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May-June 2007
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Cover Article
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Alison Wright / Corbis |
Seven Mexican immigrant children inside an old mobile home, where they live with their single mother in Mission, Texas |
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, primarily from Mexico, have followed the Montes family’s path to Gainesville and similar destinations across the South, drawn by an abundance of low-skill jobs and the relative safety of small-town life. Their numbers have transformed the demographics of communities that have known little ethnic diversity aside from the black-white divide. From 1990 to 2005, the number of Hispanics living legally or illegally in southern states quadrupled, jumping to 2.4 million from 562,663, according to an analysis of census data conducted by the sociology department of Queens College of the City University of New York. Nationwide, the Hispanic population nearly doubled during this period, going from 23 million to 43 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (Although “Hispanic” is the term used more often in academic literature and in the eastern United States, “Latino” is preferred in the West.)
In Gainesville, where immigrant labor has reinvigorated the poultry-processing industry, nearly 30 percent of the 30,000 inhabitants today are foreign-born Mexicans. The speed of change has strained public resources and stoked native resentment, threatening the goodwill that greeted earlier newcomers like the Montes family. Letters published in local newspapers accuse immigrants of “taking over”—of burdening schools and welfare agencies, lowering wages, spreading crime, and “refusing to learn English.”
The conflicts simmering in Gainesville and elsewhere across the nation raise questions about the United States as an immigrant society. Will the current tide of poor, low-skilled Hispanic labor migrants (legal or not) gradually blend into the American mainstream like their European predecessors? Or will they remain a growing but segregated population, marginalized by race, class, language, and culture? Has this country’s capacity to absorb the most vulnerable foreigners diminished during the past 50 years, or are we simply witnessing the pains of transition to a new stage of American diversity? The research so far by Harvard scholars studying immigration offers reasons for hope and concern in almost equal measure.
Writing in the North American Review in 1891, Henry Cabot Lodge, A.B. 1871, then a Republican congressman from Massachusetts, warned that “immigration to this country is making its greatest relative increase from races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races.” Lodge was referring chiefly to Italians—but also to Poles, Russians, and Hungarians—who, in his words, “represent the rudest form of labor” and “reduce the rate of wages by ruinous competition.” He concluded, “These are people whom it is very difficult to assimilate and [who] do not promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States.”
Between 1891 and 1920, an estimated 18 million immigrants, primarily from southern and eastern Europe, arrived in the United States with hopes for a better life. (Chinese immigration to the United States had largely ceased after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; exclusion policies against Japanese began in 1900.) The majority were poor, non-English-speaking peasants who had only a few years of schooling. Their “invasion” of the country’s industrializing cities provoked widespread fears of social disorder and cultural pollution. Yet less than a century later, the descendants of these groups had become virtually indistinguishable from their fellow white Americans—those of Irish, German, and Anglo-Saxon stock. The successful Americanization of the “new ethnics,” as they were known in the mid-twentieth century, marked the defining achievement of the melting pot ideal and provided a standard for evaluating future immigrant groups.
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