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Chapter Title: The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
Book Title: Immigrant America
Book Subtitle: A Portrait
Book Author(s): Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt7zw0nw.13
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1
Maricopa County, Arizona, was not a good place to be in the first years
of the twenty-first century if you were foreign and of brown skin. A child
of Italian immigrants retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration
and then turned county sheriff unleashed a veritable campaign of ter-
ror against Latin American immigrants, aiming to make the county as
inhospitable to them as possible. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was enthusiastically
egged on by a white electorate composed largely of retirees from north-
ern states who could not see any contradiction between their hiring of
Mexicans and Guatemalans as nannies, maids, and gardeners and the
persecution to which Sheriff Joe subjected them.1
Repeatedly elected by Maricopa citizens, Arpaio devised ever more
refined ways of punishing Mexicans and Central Americans unlucky
enough to find themselves in Phoenix, Tempe, or the rural areas of the
county. Although not all of them came surreptitiously across the border,
Arpaio and his men acted as if they all were illegal. Brown-skinned peo-
ple in Maricopa were guilty until proven innocent. Finally, in December
2011, the Federal Justice Department released a report claiming that
“Sheriff Joe Arpaio harasses, intimidates and terrorizes Latinos and
immigrants, and he’s been doing it for years.”2 Sheriff Joe stated that
he would not go down without a fight, but faced with the prospect of
a massive federal lawsuit, his reign of terror may be coming to an end
.
The antics of Joe Arpaio in southern Arizona highlight a leitmotif
found throughout the history of immigration to America. Although the
Chapter 1
The Three Phases
of U.S.-Bound Immigration
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2 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
words at the base of the Statue of Liberty speak of an open country
welcoming the poor and wretched of the earth, realities on the ground
have been very different. As in Maricopa, foreigners who fuel the local
economy with their labor, not only as urban servants but as hands in
the fields, have been consistently persecuted by the authorities and
denounced by nativists as a threat to the nation. As noted by a num-
ber of authors, this peculiar American waltz between labor demand and
identity politics has repeated itself in every major period of immigration
dating back to colonial days.
As we will see, the contradiction between welcoming foreign workers
and demonizing their languages and cultures has been more apparent
than real, having played into the hands of a number of actors. Sheriff
Arpaio’s repeated election in Maricopa happened for a reason, as he
represented the linchpin of a de facto functional immigration policy.
Unraveling these and other riddles of the peculiar relationship between
immigration and the development of American society and economy is
the goal of this book. We begin the story with the great waves of immi-
gration accompanying the American industrial revolution.
The Great European Wave, 1880– 193
0
Political Economy
As shown in table 1, more than twenty-three million immigrants came
to the United States during the last two decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury and the first two of the twentieth. Certainly, not all of them stayed;
many eventually returned home or even engaged in a back-and-forth
movement depending on the ups and downs of labor demand on both
sides of the ocean. As many as half of certain peasant-origin groups,
such as the Southern Italian contadini, went back at some point, while
more than 90 percent of eastern European Jews left their places of ori-
gin never to return.3 Be that as it may, the sediment that these human
waves left over time was substantial enough to cause significant changes
in the demography of the receiving nation. By 1910, the foreign-born
accounted for 14.7 percent of the American population and for 22 per-
cent of those living in urban places.
As Simon Kuznets and Brinley Thomas showed in detail, the great
waves of European immigration were, by and large, the product of the
transatlantic political economy. If conceived as a system, this econ-
omy generated enormous synergy among its complementary parts.
Beginning in England at the start of the nineteenth century, the advance
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 3
of European industrialization continuously uprooted peasant masses
whose economic livelihood was rendered precarious by advances in
capital-intensive agriculture and whose only alternative was migration,
either to industrializing cities or abroad. As Kuznets states:
The shift from Great Britain and Ireland to Germany and the Scandinavian
countries, and then to Italy and Eastern Europe, follows the trail of the
industrial revolution in Europe. It at least suggests that immigration to the
United States provided a welcome alternative to population groups displaced
by revolutionary changes in agriculture and industry; and thus facilitated,
in no small measure, the course of industrialization in the European coun-
tries. This migration may thus be viewed as an adjustment of population to
resources, that in its magnitude and the extent to which it adapted itself to
purely economic needs has few parallels in history.
4
On the other side of the Atlantic the European waves were not well
received by everyone, but they were welcomed by a politically deci-
sive class, namely, capitalists bent on breaking the hold of independent
craftsmen and skilled workers so as to meet the demand of a vast mar-
ket for cheap manufactures. This was no easy feat. As Rosenblum notes,
Tocquevillean democracy in America was grounded on independent
small producers whose determination to avoid lifelong wage slavery
led to a proliferation of enterprises whose craftsmen-owners freely and
personally interacted with their journeymen. These, in turn, planned to
found their own enterprises in due time.
5
This tradition went hand in hand with the settlement of a vast fron-
tier by independent farmers, whose demand for agricultural implements
and manufactured goods created a comfortable synergy with the prod-
ucts of small-scale industrial shops. The challenge for the rising class of
capitalist manufacturers was how to break this synergy so that markets
could be expanded at home and abroad. As Brinley Thomas demon-
strated, immigration prior to the 1870s preceded indicators of economic
development such as railway construction and demand for bitumi-
nous coal: “That was the pioneering phase when a comparatively small
nation was engaged in subduing a continent and the rate of expansion
was conditioned by the arrival of new labor. . . . Moreover, the railways
could not have been built without the gangs of laborers, many of them
Irish, recruited in the East and transported to the construction camps.”
6
After 1870, however, the causal correlation reversed itself, and indi-
cators of economic development started to precede mass migration.
This is the moment when the “pull” of American wages, advertised by
paid recruiters sent to Europe, began to make its mark among Italian
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6 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
and eastern European peasants whose economic existence was rendered
increasingly precarious by industrialization in their own countries. As
table 1 also shows, southern and central Europeans progressively dis-
placed migrants from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia, as
major sources of U.S.-bound migration. Their massive arrival led to a
radical transformation in the composition of the American working
class, from independent and quasi-independent craftsmen and journey-
men to unskilled workers.
Naturally, the native working class vigorously, and often violently,
resisted the changes engineered by industrial capitalists. Better than any
other movement, the Knights of Labor exemplified this resistance. The
phenomenal rise in the membership of this order and the bitter strug-
gles that ensued coincided with a rise in factory production that became
generalized by the 1880s. The Knights grew in membership from about
104,000 in July 1885 to more than 702,000 one year later: “The idea of
solidarity of labor ceased to be merely verbal, and took on flesh and life;
general strikes, nation-wide boycotts, and nation-wide political move-
ments were the order of the day. Although the upheaval came with the
depression, it was the product of permanent and far reaching changes
which had taken place during the seventies and the early eighties.”7
The Knights were, in the end, unsuccessful. The master-journeyman
relation was gone forever and, with it, the social basis for democratic
equality and self-reliant individualism that were founding elements of
the American republic. European migration did not change the funda-
mental pillars of American society— its elites, its class structure, or its
constitutional order; what it accomplished was to alter the demographic
composition of the population and, along with it, the character of the
American working class. Henceforth, workers became dependent on
trade unions rather than independent ownership as their sole basis for
having a “voice” in their nation’s political process.8
European migration accelerated to such an extent that it made the
causal order between capitalist development and population displace-
ment uncertain. While originally promoted by capitalist firms through
deliberate recruitment to staff the incipient factory system, the move-
ment produced such an abundance of cheap unskilled labor as to trig-
ger new waves of technological innovation to take advantage of it, in
the process burying forever the independent artisan class. As Thomas
concluded: “The massive inflow into the United States of cheap labour
from Southern and Eastern Europe coincided with technical innova-
tions calling for a ‘widening’ of the capital structure. The changing tech-
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 7
nique in the expanding industries entailed minute subdivision of opera-
tions and a wide adoption of automatic machines worked by unskilled,
often illiterate men, women, and children. After 1900, the new supply of
manpower was so abundant that firms using the new techniques must
have driven out of the market many old firms committed to processes
depending on human skill.”9
As shown in table 2, male immigrants around 1910 were overwhelm-
ingly concentrated in the bottom rungs of the occupational ladder. While
illiterate or poorly educated first-generation migrants were pretty much
stuck at the bottom of that ladder, prospects for the better educated and,
especially, for the children born in America were much brighter. As it
kept growing, the new industrial economy generated multiple economic
opportunities accessible to those with a modicum of education. A uni-
versal public-education system opened the doors for such positions to
second-generation youths. Naturally, it was the children of earlier immi-
grant waves— primarily the British, German, Scandinavian, and Irish—
who benefited most from such circumstances. They needed a continuous
supply of unskilled Italians, Poles, and other eastern European work-
ers to keep fueling a mass industrial economy that was propelling them
to positions of ever greater wealth and prosperity.10 This is a funda-
mental reason why nativist reactions against the southern and eastern
Table 2 Percentage of Foreign-Born among White Male
Gainful Workers, Ten Years of Age or Older, 1910
Occupation Percentage
Total 24.7
Professional, technical, and kindred workers 15.6
Farmers and farm managers 12.8
Managers, officials, and proprietors, except farm 26.4
Clerical and kindred workers 10.9
Sales workers 18.0
Craftsmen, foremen, and kindred workers 29.6
Operatives and kindred workers 38.0
Service workers, including private household 36.8
Farm laborers and foremen 8.4
Laborers, except farm and mine 45.0
Source : Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children: 1850–1950, 202;
cited in Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers, 77.
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8 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
European waves and the consequent identity politics were kept in abey-
ance until the third decade of the twentieth century.
Identity Politics
Despite the extraordinary synergies in the transatlantic political econ-
omy between Europe and North America, the mass of peasant immigra-
tion from Catholic countries of the European periphery could not but
awaken sentiments of rejection and hostility among the native-born.
Such sentiments and the resulting anti-immigrant mobilizations accu-
mulated over time as the mass of foreigners extended throughout the
national territory and as the economic “mobility machine” fueled by
their labor slowed down in the wake of World War I. In chapter 5 we
will examine in detail the interplay between nativist discrimination and
identity politics during this period. The main point here is that the inter-
play between the economic basis of immigration and the cultural reac-
tion to it was definitely evident during those years.
Anti-immigrant sentiment was fueled by a conjunction of groups
that saw the relentless flow of foreigners as a direct threat. First, skilled
native workers and their organizations were pushed aside by the
onslaught of unskilled migrant labor. While the Knights of Labor put
forward an ideology of universal brotherhood among all workers and
of radical transformation of the capitalist factory system, realities on
the ground continuously undermined that ideology and put the con-
frontation between skilled natives and illiterate foreign peasants into
sharp focus.11 Second, there was a general malaise among the native
population at being surrounded by a sea of foreign faces, accents, and
religious practices and at finding themselves increasingly cast as “out-
siders in their own land.” Nativist reactions took multiple forms, from
violent attacks and lynching of foreigners to organized campaigns to
Americanize them as quickly as possible.
In March 1911 the White League, a New Orleans organization akin to
the Ku Klux Klan, lynched eleven Italian immigrants accused of conspir-
ing to murder the city’s police chief. Six were about to be released after
being found not guilty. Their dark Mediterranean features undoubtedly
contributed to their instant indictment by the mob. Commenting on the
incident, the Harvard intellectual Henry Cabot Lodge characterized it
not as a mere riot but as a form of revenge, “which is a kind of wild jus-
tice.” He characterized the earlier acquittals as “gross miscarriages of
justice,” since the Italians were undoubtedly active in the Mafia.12
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 9
Cabot Lodge’s stance reflected the third set of forces in favor of nativ-
ist radicalism: the concern among American intellectuals that so many
foreigners would dilute the moral fiber of the nation and the integrity
of its institutions. In an academic environment dominated by the social
Darwinist evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and the “science” of
eugenics, the intellectual and moral inferiority of southern and eastern
Europeans was taken for granted and their capacity for eventual assimi-
lation into American culture widely questioned. The statistician Richard
Mayo Smith warned that “the thing we have to fear most is the political
danger of the infusion of so much alien blood into our social body that
we shall lose the capacity and power of self-government.”13 Similarly,
in his 1926 volume Intelligence and Immigration psychologist Clifford
Kirkpatrick argued against expecting much progress among immigrants
through the reform of school programs because “definite limits are set
by heredity, and immigrants of low innate ability cannot by any amount
of Americanization be made into intelligent American citizens capable
of appropriating and advancing a complex culture.”14
Under the intellectual zeitgeist of the time and the leadership of such
public thinkers, the restrictionist movement gathered momentum. The
movement was reinforced by three major forces in the economic infra-
structure. First, as noted by Thomas, the progressive closure of the fron-
tier and the slowing down of the industrialization process began to limit
the “economic engine” propelling native workers and members of the
second generation on the backs of foreign labor. The mass of newcom-
ers progressively ceased to be the backbone of a segmented labor mar-
ket and became a source of direct competition for natives.15 Second,
the minority of educated immigrants with union and party experience
in Europe and the Americanized second generation mobilized against
capitalist exploitation, becoming, in many regions, the backbone of
the union movement. The enthusiasm of industrialists for foreign labor
cooled significantly when confronted with such unexpected resistance.
Immigrants with industrial backgrounds were those who contributed
primarily to the first radical cohorts in America: “The spirit of a dis-
ciplined, intelligent, and aggressive socialist army was typified by the
organized working-class movement of Germany. The leaders of this
mighty force were deeply respected at home and abroad. It was men
trained in such a movement who tried to build up a duplicate in the
United States.”16
Events back home also contributed to the radicalization of certain
immigrant nationalities, such as Russian Jews and Slavs. As Fine noted,
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10 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
“almost two-thirds of the members of the Workers’ (Communist) Party
were born in countries which were either part of the old Russian empire
or inhabited by Slavs.”17 The horrors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in
New York stimulated labor militance in the needle trades. As a result,
the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers of America, each of which had a largely Jewish,
Italian, and Polish membership, developed into two of the strongest
labor unions in the United States.18 Thus, the fundamental function of
immigrant labor to American industrialism, which included not only
supplementing a scarce domestic labor force but disciplining it through
strike-breaking and the acceptance of poor working conditions, gradu-
ally weakened. The stage was set for the search by capitalist firms of a
new source of pliable labor to replace increasingly militant immigrants
and their descendants.
The identification of this alternative labor source represented the
third economic force buttressing the restrictionist movement that finally
triumphed in the mid-1920s. As we will see in the next chapter, the acti-
vation of the massive black labor reserves in the American South pro-
vided the impulse for the emergence of a split labor market in industry,
marked by major differences in pay and work conditions between white
and black workers. Descendants of former slaves, previously confined
to a stagnant agricultural life in the South, were actively recruited by
the likes of the Ford Motor Company as early as 1916. The recruitment
process was similar to that previously used among southern Italian and
eastern European peasants, and the purpose was the same— to supply
large manufacturing industries in the American Northeast and Midwest
with an abundant, cheap, and unorganized labor source. Because this
source was also unskilled, the policy of encouraging southern black
migration was accompanied by the acceleration of capital-intensive tech-
niques in manufacturing. With this strategy capitalist firms attempted,
and largely succeeded, in breaking the power of the trade unions. From
1920 to 1929 union membership dropped by almost two million. In
1933 it stood at fewer than three million, a precipitous decline from the
peak years before World War I.19
The final victory of radical nativism with the enactment of restric-
tive legislation by the U.S. Congress in 1924 was, to a large extent, the
outcome of the withdrawal of support for immigration by forces in the
American economy that had previously supported it. First, natives and
members of the second generation shifted attitudes, regarding further
immigration as an obstacle and not as a propeller of their own upward
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 11
mobility. Second, the pivotal capitalist class lost enthusiasm for the for-
eign labor supply as it became progressively organized. This withdrawal
of support accelerated when firms found in southern black peasants a
new major source to replace and, if necessary, discipline an increasingly
restless white labor force.
Political Economy and Identity in the West
The size of European immigration after 1890 and the attention
bestowed on it by politicians, academics, and the public at large com-
monly blocked from view what was happening at the other end of the
land. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexico ceded to
its northern neighbor almost half of its territory after its defeat in the
Mexican-American War. The physical size of the new acquisition was
enormous, comprising the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Ari-
zona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
The need to integrate these territories into the economy of the nation
and the vast opportunities it created generated a strong demand for new
labor, to be sourced from west and south.
Gold came first. The California Gold Rush of 1848 to 1855 saw
adventurers of every stripe attempt the difficult journey west, going as
far as the Magellan Strait at the tip of South America to reach the new
promised land. The need for labor in the mines led to the first transpa-
cific recruitment system, with paid contractors sent to southern China,
in particular the greater Pearl River Delta region around present-day
Jiangmen, in search of contract workers. The system was largely respon-
sible for the first appearance of Chinese migrants on American shores.20
The great difficulties of reaching the Pacific Coast and the need to inte-
grate the vast new territories provided the necessary impetus for trans-
continental railroad construction in the subsequent decades. Two great
railroad companies— the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific— stood
in need of massive supplies of labor that could not be sourced from
the east, especially after the tracks left Iowa and Nebraska to start
climbing the Rocky Mountains. Labor for this enormous enterprise
came primarily from southern China through a massive expansion of
the recruitment system. The two railroad companies, racing east from
Sacramento, California, and west from Omaha, Nebraska, finally met in
Promontory, Utah, in 1869.21
Chinese workers whose hands had built mile after mile of track sud-
denly became redundant. A few returned home, but most stayed because
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12 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
they had not accumulated enough money to pay the costs of the return
passage and buy land. They first turned to California agriculture, but
their appearance in the fields triggered a furious reaction among natives
who regarded the Chinese as semihuman. Chinese immigration was
described as “a more abominable traffic than the African slave trade”
and the immigrants themselves were depicted as “half civilized beings
who spread filth, depravity, and epidemic.”22
The weak Qing Dynasty could do little for its nationals abroad, and
the rising xenophobia in California and elsewhere culminated in the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively ended this labor flow.
Chinese laborers were pushed out of California farms and ranches and
forced to find refuge in tightly knit urban communities that formed the
precursors of today’s Chinatowns. Hand laundries and cheap restau-
rants became the means of survival for this confined “bachelors soci-
ety” where the ratio of men to women reached a remarkable 26:1 in
the 1930s.23
With Chinese laborers out of the land and California agriculture
in full bloom, a new source of field labor had to be found. For some
time after the mid-1880s, the Hawaii sugar industry had sourced its
demand for cane cutters in Japan. The flow now reached the mainland,
where the renowned discipline and frugality of Japanese workers made
them welcome by California ranchers and farmers, at least for a while.
Trouble started to brew when landowners realized that the Japanese
coupled these virtues with a strong desire to buy land and farm on their
own. In 1900, for example, forty Japanese farmers owned fewer than
five thousand acres of California’s land. By 1909, however, about six
thousand Japanese were farming under all sorts of tenancy, control-
ling more than 210,000 acres.24 As Ivan Light has pointed out, “So long
as the Japanese remained willing to perform agricultural labor at low
wages, they remained popular with California ranchers. But even before
1910, the Japanese farmhands began to demand higher wages . . . worse,
many Japanese began to lease and buy agricultural land for farming on
their own account. This enterprise had the two-fold result of creating
Japanese competition in the produce field and decreasing the number of
Japanese farmlands available.”25
Faced with such “unfair” competition, ranchers turned to the ever-
sympathetic state legislature. In 1913 the first Alien Land Law was
passed, restricting the free acquisition of land by the Japanese. This
legal instrument was perfected in 1920 when Japanese nationals were
forbidden to lease agricultural land or to act as guardians of native-
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 13
born minors in matters of property. Driven from the land, the Japanese
had no choice but to move into cities, just as the Chinese had done
before. They did not huddle, however, in the same restricted areas but
fanned out in diverse forms of self-employment. By 1919, almost half
of the hotels in Seattle and 25 percent of the grocery stores were owned
by Japanese migrants. Of Japanese men in Los Angeles, 40 percent
were self-employed, operating dry-cleaning establishments, fisheries,
and lunch counters. A large percentage of Japanese urban businesses
were produce stands that marketed the production of the remaining
Japanese farms.26
The anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobic measures pushed by
nativists in the West thus ended up depriving its farms and other busi-
nesses of any source of Asian labor, while turning those migrants who
stayed into urban entrepreneurs. Farms, ranches, and cities kept grow-
ing, however, and the question was what new labor flow could be engi-
neered to replace the departed Chinese and Japanese. Western business-
men borrowed a page from their eastern counterparts by turning south.
While northeastern industrialists tapped the large black labor reserves in
the former Confederacy, California and Texas ranchers went to Mexico.
In both cases the method was the same: deliberate recruitment through
economic incentives. By 1916 the Los Angeles Times reported that five
or six weekly trains full of Mexican workers hired by the agents were
being run from Laredo. According to Mario García, the competition
in El Paso became so aggressive that recruiting agencies stationed their
Mexican employees at the Santa Fe Bridge, where they literally pounced
on the immigrants as they crossed the border.27
As seen in table 3, Mexican immigration surged after 1910 as a con-
sequence of these developments— a flow that was intensified by the tur-
moil of the decadelong Mexican Revolution. Free access to Mexican
labor conflicted, however, with the increasing exclusionary mood back
east. The history of immigrant regulation from the end of World War I
to the Great Depression is a case study of governmental efforts to rec-
oncile seemingly incompatible demands through legislative compromise
and administrative regulation. Direct attempts by western ranchers and
growers to beat back restrictionism at the federal level were defeated.
In 1918, however, an exception to the ban on illiterates was granted
by Congress in favor of immigrants from Mexico and Canada. The
1924 National Origins Act again exempted Mexico and other Western
Hemisphere countries from the quota imposed on the Europeans. In
1929 a Supreme Court decision upheld an earlier administrative decree
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14 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
declaring workers who commuted between residences in Mexico and
jobs in the United States to be legal immigrants.28
In effect, through various loopholes and administrative devices, the
federal government endeavored to keep the “back door” of immigration
open to Western capital, while closing it to new southern and eastern
European migrants. For reasons we have already seen, Europeans had
ceased to be a preferred source of unskilled industrial labor, but while
their replacements could be sourced from domestic labor reserves, the
same was not the case in the West. There, foreign workers, this time
from south of the border, continued to be in high demand for many
years as the human instruments to fuel an expanding economy.
Mexican migration possessed another convenient feature: its cyclical
character. Because the border and their home communities were rela-
tively close, Mexican migrants found reverse migration a much easier
enterprise than did Europeans or Asians. Indeed, the normative behav-
ior among Mexican male workers was to go home after the harvest or
after their contract with railroad companies had expired. This practice,
together with the predominantly nonurban destinations of the Mexican
labor flow, reduced its visibility, making it a less tempting target for
nativist movements of the time than the Italians and Poles. That honey-
moon period was short-lived, however, as we will see shortly.
While the history of U.S.-bound immigration before the 1930s evi-
denced few parallels between the eastern and western regions, a decisive
feature was common to both: the conflicting interplay between political
Table 3 Mexican Immigration to the
United States, 1881–1950
Decade N (000s)
% of total
immigration
1881–1890 2 .04
1891–1900 1 .02
1901–1910 50 .60
1911–1920 219 3.80
1921–1930 459 11.20
1931–1940 22 4.20
1941–1950 61 5.90
Source: Portes and Bach, Latin Journey, 79.
Table compiled from annual reports of the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service.
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 15
economy and identity politics. Growing industrial and agricultural econ-
omies consistently demanded and received immigrant labor flows, while
the presence of many foreigners inevitably triggered a nativist backlash.
That reaction was prompted by the perception of immigrants as labor-
market competitors and as sources of social and cultural fragmentation,
as well as by the behavior of some foreign groups that sought to assert
their labor rights and their rights to self-employment in America. When
that happened, the protective hand of the employer class quickly with-
drew, leaving the newcomers to their own fate.
Early Twentieth-Century Migration and Social Change
The literature on international migration generally makes a great deal
over the changes that such flows wreak in the host societies, often pro-
claiming that they “transform the mainstream.”29 These assertions con-
fuse impressions at the surface of social life with actual changes in the
culture and social structure of the receiving society. While major immi-
gration movements, such as the great transatlantic and transpacific
waves before and at the start of the twentieth century, can have great
impact on the demographic composition of the population, it is an open
question whether such changes also lead to transformations in more
fundamental elements of the host nations.
In the case of the United States it is clear that, despite much hand-
wringing by nativists of the time, the value system, the constitutional
order, and the class structure of American society remained largely
intact. Native white elites kept firm control on the levers of economic
and political power, and existing institutions, such as the court sys-
tem and the schools, proved resilient enough to withstand the foreign
onslaught and to gradually integrate newcomers into the citizenry. It is
a commonplace that assimilation is a two-way street, with both the host
society and foreign groups influencing each other. In the American case,
however, the process was definitely one-sided, as existing institutions
held the upper hand. Eventually, children and grandchildren of immi-
grants began ascending the ladder of the American economy and the
status system, but to do so, they had first to become thoroughly accul-
turated, learning fluent English and accepting the existing value system
and normative order.
It is important at this point to distinguish between the structural sig-
nificance and the change potential of migrant flows. There is no question
that the great early twentieth-century migrations had enormous struc-
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16 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
tural importance for the American economy. They were the sine qua non
for the industrial revolution of the time, and this was, from the point of
view of white American elites, almost their sole raison d’être. That effect
did not so much change American society as reinforce its existing struc-
tures of wealth and power. The actual social transformations wrought
in the fabric of society by these flows came largely as unanticipated con-
sequences of their numbers and their cultural backgrounds.
As shown in table 4, places of destination of Europeans were over-
whelmingly urban. Foreigners lived in cities at far higher rates than
natives did, triggering a veritable urban explosion. The overall effect
was to shift the social and political center of gravity of the nation
from the countryside to the cities, especially those in the Northeast
and Midwest.30 Thanks to the great European waves, the United States
became an overwhelmingly urban country. Aside from its social and cul-
tural ramifications, this transformation had an important political con-
sequence. Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are apportioned on
the basis of number of persons in each district and state rather than the
number of citizens. As Tienda puts it: “The 14th Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution states that: ‘Representatives shall be apportioned among
the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the
whole numbers of persons in each state.’ . . . That all persons residing
in the United States are counted, but only citizens are permitted to vote
in national elections, presumes that the right to representation is more
fundamental than the right to exercise the franchise.”31
The six major immigrant-receiving states gained sixteen seats in the
Table 4 Proportion Urban: White, Native
White, and Foreign-Born White
Year White (%)
Native white
(%)
Foreign-born
white (%)
1940 57.5 55.1 80.0
1930 57.6 54.5 79.2
1920 53.4 49.6 75.5
1910 48.2 43.6 71.4
1900 42.4 38.1 66.0
1890 37.5 32.9 60.7
1870 28.0 23.1 53.4
Source: Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers, Table 6.2.
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 17
House between 1900 and 1910, signaling a significant shift in political
influence that directly threatened mostly rural states. Not surprisingly,
representatives of those states strongly supported a restrictionist stance,
adding their voices to the chorus of those endorsing the conclusions of
the 1911 Dillingham Commission Report to Congress to the effect that
“immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are intellectually infe-
rior and unworthy of naturalization.”32
Despite these voices, the balance of votes in the House did shift in
favor of increasingly urbanized and immigrant-receiving states. While
the House of Representatives is certainly not the only locus of national
political power, it is an important one. Hence, the combination of sheer
numbers with U.S. constitutional provisions led to a direct transfor-
mation of immigrant settlement patterns into political influence. That
influence was not exercised by the immigrants themselves but by native
politicians in the migrant-receiving states. As we will see in chapter 5, it
would take some time for the children and grandchildren of migrants to
come into their own in the American political process.
Immigration’s other major effect was to transform the cultural land-
scape through the massive arrival of believers in other creeds. Over
time, European immigrants and their descendants gave up their lan-
guages, and many elements of their culture, but not their religions. As
a consequence, an overwhelmingly Protestant nation was forced to
accommodate the institutionalization of the Catholic faith, brought
by Irish immigrants and consolidated with the arrival of millions of
Italians and Poles, and, subsequently, the proliferation of synagogues
in the wake of massive eastern European Jewish immigration. Thus,
a predominant Protestant culture became first “Christian” and then
“Judeo-Christian,” signaling the institutionalization of these immi-
grant faiths.
In chapter 8 we will examine the manifold effects of religion on the
social and economic adaptation of newcomers. At present, the impor-
tant point is that this transformation both demonstrated and reinforced
the strength of the country’s institutional framework, while leading to
significant changes in its culture. In effect, the arrival of millions of Irish
and Italian Catholics first and eastern European Jews later pitted the
strong desire of the Protestant majority to keep the nation culturally
and religiously homogenous against the separation of church and state
and the right to religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution. The
legal framework prevailed, and the result was a vast transformation in
the American cultural landscape, as the influence of Catholic churches
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18 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
and Jewish synagogues went well beyond their weekly services. For
Jews, in particular, accustomed to systematic persecution in Russia and
elsewhere in Europe, the American constitutional order was a priceless
gift: “For the orthodox, the good life consisted of being able to live and
worship in a manner consistent with Mosaic Law and religious tradi-
tions. Not all east-European Jews were equally religious, but most were
imbued with the Jewish cultural respect for intellectual pursuits.”33
It is a matter of debate whether the consolidation of other faiths
altered, in a fundamental way, the American value system. While Protes-
tant hegemony certainly suffered, it can be argued that, at a deeper level,
the system was strengthened. The victory of the legal framework over
provincial fears of cultural disintegration reinforced the basic institu-
tional pillars of the nation. In reciprocity Catholics and Jews responded
by “Americanizing” their religious practices, making them increasingly
compatible with core American values.
Retrenchment, 1930– 1970
The historical replacement of European by southern black migrants in
the East and of Asians by Mexicans in the West continued during the
1920s, although some Italians, Poles, and others kept coming, since the
1924 National Origins Act took time to be implemented. The delays
were due to endless wrangling in Congress about which census year to
use as the basis for determining the annual admittance quota of 2 to
3 percent of the resident immigrant nationality already in the country.
Pushing back the census year to 1890 or even 1880 facilitated future
admissions from northern Europe and concomitantly limited those from
the South. In the end the annual quota of immigrants who could be
admitted from any country was set at 2 percent, and the selected census
year was 1920, which would have allowed a greater number of Italians
and other southeastern Europeans to come had it not been for the inter-
vention of a major economic downturn.34
In 1929 the American national product had come close to $90 bil-
lion; by 1932 it was cut to $42 billion and, by the following year, to
a miserable $39 billion. Residential construction fell by 95 percent;
eighty-five thousand businesses failed; and the national volume of sala-
ries dwindled by 40 percent. The nation lay prostrate.35 Worse, the gov-
ernment had no clue about what to do at the time that “Hoovervilles”
of impoverished families rapidly dotted the land. The Great Depression
proved to be the greatest immigrant-control measure of all times, since
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 19
no matter what the quota was, foreigners had no incentive to come and
join the masses of unemployed Americans. As shown in table 5, while
immigrant arrivals, aged sixteen to forty-four, surpassed one million and
reached 4 percent of the adult labor force in 1907, by 1932 only twenty-
two thousand newcomers arrived, not even reaching 0.1 percent of the
domestic labor force.
One of the most telling features of this period was the attempt by
the federal government to reduce unemployment by deporting foreign
Table 5 Immigration and the American
Labor Force, 1900–1935
Year
Immigrant arrivals,
age 16–44 (000s)
% of
labor force
1900 370 1.3
1901 396 1.4
1902 539 1.9
1903 714 2.6
1904 657 2.4
1905 855 3.1
1906 914 3.3
1907 1,101 4.0
1908 631 2.3
1909 625 2.3
1910 868 2.6
1911 715 2.1
1912 678 2.0
1913 986 2.9
1914 982 2.9
1928 231 0.6
1929 208 0.5
1930 177 0.4
1931 67 0.1
1932 22 0.0
1933 15 0.0
1934 19 0.0
1935 22 0.0
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the
United States, 55–73.
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Table 6 The Bracero Program and Clandestine
Migrant Apprehensions, 1946–1972
Year Braceros (000s)
Apprehensions
(deported aliens) (000s)
1946 32
1947 20
1948 35
1949 107
1950 68
1951 192
1952 234
1953 179
1954 214
1955 338
1956 417
1957 450
1958 419
1959 448
1960 427 71
1961 294 89
1962 283 93
1963 195 89
1964 182 87
1965 104 110
1966 9 139
1967 8 162
1968 6 212
1969 — 284
1970 — 345
1971 — 420
1972 — 506
Sources: Grebler, Moore, and Guzman, The Mexican-
American People, 68; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service, Annual Reports.
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 21
workers. Most European immigrants were legally in the country and
could not be sent back. The repatriation and deportation campaign
thus focused on Mexicans, of whom close to half a million were sent
back. As Grebler put it, “Only a few years earlier, many of those now
ejected had been actively recruited by American enterprises.”36 In Texas
the Mexican-born population dropped nearly 40 percent between 1930
and 1940. A distinct feature of this campaign was that many U.S.-born
Mexican Americans were sent to Mexico along with the immigrants.37
Prefiguring the stance of Sheriff Arpaio in today’s Arizona, being brown-
skinned and mestizo-looking was sufficient reason for federal officials
to put you aboard a bus bound for Mexico.
The campaign made no dent in the country’s economic situation,
which continued to worsen. It was only after massive deficit spending
and a deliberate program of job creation by the Roosevelt administra-
tion that things started to take a turn for the better. World War II repre-
sented a quantum leap in this policy as federal spending reached a then
monumental $103 billion per year, while unemployment dropped to
near zero.38 By the early 1940s, American agriculture found itself again
short of hands, a situation that led the U.S. government to reverse itself
and tap the ever-available Mexican labor reserve. In 1942 an agree-
ment was signed by both governments, leading to the initiation of the
Bracero Program, under which tens of thousands of Mexican contract
workers went to work for American farms and ranches, reproducing
the pre-Depression labor scene. From the viewpoint of their employees,
braceros (physical laborers) proved so pliable and productive that they
insisted on the continuation of the program after the war’s end. As seen
in table 6, from a modest start in the post– World War II years the pro-
gram reached almost half a million workers over the next decade. By the
time it ended in 1964, some twenty-eight states had received several mil-
lion braceros— one of the largest state-managed labor migrations in his-
tory. Tellingly, during the twenty-two years of the Bracero Program, no
farm labor union ever succeeded in organizing or carrying out a strike.39
The period of immigration retrenchment, marked by the Great
Depression and World War II, had a series of important and unantici-
pated consequences. The suffering of the 1930s was shared by the chil-
dren of natives and immigrants alike, forging new social and cultural
bonds out of common adversity. These bonds were much strengthened
when youths of all ethnic origins found themselves in the trenches.
Fighting platoons had no time for discrimination so that men whose
parents had been at each other’s throats because of racial or ethnic dif-
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22 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
ferences came into close and prolonged contact. As an outgrowth of the
war, prejudice and hostility against the children of Europeans became
largely a thing of the past. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,
better known as the “GI Bill,” completed the process by giving these
newly empowered Americans a helping hand into the middle class.40 The
effects on individual mobility facilitated by the GI Bill were most nota-
bly seen among white veterans, although not among blacks in the South.
As so often happens in retrospective narratives, necessities were built
out of contingencies, with later authors speaking of an “inevitable” pro-
cess of assimilation under which natives and immigrants melted into
a single whole. Others would suggest a “designer” nation forged by
the far-seeing policies of its leaders. In fact, nothing of the sort hap-
pened. The process by which the great European and, to a lesser extent,
Asian migrations at the turn of the twentieth century became part of the
American mainstream was due to a series of unforeseen and, with the
wisdom of retrospect, rather fortunate accidents. World War II repre-
sented not only a massive Keynesian stimulus program for the American
economy but also a giant melting machine out of which the pluribus
finally turned into the unum.
There were important exceptions to this pattern. While Mexican
Americans had enlisted by the thousands and had fought and died in the
war, they were not beneficiaries of the melting machine, at least not to
the extent of other ethnic minorities. On their return from the lines, they
still found themselves confined to the barrios and victimized by white
discrimination and prejudice. Their collective position in the American
hierarchies of status and wealth barely budged, despite their enormous
sacrifice. Part of the reason for this outcome was the minority’s role as
the backbone of the unskilled labor market in western states. This posi-
tion in the social order, shared with southern blacks back east, was too
entrenched to be changed even by a global war.41
A second, and decisive, reason was that the Bracero Program ensured
the continuity of the migration from south of the border, thus renewing
and strengthening the bonds of the Mexican American population with
its country of origin. This did not happen to the children of Europeans
and Asians for whom the cutoff of migration in the 1920s inexorably
weakened cultural and linguistic ties, forcing them to become American
in one form or another. From the “longtime Californ,” as Chinese
Americans branded themselves, to the newly minted Italian American
and Jewish American ward politicians in the East, the process of adapt-
ing to and pushing ahead within the American institutional system was
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 23
well advanced by the late 1930s. The war gave it the final impetus.
Blacks and Mexicans were left behind as “unmeltable,” the latter further
handicapped by their inability to shed their foreignness in the face of a
ceaseless migrant flow.42
Rebound: 1970– 2010
The 1960s were a period of prosperity and atonement in America. The
failure of the post– World War II years to integrate African Americans
and Mexican Americans into the social and economic mainstream
finally came back with a vengeance. In the midst of economic prosper-
ity and global hegemony, the relegation of one-fifth of the American
population to a caste-like status could no longer continue. The urban
riots and the parallel civil rights movement wrought major changes in
the nation’s institutional framework. Predictably, black mobilizations in
the Southeast and riots in cities everywhere were accompanied by paral-
lel protests in the Southwest by its large Mexican American population.
Both groups reacted to the patent injustice of being used as the back-
bone of the low-wage labor market and as foot soldiers in the nation’s
wars without ever being granted access to its opportunities.
Fortunately, the nation’s political leaders at the time recognized this
and took a series of measures to remedy the situation. Civil rights legis-
lation and the War on Poverty, launched by President Lyndon Johnson,
followed in short order. Embedded in the new national mood to atone
for past racial injustices was the initiative to eliminate the last vestiges
of the racist provisions of the 1924 National Origins Act. Thereafter,
access to the United States would be based on two fundamental crite-
ria: family reunification and occupational merit. National origin would
not enter the picture, except for a per-country limit set on a universal-
istic basis. In 1952, provisions to exclude Asians had been repealed in a
bill passed over President Truman’s veto. The 1965 amendments com-
pleted the task. These events opened the door to immigration from all
countries, setting a cap of 20,000 per country and a global limit of
290,000.43 Children under twenty-one years of age, spouses, and par-
ents of U.S. citizens were exempt from those numerical limits.
In the floor debates over the new legislation, cosponsor Emanuel
Celler (D– New York) argued that few Asians and Africans would actu-
ally come since they had no families to reunite with. President Johnson
reassured critics of the bill’s benign consequences: “This bill that we
sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of mil-
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24 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
lions,” he declared. Secretary of State Dean Rusk anticipated only eight
thousand immigrants from India over five years and few thereafter.
Senator Edward Kennedy argued that the ethnic mix of the country
would not be altered.44 Subsequent history was to prove these predic-
tions deeply wrong.
A year before this legislation was passed and in the same mood
of atonement, the bracero agreement with Mexico was repealed.
Opponents argued that the program subjected Mexican workers to sys-
tematic exploitation by unscrupulous American employers and corrupt
Mexican officials. Its elimination would also create new employment
opportunities for native workers.45 The lofty spirit in which these pieces
of legislation were crafted did not envision what their actual conse-
quences would be. Denied access to braceros, U.S. ranchers and farm-
ers did not hire native workers but turned to the same Mexican work-
ers now rebaptized as clandestine migrants. As also shown in table 6,
apprehensions of “illegal aliens” at the border shot up with the end of
the Bracero Program, rising year by year and reaching more than half a
million by 1972.
A second unexpected consequence of the 1965 act was that it pro-
vided a new avenue for unauthorized migrants to legalize their situ-
ation. Clandestine Mexican workers who wanted to stay on this side
of the border could now make use of various legal means, paramount
among them marriage to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. A study of
Mexican migration conducted in the early 1970s found that, by 1973,
70 percent of legal Mexican migrants had already lived in the United
States for one year or more: “Clearly, most of the men in this sam-
ple did not face legal entry into the United States as strangers or new-
comers. Instead the vast majority were ‘return immigrants’ coming back
to places and people that had long before become established parts of
their lives.”46
A third consequence of the 1965 act was to open the professional
labor market to foreigners. As Representative Celler would have it, few
Africans and Asians had families to reunite with, but they had occupa-
tional qualifications, and Asians, in particular, took full advantage of
the meritocratic provisions of the new system. As we will see, a major
consequence was to bifurcate the immigration stream into flows target-
ing different segments of the American labor market. Thereafter, both
the composition of the foreign population in America and its impact
on the receiving society and economy would become far more nuanced
and complex.
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 25
Industrial Restructuring and the Hourglass
As in the 1920s, it took time for the new Immigration Act of 1965 to
be implemented. Immigration continued at low levels during the 1960s
so that, as shown in figure 1, the foreign-born population reached its
lowest absolute and relative numbers in 1970. It was only after that
year that the momentous effect of the reform was to be felt. Framers of
the 1965 amendments could not possibly have foreseen it, but the new
system paved the way for a segmentation of future immigration flows
reflecting the bifurcation of the American economy and labor markets
in the decades to come.
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
13.
6%
14.7%
13.
2%
8.
8%
6.9%
5.
4%
4.7%
6.2%
7.9%
11.1%
12.9%
11.6%
N
um
be
r
in
m
ill
io
ns
10.3
13.5 13.9 14.2
11.6
10.3 9.7 9.6
14.1
19.8
31.1
40.0
14%
12%
10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950
Year
Year
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
31.1 31.5 33 33.5 34.3 35.7 37.5 38.1 38 38.5 40
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Portes: Immigrant America – Fig 1-1
1st proof
Bill Nelson 12/17/13
Figure 1. The evolution of the foreign-born population of the United States.
Top: Number and percentage. Sources: Decennial census for 1900 to 2000; and
U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010. Bottom: Total immigrant
population, 2000– 2010 (millions). Sources: 2000 decennial census; and U.S. Census
Bureau, American Community Surveys, 2001– 10.
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
13.6%
14.7%
13.2%
8.8%
6.9%
5.4%
4.7%
6.2%
7.9%
11.1%
12.9%
11.6%
N
um
be
r
in
m
ill
io
ns
10.3
13.5 13.9 14.2
11.6
10.3 9.7 9.6
14.1
19.8
31.1
40.0
14%
12%
10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950
Year
Year
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
31.1 31.5 33 33.5 34.3 35.7 37.5 38.1 38 38.5 40
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Portes: Immigrant America – Fig 1-1
1st proof
Bill Nelson 12/17/13
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26 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
As seen previously, the United Sates generated a vast demand for
industrial labor during the late nineteenth century and the first three
decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, this was the reason why
European immigrants, first, and southern black migrants, second, were
recruited and came in such vast numbers to northern American cit-
ies. The availability of industrial jobs and the existence of a ladder of
occupations within industrial employment created the possibility of
gradual mobility for the European second generation without need
for an advanced education. This continued labor demand was behind
the rise of stable working-class communities, where supervisory and
other preferred industrial jobs afforded a reasonable living standard
for European ethnics. As has also been seen, their gradual mobility into
the higher tiers of blue-collar employment and then into the white-col-
lar middle class furnished the empirical basis for subsequent theories of
assimilation.
Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating thereafter, the structure of
the American labor market started to change under the twin influences
of technological innovation and foreign competition in industrial goods.
The advent of Japan as a major industrial competitor took American
companies by surprise, accustomed as they were, to lacking any real
foreign rivals in the post– World War II era. As two prominent students
of American deindustrialization concluded: “What caused the profit
squeeze was mainly the sudden emergence of heightened international
competition— a competition to which U.S. business leaders were ini-
tially blind. . . . In the manufacturing sector a trickle of imports turned
into a torrent. The value of manufactured imports relative to domestic
production skyrocketed— from less than 14 percent in 1969 to nearly
triple that, 38 percent, only ten years later.” 47
Caught in this bind, many companies resorted to the “spatial fix”
of moving production facilities abroad in order to reduce labor costs.
Technological innovations made the process easier by lowering trans-
portation barriers and making possible instant communication between
corporate headquarters and production plants located abroad. The gar-
ment industry represents a prime example of this process of restructur-
ing. While fashion design and marketing strategies remained centralized
in the companies’ American headquarters, actual production migrated,
for the most part, to industrial zones in the less-developed world.48
Industrial restructuring and corporate downsizing brought about the
gradual disappearance of the jobs that had provided the basis for the
economic ascent of the European second generation. Between 1950 and
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 27
1996, American manufacturing employment plummeted, from more
than 33 percent of the labor force to less than 15 percent. The slack
was taken up by service employment, which skyrocketed from 12 per-
cent to almost 33 percent of all workers. Service employment is, how-
ever, bifurcated between menial and casual low-wage jobs commonly
associated with personal services and the rapid growth of occupations
requiring advanced technical and professional skills. These highly paid
service jobs are generated by knowledge-based industries linked to new
information technologies and those associated with the command and
control functions of a restructured capitalist economy.49
The growth of employment in these two polar service sectors is one
of the factors that stalled the gradual trend toward economic equality
in the United States and then reversed it during the following decades.
Between 1960 and 1990 the income of the top decile of American fami-
lies increased in constant (1986) dollars from $40,789 to $60,996. In
contrast, the income of the bottom decile barely budged, from $6,309
to $8,637. The income of the bottom half of families, which in 1960
represented about 50 percent of the income of those in the top decile,
declined by almost 10 percent relative to this wealthiest group in the
following thirty years. By 2000 the median net worth of American
households had climbed to about $80,000. However, almost half of
households (44 percent) did not reach $25,000, and exactly a third had
annual incomes below this figure. More than half of American families
(57 percent) did not own any equities at all, falling further behind in
terms of economic power.50 The trend continued during the first decade
of the twenty-first century, with gaps in household wealth (net worth)
becoming wider still. By 2009, the net worth of black and Hispanic
households (which among homeowners is largely based on their home
equity) was largely wiped out in the wake of the collapse of housing
prices and a deep recession. Net worth among Hispanics dropped to
a miniscule $6,300, and the average wealth of white households was
twenty times that of Hispanic households— the widest wealth gap in
twenty-five years. Economic inequality— as measured by the Gini index
and related indicators— reached Third World levels by 2010.51
In this changed market, high demand exists, at the low end, for
unskilled and menial service workers and, at the high end, for pro-
fessionals and technicians— with diminishing opportunities for well-
paid employment in between. Figure 2 illustrates this changed situa-
tion. Contemporary immigration has responded to this new “hourglass”
economy by bifurcating, in turn, into major occupational categories. As
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The Industrial Labor Market, 1900–1960
The Post-industrial Labor Market, 1970–2010
Professional
and managerial
Administrative
and technical
Supervisory and lower
white-collar
Skilled and semi-skilled
Unskilled industrial
occupations
Unskilled and semi-skilled
occupations
Professional, managerial and technical
occupations
Petty entrepreneurs and
lower white-collar
Portes: Immigrant America – Fig 1-2
1st proof
Bill Nelson 12/17/13
Figure 2. Changing labor markets.
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 29
we have seen, the end of the Bracero Program rechanneled the low-skill
agricultural flow from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean
into the category of “illegal aliens.” Simultaneously, the occupational
preference provisions of the 1965 Immigration Act paved the way for
major professional and technical flows originating primarily in Asia.
Subsequent legislation added flexibility and volume to this form of
immigration. The increasing heterogeneity of the contemporary foreign-
born population in the wake of these legal and labor-market changes
requires additional emphasis as a counterpart of the common popular
description of immigration as a homogeneous phenomenon.
Immigrants and Their Types
There are two main dimensions within which contemporary immigrants
to the United States differ. The first is their personal resources, in terms
of material and human capital, and the second is their classification by
the government. The first dimension ranges from foreigners who arrive
with investment capital or are endowed with high educational creden-
tials to those who have only their labor to sell. The second dimension
ranges from migrants who arrive legally and receive governmental reset-
tlement assistance to those who are categorized as illegals and are per-
secuted accordingly. At present, only persons granted refugee status or
admitted as legal asylees receive any form of official resettlement assis-
tance in the United States. Most legal immigrants are admitted into the
country but receive no help. Since 1996 they have also been barred
from welfare programs such as SSI (Supplemental Security Income) or
Medicaid, to which citizens are entitled. Cross-classifying these dimen-
sions produces the typology presented in table 7. Representative nation-
alities are included in each cell, with the caution that migrants from a
particular country may be represented in more than one. The following
description follows the vertical axis, based on human capital skills, not-
ing the relative legal standing of each distinct type. A final section dis-
cusses the special case of refugees and asylees.
Labor Migrants
The movement of foreign workers in search of menial and generally
low-paying jobs has represented the bulk of immigration, both legal and
undocumented, in recent years. These workers are destined to occupy
jobs at the bottom of the labor market “hourglass.” The Immigration
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Ta
b
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7
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 31
Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 aimed primarily at discour-
aging the surreptitious component of this flow, while compensating
employers by liberalizing access to legal temporary workers. A decade
later, Proposition 187, an initiative passed by California’s electorate in
1994, sought to discourage undocumented immigration by barring ille-
gal aliens from access to public services. We discuss the intent and effec-
tiveness of these two measures in the final chapter. For the moment it
suffices to note the principal ways physical-labor immigration has mate-
rialized in recent years.
First, migrants can cross the border on foot or with the help of a
smuggler, or they may overstay a U.S. tourist visa. In official parlance
illegal border crossers have been labeled EWIs (entry without inspec-
tion); those who stay longer than permitted are labeled visa abusers
or overstayers. In 2010 the Department of Homeland Security appre-
hended 516,992 foreigners, of whom 463,382 were EWIs apprehended
at the southern border. The overwhelming majority of these were
Mexicans. What is important here is that the total apprehension figure
for 2010 was less than one-third that reported a decade earlier (1.8 mil-
lion), a fact that we discuss below.52
A second channel of entry is to come legally by using one of
the family-reunification preferences of the immigration law (left
untouched, for the most part, by the 1986 reform and reaffirmed by the
Immigration Act of 1990). This avenue is open primarily to immigrants
who have first entered the United States without legal papers or for
temporary periods and who have subsequently married a U.S. citizen
or legal resident. As seen previously, one of the principal consequences
of the 1965 Immigration Act was to provide this avenue of legaliza-
tion to unauthorized migrants. Spouses of U.S. citizens are given pri-
ority because they are exempted from global quota limits. Year after
year, the vast majority of legal Mexican migrants have arrived under
family reunification preferences. In 2002, for example, out of a total of
219,380 Mexicans admitted for legal residence, 58,602 (26.7 percent)
came under the worldwide quota as family-sponsored entries, and an
additional 150,963 (68.8 percent) arrived outside quota limits as imme-
diate relatives of U.S. citizens.53 In 2010 total legal Mexican migra-
tion had dropped to 139,120, but out of these, 24.5 percent arrived
under the quota as family preferences and 63.7 percent as quota-exempt
immediate relatives.54 As we noted previously, these were mostly return-
ees with prior lengthy residences in the United States.
The last avenue for labor migrants is to come as contract laborers.
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32 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
There is a provision in the 1965 Immigration Act for the importation of
temporary foreign laborers when a supply of “willing and able” domes-
tic workers cannot be found. This provision was maintained and actu-
ally liberalized by the 1986 reform. In both cases the Secretary of Labor
has to certify that a labor shortage exists before foreign workers are
granted a visa. Because the procedure is cumbersome, few employers
sought labor in this manner in the past. An exception is the sugar indus-
try in Florida, for which “H-2” workers, as they were labeled, were the
mainstay of its cane-cutting labor force for many years. Most of these
contract workers came from the West Indies.55
The 1990 Immigration Act stipulated a cap of sixty-six thousand
temporary H-2 workers per year. However, the demand for farmwork-
ers increased to such an extent as to encourage many employers to dis-
pense with the difficult petitioning procedure. In recent years, however,
the supply of Mexican workers willing to cross the border clandes-
tinely has diminished significantly because of the rising costs and per-
ils of the journey and the drop in construction and urban employment
opportunities in the wake of the 2007– 9 recession. Demand for agri-
cultural workers has remained steady, however, and, in response, the
federal government has been compelled to expand the H-2 program.
The number of seasonal agricultural workers (H-2A visas) thus grew
from 46,433 in 2006 to three times that figure just three years later.
According to Massey, the number of temporary legal workers from
Mexico reached 361,000 in 2008, rivaling numbers last seen during the
Bracero Program.56
The principal magnet drawing foreign manual workers to the United
States is undoubtedly the level of North American wages relative to
those left behind. Despite its rapid depreciation in real terms, the U.S.
minimum wage continues to be six to seven times that prevailing in
Mexico, which is, in turn, higher than most in Central America. The
actual wages many U.S. employers pay their foreign workers exceed
the legal minimum and are significantly higher than those available for
skilled and even white-collar work in Mexico and other sources of this
type of immigration. This is why many foreign workers are willing to
accept harsh labor conditions. To them the trek to the United States and
the economic opportunities associated with it often represent the differ-
ence between stagnation or permanent poverty in their home countries
and attainment of their individual and family economic goals.
The demand for physical labor in the bottom tier of the labor market
originates not only in agriculture but in a number of other labor-inten-
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 33
sive industries, including construction, restaurants, landscaping, and
other services. As target earners, migrants are ideally suited for jobs that
native workers do not want. Employers additionally favor this source
of labor because they do not have to pay for costs of transportation or
the risk of the journey, which are assumed by the migrants themselves.
Beginning in 2008, and in response to a wave of nativist agitation for
“securing the border,” the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
agency of the Department of Homeland Security launched a nationwide
campaign of deportation against unauthorized workers. Borrowing a
page from Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona, ICE proceeded to imprison and
deport tens of thousands of migrant workers, regardless of whether or
not they had committed any crimes or whether they had families and
U.S.-born children. As a result, and as seen in figure 3, the rate of depor-
tation shot up, reaching nearly four hundred thousand in 2009 and
again in 2010. This campaign amounted to a veritable war waged by the
United States against its poorer immigrants. The outcome was not long
in coming: added to the rapid decline in job opportunities in the wake of
the 2007– 9 recession, the response of would-be migrants in Mexico and
Central America was to desist from their plans. Unauthorized apprehen-
sions plummeted at the southern border to figures not seen in decades.57
This rapid decline in the clandestine migrant flow may have been the
aim of nativist agitators, but it spelled disaster for hundreds of busi-
nesses, especially those in agriculture. As prefigured by the experience
of Arizona, established migrants left the areas of harsher enforcement,
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
400,000
300,000
3
50,000
200,000
250,000
100,000
150,000
0
50,000
N
um
be
r
of
d
ep
or
ta
tio
ns
USA Patriot Act
Year
1965 1967 1969 1971 1981 19911973 1983 19931975 1985 19951977 1987 19971989 20071999 2001 2003 2005 20091979
Mexicans
Total
Portes: Immigrant America – Fig 1-4
1st proof
Bill Nelson 12/17/13
Figure 3. Deportations from the United States, 1965– 2009. Source: Massey and Pren,
“Unintended Consequences.”
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34 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
and new workers did not arrive. Crops rotted in the fields, and urban
restaurants, landscaping services, and other would-be employers found
themselves unable to source their needs for physical laborers. As Tom
Nassif, president of Western Growers in California, put it: “Given the
fact that 70 to 80 percent of our work force is improperly documented,
ICE audits can eliminate that percentage of our productive capacity.
You cannot stay in business.”58
The Wall Street Journal concluded, “This campaign is doing great
harm to U.S. agriculture as farmers are unable to find enough work-
ers to harvest their crops.”59 In response to this perfectly foreseeable
outcome of the country’s war on its immigrants, the Obama adminis-
tration was compelled to reverse itself in late 2011. The ICE campaign
was partially halted, with the Secretary of Homeland Security declaring
that, thereafter, only aliens with a criminal record would be deported,
and cases would be reviewed “one by one.” At the same time, and as
seen previously, the H-2 program was expanded rapidly. Its growth and
greater flexibility amounted to an unheralded new temporary labor pro-
gram in favor of American growers.60
As of this writing, the Obama administration’s declared intent to
limit deportations to “criminal aliens” has not been translated into
practice— with ICE deporting another four hundred thousand persons
in 2011 and adding even more officials to its campaign. The result is
a contradictory situation in which the same type of migrant now wel-
comed through the expanded H-2 program continues to be deported, at
considerable expense, by another agency of the same government. This
situation is unsustainable in the long run.
Not surprisingly, manual labor immigrants are found at the bottom
echelons of the economic hierarchy. They earn the lowest wages, typi-
cally live below the poverty line, and are commonly uninsured. Census
statistics show that immigrant nationalities that are composed primar-
ily of this type of migrant are in a much inferior economic situation
relative to the native-born. Thus, for example, the poverty rate among
the U.S. native-born population in 2010 was 14.4 percent, but among
Mexican immigrants it reached 28.9 percent, among Guatemalans 27
percent, and among Dominicans 26.1 percent. While 13.8 percent of
the native-born population was without health insurance, 57.8 per-
cent of Mexicans, 53.6 percent of Salvadorans, and 62.8 percent of
Guatemalans lacked such coverage.61
Willingness to work for low wages and few benefits, together with
diligence and motivation, makes these workers desirable to American
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 35
employers in numerous sectors of the economy. This flow does not rep-
resent an “alien invasion” because an invasion implies moving into
someone else’s territory against that person’s will. In this instance the
movement is greatly welcomed, if not by everyone, at least by a very
influential group— namely, the small, medium, and large enterprises in
agriculture, services, and industry that have come to rely on this source
of labor. The match between the goals and economic aspirations of
migrant workers and the needs and interests of the firms that hire them
are the key factors sustaining the flow year after year. The recent mis-
guided campaign to deport unauthorized migrant workers and the sub-
sequent reversal by the federal government to address the predictable
consequences of its own campaign demonstrates, above all else, the
strength of this match.
Professional Immigrants
A preference category of the U.S. visa allocation system is reserved for
“priority workers, professionals with advanced degrees, or aliens of
exceptional ability.” Prior to 1990 this category provided the main entry
channel for the second type of immigration. Unlike the first, the vast
majority of its members come legally and are not destined for the bot-
tom rungs of the American labor market. Labeled “brain drain” in the
countries of origin, this flow has represented a significant gain of highly
trained personnel for the United States. In 2002, a total of 34,452 “per-
sons of extraordinary ability,” “outstanding researchers,” “executives,”
and their kin, plus an additional 44,468 professionals holding advanced
degrees, and their families, were admitted for permanent residence.62
By 2010, and despite the recent economic recession, the numbers
actually increased to 41,055 “aliens of extraordinary ability” and other
priority workers and 53,946 professionals with advanced degrees and
their families. The number of professionals with advanced degrees
jumped further, to 66,831 in 2011. Although in relative terms employ-
ment-related immigration has only represented about 13 percent of the
legal total since 2000 (14 percent in 2010), it has been the main conduit
for the addition of permanent highly trained personnel to the American
labor force. Their entry helps to explain why more than 25 percent of
the foreign-born population are college graduates or higher and why
about 25 percent of immigrant workers are in managerial and profes-
sional specialty occupations.63
Foreign professionals seldom migrate because of lack of employ-
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36 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
ment back home. The reason is that they not only come from higher
educational strata but that they are probably among the best in their
respective professions, which is indicated by their ability to pass diffi-
cult entrance tests, such as the qualifying examinations for foreign phy-
sicians. The gap that makes the difference in their decision to migrate is
generally not the invidious comparison between prospective U.S. sala-
ries and what they earn at home. Instead, it is the relative gap between
available salaries and work conditions in their own countries and those
that are normatively regarded as acceptable for people with their level
of education.
Professionals who earn enough at home to sustain a middle-class
standard of living and who are reasonably satisfied with their chances
for advancement seldom migrate. Those threatened with early obsoles-
cence or who cannot make ends meet with their home country salaries
start looking for opportunities abroad. A fertile ground for this type
of migration is countries in which university students are trained in
advanced Western-style professional practices but then find the pros-
pects and means to implement their training blocked because of poor
employment opportunities or lack of suitable technological facilities.64
Because they do not come to escape poverty but to improve their
careers and life chances, immigrant professionals seldom accept menial
jobs in the United States. However, they tend to enter at the bottom of
their respective occupational ladders and to progress from there accord-
ing to individual skills. This is why, for example, foreign-born doctors
and nurses are so often found in public hospitals throughout the coun-
try. An important feature of this type of immigration is its inconspic-
uousness. Although there are about two million Filipinos and a com-
parable number of Indians now living in the United States, we seldom
hear reference to a Filipino or an Indian immigration “problem.” The
reason is that professionals and technicians, heavily represented among
these nationalities, seldom cluster in highly visible ethnic communities.
Instead, they tend to disperse across the land, following their respective
careers.65
Professional immigrants are among the most rapidly assimilated lin-
guistically and culturally. Reasons are, first, their educational and occu-
pational success and, second, the absence of strong ethnic communities
to support their culture of origin. Yet “assimilation” does not mean sev-
ering relations with the home country. On the contrary, because success-
ful professional immigrants have the means to do so, they frequently
attempt to bridge the gap between past and present through periodic
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 37
visits back home and the maintenance of active ties with family, friends,
and colleagues there. During the first generation at least, these “trans-
national” activities allow immigrant professionals to juggle two social
worlds and often make a significant contribution to the development of
their respective fields in their own countries.66 As we will see in the next
chapter, these activities also bypass the dilemma between ethnic resil-
ience and assimilation, creating a viable path between both adaptation
alternatives.
During the first decade of the new millennium several important
exceptions emerged to this general pattern. First, some refugee groups—
such as Iranians, Iraqis, and those arriving from the Soviet Union—
include high proportions of educated, professional individuals. They
must be added to the numbers coming under regular occupational pref-
erences since they also contribute to the pool of highly skilled talent in
the U.S. labor market. Unlike regular immigrants, however, refugees and
asylees are politically opposed to the regime back home and commonly
barred from returning. Hence, their capacity to engage in transnational
activities and their potential contributions to home-country develop-
ment are far more restricted. In this case their departure amounts to a
true “brain drain” for the countries they left behind.
At the opposite extreme, in terms of temporality of migration we
find professional and technical specialty workers arriving under the new
H-1B program. This category, created by the 1990 Immigration Act and
subsequently expanded, has become the principal conduit for the arrival
of tens of thousands of foreign engineers, computer programmers,
and medical personnel in recent years. Under the H-1B program, U.S.
employers can sponsor professional immigrants for a three-year period
that can be extended to a maximum of six years. In regional terms Asia
and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Europe and South America have been
the principal sources of this new high-skilled inflow. The numerical ceil-
ing for petitions for this type of visa was originally set at 65,000 in
1990; it was increased to 115,000 in 1998 and then to 195,000 under
the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-first Century Act (AC 21)
in 2002. The actual number of beneficiaries in 2002 was 197,357. In
the same year the total number of “temporary workers and trainees”
reached 582,250.67
Although the cap on H-1B visas reverted to sixty-five thousand in
2004, actual admissions under the program continued to be much
higher because beneficiaries going to work for nonprofit colleges and
universities or government agencies and renewals do not count against
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38 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
the cap. Thus, in 2006, just prior to the onset of the Great Recession,
270,981 H-1B petitions were approved by the U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services (USCIS). Reflecting the subsequent decline in eco-
nomic activity, the number of approved petitions was 214,271 in 2009,
a 20 percent drop. This was the first year during the decade in which
H-1B admissions numbered fewer than 250,000.68
This high figure reflects the hunger for trained labor in the high-tech
and other expanding sectors of the American economy. Increasingly, this
demand is being channeled through the new temporary entry program
rather than through the more traditional occupational preference cat-
egories. As shown in table 8, in 2009 almost 42 percent of H-1B work-
ers (88,961) were in computer-related fields, with an additional 11.8
percent (25,578) in architecture, engineering, and surveying. Ninety-
nine percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 59 percent held a
professional or postgraduate degree. As also shown in table 8, India has
pride of place as a source of this type of labor. This is because graduates
of Indian technical and engineering schools couple rigorous academic
training with fluency in English. More than half of H-1B workers in
2008 came from India, with an additional 15 percent from China, the
Philippines, and Korea. Of the top five sending countries, only one was
not in Asia. Annual median income for these foreign workers in 2009
was $64,000, which, despite the economic downturn, represented an
increase of $4,000 over prior years.69
Although reasonable, this level of compensation is not particularly
high for university-trained workers. Indeed one of the major advan-
tages for firms hiring H-1B workers is the contribution that they make
to keep salaries down for professional and technical occupations in high
demand. The other major advantage is the temporary character of for-
eign workers’ visas that translates into greater vulnerability vis-à-vis
their employers. Paralleling the situation of agricultural laborers during
the Bracero Program, H-1B visa holders are generally tied to the firm
that brought them to the United States and, hence, are at the mercy of
its decision to continue to employ them or not.
Finally, as shown in table 7, there are some foreign professionals who
are in the country illegally or who have not managed to meet the high
accreditation requirements of their respective fields. Doctors, dentists,
and other professionals in this situation may choose, as an alternative
to unskilled manual work, to practice without licenses. Their clients are
almost always other immigrants, mostly from the same country, who
trust these professionals and find them a preferable, low-cost option
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 39
to regular health care. Unauthorized medical, dental, and other profes-
sional practices are thus localized in immigrant enclaves and other areas
of high ethnic concentration.70
Despite these different situations, foreign professionals have gen-
erally done very well occupationally and economically in the United
Table 8 The H-1B Program, 2008–2009
Approved petitions
2008 2009
# % # %
A. By country of birth
India 149,629 54.2 109,059 48.1
China 24,174 8.8 20,855 9.7
Canada 10,681 3.9 9,605 4.5
Philippines 9,606 3.5 8,682 4.1
Korea 6,988 2.5 6,968 3.3
United Kingdom 4,494 1.6 4,180 2.0
Japan 4,321 1.6 3,825 1.8
All others 66,024 23.9 56,782 26.5
B. By level of education
Less than a bachelor’s degree 1.0 1.0
Bachelor’s degree 43.0 40.0
Master’s degree 41.0 40.0
Doctoral degree 11.0 13.0
Professional degree 4.0 6.0
C. By occupation and income # %
Mean
salary
($000s)
Median
salary
($000s)
Computer-related occupations 88,961 41.6 67 60
Architecture, engineering, surveying 25,578 11.8 71 67
Education-related occupations 24,711 11.6 53 45
Administrative occupations 21,192 9.9 58 50
Medicine and health 17,621 8.2 76 54
All other 36,112 16.9 66 55
Source: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation
Workers, 2009 Annual Report.
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40 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
States. India and the Philippines have been prime sources of this type of
migrant under both permanent and temporary legal entry programs. In
2010 the Filipino population of the United States had mean household
earnings of $90,315, while Asian Indians reached $116,186. Both fig-
ures significantly exceeded the national average of $69,506 in that year.
While median earnings for all male workers were $46,500, those for
Chinese males were $53,751 and for Asian Indians $77,484.71
Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Near downtown Los Angeles there is an area approximately a mile long
where all commercial signs suddenly change from English to strange pic-
torial characters. Koreatown, as the area is known, contains the predict-
able number of ethnic restaurants and markets; it also contains a num-
ber of banks, import-export houses, industries, and real estate offices.
Signs reading “English spoken here” assure visitors that their links with
the outside world have not been totally severed. In Los Angeles the pro-
pensity for self-employment is three times greater among Koreans than
among the population as a whole. Grocery stores, restaurants, gas sta-
tions, liquor stores, and real estate offices are typical Korean businesses.
They also tend to remain within the community because the more suc-
cessful immigrants sell their earlier businesses to new arrivals.72
A similar urban landscape is found near downtown Miami. Little
Havana extends in a narrow strip for about five miles, eventually merg-
ing with the southwest suburbs of the city. Cuban-owned firms in the
Miami metropolitan area increased from 919 in 1967 to 8,000 in 1976
and approximately 28,000 in 1990. By 2007 they had reached more
than a quarter of a million nationwide, with the principal concentration
in metropolitan Miami/Ft. Lauderdale. Most are small, averaging 7.7
employees at the latest count, but they also include factories employing
hundreds of workers. Cuban firms are found in light and heavy manu-
facturing, construction, commerce, finance, and insurance. An estimated
60 percent of all residential construction in the metropolitan area is
now done by these firms.73
Areas of concentrated immigrant entrepreneurship are known as eth-
nic enclaves. Their emergence has depended on three conditions: first,
the presence of a number of immigrants with substantial business exper-
tise acquired in their home countries; second, access to sources of capi-
tal; and third, access to labor. The requisite labor is not too difficult to
obtain because it can be initially drawn from family members and, sub-
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 41
sequently, from more recent immigrant arrivals. Sources of capital are
often not a major obstacle, either, because the sums required initially are
small. When immigrants do not bring them from abroad, they can accu-
mulate them through individual savings or obtain them from pooled
resources in the community. In some instances would-be entrepreneurs
have access to financial institutions owned or managed by conationals.
Thus, the first requisite is the critical one. The presence of a number of
immigrants skilled in what sociologist Franklin Fraizer called “the art
of buying and selling” can usually overcome other obstacles to entre-
preneurship.74 Conversely, their absence tends to confine an immigrant
group to wage or salaried work, even when enough capital and labor
are available.
Entrepreneurial minorities have been the exception in both early
twentieth-century and contemporary immigrations. Their significance
lies in that they create an avenue for economic mobility unavailable
to other groups. This avenue is open not only to the original entrepre-
neurs but to later arrivals as well. The reason is that relations between
immigrant employers and their coethnic employees tend to go beyond a
purely contractual bond. When immigrant enterprises expand, they tend
to hire their own for supervisory positions. Today, Koreans hire and pro-
mote Koreans in New York and Los Angeles, and Cubans do the same
for other Cubans in Miami, just as sixty years ago the Russian Jews of
Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Japanese of San Francisco and
Los Angeles hired and supported those from their own communities.75
An ethnic enclave is not, however, the only manifestation of immi-
grant entrepreneurship. In cities where the concentration of these immi-
grants is less dense, they tend to take over businesses catering to low-
income groups, often in the inner cities. In this role as “middleman
minorities,” entrepreneurial immigrants are less visible because they
tend to be dispersed over the area occupied by the populations they
serve. Koreatown in Los Angeles is not, for example, the only manifesta-
tion of entrepreneurship among this immigrant group. Koreans are also
present in significant numbers in New York City, where they have gained
increasing control of the produce market, and in cities like Washington,
D.C., and Baltimore, where they have progressively replaced Italians
and Jews as the principal merchants in low-income inner-city areas.
Indian immigrants, particularly from the state of Gujarat, have carved
a unique intermediate niche for themselves as owners and operators of
low- and mid-budget motels nationwide.76
The emergence of ethnic enclaves and other forms of immigrant entre-
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42 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
preneurship has been generally fortuitous. While the 1990 Immigration
Act includes a preference category for “employment creating” investors
and allows up to ten thousand immigrant visas a year for such inves-
tors, few foreigners have made use of this option. This is, in part, a con-
sequence of the high capital requirements to qualify. In the late 1990s
this preference attracted barely one thousand new immigrants per year.
By 2010 the situation had not changed, with just 1,745 new arrivals
under this category.77 No explicit entry preference exists for small entre-
preneurs with little or no capital, and none is likely to be implemented
in the future. In general, entrepreneurial minorities come under prefer-
ences designated for other purposes. Koreans and Chinese, two of the
most successful business-oriented groups, have made good use of the
employment-based preference categories for professionals and skilled
workers and, subsequently, of the family reunification provisions of the
1965 and 1990 immigration laws. Cubans usually came as political ref-
ugees and were initially dispersed throughout the country. It took this
group more than a decade after arrival to regroup in certain geographic
locations, primarily South Florida, and then begin the push toward
entrepreneurship.78
More recent refugee groups such as the Vietnamese and Russians have
also followed the entrepreneurial path, creating new enclaves on both
coasts. The principal Vietnamese concentration is in Orange County,
California, around the town of Westminster. The main Russian enclave
is found in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Research on the Vietnamese in
California has found the same pattern of economic success of ethnic
entrepreneurs reported among other groups.79 Finally, even some unau-
thorized immigrants have gone into business on their own, attempt-
ing to escape low-wage work by setting themselves up as independent
mechanics, gardeners, handymen, and house cleaners. Naturally, entre-
preneurship cannot be expected to yield the same benefits for these
migrants that it does for those enjoying legal status. Their businesses
are generally small and informal. Paradoxically, the stepped-up efforts
to penalize employers of undocumented labor under the ICE campaign
of deportation are likely to have stimulated the growth of informal
businesses among the undocumented. From house cleaning and repairs
to restaurants and food stands catering to other immigrants, informal
enterprises may offer to unauthorized migrants a more attractive option
than increasingly precarious wage employment.
Recent research has shown that a high proportion of successful
migrant firms depend for their operation on transnational ties, primarily
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 43
with the owners’ home country. They commonly import goods for sale
in the immigrant community or in the open market, export high-tech
U.S. goods to the home nation, and draw on contacts there for sources
of capital and labor. A recent study of entrepreneurial activities among
Latin American immigrants in the United States found that as much as
58 percent of firms in these communities relied for their continued via-
bility and growth on these transnational ties. Specific studies of highly
entrepreneurial communities such as the Chinese and Koreans have
documented the same patterns.80 We will return to the consequences of
ethnic enterprises and transnationalism when we examine immigrants’
economic and political adaptation in chapters 4 and 5.
Refugees and Asylees
The Refugee Act of 1980, signed into law by President Carter, aimed
at eliminating the former practice of granting asylum only to escapees
from communist-controlled nations. Instead, it sought to bring U.S. pol-
icy in line with international practice, which defines as a refugee anyone
with a well-founded fear of persecution or physical harm, regardless of
the political bent of his or her country’s regime. In practice, however, the
United States continued during the two Reagan administrations to grant
refugee status to escapees from communism, primarily from Southeast
Asia and Eastern Europe, while making it difficult for others fleeing
right-wing regimes, such as those of Guatemala and El Salvador. Being
granted asylum or refugee status has significant advantages over other
immigration channels. The central difference is that while refugees have
legal standing, the right to work, and can benefit from the welfare provi-
sions of the 1980 act, those denied asylum have none of these privileges
and, if they stay, are classified as illegal aliens.81
Being a refugee is, therefore, not a matter of personal choice but a gov-
ernmental decision based on a combination of legal guidelines and politi-
cal expediency. Depending on the relationship between the United States
and the country of origin and the geopolitical context of the time, a par-
ticular flow of people may be classified as a political exodus or as an ille-
gal group of economically motivated immigrants. Given past policy, it is
not surprising that there are few refugees from rightist regimes, no matter
how repressive, living legally in the country. Major refugee groups have
arrived, instead, after the Soviet army’s occupation of Eastern Europe,
after the rise to power of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and after the takeover by
communist insurgents of three Southeast Asian countries.
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44 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union brought
about a more diversified and less ideological orientation to U.S. refugee
policy. Although it is still driven by geopolitical interests and expediency,
there is more room at present for broader humanitarian considerations.
Thus, the national origins of the current refugee flow have become more
diversified and include countries that are not necessarily adversarial to
the United States. Still, the number of refugees pales in comparison to
that of regular immigrants and, especially, to the growing category of
temporary workers. In 2001 a total of 68,925 refugees arrived in the
United States, compared to 1,064,318 admitted for legal permanent
residence (of which 411,059 were new arrivals). In 2002— reflecting
the impact of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks— the number
of refugee petitions approved and actual refugee arrivals plunged: ref-
ugee admissions in 2002 numbered only 26,785, a 61 percent decline
from the prior year.82 The numbers trended upward in subsequent years,
reaching 73,293 in 2010. The complex geopolitical realities of the post-
Soviet era are reflected in the very diverse origins of the contemporary
refugee population. Major contributors to this flow in 2010 included
Iraq (18,016), Burma (16,693), Bhutan (12,363), Somalia (4,844), and
Cuba (4,818).83
The legal difference between a refugee and an asylee hinges on the
physical location of the person. Both types are recognized by the govern-
ment as having a well-founded fear of persecution, but whereas the first
still lives abroad and must be transported to the United States, the sec-
ond is already within U.S. territory. This difference is important because
it makes the refugee flows conform more closely to the government’s
overall foreign policy, while would-be asylees confront authorities with
a fait accompli to be handled on the spot. Thus, prior to 1990, refu-
gees were mostly opponents and victims of communism in the Soviet
Union and its allies, including Cuba and Vietnam. In the early 1990s
they came primarily from Russia and the successor states of the former
Soviet Union, as U.S. refugee policy was used to stabilize and ease eco-
nomic conditions for the fragile new governments in these countries.
By the late 1990s the refugee flow had diversified to include significant
numbers from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Iran, and Iraq.84
Asylee applications during the 1990s were, by contrast, domi-
nated by migrants from Central America— primarily El Salvador,
Guatemala, and Nicaragua. These were movements that originated in
violent civil wars in these countries, pushing large numbers to move
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 45
abroad and eventually seek entry into the United States. Their wishes
did not accord, however, with the interests of the U.S. government at
the time, which routinely denied their requests. The end of the civil
wars and return of political democracy in all three countries was fol-
lowed by urgent entreaties by the new governments to U.S. authori-
ties to grant the asylum requests of their conationals. While reasons
for asylum had been largely removed by the end of the armed conflicts,
the new Central American leaders argued that their economies desper-
ately needed the remittances sent by their migrants, living and working
in the United States as unauthorized aliens. The American government
responded to these requests by granting temporary protected status
(TPS) to Salvadorans and other Central Americans whose asylum peti-
tions had been denied. This concession was renewed on a yearly basis,
and, over time, many of these migrants managed to regularize their sta-
tus. By 2010 asylee admissions had dwindled to just 21,113. The only
significant number of asylees during that year came from the People’s
Republic of China (6,683).85
As shown in table 7, refugees and asylees vary greatly in terms of
human capital endowments. Some, like the pre-1980 waves of Cuban
exiles and recent Iranian, Iraqi, and Russian refugees, are well-educated,
and many possess professional and entrepreneurial skills. At the other
end are groups like Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Somali refugees
or would-be Guatemalans and Salvadoran asylees, composed primar-
ily of small farmers and rural laborers with little formal education. In
every case the distinct advantages conferred by refugees or asylee sta-
tus include not only the right to stay and work but a package of gener-
ous resettlement and welfare assistance, health benefits, and the right to
adjust to permanent legal residence in one year. None of these benefits
is available to regular immigrants, much less those with irregular status.
Refugee professionals and entrepreneurs have generally made good
use of these privileges to reestablish themselves and prosper in their
respective lines of work. Refugee groups arriving with little or no
human capital have at least managed to survive under the welfare pro-
visions of the resettlement program. Although, as we will see, the accul-
turation and entry into the labor market of some of these groups may
have been delayed by access to these benefits, they gave them the oppor-
tunity to rebuild their families and communities. This opportunity cre-
ated, in turn, a key source of social capital for them and their children
to cope with their new environment.
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46 | The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration
Overview
In 2010 about two hundred foreign countries and possessions sent
immigrants to the United States. Aside from basic statistical data sup-
plied by the Department of Homeland Security and the Census Bureau,
little is known about most of these groups. Tracing their individual evo-
lution and patterns of adaptation is well beyond the scope of this book.
Instead, we delineate the basic contours of contemporary immigration
by focusing on major aspects of the adaptation experience. The empha-
sis throughout is on diversity, both in the immigrants’ origins and in
their modes of incorporation into American society. The typology out-
lined in this chapter will serve as our basic organizing tool as we fol-
low immigrants through their locations in space, their strategies for eco-
nomic mobility, their efforts at learning a new language and culture,
their decision to acquire U.S. citizenship, and their struggles to raise
their children successfully in the new land.
The counterpoint between the widespread demand for immigrant
labor by different sectors of the American economy and the activities
of nativists and xenophobes along the three successive phases of U.S.-
bound immigration will also be a leitmotif of the following analysis.
The emblematic figure of Sheriff Joe Arpaio represents the latest incar-
nation of a long history of intolerance toward newcomers despite the
multiple contributions that their presence has made in the long run.
Similarly, the progressive bifurcation of the economy and increasing
inequality within the immigrant population in the postindustrial era
provide a necessary lens for understanding its diverse patterns of adap-
tation today.
We reserve the analysis of immigration policies and reform for the
final chapter but can anticipate that it will be framed by a vision of
immigration as positive, as a whole, for the nation. There are excep-
tions to be sure, but a persuasive case can be made that the United States
would not be the strong, vibrant nation that it is without the work and
talent of millions of immigrants. At present they fill the diverse labor
needs of a vast economy, rejuvenate the population, and add energy and
diversity to the culture. Without this continuing flow the United States
would come to resemble the situation of other rich, but demographi-
cally stagnant, nations whose growing elderly populations loom as a
major problem for the future. To the extent that working-age immi-
grants continue to replenish the creative energies and capacity for inno-
vation of the country, the United States will be able to avoid this fate.
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The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 47
As we pen these lines, a rising chorus of restrictionists and opponents of
immigration threaten to push the country in the opposite direction. The
importance of these alternative outcomes can be scarcely exaggerated.
They will largely determine the extent to which the nation will be able
to maintain its economic viability and political leadership in a chang-
ing global system.
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