A Question of Assimilation
As the Danish cartoon virus continues to spread from Europe to the Middle East to Central Asia to Africa and beyond, politicians, religious leaders, and the media have all come to frame the issue as a case of freedom of expression and the limits of tolerance in an age of global communications. A cartoon that is supposed to be "funny" in Copenhagen leads to riots and death in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East. The origin of the crisis, however, is rooted in a local European context, revealing the Continent's greatest postwar failure: its catastrophic record in integrating large and growing numbers of immigrant minorities--especially the second-generation children of Muslim immigrants.
If the Muslim protesters in Denmark had not pressured various Mideast governments to act, the story would have been nothing more than a case of bad taste and poor judgment by an obscure Copenhagen daily. But the Danish case is just one in a series of recent European eruptions. Item: The rioters in France last October and November were overwhelmingly the children of immigrants. Item: The terrorist bombers in London last year were second-generation immigrants. Item: The killer of Theo Van Gough, the Dutch filmmaker who had taken a controversial stance on Muslim immigrants, was also the child of such immigrants. Item: Several of the 9/11 hijackers had been enrolled as students in various prestigious German campuses.
How do we explain Europe's sorry record on immigration at precisely the time it will need more immigration? How will Europe manage to integrate into its economy and society the estimated 50 million new immigrants it will need in the decades ahead to cope with its declining fertility rates and rapidly aging populations--not to mention its over-the-top welfare system that will require new immigrant workers to pay for the benefits of its retirees?
To understand the problem, it is instructive to compare the situation in Europe with the recent U.S. experience. America today is seeing the largest wave of immigration in its history. Why is immigration a dream here but a nightmare on the other side of the Atlantic? There are at least three sets of important differences in the nature of immigration in Europe and the United States.
First, experience matters. Large-scale immigration in western Europe is a relatively new phenomenon, going back just to the end of World War II. Prior to that, Europe was a continent of emigration, not immigration. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and into the first decade of the 20th century, some 50 million Europeans left for the New World. These immigrants settled--indeed, made--cities like New York, Montreal, and Buenos Aires. In the United States, the current wave of immigration is the fourth large wave that has substantially altered the fabric of our nation over the past five generations.
Second, policies matter. If immigration gave birth to the vibrant multiethnic nation we are today, the parturition in Europe was very different, For a long time, western European nations--the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and others--felt that when it came to immigration, they could be a little bit pregnant. Hence the various "guest worker" programs and temporary-asylum initiatives that have resulted in Europe's current dilemma. These temporary arrangements proved to be quite permanent. But the ambivalence with which Europe allowed large-scale immigration has had defining consequences. The temporary workers and asylum seekers came to be a permanent reality without any significant public debate and conscious understanding of the long-term changes immigration was causing. Policies, for example, on education kept changing from instruction only in the language of the country of origin (if Turks were just temporary guest workers, why should they learn German?) to bilingual education, to education in the language of the new country. Differences in immigration policy between Europe and the United States are the most obvious when it comes to the ease with which immigrants can attain full citizenship. In the United States, all children of immigrants born here are automatically citizens. In countries like Germany, by contrast, there was the "law of the blood," changed only recently, saying you could be a German citizen only if you had German blood; America observes the jus solis or "law of the soil," which means if you are born here, you are a citizen. Immigrants born in many European countries have to wait until adulthood before they can even apply for citizenship.
In America, immigration has always been linked to the needs of the economy--Mexicans were recruited through the ambitious Bracero program (1942-1964), when World War II required a more abundant labor supply. The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act began the largest flow of immigration into the United States in history and put in place the principle of "family reunification" as the philosophical bedrock of U.S. immigration policy. Today, hardly a day goes by when the political class, the news media, and the elites are not involved, often loudly and sometimes demagogically, in debating the pros and cons of immigration. In Europe, by contrast, when the subject was broached during the past two decades, you could safely bet it was by the racist, Holocaust-denying fanatics of the fringe political parties. The mainstream remained silent--paralyzed and, therefore, irrelevant.
Third, diversity matters. In the United States, diversity defines the new immigration. By any measure, immigrants to America today are more varied than ever. They are racially and religiously diverse, economically diverse, linguistically diverse, and highly diverse in terms of education and job skills. Immigrants and their children are overrepresented among winners of the Nobel Prize, recent secretaries of state (both Republican and Democratic: Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell), and tenured professors at Harvard. (Will the next president of Harvard be of immigrant origin?) But immigrants are also well represented among workers in the service sector of the economy--a sector now totally addicted to immigrant workers. In New York City schools, the children of immigrants are now half of the total student population. What's new today, though, is the fact that they hail from the entire world, with over 190 nationalities represented. In countries like Germany and France, by contrast, there is a hyperconcentration of immigrants from a handful of countries. In Germany, they are mostly Turks. In France, North Africans predominate.
In the United States, diversity has become the high octane of acculturation. With the spectacular linguistic diversity in schools, places of work, and places of worship, English emerged as the undisputed lingua franca, especially among the children of immigrants. The fact that English is a world language has resulted in its rapid acquisition by new immigrants. The same cannot be said of languages like Swedish or Danish. I was recently visiting a school in Stockholm where over 90 percent of the students were the children of asylum seekers and refugees. The students in the science class I visited, overwhelmingly from the Middle East and Central Asia, seemed much more animated speaking English than Swedish. When I asked for a show of hands to the question "How many of you would like to go to New York?" the entire class responded. That's bad news for Sweden's efforts to integrate these youth.
What about those like Harvard's Samuel Huntington who assert that Spanish-speaking immigrants are a threat to American culture because they tend to keep their customs and language? Well, they're wrong. Spanish-language immigrants today learn English faster and better than immigrants before them. Indeed, the American experience is one of rapid linguistic acculturation and native language loss. As one of my former colleagues at Harvard once observed, America is a graveyard for foreign languages.
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.
This story appears in the March 13, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.