On Immigrant Assimilation

I have been interviewed on the radio several times in recent weeks about my new book. A question that often comes up in some form is “why don’t immigrants assimilate like my immigrant ancestors did?”  Samuel Huntington has made this argument in his book Who Are We?  Similar charges were leveled at past immigrant groups including the Germans, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, southern and eastern Europeans, etc., etc.  Well, there is much evidence that immigrants in fact do assimilate into American society (despite the scarcity of ESL programs and long naturalization backlogs).  The Pew Hispanic Center provides the lastest piece of evidence of immigrant assimilation.  According to its latest study, nearly all Hispanic adults born in the United States of immigrant parents report they are fluent in English. By contrast, only a small minority of their parents describe themselves as skilled English speakers. This finding of a dramatic increase in English-language ability from one generation of Hispanics to the next emerges from a new analysis of six Pew Hispanic Center surveys conducted from 2002 to 2006 among a total of more than 14,000 Latino adults. The analysis finds that fewer than one-in-four (23%) Latino immigrants reports being able to speak English very well. However, fully 88% of their U.S.-born adult children report that they speak English very well. Among later generations of Hispanic adults, the figure rises to 94%. Reading ability in English shows a similar trend. The analysis also finds that English is spoken more commonly at work than at home. The report is available at the Pew Hispanic Center’s website, www.pewhispanic.org.

KJ