THE NATIONAL CENTER ON IMMIGRANT INTEGRATION POLICY Securing the Future US Immigrant Integration Policy A Reader Edited by Michael Fix MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE © 2007, Migration Policy Institute. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without prior permission, in writing, from the Migration Policy Institute. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. 10-digit ISBN: 0-9742819-9-9 13-digit ISBN: 978-0-9742819-9-5 Design: Patricia Hord.Graphik Design, www.phgd.com Table of Contents Introduction Doris Meissner page i Chapter 1 page iii Immigrant Integration and Comprehensive Immigration Reform: An Overview Michael Fix Part I: Defining the Integration Vision Chapter 2 page 1 Immigrant Integration — The American Experience Tamar Jacoby Chapter 3 page 11 From Immigrant to Citizen Janet Murguía and Cecilia Muñoz Chapter 4 page 17 Today’s Second Generation: Getting Ahead or Falling Behind? Roger Waldinger and Renee Reichl Part II: The Current State of Rights and Services Chapter 5 page 45 Immigrant Rights, Integration, and the Common Good Donald Kerwin Chapter 6 page 61 Federal Spending on the Immigrant Families’ Integration Julia Gelatt and Michael Fix Part III: Key Policy Issues Chapter 7 page 83 Access to Health Care and Health Insurance: Immigrants and Immigration Reform Leighton Ku and Demetrios G. Papademetriou Chapter 8 page 107 Improving Immigrant Workers’ Economic Prospects: A Review of the Literature Amy Beeler and Julie Murray Chapter 9 page 125 Educating the Children of Immigrants Julie Murray, Jeanne Batalova, and Michael Fix Chapter 10 page 153 Designing an Impact Aid Program for Immigrant Settlement Deborah L. Garvey Appendix I page 165 Major Legislative Milestones in US Immigration History Appendix II page 167 Access to Health Care after Immigration Reform: Lessons from New York Adam Gurvitch Appendix III page 183 New Americans: Selected Facts on Naturalization and Birthright Citizenship Mary Helen Ybarra Johnson, Michael Fix, and Julie Murray About the Editor and Contributors page 188 About the Migration Policy Institute page 189 Introduction ur nation’s immigration policies and debates have traditionally been concerned almost entirely with questions of who, how many, and what Okinds of immigrants should be admitted to the country. Immigration laws specify in great detail procedures and prohibitions governing admissions of immigrants. In contrast, although immigrant integration is the ultimate test of whether immigration succeeds, integration policies are skeletal, ad hoc, and under-funded. Immigrant integration has historically occurred at the local level, primarily through the efforts of families, employers, schools, churches, and communities in the context of a growing economy and legal structure that upholds basic rights for all “persons” in the country. This model — with its minimum of engagement by government and society at large — has proven to be successful and distinct in character from that of any other nation. Thus, the admonition against fixing what isn’t broken should be a guiding principle in examining the issues underlying immigrant integration. At the same time, the United States is experiencing a period of sustained, large-scale immigration, akin to that of the early years of the last century. Today’s immigration constitutes a critical national asset if it is effectively man- aged, a challenge that includes the successful integration of large numbers of newcomers. This volume provides a broad look at what is working and at what must be done to assure that an enduring, familiar American story again has a happy ending. The origins of the volume reside in the work of the Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, a distinguished group of leaders convened by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) working with Manhattan Institute (MI) and the Division of United States Studies and the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWIC). The purpose of the Task Force was to analyze the economic, social, and demographic factors driving today’s immigration and propose policies that harness its advantages and minimize its tensions. MPI developed and commissioned extensive research, analyses, and policy assessments to help inform discussion and stimulate debate among members at I ntroduction i their meetings. Those background materials were then published to contribute sound information to an often heated public dialogue on immigration policy during the past year. The background work on immigrant integration that was prepared for the Task Force has been collected in this single volume. Although different in character because of the purpose for which they were originally prepared, taken together, the pieces paint a vivid portrait of key trends, policy questions, funding gaps, and challenges the nation faces in the least explored and ultimately most important element of immigration policy — immigrant integration. We believe that this scan of the fundamentals of immigrant integration provides a useful primer on issues that are an essential dimension of effective immigra- tion policymaking. Doris Meissner Senior Fellow Director of the Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future December 2006 ii S ecuring the Future: US Immigrant Integration Policy CHAPTER 1 Immigrant Integration and Comprehensive Immigration Reform: An Overview MICHAEL FIX his chapter synthesizes the set of papers devoted to integration issues that were initially collected for the Task Force on Immigration and TAmerica’s Future. The chapter begins by discussing why integration needs to be made more central to debates over immigration reform. It then seeks to define what is meant by the term integration and to draw the broad contours of US integration policy. The chapter proceeds with a review of the evidence of immigrants’ integration, examining the second generation’s progress, and then focusing more narrowly on trends in education, health, the workforce, and citizenship. The chapter concludes by briefly discussing key ele- ments of a national integration policy, noting several issues raised directly by congressional comprehensive immigration reform proposals. These include health care coverage for temporary workers and legal immigrants and the mer- its of providing impact aid to state and local governments. I. Immigrant Integration: Why Should We Care? An Afterthought There are a number of strong reasons to link discussions of immigration and integration. The integration of immigrants remains an afterthought in immi- gration policy discussions; in fact, integration remains one of the most over- looked issues in American governance. As a result, there is a mismatch between the nation’s immigration policies — which, however broken, are on the whole comparatively generous — and the United States’s immigrant inte- gration policies that are ad hoc, under-funded, and skeletal. So today, as it has historically, the integration of newcomers is carried out by families, employers, A n Overview iii churches, nongovernmental organizations, and by an increasingly restive set of state and local governments. There is no national Office for Immigrant and Refugee Integration; this absence stands in contrast to other countries, such as Canada and the Netherlands, which have strong integration offices within their immigration agencies. And an examination of the growing numbers of proposals for comprehensive immi- gration reform reveals that they pay little if any attention to integration issues. The Demographic Imperative There are a number of well-known demographic forces that make the need to focus more directly on integration clear. These include: n High sustained flows. Nearly one in eight people in the United States today is foreign born. One in five children in the United States, and more than one in four low-income children, is the child of an immigrant. Over half of new workers in the 1990s were immigrants, and the foreign born compose very high shares of some occupations, accounting for one in five doctors in the United States, for example. High flows mean that the success of the nation as a whole and of its institutions (schools, the workplace, the military) will increasingly depend on the contributions and integration of immigrants. n Dispersal. It is now broadly recognized that while the immigrant popula- tion remains highly concentrated in the six largest receiving states, a work- driven dispersal to new gateway states has been rapid. The migrants in these flows are more recently arrived, poorer, younger, less educated, and more likely to be undocumented than immigrants nationally. Limited community resources, institutional infrastructure, and experience may all present barriers to integration. At the same time, new opportunities and successes may emerge. n Shifting legal composition. A decade ago the unauthorized population consti- tuted about 15 percent of all immigrants. Today it represents almost a third. This trend toward increasing shares of immigrants arriving outside rather than inside the immigration system complicates the politics of developing effective integration policies. It does so by reducing the legiti- macy of the immigration system and support for services and benefits that some believe are captured by unauthorized immigrants and their families. While there has been rapid growth in the unauthorized population since the mid-1990s, there has also