The American Dream is alive and well

[Many] worry about the health of the American Dream. Can immigrants still work their way up from the bottom? Can they become American?

Many fear that, for the latest wave of mostly-unskilled immigrants from Latin America, the answer is no. Some fret that the newcomers are too ill-educated and culturally alien to prosper or assimilate. Others are convinced that immigrant workers are horribly exploited or trapped forever in low-wage jobs. Both worries are largely unfounded.

Consider Alberto Queiroz, who crept across the border 12 years ago. After a stuffy ride in the boot of a car, he found his first job in a Chinese-owned clothes factory in Los Angeles. Workers with papers were paid the minimum wage, he recalls. Having none, he had to make do with $2.50 an hour. Though unlawfully stingy, this was much better than he could have earned back home in Mexico...

Slaughterhouses are harsh and dangerous places to work...and illegal immigrants, who form a large chunk of the workforce, find it hard to defy abusive employers.

Mr Queiroz takes a more benign view. Yes, the work is hard. The line goes fast and you have to keep cutting till your hands are exhausted. And yes, it is sometimes dangerous. He says he once saw a co-worker lose a leg when he ducked under the disassembly line instead of walking round it. But many occupations are risky. Taxi-drivers are 34 times more likely to die on the job than meatpackers.

Mr Queiroz does not think Smithfield was a bad employer. Wages of more than $10 an hour enabled him to buy a house back in Mexico. Cutting up pigs was easier than picking blueberries, he says, because he did not have to toil under the sun all day. And when he had had enough, he quit and set up a taco stand with his brother. That was five years ago. Now he owns a Mexican restaurant. America, he says, is “the land of opportunity”.

...In some areas, the newcomers strain local services. Cindy Evans, director of a county clinic for children in Raleigh, says the percentage of her patients who are Hispanic has leapt from perhaps 2% a decade and a half ago to about 65%. The clinic is full of bilingual signs. Next to one, someone has scrawled: “Speak English!”.

...Fear of immigration is akin to fear of globalisation. Unemployment may be low, but many Americans fear losing their jobs to someone cheaper in Bangalore, or someone who took the bus up from Tijuana. Meanwhile, the benefits of immigration, like those of globalisation, are often taken for granted. “Americans just assume they can have a pizza delivered for $9,” says Federico van Gelderen, a Raleigh-based executive for Univision, a Spanish-language television station.

Accurately measuring the economic consequences of immigration is hard. Looking only at North Carolina, John Kasarda and James Johnson recently found that Latinos paid $756m in taxes annually and cost the state government $817m. That works out as a net burden of $102 per head. Anti-immigrant agitators will seize on this figure, worries Mr Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. But it is dwarfed by the positive impact of Latino spending in North Carolina, which he estimates at $9.19 billion in 2004. That translates into nearly 90,000 new jobs, he says.

The worry that America is importing a new Hispanic underclass, as some claim, is also probably unfounded. Granted, foreign-born Hispanics are less educated and earn less than the average American. But that is hardly surprising, given that so many were until recently Mexican peasants. What matters is whether they are socially mobile, and it seems that they are. Although, by some measures of income and education, the Hispanic average is not improving much, that average is dragged down by a steady influx of poor Mexicans. A better way of gauging progress is to look at inter-generational differences.

First-generation male Mexican immigrants earn only half as much as white men. But the second generation have overtaken black men and earn three-quarters as much as whites. They enjoy more benefits than the first generation, too: they are twice as likely to have employer-provided pensions and one-and-a-half times more likely to have health insurance. And the adult daughters of Mexican immigrants, having learned English, are much more likely to have jobs than their mothers were.

...in absolute terms, Mexicans have grown much richer by coming to the United States. If they had not, they would go home. And their children are doing even better. Whereas only 40% of first-generation Mexican immigrants between the ages of 16 and 20 are in school or college, nearly two-thirds of the second generation are. Between the ages of 21 and 25 the leap is even more striking, from 7.3% to 24.4%.