Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [51]
The 2000 census found that the foreign-born poverty rate had fallen slightly, to 19.1 percent from 19.8 percent in 1990. Myers reports that this small decrease was not due to an influx of more prosperous immigrant groups, such as Asians. The disaggregated data show that poverty fell among Latinos and Asians alike. Nor can it be attributed to a temporary upturn in the economy, since the economic conditions measured in the 1990 and 2000 censuses were similar. Again using as his sample California, Myers found that poverty reversal was directly attributable to the maturing of California’s immigrant population. Longer-residing immigrants generally experience substantial improvements in poverty, but in the past those gains were overshadowed by the increasing numbers of newcomers. He explains: “Now that the longer-settled immigrants are beginning to outweigh the newcomers in number, the force of upward mobility is no longer being offset by the relatively high poverty of newcomers, and the total poverty rate of the foreign-born has turned around.”
Myers is hardly the only social scientist to notice Latino upward mobility, and California isn’t the only place it’s happening. In a definitive longitudinal study in the 1990s, sociologists Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut found substantial second-generation progress among Latinos in Miami and Fort Lauderdale as well. Nationwide cross-generational studies show the same results. In 2006, economist James Smith of the RAND Corporation found that successive generations of Latinos have experienced significant improvements in wages relative both to their fathers and grandfathers and to the native whites with whom they compete for jobs. And Roger Waldinger and Renee Reichl, two UCLA social scientists, found that while first-generation Mexican men earned just half as much as white natives in 2000, the second generation had upped their earnings to three-quarters of their Anglo counterparts.
Yes, Latino immigrants are trailing economically. That’s no surprise. In his book, Italians Then, Mexicans Now, economist Joel Perlmann says that earlier European immigrants “were at least as concentrated as the Mexicans of today in low-skill work, and at least as over-concentrated there relative to native whites—and this is also true if we restrict attention to those who are not working in agriculture. ” Perlmann is not convinced by those who claim that the income gap today between Mexicans and natives can’t be compared to the earlier European immigrant experience. Harvard’s Christopher Jencks, for example, has said that one reason “assimilation . . . proceeded quickly in the past was because the economic gap between immigrants and natives was far smaller than today’s folklore suggests. Most immigrants were poor, but so were most natives.”
Not so fast, says Perlmann. Jencks has oversimplified the historical record. Over time, wage inequality fluctuated for the millions of low-skill foreigners who arrived between the 1880s and the 1920s. Thanks to two world wars, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression, among other shocks to our labor markets, the economic well-being of immigrants varied from decade to decade. In 1910, European immigrants were averaging 50 percent to 60 percent of the native white mean wage. By 1920, their wages had risen, relative to natives, by about 10 percentage points, but by 1940 they were back to 1920 levels, only to rise again by 1950.
Large numbers of Mexicans began arriving in the 1970s, and Perlmann found that, contrary to Jencks’s implication, they did not start out as far below the native whites as did Southern and Eastern Europeans in 1910. “In terms of relative well-being,” says Perlmann, “the 1970 Mexicans were probably comparable to the 1920 [European immigrants]— notwithstanding (we should note in passing) that many of the Mexicans but virtually none of the [European immigrants] arrived as undocumented workers and that that status certainly takes a toll on wage prospects.”