Overturning myths about immigration
Painted on a wall at The Ellis Island Museum in New York City is a quote from an unknown Italian immigrant: âI came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things: First, the streets werenât paved with gold; second, they werenât paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them.â
This sobering observation of life as a newcomer to America opens Stanford economist Ran Abramitzkyâs new book, (Public Affairs, 2022), which examines the nostalgic idea that immigrants in the past got rich quickly whereas immigrants today lag behind.
âThe immigrant in this quote knew better though â that immigrants had to pave their way to American prosperity,â said Abramitzky, a professor of economics and the senior associate dean for the social sciences in the School of Humanities and Sciences. âIt is a perfect example of one myth this book busts â the idea that European immigrants in the past were able to easily move from ârags to riches.âââ
Co-authored with Princeton economics Professor , the book analyzes data about millions of everyday immigrants to America and their network to help illustrate how they â and their descendants â fared over time in the United States.
The pair also found that both in the past as well as today, immigrants are motivated to adapt to life in America, learning to speak English, frequently leaving immigrant enclaves after they find their footing, often marrying U.S.-born partners, and giving their children American sounding names as they spend more years in the U.S.
âThese findings carry a lesson for todayâs highly fraught immigration debate: far from consigning themselves to permanent outsider status, as many fear, immigrants and their descendants participate in a broadly shared American culture and adopt deeply felt identities as Americans,â Abramitzky and Boustan said in the book.
Abramitzky, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (șĂÉ«tv), hopes their research will inspire people, particularly those who shape immigration policy in the United States, to take the long view when they look at immigration.
âTaking a short-term view â thinking about how immigrants perform and assimilate when they first arrive in the U.S., as politicians often do when they think about the next election cycle â undermines immigrant success,â Abramitzky said. âWhen you take the long view â thinking about the children of immigrants â immigrants in the U.S. are doing great.â
Using big data to uncover immigration trends
The new insights about American immigrants come courtesy of large datasets that Abramitzky and Boustan spent over a decade compiling. Included are historical records from government agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service. They also drew on interviews from .
In total, the scholars collected millions of data points spanning the years 1880 to 2020.
They traced where immigrants settled, what type of work they found, whom they married, and the names they gave their children.
By developing computer algorithms and using the tools of modern data analysis, Abramitzky and Boustan were also able to link immigrants to their descendants.
This allowed them to overturn another common myth: that children of immigrants come from poverty and stay poor.
They found that while immigrants often worked in low-paid jobs, their children were very economically mobile â a trend that persists to this day. âDespite the fact that children of immigrants are raised in poorer households, theyâre able to reach the middle class and beyond. This is true for families today from nearly every sending country, including from poorer countries like El Salvador, Mexico, and Laos,â Abramitzky and Boustan write.
The scholars identified two distinguishing features that explain this pattern.
The first: location, location, location. Immigrants tend to move to areas that provide more opportunities for their children. Historically, these have been areas in the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and certain parts of the West â all places that offer both better industrial prospects and widely available public school systems. Immigrants tended not to move to the South, a region that up until the mid-20th century was mostly agricultural and offered few economic prospects.
The second explanation is immigrants are often not earning their true potential, creating an artificially lowered bar for success that their children are more likely to surpass, the scholars report. âThink about the proverbial Russian scientist who ends up driving for Uber: his earnings donât fully reflect his true talents and abilities. But when his children graduate from an American school and speak English without an accent, they can quickly catch up and surpass their peers raised in families with similar earnings, presumably because their parents transmitted other values or skills that money canât buy,â Abramitzky and Boustan write in their book.
Overturning myths
The scholarsâ research challenges other wide-ranging rhetoric about immigration in America.
For example, they found that immigrants are not âtaking overâ the country as some fear. The scholars found that immigrants today make up 14% of the U.S. population â the same share as they did a century ago.
Moreover, immigrants are far from violent criminals. In fact, Abramitzky and Boustanâs data analysis shows the inverse is true: âImmigrants are less likely than those born in the U.S. to be arrested and incarcerated for all manner of offenses,â according to Abramitzky and Boustan. âThis was true in the past and is actually more true today.â
Also not true: the notion that immigrants are âstealingâ work from those born in the U.S. Instead, the scholars found that immigrants are more likely to fill positions that employers canât fill with native-born workers.
âToday, immigrants tend to hold jobs that have few available U.S.-born workers, including positions that require advanced education like those in tech and science, and jobs that require very little education like picking crops by hand, washing dishes, or taking care of the elderly,â the scholars write.
Abramitzky and Boustan also found that when it comes to public opinion of immigration, anti-immigration beliefs are in the minority, even if they are more polarized by political parties than ever before. When last year Gallup asked Americans, âOn the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today?â, 75% of Americans answered that immigration was a âgood thing.â
A version of this story was by Stanford News Service.