Reihan Salam writes for National Review: How have decades of immigration transformed America? Shedding light on this, the Pew Research Center has released a fascinating new report, which finds that the current foreign-born share of the U.S. population (13.9 percent) is very close to the peak of 14.8 percent that it reached in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Assuming current levels of immigration continue, the foreign-born share will reach 17.7 percent in 2065. But this number understates the impact of immigration on the U.S. population, as it does not capture the role played by the children and grandchildren of immigrants. Pew estimates that when we factor in the second- and third-generation offspring of immigrants, the post-1965 immigration wave has added 72 million people to the U.S. population. To put this number in perspective, France has a total population of 67 million, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has a population of 77 million. Suffice it to say, this post-1965 wave has had profound effects on U.S. society. Most obviously, this wave has changed the ethno-racial composition of the U.S. population quite dramatically.
In the absence of the post-1965 wave, Pew estimates that the non-Hispanic white and black populations would be larger shares of the total U.S. population while the Hispanic and Asian shares would be much smaller. This ethno-racial transformation has attracted a great deal of attention, for obvious reasons. Among immigration advocates, there is a widespread belief that opposition to immigration, including opposition to less-skilled immigration, is driven largely by racial animus against non-whites.
I would argue that a far more consequential effect of the post-1965 wave has been the increase in the number of U.S. residents with low levels of literacy and numeracy. This increase has occurred just as global economic integration and automation have put the wages of less-skilled workers under intense pressure, and as the family lives of college-educated and non-college-educated adults and their children have sharply diverged. Had the post-1965 immigration wave consisted of people with higher-than-average levels of literacy and numeracy, its effect on U.S. society would probably have been markedly different, even if it had been of exactly the same size and ethno-racial composition. One of Pew’s more noteworthy findings is that today’s immigrants have a higher level of educational attainment than those who arrived in 1965.
Specifically, Pew reports that while only half of newly arrived immigrants in 1970 had at least a high-school diploma, by 2013 that share had increased to over three-quarters. And while only a fifth of immigrants had graduated from college in 1970, 41 percent had done so in 2013. Immigration advocates often point to this fact as cause for optimism, particularly when conservatives in particular express concern over the skill levels of immigrants. Are the immigration optimists right: Are the skills of recent immigrants actually quite strong, and are conservative concerns about skills really just a smokescreen for bigotry? To answer this question, we need a better sense of the extent to which years of schooling translate into cognitive skills.
Earlier this year, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) released a detailed analysis of data from 2012 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a comparative study of the cognitive skills of 16- to 65-year-olds in the countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). According to PIAAC, immigrants represent 33 percent of adults with low levels of literacy and 24 percent of adults with low levels of numeracy, despite the fact that the foreign-born share of the working-age population is only 15 percent. Even more discouraging is the fact that although native-born U.S. adults outperformed immigrants, both groups are well below the OECD average. In theory, the U.S. could use its immigration system to raise its average skill level by recruiting immigrants with higher levels of literacy and numeracy than the native-born population. Instead, U.S. immigration policy appears to have had a modestly negative effect on the average skill level in the U.S., even though younger immigrants have somewhat stronger skills than their older counterparts.
