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evious Ones,
Newest Immigrants Assimilating as Fast as Pr
Newest Immigrants Assimilating as Fast as Previous Ones, 5
Newest Immigrants Assimilating as Fast as Pr
evious Ones,
3 3 3 3 Report Says
Julia Preston Julia Preston
Julia Preston (b. 1951) is currently a visiting scholar in Latin American Studies at Princeton
University. She is a Contributing Writer specializing in immigration for The Marshall Project,
a non-profit journalism organization that focuses on the justice system. She worked for
over 20 years at the New York Times and was the recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Award
for Humanitarian Journalism. The following op-ed was published in the New York Times
in 2015.

The newest generations of immigrants are assimilating into American society as fast
and broadly as the previous ones, with their integration increasing over time “across
all measurable outcomes,” according to a report published on Monday by the National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Immigrants’ education levels, the diversity of their jobs, their wages and their mastery of
English improved as they lived for more time in the United States, and the gains were even
greater for their American-born children, the report concluded.
“The force of integration is strong,” said Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard who led
the panel of 18 immigration scholars who wrote the more than 400-page report. “However
we do it, we are good at it,” she said.
The report is an effort by scholars not engaged in politics to summon the latest research
to address many contentious issues in the increasingly heated immigration debate. It is
the first major report by the national academies on the integration of immigrants since a
similarly sweeping overview in 1997. Its timing is linked to the 50th anniversary in October
of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 1965 legislation that abolished restrictive national
quotas and opened legal immigration to all countries.
The study was initiated at the request of United States Citizenship and Immigration 5
Services, a federal agency, and the National Science Foundation as well as private
foundations. The scholars drew on their own work and also conducted a wide-ranging
review of recent research by others.
Professor Waters said the report should allay fears that recent immigrants committed
crimes more frequently than Americans, that they were generally in poor health and burden
public health care systems, or that they were failing to learn English.
“The desire on the part of immigrants to learn English is very high,” Professor Waters
said the researchers found. Concerns that the latest generation of immigrants is seeking
to impose its languages on American society “is not something people should be worried
about,” she said.
The report looked at 41 million foreign-born people — including about 11.3 million
immigrants here illegally — and their children born in the United States, about 37 million
Americans. Taken together, the two generations include one in four people in this country.
English language learning “is happening as rapidly or faster now than it did for earlier waves
of mainly European immigrants in the 20th century,” the report found.

Immigration and the American Dream CONVERSATION
77
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