UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Immigration remains a top concern for American voters, and a topic fueling much debate in the news and on social media. Penn State News spoke with Jennifer Van Hook, distinguished professor of sociology and demography and director of the Population Research Institute, about immigration and the rhetoric of the presidential election race.
Q: As climate refugees and asylum seekers, particularly from Latin America, migrate to the United States, what kinds of impacts do we see?
Van Hook: In the last few years, we’ve seen large numbers of people applying for asylum from Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras and other Central American countries. Once these immigrants arrive, they are assigned a court date so that they can make their case to a judge who would then determine the outcome for their asylum case. Of course, there are costs to communities where these immigrants settle. For example, for families with children, there's going to be a lot of housing and schooling needs. On the other hand, these immigrants also help fill labor needs. Depending on their immigration status, some have legal rights to work. On balance, it’s sort of a wash — they fill the labor needs that our economy has, and, at the same time, their children are in school and using some of the resources that public services offer.
Certain states are feeling the influxes of immigrants more than others. Some Americans are worried that these immigrants are going to take jobs away from American citizens. Yet past research suggests that this just doesn't happen. The economists who have studied this issue for decades have shown that many immigrants work. But immigrants also help generate new jobs because they are also consumers. They buy groceries, rent houses and purchase services. They grow the economy. Some of them even start new businesses, creating new jobs. The net change in terms of job production is about neutral.
The other question usually concerns crime. There's no evidence that immigrants increase crime rates. In fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than natural-born American citizens. One possible reason is that they are wary of breaking the law because they're new and under some pressure to make sure that they don't get in trouble.
If anything, immigrants decrease crime. Some people argue that the presence of immigrants in communities, especially when they are living in ethnic neighborhoods, creates social networks that make crime less common. They're looking after their neighbors' children and their neighbors are looking after their children, and these mutual social ties end up forming communities that make crime less likely to occur.
Q: You research immigrants across generations. What have you found?
Van Hook: We conducted an historical study where we looked at immigrants who arrived during the last big wave of immigration, the ones who came during the industrial era in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We were able to look across three generations, about 80 years of history, to see what happened to those families over time.
You might be familiar with Italian immigration. There are a lot of Italian descendants who live in Pennsylvania, and their third-generation ancestors — the grandchildren of the original immigrants — have been pretty successful. Yet when they first arrived in the United States, they were amongst the lowest educated immigrant group at the time, and Americans were very concerned. Many considered the Italians to be unassimilable. Italian immigrants were seen as likely to get in trouble with the police and unlikely to ever fit in. Now, three generations later, Italian-Americans are one of the most highly educated groups in the country and they are doing better than many of their peers. We've seen this story before with each new wave of immigration. We think they're so different from us and that they'll never become one of us, yet it's been proven wrong over and over again.
Another thing we learned is that some immigrant groups were prevented from accessing the resources they needed to get ahead. For example, Mexican immigrants from the 1920s and 1930s were not granted equal access to schooling. Their descendants did not make as many strides forward as the groups that did have equal access to schooling under the law. The lesson here is that efforts to exclude immigrants from equal access to services, schooling and higher education don't pay off in the end. In fact, the country ends up with more inequality down the road.
Q: What do the dynamics at the southern border look like? Are we seeing a blip in immigration, or is this a lasting change?
Van Hook: In the last 10 years or so in Central America, and in certain South American countries, there has been tremendous political and economic instability that have made it difficult for some people to continue living there. So, we've seen an increase in out-migration, especially from countries like Venezuela, Honduras and Guatemala, and many of these people applied for asylum.
At the same time, there have been a series of policy changes at the U.S.-Mexico border. One was in response to COVID-19, where the government reduced admissions at the border. Another was the wait in Mexico policy, where if you were to come to the border and claim asylum, you would have to wait in Mexico for your case to come up in court. These policies created a buildup of demand at the border. When they ended, there was a large increase in border encounters — people who are coming in, often through regular ports of entry, claiming asylum. Many of them are detained, but then released into the United States after being issued a notice to appear in court. And of course, there are so many cases that the courts can't keep up with it all.
Over the summer, the Biden administration implemented a rule change that restricts asylum claims once illegal border crossings reach a certain threshold. Since June, the number of border encounters has dramatically declined. People are now wondering if the recent border surge will return, and it really depends on whether any kind of permanent change in immigration policy can be enacted.