Beyond rhetoric: Immigration in America

What’s the untold story of immigration in the United States? Are our beliefs misconceptions or truths? 

In this episode of Econ To Go, Neale Mahoney, the Trione Director of SIEPR, sits down with Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky to unpack some of the most persistent myths about immigration — and what the evidence shows instead. Drawing on decades of data, Abramitzky breaks down how immigrants and their children fare over time, how assimilation works in practice, and why common narratives about crime and economic impact often miss the mark. 

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Follow along as the conversation explores several key themes, including:

• (01:28) Debunking common myths about immigration
• (03:11) Upward mobility and the children of immigrants
• (08:11) What cultural assimilation looks like
• (11:16) Immigration rhetoric and the facts on crime
• (17:07) Rethinking immigration policy
• (22:44) The joy of teaching immigration: Sushi and pizza as signals

Abramitzky, a SIEPR senior fellow, is the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Economics and the senior associate dean of social sciences at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. His research focuses on immigration, economic mobility, and economic history. To learn more about his work, visit his Stanford profile or explore these links:

• Book: Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success
• Economics and the Modern Economic Historian

• The mythical tie between immigration and crime

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  Econ To Go brings Stanford economics into your everyday life — served with a side of coffee. Hosted by Neale Mahoney, the Trione Director of SIEPR and TG Wijaya Professor of Economics, the show takes you on a walk across campus with leading thinkers as they unpack the ideas shaping our economy, public policy, and daily lives. Smart, curious, and conversational — it’s Stanford economics, to go.
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  Transcript

  Season 1, Episode 6

Neale Mahoney: When we talk about immigration, the conversation is often dominated by myths, fear and political rhetoric. But what do the numbers actually tell us? Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky has spent his career digging into the data behind the American immigrant experience. His research tells a different kind of story, one grounded in facts, rich in nuance, and deeply human. When did you start doing economic history? This was early in grad school, before you came to grad school?

Ran Abramitzky: Oh, you know, very few people go to grad school wanting to do economic history, but I was one of the lucky few who went to Northwestern and got Joel Mokyr as the second year economic history course teacher. And Joel has this thing that he can convince you that the fluctuation of the price of butter in the 14th century is the most exciting thing you're ever gonna see. And so his passion for economic history is contagious. And you know, like after taking his course, there was nothing I wanted to do more than economic history.

Neale Mahoney: I'm Neale Mahoney, economist and director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In this episode of "Econ To Go", I catch up with Ran over coffee on the Stanford University campus. We talk about what makes immigrant families so upwardly mobile, how culture and backlash shape the debate, and what history can teach us about building a better path forward. And we start with a simple question, why did he call his new book "Streets of Gold"?

Ran Abramitzky: The "Streets of Gold" is a reference to this idea that immigrants used to come here without much in their pockets and move quickly from rags to riches. But we chose the title for a completely different reason. An Italian immigrant around the early 1900s said something like, "Before I came to America, I was told that the streets here were paved with gold. But when I arrived, I found out three things. First, the streets were not paved with gold. Second, they were not paved at all. And third, I was the one expected to pave them." So we thought, you know, this captures brilliantly what we are trying to do in this research that Leah Boustan, my long-term collaborator and I are doing in the last 20 years of reassessing some of the myths that, you know, like about immigration and the American dream over the last century.

Neale Mahoney: The famous quote by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on how you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts. People have strong opinions about immigration, but they often have incorrect facts. What do you think people get wrong the most about sort of the history of immigration in our country?

Ran Abramitzky: Well, one is that the immigrants used to be amazing in the past, this nostalgic view that immigrants used to move quickly from rags to riches in the past, but today, immigrants are stuck in a permanent underclass. There is a misperception about how much crime immigrants are doing, and there is a misperception about how immigrants are necessarily going to take the jobs and reduce the wages of the US born. Those are a few.

Neale Mahoney: So I want to dig more into sort of your finding on children of immigrants 'cause I think that's sort of the most remarkable. Can you tell me a little bit of what you found?

Ran Abramitzky: Yeah. So basically what we do is we compile data sets from going back 100 years where we can look at the children of immigrants and how they are doing depending on whether they grew up in poverty or they grew up rich. And the main finding that we have is that the children of immigrants are more upwardly mobile than the children of the US born, especially when they grow up in poverty. So for example, think about immigrants growing up to families in the bottom 25th percentile of the income distribution, which would put you today at around $30,000 per year. So think about, you know, you grow up in a family where both parents work full-time for minimum wage jobs. The children of immigrants growing up in such families are more upwardly mobile than the children of the US born, and this is true both in the past and today and it is true for immigrants from nearly every sending country.

Neale Mahoney: That's a remarkable statistic. Do you have any insight as to why that's the case?

Ran Abramitzky: The reason why the children of immigrants are more upwardly mobile than the children of the US born in large part is because immigrants choose to move to places in the US that offer high mobility for everyone, whereas the US born are more rooted in place. The reason why that happens is because moving away, moving to opportunity for the US born means moving away from home, and it's hard to move away from home. And immigrants already chose to move away from home, so they're better at optimizing and move to those places that offer high mobility for their children. So it's not so much that immigrants are exceptional in the sense that they care more about the education of their children or things like that. It's more that they are better at optimizing well to move in the US to places that offer high mobility for their children.

Neale Mahoney: I think your research and research by others on the importance of place makes me reflect and in fact, be concerned with some of the barriers we're erecting to people coming to move and work in our most thriving cities and sort of geographic regions, I think particular housing markets, right? We think about where we live. Santa Clara County being area where there's huge upward mobility, but also where thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people are sort of priced out of the market. And so, you know, when I think about policies that increase opportunity for immigrants, but also for Americans, is making sure we don't build moats around those dynamic cities.

Ran Abramitzky: Yes, and following up on this is that allowing mobility is one thing, but you also wanna focus on making sure that the place people move out from are becoming better.

Neale Mahoney: Yeah.

Ran Abramitzky: So you know, you can't have at some level everybody moving and then, you know, places become ghost towns. You wanna invest in making locations that are not as attractive good. So it's kind of interesting because in European, other European countries and you know, who receive also many immigrants, we also look at mobility in many other countries. So you know, as we were writing the book, we were asked, "Well, are you telling the story of immigrants everywhere or is there a special sauce about America?" And so we are like, "Oh, that's a great question." And we look at 15 different countries and we look at the same statistics about the mobility of immigrants in many other countries. And one of the things that we find is that, well, you know, when it comes to sons of immigrants, there is some special sauce in America. So the sons of immigrants in continental Europe aren't doing as well as the sons of immigrants in America. The daughters of immigrants though, they're doing well in many of the countries that we look at. So for the daughters of immigrants to be very upwardly mobile is the story of, it looks like it's the story of the daughters of immigrants everywhere. And we are now trying to understand why it's not. We are not there yet, but that's kind of where we are.

Neale Mahoney: Upward mobility isn't just a data point, it's a lived experience carried across generation. On a walk around campus, Ran told me about where these stories come to life in the voices of the immigrants themselves.

Ran Abramitzky: I listened to immigrants in their own voices in Ellis Island.

Neale Mahoney: Ah, yes. Okay.

Ran Abramitzky: And you know, like I went, you know, like and I read and I listened to them and I tried to understand their motivations of coming and how they did here and why, what their perception of their success and how well their English was. And then, you know, I analyzed, you know, presidential and congressional speeches. So these are all attempts to kind of like let qualitative data speak and try to use quantitative methods to analyze actually the way people in their own voice.

Neale Mahoney: I'd like to turn to sort of the cultural assimilation of immigrants. When I think about these issues, I go back to, you know, this great speech by Ronald Reagan, I think it was his last speech in office when he was talking about how you can move to France, but you can never be a Frenchman. You can move to Germany, but you can never be German. But anybody from anywhere in the world can come to America and be an American. And of course, being American is something which is, you know, hard to measure in data, but it shows up in all of these sort of soft measures of cultural assimilation, which you've looked at. Can you tell me about that research?

Ran Abramitzky: Culture is multifaceted and it's impossible to measure the full range of cultural assimilation. But there are indications in the big data like who you marry. Are you likely to marry somebody from your own cultural group or do you marry outside of your group? How well do you speak English? Do you move to an immigrant enclave or do you move to just a neighborhood surrounded by other US born? Are you applying for citizenship? And one that is especially a favorite of mine is like, how do you name your children? And so you know, how you name your children has a cultural content in it. We look at the naming patterns and we find that immigrants give more American-sounding names to their children when they stay more years in the US. And this is, to us, a sign that the more immigrants stay in the US, they are kind of more integrating into the culture. Now any way we can measure it with the intermarriage or with the ability to speak English, application to citizenship, the propensity to move away from immigrant enclaves, we find substantial amount of assimilation into the US society by immigrants. And so for us, this notion that immigrants don't even try to assimilate and integrate into the US is just not boring the data. The data shows that even within the first generation, immigrants make attempt to assimilate. Now do they assimilate all the way? Do they move from calling their children Ran to calling their children Dallas? No, but they move from calling their children Ran to calling their children David. So they are not moving completely away from the, they're trading off retaining their cultural identity with the benefits of assimilation, but they definitely take substantial steps to assimilate into US society.

Neale Mahoney: The rate at which they're assimilating, you know, has it slowed down? Has it sped up?

Ran Abramitzky: We find remarkable similar degree of say, name assimilation in the past and today, and similarly, we find similar propensity of moving away from immigrant neighborhoods toward more integrated neighborhoods in the past and today. So much of the story that we have in the research is one of many things might have changed in terms of policy, but the immigrant behaviors and the immigrant assimilation and integration into the labor markets and into society has remained similar, of course, with important caveats and with many much heterogeneity, but kind of as a general pattern.

Neale Mahoney: So you know, we've seen heated rhetoric directed at immigrants. We can all think of recent examples, but you've sort of panned back and looked at rhetoric over time and more systematically. What does that analysis show us?

Ran Abramitzky: We look at congressional and presidential speeches going back to the 1870 until today, and what we do is we analyze the tone and the topic that, you know, immigrants are discussed in congressional and presidential speeches. The way this looks like is imagine you take a group of research assistants and you have them read a large number of congressional speeches, and you code the immigration speeches about being positive or negative in tone about immigrants, and then you use machine learning to scale this up to the larger corpus of immigration speeches. Or you do things like, my favorite one is I wanted to capture, we wanted to capture, you know, implicit dehumanizing language for immigrants. You know, immigrants infest, a flood of immigrants, a cargo of immigrants. So you can give the computer a sentence, and then you take out the subject of the sentence and you have the computer guess whether this is about a human or non-human? And this creates an implicit dehumanization language that is free of our choice. And when we look at all of that, what we find is that, you know, in the 19th century, you will be hard pressed to find anybody saying anything nice about immigrants. Both Democrats and Republicans are very negative about immigration. Within a generation between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, immigration speeches are becoming from on average negative to an average positive. And today, immigration speeches on average are as positive about immigrants as they have ever been in US history, but there is an increasing polarization over the last 20 or 30 years where Republicans are just as negative as everybody was a hundred years ago about immigrants and Democrats become increasingly more positive. And when we look at what it is that they say about immigrants, we find that the differences are not driven by how they speak about the economics of immigrants. It is just that Democrats, when they speak about immigrants, they mention things like compassion and you know, refugees and us being a nation of immigrants, and Republicans tend to focus on legality and crime when they speak about immigrants. And so that has been the trends in, you know, like in political speeches.

Neale Mahoney: Can you tell me some of the facts on criminality of immigrants sort of over time?

Ran Abramitzky: Yep, so look at census data and then we can see, and then we follow people across population censuses so that we can create genealogies of millions of immigrants and the native born as they move up the ladder and integrate into society. One of the things we noticed as we did that was, "Oh, this is a big family of like 200 people." And then you look into this and you're like, "Oh, that's San Francisco jail and the occupation is like inmate." And so you're like, "Oh, so now we have data on all of the population of, you know, including country of origin and incarceration data." And so why don't we look at incarceration rates since 1870 until today of immigrants versus the US born. What we find when we look at this data is that there hasn't been a period in US history over the last 150 years in which immigrants were more likely to be incarcerated than the US born. And in fact, starting the 1960, the 1960s, a gap has emerged in, you know, like where immigrants are even less likely to commit, to be incarcerated than the US born. And when we try to understand why that is, we find that this has to do actually with US born in the last 50 years, high school dropout US born are not doing as well. You know, they're reporting, they're less likely to be employed than similar immigrants, they're less likely to be in the labor force, less likely to be married, more likely to report health problems. And so much of it is, and immigrants that are equally less educated, you know, this is the population that typically find itself in jail are not doing as badly. And so there is something about incarceration that is just one outcome out of many in which US born aren't doing very well when they're high, you know, like when they're coming from low education in the last 50 years.

Neale Mahoney: When we trade data for rhetoric, it's easy to lose sight of the truth. Over coffee, I asked Ran what lessons from economic history he thinks every policymaker should keep in mind.

Ran Abramitzky: It would be that the context matters a lot. You have to care, you have to learn, you know, the underlying, the statistics are human beings that make decisions and that have constraints and that they live in a society with the choices and constraints. And that you should not just study the statistics in abstract, but you should actually delve into the context and think about how the life looks like from the lived experience of people. And then always remind yourself that the statistics is no more than the collection of the many, many individual stories. And so like I come to policy from a place of, you know, rigorous economic analysis, but also from a place of curiosity and understanding why did people make the decisions that they did in the historical context that they had around them and the communities that they had, you know.

Neale Mahoney: With all your scholarship you've, you know, focused on different time periods, different immigrants from different countries, different immigrant experiences, what have we learned about the policies and practices which help with, you know, this upward mobility of immigrants, allowing immigrants to sort of grab the American dream?

Ran Abramitzky: The main lesson is that if you take a short, that we should take a longer term view for immigration policy. So if you take a short-term view for immigration policy, it often understates how successful immigrants are. So for example, you look at the immigrant generation itself when they are just off the boat, they often don't do as well as the US born. You know, they often work in manual jobs. All of immigrants know how the first generation often sacrifices. And so like you look at immigrants when they just arrive, it might appear to you that immigrants are not doing as well. But when you take the longer view, looking at the children of immigrants, then looking at immigrant groups who arrived here 100 years ago, then you see how immigrants are much more successful than they appear to be in policy. So the children of immigrants are moving up regardless of whether they were growing up in poverty. The immigrant groups that arrived 100 years ago, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the English, the Germans, nobody's speaking about them as being problematic immigrants. And so it's just that taking a longer term view emphasizes the contribution of immigrants. You know, the children of immigrants are more than paying the debts of their parents as they integrate into the US economy and society. So you know, that's kind of like one of the main lessons, you know, from our work. The other one is to avoid this nostalgic view about immigrants. You know, it's like if you look at American history, it oftentimes looks like, you know, at first it was the English complaining about the newly arrived Germans, and then the Germans complaining about the Italians, and then the Italians now, you know, complaining about the Mexicans. And I'm sure like if you go in 50 years, there will be a podcast, somebody will say, "Well, the Mexicans are terrific, but you know, what about the new immigrant groups that arrive today?" So we should avoid this nostalgic view about the past. Those Italians, you know, like when they first arrived, they also worked in manual jobs. You know, they made a huge effort to assimilate and integrate. Their children are now doing well, and now from the perspective of 100 years, they appear to be doing great, but we should be patient to see the contributions of immigrants unfold over time.

Neale Mahoney: One thing that struck me hearing about your work is the correspondence between your findings on the importance of place and the work by Raj Chetty and co-authors on sort of cities and other areas, sort of lands of opportunity within the United States.

Ran Abramitzky: At some level, you know, when we show, when the immigrants are doing better than the US born, it also means that the US born aren't as upwardly mobile as we hope that they might be. And if they don't move to opportunity as much, you know, as Raj and Tim is finding, then you know, like the immigrants, advantages start to show up and they are more likely to move. One of the things that we do is look at another aspect of the American dream, and that's looking at the higher education and how access to higher education changed. So moving attention from immigrants to the US born and almost if you want, take Raj Chetty stuff, you know, that he's working on in the last few years in historical perspective. So for example, one of the recent work that we have been doing, we are looking at college yearbooks going back to the 1920s that we digitize, and then we link the college yearbooks to the census so that we can see the socioeconomic background that people are coming from. And then we create data on millions of students, you know, over the last 100 years, and you know, as they access higher education. One of the things we find for example is looking, you know, focusing on say elite colleges, Stanford, Harvard, and so on. So today, the, you know, people from the bottom 20th percentile of the income distribution are about 4 or 5% of the incoming class at Stanford and Harvard. In contrast, 100 years ago, it was also 4 or 5% in, you know, of the underlying class. And so we find very little change in access to elite education, for example, by people from low socioeconomic backgrounds. And we can then look at various policies that changed over the century like the GI Bill or the introduction of the SAT in order to try to learn how we can improve upward mobility in the American dream to the US born. So that's kind of like part of my larger research agenda, you know, focusing on immigrants, then focusing on US born, try to make sure that, you know, we can create the best American dream for everyone regardless of where they come from.

Neale Mahoney: Ran's passion for expanding the American dream runs deep. And while we were waiting for coffee, we found ourselves reminiscing about his early days teaching at Stanford.

Ran Abramitzky: Been coming here for 20 years.

Neale Mahoney: Do you remember? It was moonbeam.

Ran Abramitzky: It was moonbeam.

Neale Mahoney: When-

Ran Abramitzky: Yeah, I absolutely remember-

Neale Mahoney: Because you came here also in 2005?

Ran Abramitzky: 2005. I think you were in my first graduate classes.

Neale Mahoney: I was in your first-

Ran Abramitzky: So it's very memorable. It was a very memorable year.

I love teaching about immigration to students. My favorite class, you know, before I started to have, you know, to have my dean job and I then didn't have time to teach small classes was I had like a class about immigration in American history. Basically what I did was, you know, like it was 10 weeks. Every week, I brought some food that immigrants brought to America. So you know, one week, it was like bagels, you know, and I told them the history of the bagels from Jewish immigrants, and there was a pizza and sushi. And so like, you know, like it's also, there is something beyond just the observables, you know, there is America without immigrants is also, you know, America without sushi and pizza. And it was really lovely to teach because, you know, like the eventually at the end of the class, the main task was to, is a, we are in a congressional hearing and each student has to propose an immigration policy change. And it was very nice, you know, and different people come with different views to it. Some people think we should close the borders. Some people think we should close the, we should favor immigrants that are high skilled over immigrants that are low skilled. Other people think we should create a more inclusive society and bring people, you know, that are refugees and from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. And it's all great as long as they, you know, like we talk about, the same facts and reach different conclusions, but you back up your argument with facts. It was great, so to me, the notion that, you know, today you hear more often about how the campus is only one sided and like everybody is speaking in the same voice, I did not see that in any of the classes that I, you know, that I taught in undergrads or in grad school. I see, in fact and again, you know, maybe economics is a bit different like that, it's possible. But I feel in economics, like you ask the hard questions, even if they're uncomfortable to hear. You know, we are not just here to be advocate. You know, it's not advocacy for immigrants, it's about like what policies, you know, might work for US born, for Americans. And I have not seen much change over the years. I feel my students have always been very curious and very probing and they're not speaking in a uniform voice.

Neale Mahoney: Immigration has always been central to the American experience. It's a path shaped by challenge, resilience, and surprising upward mobility. From misleading narratives to powerful data, Ran's research reminds us that where people land and how they're welcomed can shape generations. A big thank you to Ran Abramitzky for this insightful conversation and to all of you for listening. I'm Neale Mahoney, and "Econ To Go" is where we bring Stanford economics into your everyday lives. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe or follow the show wherever you get your podcast. We've got more smart, curious conversations coming your way from the Stanford University campus.