Economist Gregory Clark writes:
The evidence shows that immigrant groups tend to retain the social status that they arrive with. The same goes with more recent immigrants to the United States. Due to visa restrictions, certain immigrant groups were permitted entry to the United States only if they could prove they had skills that were needed in the U.S. labor market. For example, the Africans, Chinese, Christian Arabs, Filipinos, Indians, Iranians, and Koreans who did gain entry into the United States were from the upper echelons of their home societies. And, in the United States, they enjoy significantly higher than average social status (as measured, again, by the number of doctors per 1,000 members of the group). Groups who, for various reasons, did not face the same restrictions — including the Hmong, Latinos, and Maya — entered the United States with low social status and have struggled to achieve upward mobility since. Immigration to the United States, in other words, rarely changes one’s social status. …
Given current patterns of immigration to the United States, Washington faces an enormous policy challenge. Two in five of all immigrants to the United States are from Mexico and Central America. Latinos now constitute 22 percent of all children in the United States; by 2050, they are expected to be 39 percent. But the social status of Latinos, even those born in the United States, is persistently low.
This perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, given that migrants from Mexico and Central America tend to be negatively selected from their home populations: they are often the people who found themselves in such desperate economic circumstances at home that they preferred to live as illegal immigrants in the United States. (Latinos constitute nearly half of the foreign born in the United States, but four in five of illegal migrants.) The effects have been dire: there can be no doubt that immigration is widening social inequality in the United States.
