A Question of Assimilation
Diversity here gets a huge boost from another uniquely American predilection: marriage outside one's ethnic group. Immigrants to the United States have always sought marriage outside their own groups. This was true a hundred years ago, with Jews marrying Christians, Japanese marrying whites. Today, we see it with Latinos marrying African-Americans. Census data over the past few decades reveal that well over a third of all marriages involving immigrants have been to partners from other ethnic groups. In the United States, Balkanization was defeated at the altar. In Europe, on the other hand, immigration is characterized by kinship and social structures that favor arranged marriages and marriage within the group. It is common for second-generation Kurdish immigrant girls in Norway, for instance, to marry cousins back in Kurdistan so the men can migrate to Europe. This has two powerful effects: It prevents the immigrants from crossing the most cherished threshold of social integration, marriage with members of their new country, and it replenishes the cultural traditions of the old country in the new setting as newly arrived villagers settle in European cities.
Moving forward, what does the evidence suggest will be different in the two settings? The best way to tell how future generations will fare is to look at the education of the children of today's new arrivals. Here again, there are big differences between what's going on in Europe and in the United States. I was delivering a series of lectures in Germany a couple of years ago when data from the Program for International Student Assessment, a standardized assessment of 15-year-olds in schools, were released. The data were shocking to many in Germany because they revealed the multiple ways German schools were failing immigrant youth, who scored significantly below German students in a variety of areas of academic proficiency. The study concluded, ominously, that students whose parents are immigrants show weaker performance than native students in some but not all countries. The greatest gap, of 93 points in mathematics scores, is in Germany.
In the United States, it's a completely different story. Our record in educating immigrant students is uneven, to be sure, but it is a lot more hopeful than the European record. Immigrant kids here win more than their share of the nation's most competitive and prestigious awards, like the Intel Science Awards and National Spelling Bee championships. New data show that immigrant students in the United States have more positive attitudes toward schools and teachers than their nonimmigrant counterparts. A study of 400 immigrant families and their children revealed that fully 40 percent of the immigrant students from Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America who enrolled in American schools received, on average, grades of A or B over a five-year period. The fact that immigrant girls in the United States are outperforming immigrant boys augurs for an even brighter future, for there is no better return on investment in education than the success of girls. Immigrants and the children of immigrants--from Ghana, Jamaica, Colombia, Korea--are overrepresented on every one of the campuses where I have taught over the years, including Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, and New York University. The same, sadly, cannot be said of the leading universities in Europe.
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