A New Sort of Multiracial America

Friday, September 18, 1998 - Washington Post

By T. Alexander Aleinikoff

After a year of hearings and deliberations, the advisory board of the president's Race Initiative will present its report this afternoon. Much of the initiative's work has focused on the black/white color line. But immigration from Asia and Latin America is helping to create a multiracial America that calls into question many of the assumptions and strategies of traditional civil rights approaches.

Forty years ago, immigration was at historically low levels, and the vast majority of immigrants were white Europeans. Today the United States is witnessing record-high immigration, and the vast majority of immigrants are "of color." The top six sending countries are Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, China and India, with immigrants from these countries accounting for more than a third of the flow.

The National Research Council has estimated that the U.S. population will increase by almost 50 percent in the next half-century, and more than two-thirds of the increase will come from immigrants, their children and grandchildren. Because of the impact of immigration, Hispanics will soon outnumber African Americans, and the Asian-American population is expected to nearly triple by 2050 (to 8 percent of the total population).

Immigration history shows that racial categories are not fixed and unchangeable. Groups once considered "non-white" -- the Irish in the 19th century and southern and eastern Europeans in the 20th -- have later crossed the color line. Other diverse immigrant groups -- such as Chinese, Filipinos and Indians -- are fitted into a racial category labeled Asian. These complications only underscore the fact that the concept of "race" in America is not, and can no longer be, a black and white discussion.

Some civil rights advocates are concerned that high levels of immigration spell danger for the African American community. Immigrants are portrayed as competitors for jobs and housing, and whites are seen as preferring immigrant workers to native black workers. It also is asserted that white Americans, in an attempt to preserve their majority status, will ensure that some groups of new immigrants will be considered "white." But current research is unable to find a significant adverse impact of immigration on black prospects. African Americans face many challenges -- including the persistent effects of past and present discrimination -- but immigration does not appear to be a major determinant of their economic or social status.

Some on the other side of the debate see different risks from immigration. They fear that it is contributing to an increasingly multicultural United States that is on the verge of balkanization. These concerns are dramatically overstated. Most immigrants learn English, and it is the preferred language of the vast majority of their children. If anything, the problem runs the other way. Immigrant children lose proficiency in their parents' language -- at the same time that public schools spend millions of dollars teaching foreign languages to native English speakers.

Although immigrants are concentrated in some large American cities, there is no "Quebec" problem here. The greatest threats to successful assimilation may well be anti-immigrant measures that create barriers to integration and stigmatize immigrants.

If there is a problem in the integration of immigrants, it is economic. Immigration has an hourglass quality; a great many immigrants enter the United States with education and skills significantly above the national average and fairly rapidly assimilate into the American middle class. Immigrants who come without skills and without much education face poorer prospects, particularly if they do not finish high school. These immigrants (most of whom are non-white) do not directly compete with African Americans. But they are subject to the same structural obstacles to upward mobility that hinder the advancement of low-skilled black workers.

A 21st century civil rights strategy must follow two tracks. First, it must continue to call attention to the debilitating effects of past and present discrimination and demand strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws on behalf of African Americans and other minorities, many of whom may be immigrants or the children of immigrants. Such a strategy also must recognize that the discrimination against immigrants may be based on alien status, language or religion as well as on race.

Second, the strategy must look to the future, supporting policies that foster the healthy functioning of a multiracial nation. These would include policies aimed at economic advancement, including education, skills training and English; citizenship training in U.S. history and civics (for newcomers and native-born citizens alike); and promotion of empathy for and respect among groups.

The writer, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Carl Gutiérrez-Jones
Department of English
University of California, Santa Barbara
e-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu