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« Back to Will Immigration Change the American Way? main page    Transcript for: Will Immigration Change the American Way?Think Tank Transcripts: Immigration MR. WATTENBERG: A new wave of immigrants is coming to America. Arethey taking American jobs? Are they eroding American traditionalculture? Or do the new immigrants bring economic growth and strongvalues, helping to create the first universal nation? Joining us to sort through the conflict and the consensus aresociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard University, co-author of 'Beyondthe Melting Pot,'; and editor of 'Clamor at the Gates: The NewAmerican Immigration'; Francis Fukuyama of the Rand Corporation,author of 'The End of History and the Last Man'; Jeffrey Passel ofthe Urban Institute, co-author of a new report, 'Immigration andImmigrants: Setting the Record Straight'; and Michael Lind of theNational Interest and author of the forthcoming book, 'The NextAmerican Nation.' The question before the house, will immigration change theAmerican way of life? This week on 'Think Tank.' An old joke has it that when the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock,they looked over their shoulders at the second boat load andsaid,'Uh-oh, there goes the neighborhood.' Well, the great migrationof the 1900s raised many similar complaints. Opponents of immigration then said that the new arrivals pouringthrough Ellis Island were uneducated and low skilled. Their religiousbeliefs and customs were strange. They congregated in inner cityghettos and they hardly spoke English. Yet over time, most of themand their offspring prospered. Well, there are similar problems today, especially with illegalimmigrants. Many immigrants are prospering, but others, as of yore,are low-skilled, live in troubled inner cities, and speak Englishpoorly. All told, about 300,000 illegal immigrants, many from LatinAmerica, move to the U.S. each year. Stopping the tide of illegalshas become a leading political issue in California and Florida, andis a growing concern across the country. Some critics say let's even cut back legal immigration. What's thesituation? Today America is letting in about as many immigrants as wedid during the early 1900s, about one million per year. But look atthis. The rate of immigration, that is, the number of newcomersrelative to the whole population, is much smaller today than it wasback then. In 1900, there were 10 new immigrants for every 1,000 Americanresidents. Today that rate is not 10, but 3 per thousand. And thereis another big difference, the makeup of the pool of immigrants. In1900, 85 percent of immigrants came from Europe. Today it's onlyabout 15 percent. The rest come principally from Asia and LatinAmerica. Now, this has long-range implications. In 1990, 76 percent ofAmericans were non Hispanic whites, so called Anglos. Twelve percentwere black and 12 percent were Asian or Hispanic. But if currentimmigration trends continue-- and that is a big if--50 years fromnow, barely half of America will be Anglo. Some fear that the diverse ethnic makeup of the new Americans iscontributing to the unraveling of America's European heritage. Professor Nathan Glazer, you have seen these numbers. Are we goingfrom a nation of predominantly European descent to a more universalpopulation? MR. GLAZER: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: Is that good? MR. GLAZER: I don't know that one can say it's either good or bad.It's I think the United States has a great capacity to incorporatepeople. I think it thinks of them as different when they first come,and over time, as they change or assimilate or move upoccupationally, it thinks of them as less and less different. Asiangroups are less different than they used to be. Jewish groups are sodifferent from what they used to be, they're now considered theexploiters by other minorities, at least one of the minorities. So groups change. At the same time, I don't think one can betotally placid about this process because the changes are not easyand the changes are demanding. And there is a question of whether onewants to undergo that strain if one has a choice not to. MR. WATTENBERG: Nat, you have described yourself as a moderaterestrictionist. MR. GLAZER: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: Why? MR. GLAZER: Because I think the transitional course has not beenchosen by us, for the most part, but been imposed on us by choices ofother peoples, other governments, making the lives of theircountrymen difficult or impossible. And the question is MR. WATTENBERG: And hence that gives us a push from thosecountries MR. GLAZER: That's right. MR. WATTENBERG: And we receive them here, either legally orillegally. MR. GLAZER: Yeah, and to question what our obligation is. I mean Iaccept obligations. I accept obligations for refugees, politicalasylum seekers, and so on. The question is how much. MR. WATTENBERG: Now, Frank Fukuyama, you are not a moderaterestrictionist, I gather? MR. FUKUYAMA: No. I think that in the first place, that doesn'ttake into account a lot of the benefits that immigrants bring to thecountry. At the high end, you look at Silicon Valley, there aresomething like 12,000 engineers of Chinese origin that, you know,have added measurably to the wealth of the country. I mean, you walk around an elite higher educational institution,and you see that immigration has had a very large and I think a verypositive effect. You know, if we could go back to your earlier question on whetherthe non-European character of the country&emdash;You know, it seemsto me that much less important than whether it's the basicallyEuropean--ethnically European country is whether it has a singleculture, whether there is an American culture that Americans share, acommon language in which they can speak, and a common set of valuesby which these diverse communities can relate to each other insomething other than a purely legal sense. And so, to my mind, the issue is really much less immigration perse as what happens to the immigrants once they get there and whether,you know, we still believe in assimilation as the ultimate goal. Andthe only thing that troubles me about the current immigrationcompared to that that occurred at the turn of the century is that ourbelief in assimilation is really we don't believe in it in the waythat we once did. MR. WATTENBERG: Michael Lind, where do you come out on this one? MR. LIND: I come out with Nat as a moderate restrictionist foreconomic reasons, but I agree entirely with Frank when it comes tothe question of whether America is or is not a European culture. Thefact is that for 300 years, there has been in the making in NorthAmerica a unique American culture which is in fact a melting potculture of contributions from various races. And when you look at cuisine, when you look at music, when youlook at the vernacular culture of the modern United States, it is aracial melting pot. It has elements from Africans, from AmericanIndians, from Hispanics, as well as from Europeans. Now, what we see happening today and what will continue in the21st century is that the concept of American ethnicity is catching upto what for a very long time has already been a melting pot culture.One of the charts that you showed I thought was rather misleading,the projection of U.S. population in 2050, because it assumes thatthese categories of white, Hispanic, Asian, and so on, are going tostay fixed for the next 50 or 60 years. What we see are extraordinary intermarriage rates, and what Ibelieve will happen, regardless of the rate of immigration, even ifwe end it tomorrow, will be the emergence of a new, mixed race,mestizo or mulatto population to catch up to what for centuries hasalready been a mestizo or mulatto culture. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me just ask Jeffrey Passel one question. Thecase has been made that immigrants hurt the economy. You have justedited a wonderful compendium of data reviewing all the literature.What do immigrants do to the American economy? Let's see if we canjust nail that one down. MR. PASSEL: Well, it's very difficult when you look at this tofind strong negative impacts. Immigrants contribute substantially tojob growth, and we've seen that at different points in our historyand at different points throughout the United States. MR. LIND: But don't you have to look at something besides justjobs? You have to look at the effect of an ever-growing labor pool,especially at the lower end of the market, on wages. MR. PASSEL: There does seem to be some effect on wages. Thereseems to be very little effect on employment at all. MR. GLAZER: I wanted to come back to a larger question, say, interms of the moderate restrictionist position, and so on. I dobelieve that American culture, despite the fact that assimilation hasbecome a dirty word and Americanization has become an even dirtierword, works its way. I do believe a common American culture is made,and it's made with groups of all races and creeds, and so on. So I'm not worried an internal clash of civilizations--perhaps oneshould be--or the changing color or racial character of America. Sotherefore I'm on Francis' side in that. I am thinking of short term effects which themselves are dynamic.Short term effects, for example, might mean a very stronganti-immigration sentiment, the rise of a mass restrictionism. Youthink of the impact on southern Florida, and so on. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me break in for a minute. I wanted to readvery quickly a statement which would represent not the moderaterestrictionist point of view, but the real restrictionist point ofview. And I'll do it quickly. 'There is, after all, an American story that is primarily a sagaof enterprising men and women who came here from Europe. The languageand culture, as well as the legal and political systems, were derivedfrom Britain. This way of life of ours is not the result of anygeneral principles. It is the legacy of our forbearers and acivilization that goes back to Greece and Rome. 'It is vastly creative and has shown enormous capacity fortransforming immigrants from somewhat differing cultures. Thiscapacity, however, is not infinite, and a United States dominated bythird world immigrants would be a very different nation in itscultural and its economic life.' My question is this. There is a building political furor. Frank,would there be this furor if the people coming in were whites? MR. FUKUYAMA: Well, I'm sure that there wouldn't be the kind ofresentment. But I think that you have to, you know, disaggregatethese groups. I mean, the white European groups that came at the turnof the century, you know, Italians and Poles and Jews, and so forth,were regarded by the Anglo-Saxons that had been there earlier as toodiverse or not sharing the same culture. And similarly, the third world is a very large place, and thereare actually many third world societies that have a number of socialand communal virtues that actually dovetail, I think, quite well withthese traditional Anglo Saxon ones. MR. WATTENBERG: You have made the point that many of the newimmigrants coming in--and I know there is some data to back itup--are more proud of America, more patriotic, more signed on to theideals of America, send their sons and daughters into the military athigher ratios than, quote, regular Americans, native born Americans.So you would say, I assume, right on. MR. FUKUYAMA: Well, yeah, there is that. There is also thequestion of, let's say, family values, which has been very much onpeople's minds. I think if you look at many of the immigrant groupscoming in, they actually have in many ways stronger family valuesthan do whites, you know, Americans that have been here forgenerations. MR. WATTENBERG: Michael, would you be as concerned about thissituation if the people coming in were white Europeans? MR. LIND: I think for economic reasons, yes. If you look atWestern Europe today MR. WATTENBERG: But the economic differences are so small. I mean,there are so many--everybody's tossing the studies around at eachother and you're talking about a thousand dollars here, a thousanddollars there. The serious question is, what kind of country are wegoing to be? MR. LIND: No, Ben, there are two questions. The economic questionis the concentrated impact of immigration, white or non-white, on themost low-level members of society. Now, the cultural question, which is the one that the Flemingquote raises, is one that needs to be addressed in reference tosomething that we haven't even brought up yet. And that is the factthat immigrants are migrating to a country which since the 1960s hashad an affirmative action, multicultural legal system in whichAmerican citizens are classified into official, bureaucraticallydefined racial groups for purposes of differential benefits. MR. WATTENBERG: So you think immigration is driving thismulticultural phenomenon? MR. LIND: I think that multiculturalism is driven primarily by thedomestic system of affirmative action that we created in the 1960s.The danger is not what a lot of conservatives fear, thatmulticulturalism will lead to the Balkanization of America becausethe immigrants will not assimilate to common culture. The danger isthat they will reinforce this domestic affirmative action which wascreated initially to help out black Americans. The danger, in other words, is not that Chinese and Mexicanimmigrants will not have grandchildren who are not Americans, butthat they will have grandchildren who pretend to be Chinese andpretend to be Mexican in order to benefit from affirmative action. MR. WATTENBERG: The interesting thing is, so often in thisargument about multiculturalism, people say, oh, immigrants aredriving multiculturalism, immigrants this, immigrants that. Thebiggest single problem in that area, if you accept that it is aproblem is coming from the black community. And if I have to guess,the typical American black has roots in this country longer thananyone on this panel. And so that phenomenon of multiculturalism does not seem to me tobe immigrant driven. That's an internal problem that you haveidentified. MR. GLAZER: Right, right. But isn't, though, the key questionisn't there an issue about how large immigration affects the greatAmerican problem, the problem of American blacks? And it could affectit in a lot of ways, not only in the narrow econometric ways, but inthe way, for example, since it's not a possibility, that we don'thave to pay attention to it. MR. WATTENBERG: That we don't have to pay attention to blacks. MR. GLAZER: The employer who finds low income blacks difficult towork with or unsatisfactory for his manufacturing can employMexicans. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask another question. One little speech, ifI might. In the early part of the century, there was a book writtenby a play written by a man named Israel Zangweld (ph), called 'TheMelting Pot.' I believe it was a best selling book, I guess, and aplay. It was President Teddy Roosevelt's favorite book. And everybodysaid, wasn't it wonderful, we were all going to become sort of onehappy family. There's a quote where the hero, David, at the end of it says, 'Weare breeding a new race of men here.'; And he continues, 'We aregoing to be supermen.'; He uses that phrase long before Hitler andother people used it. He says,'We are going to be a super race.' The rate of intermarriage among these various groups that we aretalking about--among Asians, I think about a third are nowout-marrying, and just one generation ago, it was about half that.Hispanics, about a third are out-marrying, twice the rate it was. Among the European groups, Jews used to be five percentout-marrying. Now it's 50. Italians, Irish, Poles 80 percent outmarrying. So is it possible that we have all these wonderful chartsthat we use, but that we are really creating something that has neverhappened before, which is, to coin a phrase from a book that I wrote,'a first universal nation'? MR. GLAZER: Isn't the real challenge to Ben's vision of the'universal nation' American blacks, after all whose intermarriagerates is more like, I don't know MR. LIND: Four percent, I think. MR. GLAZER: Four percent, doubled from two percent. MR. LIND: It has actually gone up by a factor of four or five inthe last 20 years. MR. GLAZER: Black intermarriage is going up very rapidly,particularly in the West. I saw some data that 15 percent of blackmales in California are intermarrying. MR. WATTENBERG: Are out-marrying. MR. LIND: And for the immigrants, with time in the country,generations in the country, the rates go up substantially, so thathalf or more of native Hispanics and native Asians are intermarrying. MR. PASSEL: The biological question in a way is less importantthan the cultural question. I mean you can be, you know, a quarterblack, as many people considered black in this country are, and stillbelieve that you have a very distinct and separate culture and feelmany resentments and, you know, hurts from the dominant society,regardless of what your genetic makeup is. And I think it's a matter of consciousness rather than MR. GLAZER: You're right about MR. WATTENBERG: Is there--let me ask this. Is there a sense, doyou have a sense that your America is being stolen from you? MR. LIND: No. No. MR. WATTENBERG: Suppose in this room a hundred years from now,instead of having 76 percent of the population in America of Europeandescent, 76 percent of this population were of non European descent.Would you feel that this nation has been stolen? Or is it not alegitimate question for people who grew up in such a country to say,look, we have some rights about I mean, I am an anti restrictionist,but it's not an you've pointed out, it's not an unclean argument. MR. LIND: Look, it's legitimate when you insist that immigrantsassimilate to your language, your customs and your values. Now, if inthe year 2100 most Americans are primarily of Hispanic or African orChinese descent so they look different from white Americans, but theyspeak our language, they have inherited our political traditions, ourvernacular culture, our holidays, then they are my people,notwithstanding the fact that I'm of European descent, in the sameway that Europeans, who may be genetic relatives of mine, are not mypeople. MR. GLAZER: Now, I'm on Francis' side on that. I'm sorry we don'thave someone who doesn't feel the sense of loss. I think the sense ofloss you can feel in south Florida, where simply a way of life haschanged. Inevitably, it had to change, and you might say changedbecause of growth. Or in southern California, you feel that. MR. WATTENBERG: If 75 percent of Americans, Nat Glazer, were ofnon European descent, would you be disappointed and unhappy? MR. GLAZER: No. I think I would agree with Michael on our culture.But I would say MR. WATTENBERG: But most Americans would be. MR. GLAZER: A lot of people are not necessarily of ordinarilynativist narrow mindedness do feel the sense of loss. They feel it inNew York. They lost a real different city, with 30 percent--we're upto 30 percent foreign-born and MR. LIND: But isn't the fact that they're hearing foreignlanguages? MR. GLAZER: What? MR. LIND: It's not that people look different. It's that theydon't understand what's being said around them. MR. GLAZER: That's right. MR. WATTENBERG: Your data says that immigrants are learningEnglish as well as they ever did. MR. PASSEL: We have to keep in mind the difference between thelong term process and the immediate future. Right now we're at thecrest of this wave, or we're at a point where almost half theimmigrants recently arrived in this country. And that's not going tolast. I think, though, that the concentration is a real concern, andthat is driving a lot of the debate. The impact is very localized andwith the structure of revenues, fiscal federalism in this country,we're seeing impact on local areas that they're having trouble with. MR. GLAZER: Your point is that immigrants on a budgetary basis aregood for the federal government, sort of varied for the stategovernment, and hurt the local MR. PASSEL: That's right. The majority of revenues that flow fromimmigrants go to the federal government, but the impact on servicesis felt by and large at the local level. The schools thing MR. GLAZER: Which is why when you see a gubernatorial race inCalifornia, Pete Wilson has suddenly made this a great big issue. MR. WATTENBERG: Frank, I want to ask you a question. You have madethe case that the Asian immigrants particularly are doing so well.And as I recall, it's going back to some of the principles ofConfucianism and everything as to why they're so disciplined andorderly, and so on and so forth. Why, if that is true, did so many of the countries in Asia for somany centuries and millennia, same culture, turn out to bepoverty-stricken? With all those wonderful values, they didn't makeit at home. They came here, all the overseas Chinese, and they gogangbusters. What is--how does that stand? MR. FUKUYAMA: Well, it's the United States. I mean it's not theConfucian culture per se. It's the synergy that happens when some ofthese traditional cultures meet the liberating influence of a liberalpolitical system and a liberal economy, where they have opportunitiesthat simply didn't exist back in, you know, traditional China or apast stratified India. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask one final brief question. What do youall as a panel agree upon and what do you disagree about? MR. GLAZER: I think we all agree on the assimilatory power ofAmerican society regardless of culture trends, that we agree on that. What we disagree upon is the value of trying to restrict thenumbers of that element of immigration that we don't think is animmediate contribution to economic growth and that will requireconsiderable cost in terms of adaptation, assimilation, and so on. MR. LIND: I agree with Nat's summary of our agreement. MR. WATTENBERG: And what do we disagree about? MR. LIND: I think we're disagreeing on the economic impact ofimmigration. And I do think there is a disagreement on whether thisis primarily fueled by racial or ethnic prejudice. MR. PASSEL: Yes. Our work at the Urban Institute suggests that alot of the negative impacts that we hear about when we talk aboutimmigration come from the illegal component and not the legalcomponent, so that restricting legal immigration is not going to doanything about some of these negative impacts. MR. WATTENBERG: Frank? MR. FUKUYAMA: Well, I guess this breaks the general agreement. Imean I am not nearly as confident as you in this Americanassimilation machine. I mean I think we really do have something toworry about because the multicultural ideology, I think, is verystrong today. And it's something we're doing to ourselves. It doesnot necessarily have to be. And I think that that's really MR. GLAZER: Not because of the immigrants. Because of what we havebecome as a nation. MR. FUKUYAMA: That's right. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you, Professor Glazer, Mr. Lind, Drs.Passel and Fukuyama. And thank you. For 'Think Tank', I'm BenWattenberg. 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