Measuring immigrant assimilation in the United States

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. Ironically, the effect of the reduction in the numbers of immigrants arriving and staying has been to offset the impact on the assimilation index of gradually declining levels of English skills upon arrival and afterward as well as lower rates of naturalization. The reason for this is that recent arrivals differ most from natives, and thus their absence raises the collective assimilation index values of immigrants who have been here longer.