The American Dream is still alive! Children of poor immigrants still beat US-born kids up the ladder – just as they did 100 years ago – but now Chinese and Indian migrants have replaced Italian and Irish as the most successful
Ran Abramitzky, Stanford University and Leah Boustan, Princeton University announce the findings of a new report:
“When large numbers of Italian immigrants came to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, they faced intense discrimination. But today, politicians from both the right and left have changed their tune, remembering Italians and other immigrants from Europe as dedicated members of American society who built the country, learned the language, and made it on their own.
Our understanding of how immigrants contribute to U.S. society is central to policymaking. But too often, that understanding is shaped not by hard evidence, but by pre-determined biases. This was true 100 years ago and remains true today.
For nearly ten years, we’ve been working on research that adds data to the debate. And now, in a new paper co-authored with Elisa Jácome of Princeton and Santiago Pérez of UC Davis, we use millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of U.S. history to show that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants from 100 years ago.
Both today and in the past, many immigrants earn less than U.S.-born workers upon first arrival and do not completely catch up in a single generation. But their children do. No matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers. What’s more, their rates of mobility today are strikingly similar to rates of mobility in the past.” (bold added).
The Daily Mail summarizes the fdindings of the report.
KJ