U.S. Immigration in the Twenty-First Century: Making Americans, Remaking America by Louis DeSipio & Rodolfo O. de la Garza

Author:Louis DeSipio & Rodolfo O. de la Garza [DeSipio, Louis & Garza, Rodolfo O. de la]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780813344737
Google: j0tWDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 13237618
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2014-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Settlement and the Interaction Between Immigrants and Minorities

Immigration to, and settlement in, the United States do not occur in a vacuum. From their first days in the United States, immigrants interact with other immigrants and with US-born populations, and reshape what it means to be American for all involved. The impact of immigrants is particularly strong among one segment of US society—minorities. We use the term minorities to mean US-born racial and ethnic minorities but also the US-born coethnics of contemporary immigrants.

There are tangible foundations for immigrant and minority interaction in US society—namely, geography, ethnicity, and class. Overwhelmingly, immigration since 1965 has been an urban phenomenon. Within cities, immigrants often live in specific neighborhoods, ones that tend to already be dominated by US-born minorities. Geographically, most immigrant populations often come into immediate contact with minority populations before they have sustained contact with nonminority natives. For example, an immigrant from Mexico will likely live around and work with both US-born citizens of Mexican ancestry and other Mexican immigrants. Finally, class dictates that immigrants and minorities interact. The majority of immigrants are at the lower end of the economic spectrum. Again, this puts them into contact with US-born minorities, particularly in the urban environment.

This contact is not just interpersonal. This interaction between immigrants and minorities offers insights into the way US society tries to address the public policy needs of disadvantaged groups. Immigrants’ class position dictates that they can benefit from policies designed to assist poorer US-born populations. As there is little explicit assistance from the society with settlement, these public policies become a de facto settlement policy. And similarly, though the needs of US-born minorities and immigrants are different, the public policies developed for immigrant populations often follow those developed for minorities. Society has not recognized the difference between minorities and immigrants; instead, it has extended to immigrants programs that were designed to assist minorities and to remedy past discrimination against minorities. Undeniably, immigrants have benefited from these programs in the short term, whereas the cost to minorities has not been great. Nevertheless, it does both populations a disservice: programs for minorities are diluted, and immigrant needs are not met with carefully crafted public policies.

During the same period that many social welfare programs emerged, the United States also developed group-based programs targeting groups that had experienced discrimination in the past. Initially designed to remedy past discrimination against African Americans, these programs—civil rights and voting rights protections, and affirmative action programs—were soon expanded to other minority populations that had also experienced discrimination in the past, including Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. These remedial programs are the exception in American political history, where policy had explicitly or, more often, implicitly benefited society’s dominant population. These remedial programs have been highly controversial and, at this writing, are being attacked in the courts and in legislatures.

Immigrants have come to benefit from these programs since their inception. An example is the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). In its initial form, the VRA sought to remove barriers to registration and voting experienced by African Americans.

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