In the paper “Assessing Immigrant Assimilation”, Waters and Jimenez analyze the issue of whether new immigrants are assimilating into the American society. There are mainly four factors used to approach this analysis: socioeconomic status, spatial concentration, language assimilation and intermarriage.

• Socioeconomic status: they conclude that the generations of new immigrants achieve earning parity with their native born co-workers. Indeed, some new immigrant groups do better in school than certain native-born groups
• Spatial concentration: immigrants still settle in the major known immigrant cities like New York and Los Angeles, but there is also “New immigrant gateways” which are areas in which new immigrants are increasingly  starting to occupy. In these areas, mainly in the Midwest and the South, something really interesting is happening: because they were never places chosen by immigrants as destinations, they were quite unprepared to socially welcome immigrants. But despite this unpreparedness, immigrants still seem to be integrated very well, proving once again that the United States is a very successful country in terms of immigrant integration.
• Linguistic pattern: They found that a very small minority of people (~10%) coming from non-English speaking countries does not speak English, so immigration is very much associated with being bilingual (one language being English).
• Intermarriage: Waters and Jimenez found that there are higher rates of intermarriage between Whites and Latinos than of marriage between Whites and Blacks. Also, this successful immigrant integration aspect is proven in the article by Berger (“The World in a CIty”) about the Brooklyn neighborhood (Distmas Park) that was full of couples composed by partners of extremely different backgrounds.

The conclusion of Waters and Jimenez is that the United States is a very successful country in integrating new immigrants, although it might not seem so true because of immigrant replenishment (that is, the fact that there are constantly new immigrants coming in making it seem like there is never any progress, because integrated immigrants fall in the background).

Sara Camnasio