LOS ANGELES -- If demographics is destiny, as demographers say, then neither side in the polarized debate over this nation's immigration future can take much comfort in a recent study of immigration statistics done by the Rand Corp.
For the past decade, researchers at the Santa Monica, Calif., think tank have been notably objective and admirably restrained in trying to bring better public understanding to a very contentious issue.
Their latest effort analyzes census data from 1970 to 1990 in an attempt to gauge how well recent immigrants (both legal and illegal, since the Census Bureau makes no distinction in its fact-gathering) have fared in comparison with U.S. citizens with regard to schooling and jobs. The record is decidedly mixed.
Education the key
Those who see the immigration glass as half full can cite the two Rand studies to argue that the American Dream is alive and well, at least for those immigrant families who push education as the way to achieve it.
Immigrant children are just as likely to finish high school as their U.S.-born counterparts, and somewhat more likely to finish four years of college. And while immigrant workers from Europe and Asia start out earning less than U.S. workers, they rapidly reach pay parity.
But those who see the immigration glass as half empty will point to some very real social problems identified by Rand, particularly with regard to immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Not only are Latino immigrants not keeping up with U.S. citizens and other immigrants in school and at work, but the gap may be widening.
Growing wage gap
In 1970, workers from Mexico and Central America earned an average wage 25 percent to 40 percent lower than native-born workers; by 1990, the difference was 50 percent.
And not enough of these immigrants are using education to catch up: 73 percent of Mexican-born teen-agers in the U.S. are in high school, compared with 90 percent of those born in other countries.
Such findings will come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the immigration issue with an open mind over the past few years. They have been hinted at in other research, some of it cited in the Rand survey.
Unfortunately, some of those earlier studies were seized upon by anti-immigrant extremists who have misused them to create a nasty myth that immigrants coming to the United States today are somehow of lesser ''quality'' than those who came here in the nation's past.
