Immigration – Part 3

Immigration, communication, and community.

In this last essay in a series on immigration, we’ll explore how immigration impacts communication and community in the United States.

Not being proficient in the English language reduces the job prospects for legal and illegal immigrants.  The relatively large numbers of immigrants from Mexico and other Spanigh-speaking countries to the U.S. over the years make it increasingly easy for immigrants from those countries to avoid learning English, as they are more likely to be able to live in communities with a critical mass of other Spanish speakers, leading to fewer job prospects for them outside predominantly Spanish-speaking communities.  As a report by the National Academies states:

The relative slowdown of language assimilation may again be partly explained by high rates of immigration from Mexico during the 1990s … Mexicans start below immigrants from other countries in terms of English-language fluency and never catch up; in general, non-Hispanics were more fluent than Hispanics at all times after arrival in the United States. One possible explanation … is “immigrants who enter the country and find a large welcoming ethnic enclave have much less incentive to engage in these types of investments since they will find a large market for their pre-existing skills.”

According to a 2013 Census Bureau publication. the number of people in the U.S. that speak Spanish at home grew 233 percent between 1980 and 2010, while the U.S. population grew 38 percent over the same time.

More generally, the percentage of U.S. residents speaking a language other than English at home has grown dramatically over the last few decades, rising from 11 percent in 1980 to 21 percent in 2014.

As one Harvard researcher has concluded:

the data reveal a concurrent decline in the rate at which the newer immigrant cohorts are “picking up” English language skills. The cohorts that entered the country prior to the 1980s typically experienced a 12 percentage point increase in their fluency rate during their first decade, while the cohorts that entered the country after the 1980s show only a 4 percentage point increase.  Finally, [our] study identifies one factor that seems to be correlated with the decline in the rate of economic assimilation: the rapid increase in the size of some national origin groups in the United States.  Both the rate of increase in English language proficiency and the rate of economic assimilation are significantly slower for larger national origin groups.

Common language is important to genial coexistence among peoples.  As noted by Joseph Heinrich in The Secret of Our Success:

[R]acial cues do not have cognitive priority over ethnic cues: when children or adults encounter a situation in which accent or language indicate “same ethnicity” but skin color indicates “different race,” the ethnolinguistic markers trump the racial markers. That is, children pick as a friend someone of a different race who speaks their dialect over someone of the same race who speaks a different dialect.

Researchers have found the following on this subject:

The present research provides evidence for children’s early and robust use of language and accent in guiding social preferences. In Experiment 1, children chose to be friends with speakers of their native language compared to speakers of a foreign language (Experiment 1a), or speakers with a foreign accent in the child’s native language (Experiment 1b) … Experiment 3 compared children’s preferences for speakers with a native accent to preferences for individuals of their own race. Experiment 3a replicated extant literature showing that young White children raised in the U.S. display friendship preferences for other children of their own race. When race was pitted against accent, however, children expressed a social preference for Black children who spoke with a native accent, over White children whose accent was foreign. In Experiment 4, when accent was pitted against visual distortion of the target faces, children again chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language, thus providing evidence that children’s attention to accent over race in Experiment 3b was not guided by the relative familiarity of each dimension … [O]ur findings suggest that children’s social preferences can surpass reliance on information that is visual.

As Peter Beinart has written in the Atlantic magazine. “[Ariela] Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did.”

Incidentally, just as an interesting historical side note regarding the English language, it has developed to be a particularly descriptive and efficient language as languages go.  The Norman conquest of England in 1066 merged the Anglo-Saxon and French languages to create a particularly rich vocabulary with words reflecting similar concepts with subtly different meaning, such as eat (Anglo-Saxon) and dine (French), and meet (Anglo-Saxon) and encounter (French).

In addition, as Thomas Sowell wrote in the early 1980’s in his book The Economics and Politics of Race, “There are real costs involved in having a Tower of Babel, independently of how one chooses to look at it.  The printing of ballots, directions, and other public communications in a multiplicity of languages is only one of these costs and by no means the largest.  People lose their lives when they cannot communicate in an emergency with paramedics, firemen, and policemen.”

More generally, on a scale of assimilation factors, immigrants to the U.S. from Mexico ranked lower than immigrants from other countries.

The relative rate of crimes committed by illegal aliens compared to native U.S. residents is sometimes disputed, but whatever the case may be regarding that question, there is no question that every crime committed by someone in the U.S. who is here illegally is a crime that could have been prevented by border enforcement.  As Todd Bensman writes in his book Overrun:

[I]llegal immigrants, and especially those with knowable criminal histories, are uniquely subject to government deportation and detention, which does not exist for American citizens and lawful residents. So, unlike every crime committed by American citizens, every crime committed by illegally present immigrants with criminal histories was avoidable … Americans have no choice but to suffer every single American citizen-committed crime but should never have to suffer one single illegal immigrant-committed crime.

And with the dramatic increase in criminal aliens coming to America over the last few years:

America is in for a sustained unnecessary crime wave of preventable murder, rape, child abuse, burglary, felony theft, drug trafficking, alien smuggling, and drunken driving manslaughter … [For example, the] Texas DPS [Department of Public Safety] learns the immigration status of suspects booked into local jails through a program that submits fingerprints to the FBI for criminal history and warrant checks, and to DHS, which returns immigration status information on those whose fingerprints were already on file (which is not all of them). The glimpse is limited and not a reflection of much almost certain higher totals, but it is telling about the trend line ahead across America. Between June 1, 2011, and July 31, 2022, these 259,000 illegal aliens were charged with more than 433,000 unnecessary, preventable criminal offenses. Those included 800 homicide charges (resulting in 374 convictions as of July 2022), 822 kidnapping charges (resulting in 265 convictions), 5,470 sexual assault charges (resulting in 2,593 convictions), 6,485 sexual offense charges (resulting in 3,065 sexual offense convictions), and 4,945 weapons charges (resulting in 1,723 weapons convictions). What the Texas data show is that hundreds of dead people should be alive, thousands of sexual assault and sexual offense victims should never have suffered the trauma, and tens of thousands of assault charges involving victims would not have been hurt. The Texas data also shows that criminal aliens took up police time and clogged up the American justice system that could have been more dedicated to American criminals. Thousands of drug, burglary, robbery, and weapons charges need not have jammed the Texas criminal justice systems at taxpayer cost. The Texas program found that another 10,590 illegal aliens were identified while they were in Texas state prisons over the past decade.

Indeed, the act of intentionally coming to another country in an illegal manner is itself detrimental to a culture that should support the rule of law.  As Bensman writes:

But therein lies the line of tension … my compassion for anyone motivated to better themselves and my respect for rule of law. I part company with them over what they intend for their very first acts of joining America, which is to break the law against illegal entry, lie to defraud U.S. asylum laws, and then live illegally for years. This should strike anyone as disqualifying first impressions. Unlike my great-grandparents and the Refuseniks, their dishonorable intention is to foist themselves on unwilling hosts who did not invite them, break American law, and personally profit in spite of the legislated will of United States citizens.

Finally, the Mexican drug cartels demand payment from anyone who seeks to cross the border into the United States from Mexico, and increased illegal border entries only incentivizes more people to pay them for their passage.  As Bensman writes:

ICE’s Acting Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner told Congress the human smuggling industry was generating somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million a year for the cartels prior to 2018. But ICE intelligence estimated the revenue was $13 billion through the end of 2021.  Another estimate in 2021 from John Condon, acting assistant director of international operations at ICE’s Homeland Security and Investigations, came in lower but no less historic: “between $2 billion and 6 billion per year,” Condon told the House Homeland Security Committee’s oversight subcommittee.  Even assuming the lesser of the two estimates is truer, the Biden border policies have showered these brutal criminal organizations with many times more than their former annual revenues. They will use the vast wealth to counter Mexican state power with the purchase of weapons, ammunition, vehicles, housing, and government influence for later when the boom ends, if it ever does. Packed with more and better weaponry, Mexico’s criminal trafficking syndicates can be expected to lessen the core ability of Mexico to act against them when the United States asks.

A more dysfunctional and corrupt Mexico makes that country even less attractive to their own citizens, who are then further incentivized to leave the country and cross into the U.S. illegally, thereby creating a vicious cycle of incentivized illegal immigration: easier entry to the U.S. makes more money for Mexican cartels, who use the money to further destabilize Mexico and thereby further encourage people to leave for America.  And of course the cartels use this process to expand their crime networks in America as well, gaining further profits.  The rule of law is thereby undermined along many dimensions at once.

As Bensman continues in his book Overrun:

Lowering the odds of smuggling fee payoff is a lever that American leadership can move at will to open and close doors, to start and stop mass migration immediately. It is the regulating influence in the most kinetic sense—if those who wield it understand how it works … Democrats and Republicans who do not want mass illegal immigration must run every proposal through this analytical litmus test: Will this or that elevate—or lower—the odds that an aspiring immigrant’s smuggling fee investment pays off with successful entry over the border and long-term legal or illegal stay inside America? If the policy will increase an immigrant’s entry-and-stay odds high enough, it is the wrong one … Conversely, if the policy will reduce the entry-and-stay odds, it is the right one …  This simple calculus, though it may seem obvious, should no longer be allowed to defy broad absorption. If immigrants are telling us that they run this basic calculus through their skein when deciding to stay or go, so too should American leaders.

This concludes this series of essays in immigration.