The fourth wave: 1965 to the present

The 1965 law ushered in the fourth major wave of immigration, which rose to a peak in the late 1 990s and produced the highest immigration totals in American history by the end of the decade. In addition to the many immigrants allowed by the hemispheric limits (changed to a global total of 320,000 in 1980), the wave has included hundreds of thousands of immediate relatives and refugees outside those limits. It has also contained millions of illegal aliens, who cross borders without (or with false) papers or arrive at airports on student or tourist visas and then overstay.

Between 1960 and 2002 nearly 35 million people settled legally in America. The list of the ten largest nationality groups in Table 3.1 for 1960 shows only two Latino and no Asian immigrant groups hut many European nationalities. The prominence of Mexicans, however, foreshadowed future trends. At the peak

of the fourth wave in the 1990s, some 9.5 million more newcomers arrived. The

second list of groups, in 2002, after the peak brought by the 1965 Act, reveals

the law’s unexpected benefits for the Third World immigrants of the fourth wave.

In 2002 three quarters of the legally resident foreign-horn in the US were Latino

(51 per cent) or Asian (24 per cent).

Like the earlier waves of newcomers, the fourth includes a broad range of socio-economic groups. One result of saving visas for needed occupations is that a very noticeable minority are highly skilled workers, professionals (especially engineers, doctors and nurses), and entrepreneurs with capital. The large majority of both legal and illegal immigrants are similar to those who have arrived since the 820s. They are above average educationally and economically at home, but below average in these areas in the USA. They have come because commercialization and industrialization (now revolutionizing the Third World) have disrupted their traditional economies.

At the socio-economic bottom of this wave are people who obtain visas because they are near relatives of recent, more skilled immigrants or who take jobs Americans do not want. Among the latter are Latino women recruited by agencies as live-in domestic servants and nannies. Spreading the word about these jobs and moving into better-paid work once they have acquired more English, they bring their families and forge the links in ‘chain migration’ based on a network of female contacts.

The nationalities and skin colours of most people in this wave are different and more various, however, and they arrive in different ways and settle in different places. There are colonies of Hmong in Minneapolis, Vietnamese on the Mississippi Delta, east Indian hotel-owners across the Sunbelt, Middle-Eastern

Muslims in Detroit and New Jersey and large concentrations of Latinos — not only in the south-west but also in the rural south and mid-west as well as the nation’s big cities. These large foreign-born settlements have given rise to contemporary forms of racism and nativism. Groping for ways to adjust to the changes in their country’s population, some Americans are again resorting to broad stereotypes.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1191