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Does America Have An Assimilation Problem?

American Enterprise - December 1, 2000

Michael Barone says NO

Our Immigrants Always Melted Before

Heavy immigration has been the rule in American history, not the exception, and the minority groups of 2000 in many ways resemble the major immigrant groups of 1900: Blacks resemble Irish, Latinos resemble Italians, Asians resemble Jews. We are not in a wholly new place in history.

Consider the Irish. In the 1840s, the potato famine hit Ireland, and nearly 700,000 Irish came to America. One million arrived in the 1850s, 2.4 million more between 1860 and 1914.

The Irish were the first immigrants to throng to the cities, and the Catholic Church was the dominant institution for most of them. The "wild Irish" had high rates of crime and alcoholism--even while their love of hierarchy and affinity for the state also meant that many became cops. They also produced many entertainers and athletes, and continued for many years after the 1840s to be physically distinctive. Discrimination against them continued until well into this century.

Irish distinctiveness was greatest in politics. Up through 1960, the differences in voting behavior between Yankee Protestants and Irish Catholics in the Northeast were as stark as the differences between blacks and whites in Mississippi today. Today the particularities of Irish-Americans are mostly past. In the 1950s, they surpassed U.S. average levels in income and education. Then in 1960 JFK became the first Irish-American President. Intermarriage with non-Irish became common, and with the advent of the birth control pill large Catholic families mostly disappeared. The Irish became woven into the fabric of American life. It took 120 years.

People of African descent have lived in America since the first slaves landed at Jamestown in 1619, but the great migration of blacks within America didn't come until the middle of the twentieth century. During 1940-65, about 5 million African Americans poured into cities above the Mason-Dixon line. They brought to the North a faith that only strong action by the federal government could overcome the discrimination they suffered.

Southern blacks had limited chances to own businesses, and in the North blacks showed little entrepreneurial drive. Even today, relatively few businesses in black areas are owned by blacks, and black incomes remain well below average. But blacks moved upward in political machines, labor unions, and the civil service. Blacks also became great athletes, musicians, and entertainers.

Like the Irish, the blacks who migrated to Northern cities had unusually high rates of crime, alcoholism, and drug use. They produced urban riots of a kind the nation had not seen since the Irish protested against the draft in New York in 1863. Between 1965 and 1975, crime tripled in America, with about half of all offenses committed by blacks. In the same years, welfare rolls tripled, and about half of those on welfare were black. These two trends devastated many black inner-city neighborhoods.

In the 1940s blacks were still only 3 percent of the electorate, since most of those living in the South were barred from the polls. In the 1950s the parties competed for black votes; pioneering black politician Adam Clayton Powell supported Eisenhower in 1956, and only 65 percent of blacks voted for Kennedy in 1960.

Then, in 1964, blacks became as heavily Democratic as the Irish had been in the 1850s, largely because of Kennedy's support for the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater's vote against it. Most of the growing number of black officials enthusiastically favored expanding government. But black progress in incomes, education, and jobs began in World War II, and continued through the 1950s and '60s without big government programs.

Today the black middle class is burgeoning, and black families that have two-parents are earning incomes equivalent to those of intact white families with similar levels of education. Since around 1993, crime and welfare dependency have been decreasing as quickly as they rose in the awful decade of 1965-75. Still, the majority of black children are raised in homes without a father present today.

All this is evidence that the habits of mind blacks brought from the rural South are gradually changing. There is reason to hope it won't take American blacks--whose mass migration began 60 years ago--as long to be fully assimilated into American society as the 120 years it took the Irish.

Italian immigration to America also came in a rush. Only 70,000 Italians arrived before 1880, but they were followed by 807,000 in the next two decades and by 3 million from 1900 to 1914. Nearly 80 percent came from southern Italy, where powerful barons, ineffective bureaucracies, and organized crime thrived, and the economy remained stagnant even as northern Italy industrialized.

Most Italian immigrants settled in or near New York City; today almost half of Italian-Americans still live within 100 miles of Manhattan. They lived in "Little Italies," with different streets dominated by immigrants from particular provinces. These "urban villagers" worked mostly as manual laborers, often in construction or on the docks; some worked as barbers, shoemakers, stonemasons, shopkeepers. Many found work from a padrone, a labor contractor who charged a fee for setting them up at job sites.

Italian immigrants didn't trust major American institutions any more than they had those in southern Italy, including the Irish-dominated Catholic Church. Nor did they trust schools. Dropout rates were high, and an Italian proverb ran, Stupid is he who makes his children better than himself.

Nor did Italian immigrants enter quickly into politics. The Yankee-dominated Republicans and Irish-dominated Democrats had little appeal.

Yet in time, Italian-Americans began to assimilate. By the late 1930s, when sociologist William Whyte observed gangs in the Italian North End of Boston, he distinguished between "corner boys" and "college boys": those who hung out on the street versus those who concentrated on school work in hopes of upward mobility.

World War II played a critical part in Italian-Americans' rise. Hundreds of thousands of Italians served in America's multiethnic military. When they returned, many took advantage of the G.I. Bill; college attendance among Italians rose from 15 percent in 1940 to 38 percent in 1960. They climbed the occupational ladder, earned higher-than-average incomes, and fanned out from Little Italy to the suburbs. They also became more involved in the Catholic Church and voted for Kennedy in 1960 at even higher rates than Irish-Americans.

By the 1970s Italians were thoroughly absorbed into American life. It took 100 years.

Immigration from Latin America was negligible for most of U.S. history. The Mexican revolution and its aftermath sparked a rush of 700,000 arrivals from south of the border between 1910 and 1930. Then over 800,000 Cubans fled Fidel Castro's regime from 1959-96.

Since the late 1960s, Latino immigration has increased on a steady curve, with spikes upward from countries with political disturbances. Immigration from Latin America totaled 1.1 million from 1961-70, 1.7 million from 1971-80, 3 million from 1981-90, and 2.7 million in just the six years from 1991 to 1996. The increase from Mexico has been even steeper, nearly quadrupling from the '60s to the '90s and still rising. Overall, measured Latino immigration was 8.5 million between 1961 and 1996. By 1998 there were an estimated 30 million Latinos in the U.S., including several million illegals.

Like the Italians, Latinos have moved mostly to a few large metropolitan areas. The overwhelming majority of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans headed to New York City. The overwhelming majority of Cubans went to Miami or Hudson County, New Jersey. The large majority of Mexican-origin Latinos ended up in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and New York. In 1998, Latinos composed 31 percent of the total population in California, 30 percent in Texas, 15 percent in Florida, 14 percent in New York, 12 percent in New Jersey, and 10 percent in Illinois.

What America's Latinos do more than anything else is work. The work force participation rate of Hispanic males is 80 percent, above any other measured group. The flow has largely been into private sector jobs, and more into small than large firms, with little movement toward unionization. In 1994, Hispanic income per person was only 57 percent of the national average, but Hispanic household income was 73 percent of the U.S. average, thanks to multiple workers and multiple jobs.

Latinos work, most of all, for their families. A larger percentage of Latinos than of native-born whites live in father-mother-children families; the divorce rate among Latinos is significantly below average. Crime rates, though above the national average, are well below those of blacks.

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