Transforming Politics, Transforming America

The Political and Civic Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States

Taeku Lee,S. Karthick Ramakrishnan,Ricardo Ramírez

• Editorial: University of Virginia Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813934204
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Histoire et théorie politique

Over the past four decades, the foreign-born population in the United States has nearly tripled, from about 10 million in 1965 to more than 30 million today. This wave of new Americans comes in disproportionately large numbers from Latin America and Asia, a pattern that is likely to continue in this century. In Transforming Politics, Transforming America, editors Taeku Lee, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramírez bring together the newest work of prominent scholars in the field of immigrant political incorporation to provide the first comprehensive look at the political behavior of immigrants.Focusing on the period from 1965 to the year 2020, this volume tackles the fundamental yet relatively neglected questions, What is the meaning of citizenship, and what is its political relevance? How are immigrants changing our notions of racial and ethnic categorization? How is immigration transforming our understanding of mobilization, participation, and political assimilation? With an emphasis on research that brings innovative theory, quantitative methods, and systematic data to bear on such questions, this volume presents a provocative evidence-based examination of the consequences that these demographic changes might have for the contemporary politics of the United States as well as for the concerns, categories, and conceptual frameworks we use to study race relations and ethnic politics.

Contributors Bruce Cain (University of California, Berkeley) * Grace Cho (University of Michigan) * Jack Citrin (University of California, Berkeley) * Louis DeSipio (University of California, Irvine) * Brendan Doherty (University of California, Berkeley) * Lisa García Bedolla (University of California, Irvine) * Zoltan Hajnal (University of California, San Diego) * Jennifer Holdaway (Social Science Research Council) * Jane Junn (Rutgers University) * Philip Kasinitz (City University of New York) * Taeku Lee (University of California, Berkeley) * John Mollenkopf (City University of New York) * Tatishe Mavovosi Nteta (University of California, Berkeley) * Kathryn Pearson (University of Minnesota) * Kenneth Prewitt (Columbia University) * S. Karthick Ramakrishnan (University of California, Riverside) * Ricardo Ramírez (University of Southern California) * Mary Waters (Harvard University) * Cara Wong (University of Michigan) * Janelle Wong (University of Southern California)

Part 1

The Fundamentals of Measurement

Immigrants and the Changing Categories of Race

Kenneth Prewitt

The study of immigration has its distinct vocabulary—incorporation, assimilation, mobilization, coalitions, conflict, identity, and so forth. The terms in play touch on the broad question of whether ethnic and racial boundaries are being hardened or blurred, and to what extent the recent immigrant flows contribute to some mixture of these outcomes. The small contribution I offer is the reminder that the boundaries themselves, or at least their accessibility to research, rest on the way in which official statistics label population groups—starting even with the labels foreign born and native born.

Subdividing the population is as old as census taking itself. Numbers, the fourth book of the Hebrew Bible, has Yahweh instructing Moses: “Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, with the number of their names, every male … from twenty years old and upward.” Here the key categories are male/female and under/over twenty. The intent, of course, was to know how many of the Israelites are “able to go forth to war.” A census is never just a count; it is always also a series of classifications selected to serve policy decisions.

America’s earliest national census in 1790 rested, first, on a geographical classification—needed, of course, to allocate seats in the new Congress proportionate to population size. This census also divided the population by civil status: taxed and untaxed, free and slave. These civil status categories generated a racial classification that separated those of European descent from those of African descent and from Native Americans. The earliest censuses did not even bother to distinguish between native born and foreign born.

The nation’s first racial classification carried a lot of policy and political weight. Including slaves in the census counts, even at three-fifths, rewarded the South with approximately a dozen more congressional seats and votes in the Electoral College than a count limited to its white population would have provided. This population bonus was among the several compromises struck with the slave-owning states to secure ratification of the new federal constitution. It had immense consequences. Known by historians as the “slave power,” the bonus in the Electoral College put Thomas Jefferson in the White House, and then his Virginian compatriots, James Madison and James Monroe. As Gary Wills documents in detail, a steady stream of pro-slavery (and anti-Indian) acts by Congress can be traced to the “extra” congressional seats awarded to the Southern states by the three-fifths clause (Wills 2003).

It is instructive to compare the ease with which a racial classification was introduced into our statistical system with the resistance resulting from an occupational classification. In preparing for the nation’s first decennial census, James Madison proposed a question to classify America’s working population into agriculture, commerce, or manufacturing (Cohen 1982).¹ The new Congress rebuffed his initiative, registering both a technical and a philosophical objection. Technically, said the congressional opponents, the categories were imprecise, because, after all, the same person could fall into all three sectors—being a farmer who manufactured nails on the side and traded those he did not need to a neighboring farmer who made ax handles. More philosophically, Madison’s critics held that an occupational classification would admit to, and perhaps even excite, differing economic interests. This very possibility challenged eighteenth-century thought that took society to be a harmonious whole, and viewed the task of governing as that of divining a common good rather than that of managing conflicting interests. The harmonious whole that was blind to occupational differences was not, of course, color-blind. In the color-coded language that becomes prominent in the nineteenth century, the earliest census separates the black, red, and white population groups.

I take from the 1790 census a larger lesson. To divide the population into its several race groups was unquestioned. The categories could change, but not the need for the classification itself (see, e.g., Nobles 2000). In 1820 “free colored persons” was added to the census form (as, by the way, was Madison’s occupation question). After the Civil War, interest in shades of color led the census to classify people as mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon, motivated by a race science that viewed race mixing as detrimental to the moral fiber of the nation itself. New immigrant groups began to appear in census categories around the same time. Chinese and Japanese were counted in 1890. Later, in 1920, Filipinos, Koreans, and Hindus appeared on the census form. Before 1930, Mexicans were counted as white, but in 1930 were separately counted as a race. This was quickly dropped when the government of Mexico complained, and Mexicans remained “white” until the category Hispanic origin appeared in the 1980 census (and has remained in every census since), though as I note in more detail below, labeled an ethnic rather than racial group.² Following statehood for Hawaii, Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian appear on the 1960 census form, though statehood for Alaska did not generate a specific category for Aleut and Eskimo until 1980.

America’s changing demography is traced to both immigration and imperialism, the latter resting on purchase as well as conquest. The Louisiana Purchase brought Creoles into America’s population. The purchase of the Russian colony of Alaska in 1867 added the Inuit, the Kodiak, and other Alaskan natives. The Mexican-American War in midcentury added the nation’s first large Mexican population. The Spanish-American War later in the century added Puerto Rico, other Caribbean islands, and their peoples, as well as Guam and the Philippines. When Hawaii was annexed in 1898, its native Pacific Islander population fell under American rule. Although population increases that resulted from conquest and purchase were relatively small, they added substantially to the country’s racial diversity, completing David Hollinger’s “racial pentagon” (1995) by adding brown and yellow to the eighteenth-century population base of white, black, and red.

The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration story is less about race than about national origin and religion, though these traits were often “racialized” as in the swarthy southern Europeans or the Jewish race. The well-known story is how a permissive immigration policy that brought workers to a growing economy was combined with civic exclusion, denial of citizenship, and limited rights (Smith 1997, Zolberg 2005). And when people with nativist tendencies in American political life worried that the internal borders were not holding, permissive immigration was brought to a sharp and sudden halt (Chan 1991, Hing 1993). The restrictive 1924 legislation drew specifically on the census to set limits that effectively denied entry to those national origin groups that had dominated immigration flows for the previous half century (Anderson 1988).

From the founding period through the Second World War, racial classification in our official statistical system interacted with two politically related policy narratives. One, the three-fifths clause, entrenched slaveholding interests until the Civil War, and then, even as three-fifths gave way to a full count of African Americans, entrenched a Jim Crow society and continued disproportionate power for the South in Congress and the Electoral College. The census made room for Southern blacks, but voting rolls and polling booths did not (Keyssar 2000). The second policy narrative is the racially constructed policy that excluded Asians, Mexicans, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and other minorities from civic life, and then, with the Immigration Act of 1924, sought to wind the demographic clock back to Anglo dominance (Haney Lopez 1996). These policy narratives eventually gave way to a liberalization of immigration and a reopening of America’s gates with the Immigration and Nationality (McCarran-Walter) Act of 1952 —which lifted the ban on immigration set by the 1924 Act, but kept stringent quotas on immigrants from particular sending countries (e.g., the limit on Japanese immigrants was set at 128 persons per year)—and the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act amendments to the 1952 legislation, which effectively ended the discriminatory national origin-based quota system.

If state-sanctioned discrimination is the central policy narrative linked to racial classification for more than a century and a half, the 1960s ended it only in part. Discrimination was to end, but not classification itself or its tight coupling to national policy. That is, the long period that precedes the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the shorter period that immediately follows it rest on two propositions: First, that there should be a racial classification system that assigns every American to one and only one of a small number of discrete ethnoracial groups. The second proposition is that this racial classification system should be designed to serve public policy purposes. Where earlier policies had been discriminatory, new civil rights policies were intended to right those wrongs and benefit groups that had been “historically discriminated against.” Belonging to a racial minority becomes a basis from which to assert civic rights. In this task, statistical proportionality became a much-deployed legal and administrative tool. Soon, the nation was enmeshed in a new form of politics. Equal opportunity becomes proportional representation. Disparate impact gains an important place in legal reasoning. Institutional racism enters the political vocabulary. Individual rights came to share political space with group rights.

Accompanying this shift in vocabulary and focus was a broadened understanding of civil rights, which was quickly adjudged to be about more than redressing the legacy of slavery. It was about all “groups historically discriminated against”—including, especially, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Civil rights became minority rights, and references to black-white were supplanted by references to people of color. Even this was too narrow a construction. The minority rights revolution came to encompass other groups historically discriminated against, in particular, women and the disabled (Skrentny 2002).

Statistical proportionality was central to this steady broadening of the civil rights agenda. Through legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the subsequent Supreme Court interpretations of these laws, the discriminatory and exclusionary nature of society came to be determined by examining whether certain groups were statistically underrepresented in colleges and universities, in the better jobs, in winning government contracts, in home mortgages, and in elected office. Underrepresentation was accepted as an indicator of denied social justice.

The census racial classification system that gave rise to concepts of underrepresentation and to statistical proportionality as a juridical and administrative tool had a small number of discrete categories—white, black, Indian, Asian and, as an ethnic category, Hispanic. But with the census classification scheme steadily accumulating more policy weight, the categories themselves could hardly be left to chance. The “politics of classification” changed, drawing fresh energy from multicultural identity politics. These politics brought many advocacy groups to issues that had generally been the preserve of statistical agencies (Anderson 1988, Espiritu 1992, Nobles 2000).

Fueling these politics is a broad public question. Why do we have an official ethnoracial classification? For much of American history, the answer was self-evident: the classification helped in the design and implementation of discriminatory and exclusionist policies. When these policies were radically challenged and eventually dismantled, the policy use of classification remained in place. Except now it was historical wrongs and ongoing discrimination that were made tractable to policy intervention.

Recent developments have begun to confuse this basic understanding of the policy function of ethnoracial classification. Today the country has a less sure or agreed-upon answer to why we preserve the racial classification system, at least in its current broad outline, which essentially carries forward race categories that date to the seventeenth century. There are many reasons for why we are on shakier grounds at present. Here I take up two: immigration and multiracialism.

Immigration

It should be stressed at the outset that at various moments in American history, new immigrant groups fit uneasily into the prevailing color-denominated racial classification. In the late nineteenth century, Southern European Catholics and Central European Jews, though in different ways, fiercely resisted being “racialized” and thereby prevented from joining the dominant white group. Our attention, however, is with the present period, starting with the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965 that removed national origin-based quotas and introduced, instead, family reunification, political refugee status, and skill-based criteria as the controlling factors in immigration policy. The late twentieth-century immigration surge led to shifts in the regions of the world sending immigrants to the United States. Asians and Latinos arrived in large numbers, patterns that show no signs of reversal. The current immigration flows—to the United States and elsewhere—bring immigrants who are culturally, linguistically, ethnically, and religiously unlike the populations of the receiving countries.

The post-1965 wave of immigration challenges an ethnoracial classification designed for the midcentury demographic makeup of the country. Policymakers and statisticians are today being pressed by ethnic lobbies, demographers, and indeed common sense to provide data that allow for meaningful generalization about America’s much more diverse population. There is now an active, self-conscious politics of how the country should sort and classify.

For example, the Census Bureau presently has five racial and ethnic advisory committees, representing groups historically discriminated against: African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. Do immigrants from the Middle East, Central Asia, and Islamic Africa have to find their way into this preexisting structure or argue for their own committees? If the latter, how many such committees should the Census Bureau appoint? Today’s immigrants, or their leaders, take for granted that categories will not be determined by distant government agencies but will result from advocacy and agitation.

We got a taste of this in the period leading up to the 2000 census, when the government initiated a review of the standards for collecting information on race and ethnicity announced in 1977. Those standards, issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, instructed all federal agencies to collect and report race and ethnic data in five categories: American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; black; white; and Hispanic, with the first four called races and Hispanic called an ethnic group.

These standards were examined again in the 1990s. Two major changes were made. First, responding to research that documented differences between Native Hawaiian /Pacific Islanders and the Asian category to which they had been assigned, as well as to advocacy by a persuasive senator from Hawaii, the federal office responsible for statistical policy allowed Native Hawaiian /Pacific Islanders to become a separate racial group (Wallman 1998). Other groups—Arabs, Creoles, and Cape Verdeans, particularly—presented arguments for why they, too, should get their own category. Though none of these efforts were eventually successful, the Arab case was the one most closely considered. The inability of this group to decide whether Arab or Middle Easterner was the best label, and how geographically to define the Middle East, made it difficult for OMB to be responsive. Advocacy groups indicated at the time that they would continue to press for a separate category, but the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent stereotyping of Arab Americans may complicate these efforts. The new standard also made it clearer that the population was to have two primary “ethnic” groups: “Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino” (Federal Register 1997, Snipp 2003).

The changes introduced in 1997 did not, however, resolve the larger issue: how well do the present race categories accommodate the great demographic diversity introduced by four decades of immigrants coming to the United States from every world region. Consider recent immigrants from Africa. The cultural, linguistic, religious, and even color differences between, for example, Islamic Somalis and sixthgeneration descendents of Bantu slaves from Africa’s Gold Coast are great indeed. Yet these Somalis, as well as Ethiopians, Sudanese, Senegalese, and others, have no place in official statistics to go except to the black African American category. Similar points can be made about Northern Africans, except in this case they are treated as white in the official statistics. If in the 1990s, Arabs, Creoles and Cape Verdeans complained of a mismatch with official statistical categories, diasporic Africans are likely to offer similar complaints in the decades ahead. We return below to the complications that late twentieth-century immigration introduces into our classification system, but first we turn to the second major change introduced in 1997.

Multiracialism

The most noticed change in the 2000 census was, of course, the multiple-race option. The revision of OMB Directive 15 that was announced in the October 1997 Federal Register introduced the “Mark one or more” provision in connection with the race categories. This change allows respondents to indicate their heritage as they select one or more of the five primary race groupings. As a result, rather than the previous scheme of five racial categories and two ethnic categories, there were now 63 possible combinations of “Mark one or more” among the race categories and 126 possible combinations when race is cross-tabulated with the Hispanic/non-Hispanic distinction (Snipp 2003).³

The multiple-race option was not heavily used in the 2000 census (2.4 percent of the population), and agencies that...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Fundamentals of Measurement
• Part 2 Citizenship: Here and Abroad
• Part 3 After Citizenship: Party Identification and Mobilization
• Part 4 Portents for the Future
• Conclusions
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index