Read The Blackwell Companion to Sociology Online
Authors: Judith R Blau
proportion of immigrants arriving during 1880±1900 came overwhelmingly
from Europe (97 percent), the proportion of European immigrants arriving
during 1980±98 plummeted to just over 10 percent of the total number of
legal admissions. Of today's 27 million foreign-born ± already the largest immi-
grant population in world history ± fully 60 percent had arrived after 1980, and 90 percent since 1960. Of those post-1960 immigrants, the latest Current
Population Survey data available show that the majority (52 percent) had
come from Latin America and the Caribbean; nearly a third (29 percent) had
'In
legal
Asia (%)
1.3 2.0 3.7 4.3 2.7 3.1 3.6 6.1 12.9 35.3 37.3 30.1
persons
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0.6 1.0 2.1 7.0
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region
(%)
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1890
of
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than
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zation and
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1997.
immigratì`native'
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1881±90 1891±00 1901±10 1911±20 1921±30 1931±40 1941±50 1951±60 1961±70 1971±80 1981±90 1991±98
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Foreign-born
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least 1970, annually c
years d
permanent
Sources Foreign-born Naturalization
394
RubeÂn G. Rumbaut
come from Asia and the Middle East. The Filipinos, Chinese, and Indochinese
alone accounted for 15 percent of the total, or as much as all of those born in
Europe and Canada combined. And African immigration, while smaller and less
noticed, was also rapidly increasing, having grown to eight times its volume over the past three decades.
As in the past, today's newcomers are heavily concentrated in areas of settle-
ment. Fully one-third of the immigrant-stock population of the country resides in California, and another third resides in Florida, Texas, and the New York±New
Jersey region, with the ethnic concentrations being denser still within metro-
politan areas in this handful of states. As of 1997 in Los Angeles County, for
instance, a preponderant 62 percent of the area's 9.5 million people were of
immigrant stock, as were 54 percent of New York City's and Orange County's,
43 percent of San Diego's, and 72 percent of Miami's (Rumbaut, 1998). In
general, patterns of concentration or dispersal vary for different social classes of immigrants (professionals, entrepreneurs, manual laborers) with different
types of legal status (regular immigrants, refugees, the undocumented). The
likelihood of dispersal is greatest among immigrant professionals, who tend to
rely more on their qualifications and job offers than on pre-existing ethnic
communities; and, at least initially, among recent refugees who are sponsored
and resettled through official government programs that have sought deliber-
ately to minimize their numbers in particular localities (although refugee groups too have shown a tendency to gravitate as ``secondary migrants'' to areas where
their compatriots have clustered, as have Cubans to South Florida, and South-
east Asians to California). The likelihood of concentration is greatest among the undocumented (for example, over 25 percent of the three million Immigration
Reform and Control Act (IRCA) applicants who qualified for amnesty nationally
were concentrated in the Los Angeles metropolitan area alone) and working-
class immigrants, who tend to rely more on the assistance offered by pre-existing kinship networks; and among business-oriented groups, who tend to settle in
large cities. Dense ethnic enclaves provide immigrant entrepreneurs with access
to sources of cheap labor, working capital and credit, and dependable markets.
Over time, as the immigrants become naturalized US citizens, local strength in
numbers also provides opportunities for political advancement and representa-
tion of ethnic minority group interests at the ballot box. The research literature has shown that, among legal immigrants and refugees, the motivation and
propensity to naturalize is higher among upwardly mobile younger persons
with higher levels of education, occupational status, English proficiency, income, and property, and those whose spouses or children are US citizens. Undocumented immigrants by definition remain disenfranchised and politically powerless
(Portes and Rumbaut, 1996).
But unlike the last great waves of European immigration, which were halted
by the passage of restrictive legislation in the 1920s and especially by the back-to-back global cataclysms of the Great Depression and the Second World War,
the current flows show no sign of abating. On the contrary, inasmuch as
immigration is a network-driven phenomenon and the United States remains
the premier destination for a world on the move, the likelihood is that it will
Immigration and Ethnicity
395
continue indefinitely. To varying degrees of closeness, the tens of millions of
immigrants and their children in the USA today are embedded in often intricate
webs of family ties, both here and abroad. Such ties form extraordinary trans-
national linkages and networks that can, by reducing the costs and risks of
migration, expand and serve as a conduit to additional and thus potentially
self-perpetuating migration. Remarkably, for example, a recent poll in the
Dominican Republic found that half of the 7.5 million Dominicans have relat-
ives in the USA and two-thirds would move to the USA if they could. Similarly,
by the end of the 1980s, national surveys in Mexico (a country now of 100
million people) found that about half of adult Mexicans were related to someone
living in the United States, and that one third of all Mexicans had been to the
United States at some point in their lives; more recent surveys suggest still larger proportions (Massey and Espinoza, 1997). Immigrants in the USA in 1990 who
hailed from the English-speaking Caribbean, notably from Jamaica, Barbados,
Trinidad, Belize, and Guyana, already constituted between 10 and 20 percent of
the 1990 populations of their respective countries ± a growing double-digit
group which now also includes El Salvador. By the same token, despite four
decades of hostile relations, at least a third of Cuba's population of 11 million (and maybe half of Havana's) now have relatives in the USA and Puerto Rico,
while over 75 percent of first-and second-generation Cubans in Miami have
relatives in Cuba ± ironically, a greater degree of structural linkage than ever before in the history of US-Cuban relations. Not surprisingly, when in July 1999
the US diplomatic mission in Havana held a lottery for 20,000 immigration visas
to the USA, it received 541,000 applications in 30 days ± meaning that about 10
percent of the total eligible population of Cuba applied to leave. Potentially vast social networks of family and friends are implied by these figures, microsocial
structures that can shape both future migration and incorporation processes, as
well as patterns of settlement in areas of destination, and may offer hints about the future of American pluralism (Rumbaut, 1997).
Causes and Contexts of Contemporary
Contemporary Immigration
Changes in US immigration laws ± in particular the amendments passed in 1965,
which abolished the national-origins quota system and changed the preference
system to give greater priority to family reunification over occupational skills ±
have often been singled out as the principal reason for thè`new immigration''
and the change in the national origins of its composition. But the ostensibly
causal effects of the 1965 Act have been exaggerated, especially so with regard to Latin American immigration (legal or illegal) and the large-scale entry of Cold