Beyond Census 2000: As a Nation, We are the World
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Late 20th Century Immigration

After the passage of restrictive immigration laws in the 1920s, immigration dropped off sharply; and those who were allowed into the U.S. were primarily from northern and western European countries. These patterns began to shift in the 1960s when, influenced by the civil rights movement, new and more liberal immigration laws were enacted, including those based on the moral claim of family reunification and the humanitarian cause of admitting political refugees. Immigrants from Southeast Asia and, later, from Central America, who owed their refugee status to American military action, began arriving in large numbers. Additional changes in immigration law, responding, in part, to the need for farm labor and service workers, offered legal status to significant numbers of undocumented aliens. Under pressure from universities and technology companies, Congress also increased selected categories of employment-based immigration to encourage hi-tech workers to come to this country.

Taken together, these new criteria have massively shifted the routes of world immigration flowing into the U.S. In 1850, more than nine-out-of-ten foreign-born residents were from Europe, and this pattern held well into the 20th century. As late as 1960, Europeans still comprised three-out-of-every-four foreign-born Americans. But by 1997, more than half of the foreign-born cohort of the U.S. population was from Latin America and more than a quarter from Asia. Foreign-born Europeans have dropped to fewer than one-in-five and will soon be a tiny fraction of the foreign born.
It is these census numbers that give rise to the recent flood of media stories announcing that by mid-century, America will be a minority-majority nation. As convoluted—and misleading—as that phrase is, it still points to the fact that the U.S. is now more demographically diverse than ever in its history.

This, I suggest, is why the nation must yet again confront the questions, How can we live together? How can we live together justly?

An Uncertain Future

Census 2000 marks a demographic turning point. A radical change in how we count and sort by race is interacting with immigration patterns that are producing escalating diversity. Either of these two factors taken by itself has large and uncertain consequences.

For example:

• We rely upon local, state and federal government to lead the way in eliminating discrimination in areas such as education, employment, housing and health care; to protect voting rights; to stop racial profiling; and to safeguard our civil liberties in dozens of other ways. Equity in these areas, however, has often depended upon the use of statistical proportionality, a tool that is being weakened as racial groups are divided into more and more subcategories. What methodology will we use in its place?

• Until recently, the economy has been strong and unemployment low. Has this created a national optimism about the future that has outweighed the forces of nativistic politics, or has the concept of multiculturalism become so thoroughly entwined with our image of the U.S. that anti-immigration policies are now largely discredited? We may not know the answer to these questions until there is a significant economic downturn and increased competition for low-end employment opportunities.

• The nation’s often celebrated religious tolerance was originally based on differences within Protestantism, and only grudgingly extended to include Catholics and Jews. There are now swiftly growing numbers of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others. Will religious tolerance be easily extended, or will we repeat one of the darker chapters in our history?

• Historically, immigrants arrive from world regions that are poor or in turmoil. But with the advent of globalization and internationally interdependent economies, there are new reasons to emigrate and new needs on the part of the U.S. to welcome skilled immigrants. Might educated technology workers from more developed countries come to dominate immigration flows to the disadvantage of poorer workers from poorer countries? If so, there are implications not only for our economy but for the countries of origin which may educate and then lose their most skilled people.

• Americans of European ancestry are not reproducing at replacement levels; neither are the native populations of western European nations. If this trend continues, the competition among wealthier nations for foreign labor may be fierce; in the struggle to find workers to support growing economies, nations that are hospitable to immigrants will have an advantage. Under these conditions, might how we can live together turn out to be as much about gaining an economic edge as about social justice? There are any number of such issues, but as complicated as they are they do not begin to tell the whole story. What makes the future much more challenging is our uncertainty about the interaction between the two transformations discussed in this essay—the radical change in racial measurement and classification and the displacement of a European immigrant stream with one that is Asian and Latin. There is no historical reference point for this dynamic. For example:

• The pressure on previous immigrant groups was to assimilate, to become “American,” when that meant to accept that getting ahead depended on individual effort and merit—not group rights. Identity politics have now been put into the mix, primarily as a way to compensate for the fact that some groups, because of race or ethnicity, were denied the normal routes of upward mobility. Will new immigrants find that asserting group rights is an avenue to success, or will they assimilate in a manner that blurs rather than sharpens boundaries between different groups?

• More generally, as today’s new immigrants gain citizenship and become politically active, will they want more or less to focus on their separate identities? If the former, they will expect to find their own place in the racial and ethnic classification that has marked our politics for two centuries. And that classification will get more fine-grained and less usable. But if they seek to escape being measured as separate groups, they risk antagonizing other groups that still rely on statistical proportionality as a tool to redress earlier wrongs. For example, will new African immigrants from Somalia or Ghana want to be separately measured, not measured at all, or be included as African Americans?

  For such questions there is no crystal ball. We cannot know if the changes that are now inevitable will be marked by tolerance and social order or by turmoil and violence. History offers ample evidence for both possibilities, suggesting that we are likely to have some of each. How can we live together justly? is the question we again must ask.

  A century hence, historians will record of the early 21st century whether churches showed moral leadership or retreated to dogma; whether universities provided intellectual clarity or argued about disciplinary turf; whether civic organizations went boldly into new territory or hewed to the safe and familiar; whether businesses recognized the claims of social justice or saw only the next quarter’s earnings; whether foundations were visionary or irrelevant; whether the political class was courageous or succumbed to intimidation; and, mostly, whether the public demanded of itself and its leaders an honest go at figuring out how we can, in fact, live together—justly.

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