Article: “The American Dream and the Children of Immigrants,” Cardiff Garcia, NPR, November 4, 2019.

Post by Kate Maro. Colgate Class of 2022.

An individual’s or family’s mobility can have a large impact on their ability to move between socioeconomic levels. Generally, immigrants are perceived as relatively imobile. This would be due to the barriers faced by immigrants once they enter the United States—language, lack of contacts, employment restrictions, etc. However, when comparing the economic success and mobility of the children of immigrants, researcher Leah Boustan finds that they are actually just as mobile, if not more so, than the children of lower-middle class American-born families. 

In her study, Dr. Boustan uses three cohorts of immigrants (those living in the U.S. in 1880, 1910, and modern day). The income of the children of these immigrants 30 years after arrival consistently averaged to the same income level of native-born children of working class families. Between the three different cohorts, very little variation was found in the relative success of the children of immigrants. Each group was shown to have significant socioeconomic mobility, regardless of country of origin. In some cases, immigrant children actually gained more economically than native children, likely due to the choice of location for each family. Immigrants have consistently been more likely to settle in urban areas that have more opportunities for upward mobility. On the other hand, American families of lower income may be unwilling or financially unable to relocate to a city or state that has higher economic opportunity. A significant part of this divide can be traced back to the divide between the North and the South. In the time period of the 1880 and 1910 cohorts, the U.S. was 15% foreign-born, while the South was only 2% foreign-born. Immigrants rarely located there, signaling the low levels of socioeconomic mobility in the South that can still be seen today.

The role of location in the mobility levels of immigrants is thus shown to be more significant than the common explanation of the “immigrant work ethic or culture.” Americans are not nearly as mobile as immigrants, as many have strong family ties to their home state or town. These ties, however, prove to hinder their ability to raise their own income and that of future generations. Socioeconomic mobility is thus not a question of ethnic background or work ethic, but of a willingness to move to a location conducive to economic growth.