Crossroads: The Psychology of Immigration in the New Century

patents than any country in the world, and immigrant adults
are responsible for 24% of them, creating patents at twice
the rate of native-born Americans (Gauthier-Loiselle &
Hunt, 2010; Kerr & Lincoln, 2010). Another measure of the
immigrant contribution to technological development and
the economy is that of all U.S. engineering and technology
companies started between 1995 and 2005, 25% had at least
one immigrant founder. These companies were responsible
for $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 people in
2005. Another 27% of the companies founded during those
years had a foreign-born chief executive or chief technology
officer (Wadhwa, Saxenian, Freeman, & Salkever, 2009).
Many highly educated and skilled immigrant adults,
however, experience a dramatic decrease in employment
opportunities when they immigrate (Yakushko, Watson, &
Thompson, 2008). They may experience unemployment,
underemployment, downward mobility, and disqualification
of previously held professional credentials (Dávila, 2008; G.
Lee & Westwood, 1996; Yost & Lucas, 2002). These issues are
magnified for ethnic or racial minority adults (Catanzarite &
Aguilera, 2002; Fernandez, 1998; M. C. Morales, 2009).
At the other end of the spectrum, some immigrant
adults have educational levels far below their U.S.-born
contemporaries (CBO, 2011; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006).
Some sectors of the U.S. labor market are particularly reliant
on “low-skilled” immigrant adults, including those in the
agriculture, service, and construction industries (CBO, 2011;
Passel & Cohn, 2009; Schumacher-Matos, 2011). American
farms produce more than 9% of U.S. exports and almost
all the food consumed in the United States (Schumacher-
Matos, 2011). The U.S. agricultural industry is very reliant
on the immigrant population (CBO, 2011; Schumacher-
Matos, 2011). Approximately 75% of all hired farm workers
in the United States, and nearly all those involved in
the production of fresh fruits and vegetables, are legal or
undocumented immigrant adults (Kandel, 2008).
Economists have routinely debated the relative costs and
benefits of immigration for the U.S. economy. These
debates are often based on rivaling methodologies and
modeling (Schumacher-Matos, 2011) as well as on the
challenges involved in capturing economic activity in the
informal economy (Thukral, 2010). Nevertheless, metaanalyses
on the topic seem to indicate that on balance,
immigration benefits the U.S. economy (Griswold, 2009; see
Schumacher-Matos, 2011, for a comprehensive review on
the topic), although the overall contribution of immigrants
The Why and Who of Immigration
is relatively modest given the size of the total U.S. economy
(Schumacher-Matos, 2011).
There is, however, a general tension between the federal
government and state governments when it comes to
the economic consequences of immigration. The federal
government keeps the lion’s share of taxes generated by
immigrants, whereas local governments must bear many
of the costs and provide the services immigrants consume,
particularly for education (National Research Council, 1997;
Schumacher-Matos, 2011). Notably, in the United States,
women with graduate educations are particularly likely to
benefit from the services of low-skilled immigrant labor, as
it decreases the time they devote to housework and increases
the purchases they make (Cortes & Tessada, 2009).
Language Diversity
An estimated 460 languages are currently spoken in
homes in the United States (Kindler, 2002). The National
Center for Education Statistics estimates that between
1979 and 2008, the percentage of children who spoke a
second language at home increased from 9% to 21% (U.S.
Department of Education, 2010). Of those individuals
speaking a language other than English at home, 62% speak
Spanish, 19% speak another Indo-European language,
15% speak an Asian or Pacific Island language, and the
remaining 4% speak another language (Shin & Komiski,
2010). Though Spanish is the predominant foreign language
spoken in the United States, there are 2 million speakers of
Chinese (including its various dialects) and more than one
million speakers of Tagalog, French, German, Korean, and
Vietnamese. There is a total of 26 languages with more than
100,000 speakers over the age of 5 in the United States
today (Bayley & Regan, 2004).
Many of these non-native English speakers also speak English
with varying degrees of fluency (Shin & Komiski, 2010). In
general, higher levels of education and longer residency in
the United States correlate to greater fluency in English (Shin
& Komiski, 2010). Within one generation of immigrating,
however, bicultural competency drops dramatically, and by the
third generation, very few retain even minimal language skills
from their grandparents’ country of origin unless there has
been intermarriage or a multigenerational living arrangement
(Alba, Logan, Lutz, & Stults, 2002; Portes & Schauffler, 1994;
Wong Fillmore, 1991).
In the United States, there have been recurring concerns
about the immigrant population’s inability or unwillingness
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