Measuring Immigrant Assimilation in the United States
Vidgor, Jacob
Manhattan Institute, Civic Report #59, October 2009, online edition, 52p (PDF)
"This report, the second in an ongoing series, takes advantage of newly released U.S. Census Bureau data from 2007 to measure changes in an index describing the state of economic, civic, and cultural assimilation of immigrants to the United States. It also explores in detail two of the factors used to compute the index: immigrants’ English-language ability and naturalization rates, both of which have been affected by the reduced inflow and increased outflow of recent immigrants. Because legal adult immigrants who have been here less than five years cannot become citizens and are unlikely to have mastered English in so short a period, the economic downturn is having an effect on all three assimilation indexes: economic, of course; but also cultural assimilation, of which English skills are an important component; and civic assimilation, of which citizenship is an important component."
Jacob Vigdor is professor of public policy and economics at Duke University and a faculty researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Go to the report at:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/cr_59.pdf
E10/05-09, Posted December 22, 2009
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