It is very interesting to me that more and more immigrants are now moving to the suburbs and the Midwest instead of to big cities. I would think that immigrants would want to live in places where there are people already established from their culture. But because of the high costs of living in the city, it seems that immigrants need to find a cheaper alternative. Also, because of the improvement of transportation over the past a hundred years, immigrants no longer need to be directly in the city to make their livelihood. This was not the same in the 1900s where the immigrants were pretty much forced into the cramped urban areas, and now immigrants can commute from the suburbs to their jobs in the city.

There are definitely some benefits to more immigrants moving to the Midwest. Firstly because there are limited facilities such as schools, etc. the natives are sort of forced to interact with the immigrant population. The Midwest still lacks a lot of diversity, so this influx of immigrants is just what the Midwest needs. However, there are also cons of immigrants moving. The native Midwesterners are not always so accepting of immigrants, and the immigratns face racism and prejudice.

Finally, it was interesting to learn how assimilation is measured. The four factors are socioeconomic status, language assimilation, spatial concentration, and intermarriage with intermarriage being the ultimate test of true assimilation.

Waters and Jimenez focus mainly on the influx of immigration towards the Southern and Mid-Western states. One of the reasons proposed for this path that immigrants choose (to new gateways instead of established gateways) is that the different institutional arrangements will influence the immigrant assimilation. It’s interesting to see how having one high school, one YMCA, one college and so on, will force the immigrants and the native-borns to interact with each other. I wonder if there was any hostility or any attempt to drive the immigrants out of the town in Garden City, where Jimenez conducted the research.

It’s also true that with each generation, it becomes harder for immigrants to speak their native tongue. Even though my parents and siblings can speak Chinese, I can’t speak it; I can only understand. My parents had shown their frustration towards me by putting me in various Chinese tutoring schools when I was younger, but somehow I was never able to speak it. Both my parents and siblings, on the other hand, can speak and understand Mandarin and Cantonese fluently. It really is disheartening because I know that if I have kids, they won’t be able to speak Chinese as well because I won’t be able to teach them.

In their article on immigrant assimilation, Waters and Jimenez highlight the recent trend of immigrants to settle in Midwestern states and in the suburbs, the so-called “new immigrant gateways”, away from the higher cost of living in cities in which immigrants of earlier centuries were forced to live if they were to have any hope of having jobs. Transportation in the U.S. has come very far in the past several decades, allowing for those who work in the city to live on its outskirts, where it is cheaper, without having to give up having a satisfactory job. Living in a metropolis is no longer central to immigrant success in the U.S. This can be seen in New York, where many commute to work from New Jersey, Westchester, and other relatively rural parts. Hence, the observation that California and New York are seeing a smaller influx of immigrants was not at all surprising. Having immigrated here with my family, I can attest to how expensive life in New York can seem (not that I’m saying that it’s at all cheap to live here even when you’re more established) when you don’t have much money in your pocket, and our being able to settle in Brooklyn with the knowledge that commuting to work wouldn’t be a problem for my parents, was truly important.

Waters and Jimenez’s observation that first generation immigrants speak their native language, second generation immigrants are bilingual and third generation immigrants speak the language of the country they were born in is unfortunate, for much culture is lost with the loss of the language. I can once again attest to this, as my cousin grew up on mostly American cartoons and books, rather than a mix of Russian and American, and this is reflected in her values and habits, especially when compared to mine. The mention of intermarriage as the ultimate indication of a completion of mixing of cultures and races is a very interesting point, and I agree that it carries importance in the melting together of heavily diverse cultures. However, I think that many other criteria and factors must be accounted for when considering how mixed an area has become and intermarriage doesn’t stand out as being much more important than language assimilation.

Waters and Jiminez

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

I like that this article brings up the issue of all types of immigrants being discussed together when talking about them. Meaning, there are lots of different backgrounds the immigrants come from, as well as their different statuses in their home country, and all those differences mean that immigrants will not all have the same experiences when they arrive in the United States. Also, this is the first time I heard of the 1.5 generation – generation of immigrants who arrive before the age 13. It makes sense to have that as a term since children so young are likely to have a different immigrant experience than those who come to the US as adults and have to work right away instead of getting an American education.
It is surprising to me that third generation Mexicans show a decline in education comparing to their parents, especially since the children of immigrants showed an increase in levels of education. I would want to know more about this and see which factors influence the decline.
I am also surprised to hear that large number of immigrants now settle in the suburban areas, comparing to immigrants in the past. I wonder how the job market must have changed to start attracting immigrants to suburban areas.

It is curious that the longer people are in the US and the more their socioeconomic status increases, the more they move away from their ethnic group. That feels a bit unexpected because one might think people would grow to have stronger bonds with their own people during their immigrantion experience. Since people of the same ethnic group likely provided networking and support, one would think that the immigrants would stick to that group throughout their lives. It does makes sense though that children would move away from the ethnic group because if they grow up in the United States, they are more American than anything else.