with time spent in America.
Of newly arrived Mexican immigrants, 71 percent live at or near the poverty level, and after 31 years or more, 51 percent live at or near the poverty level. “In fact,” says Robert Leiken, one of the scholarly researchers at The Nixon Center, “the second generation is also experiencing a downward mobility and a downward assimilation.”
Meanwhile, even while talk continues about greater control of immigration by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, in fact, as Leiken says in his report, neither the U.S. nor the INS’ Mexican counterpart has the ability to carry out any real immigration reform.
The 2000 Census Bureau figures just released also show that, for the first time, Latin immigrants make up more than half of new immigrants–51.7 percent, up from 44.3 percent 10 years earlier and fewer than one in five in 1970. Between 1970 and 2000, European immigrants went from a majority of immigrants to 15.8 percent.
The New York Times reported comprehensively in its Aug. 6 edition on the census that the “surprising drop in median income in New York that has puzzled some demographers studying the results of the 2000 census appears to be traceable to immigration.”
The idea that nothing can really be done about controlling immigration, however, may be hitting the dust. As Dimitri Simes, president of The Nixon Center, said when this new data was introduced recently:
“I personally think that immigration has become the most important element in national security. The perception is that nothing can be done about it, and I don’t understand that. We have a first-rate military–we can have a missile defense but we can’t have a border defense?
“Maybe we can say our political culture is not ready to deal with it, but we shouldn’t say it’s not doable.”
The question, then, really becomes what kind of immigration the U.S. should encourage–at what levels, and with what concern for security.
Do Americans still care enough about the country and about larger principles to demand immigration policies that would bring skilled immigrants, that would better balance all the poor and untutored immigrants with those with higher skills, and that would reconstitute a serious INS? One has to wonder.
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