California Here We Come
Immigrants make it to the middle class.
Sunday, February 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
The immigration debate has long been the loudest in California, the destination of nearly one-third of foreign newcomers in the past 30 years. Where are they now? A study just out from the University of Southern California supplies an answer: in the middle class.
By looking at Census data going back to the 1960s, Dowell Myers and his team of demographers tracked the progress immigrants are making in the Golden State. They found that after about 10 years immigrants begin closing the economic gap with native-born Americans.
According to 1970 Census data, 17.7% of immigrants who arrived in California in the 1960s were living in poverty. Ten years later their poverty rate had dropped to 12.2%. By 1990 it had fallen to 9% and in 2000 it was 8.7%. This trend held true for immigrants who arrived in the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
Some groups do better, earlier, than others. In 1980, one out of five of the Asians who had arrived the previous decade were living in poverty (20.3%). But this group, a sizable number of whom were Vietnamese fleeing communist oppression after Saigon fell, raced up the capitalist ladder. By 1990, more than 90% had reached the ranks of the middle class, or even what John Kerry would call "the rich."
Mr. Myers also shows that immigrants are reaching the American dream of home ownership. Among Latinos who arrived in the 1960s, he found that 68.1% of those age 60 or older owned their own home by 2000. Younger Latinos own homes at a slightly lower rate--67.2% for those in their 50s and 61% for those in their 40s. California's overall homeownership rate is 56.9% and nationally it's 66.2%.
All of this is why, Mr. Myers argues, it is important to distinguish between new arrivals and those who've been here more than a decade. The longer an immigrant is here the more he contributes. "Earnings, homeownership and voting participation all rise markedly with growing length of settlement," the study concludes.
This hasn't been obvious in recent years for two reasons. First, the number of new immigrants in California doubled between 1980 and 1990. About 1.8 million came in the 1970s, compared with the 3.5 million who moved in in the '80s. Lumping the new arrivals in with established immigrants swamped the data and made it appear that the poverty rate for the entire immigrant community was increasing.
Second, a relatively high percentage of immigrants who arrived since the 1970s were poor. In 1980, the poverty rate for new arrivals was 24.7%; in 1990 it reached 27.5%. But they don't stay poor. The USC study finds that nearly 90% of those who've been here more than 20 years have made it to the middle class.
Restrictionists on the political right argue that immigrants are a net drain on government. But the implication of the Myers study is that this changes over time. The number of new immigrants arriving in California has leveled off over the past decade and the number who arrive poor has dipped. If those trends continue, then California will be collecting more in taxes from the immigrant community just as the percentage of immigrants who need government services is shrinking.
Arnold Schwarzenegger--himself an immigrant--is now leading a state where more than one out of every four residents was foreign-born. Far from being a burden, they are a revitalizing force. |
