New Look at Immigrants

A new research study concludes that the flow of Mexican workers into California helps the state more than it hurts. The finding should help bury the myth that recent immigration trends threaten the American way of life.

Demographer Kevin McCarthy and economist Robert Valdez of the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica studied California’s Mexican population for 18 months under the sponsorship of the California Roundtable, an organization of state business leaders. They found that concern over Mexican immigration is largely unfounded. The state is not, as some think, being overrun by alien hordes.

If anything, Mexican workers have helped keep the state’s economy strong while other areas of the nation are undergoing difficult economic readjustments. The effect of Mexican workers who take low-paying, unskilled jobs extends beyond agriculture, where migrants have been important for generations. They also keep light manufacturing and services viable and competitive with industry in foreign countries.

The Rand researchers found that the population of Mexican immigrants is not homogeneous. Some work here for a few weeks or months and go home. Others establish ties with particular employers, return on a regular basis but maintain their permanent residences in Mexico. Some settle permanently, legalize their status and bring families north to join them. The Rand study estimates that there were 300,000 such permanent immigrants in 1980; their families accounted for 900,000 more people.

These permanent Mexican immigrants are assimilated into American life much like previous immigrants. The new arrivals are poor and speak mostly Spanish, but their children learn English rapidly and start moving up the economic ladder. That should take care of the myth that recent Latino immigrants will resist English and create a potentially troublesome foreign-language enclave in the United States like the French-speakers in Canada’s Quebec province.

On one point the study reinforces the findings of another recent study of Mexican workers in Los Angeles by the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.: There is no evidence that Mexican workers take jobs from Americans. Ironically, the one group whose job opportunities do seem to suffer from illegal migrants from Mexico are second-generation Latinos.

What that means, the Rand researchers say, is that California must do a better job of educating the children of recent Mexican immigrants. Rand foresees 3 million new jobs in California by 1995--two-thirds of them in white-collar professions, high-technology or skilled services. While the need for some low-skilled labor will persist, so will the long-established flow of Mexicans back and forth across the U.S. border. Thus if the children of Mexican immigrants are not prepared to fill the higher-paying white-collar jobs, they will have to compete with newer arrivals for low-paying jobs.

“One way to avoid this potential problem is to accelerate the educational advancement of future native-born Latinos so that they may qualify for jobs . . . where the growth of the economy is going to occur,” the Rand study concludes. “While California’s public and private sectors have little leverage with which to affect future levels of immigration into the state, they can indeed facilitate the educational advancement process.”

That is sound advice, and it reflects the underlying value of the Rand study. By helping to dispel myths about migrants, the report can turn the debate into less emotional and more constructive channels. Once that happens, public officials can spend less time on controversial schemes to deter immigration and more on programs that can do some good. The most important of these, as the report says, is support for public schools so that they can continue to provide the important service that they have rendered this nation for 100 years: taking the children of immigrants from a diverse assortment of foreign lands and turning them into Americans.