GOP Candidates Say Immigrants Don’t Learn English, But Report Proves Them Wrong

WASHINGTON -- The Republican presidential candidates frequently employ harsh rhetoric to discuss immigration, accusing immigrants of failing to assimilate and integrate into American society. But an extensive report released this week debunks their claims, finding that immigrants make great efforts to learn English and adopt American values and customs, and that subsequent generations are entirely integrated.

The report, published on Monday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and compiled by a panel of prominent immigration scholars, defines integration as the process by which immigrants "become American," adopting similar values and customs of native-born Americans and achieving similar socioeconomic outcomes.  The research concludes that “across all measurable outcomes, integration increases over time, with immigrants becoming more like the native-born with more time in the country, and with the second and third generations becoming more like other native-born Americans than their parents were.”

Among its specific findings: immigrants and their children do learn English -- and, contrary to GOP candidates' scaremongering, immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than the average American.

Learning English

Politicians frequently chide immigrants for not learning English. During CNN’s Republican presidential debate last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) -- actually one of the GOP’s more moderate voices on immigration -- said he opposes other Republicans’ proposals to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., but said they should learn English to remain in the country.

“They can come here, but they should learn to speak our language,” he said. He then quipped: “I don’t speak it very well, but look how far I’ve come.”

The importance of learning English is a common refrain in conversations about undocumented immigrants. Even candidates who support immigration reform, like Graham, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), say that a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants should include a requirement that they learn English.

While the new report acknowledges that immigrants often speak their native language at home, it also found that a majority of them are in fact learning English, or already know it. Sixty-six percent of immigrants who speak a foreign language at home also can speak English "very well" or "well,” according to the research.

“Today’s immigrants are actually learning English faster than their predecessors,” the report says, in part because many immigrants come from countries where English is already widely used or taught in schools.

Thirty-eight percent of new legal immigrants took a class in English before coming to the United States, according to research cited in the report. And almost all immigrants have “consumed at least one form of English language media prior to departure,” which also helps improve their knowledge of the language.

In general, the children of immigrants are learning English at faster rates today than in previous generations, the report says. Typically, the grandchildren of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants only know how to speak English.

Crime

Another Republican allegation against immigrants is that they create more crime. Famously, reality television star and real estate mogul Donald Trump kicked off his presidential campaign this year by calling undocumented immigrants from Mexico "rapists" and accusing them of “bringing crime.” On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly brought up the murder of Kathryn Steinle, a San Francisco woman killed by an undocumented immigrant, as evidence of rising crime committed by immigrants. 

But this “immigrant crime wave” is a myth, according to this week’s report. Researchers found that crime rates in immigrant communities are much lower than national averages. Immigrants are “much less likely” to commit crimes, and communities with high immigrant populations have lower crime rates than “comparable non-immigrant neighborhoods.” Additionally, immigrants have lower rates of incarceration than the average population, even after including immigrants who are in jail for violating immigration laws.

While the report’s authors cautioned that their job is to produce scientific research, not political prescriptions, they found substantial evidence that the integration process can be affected by an immigrant's legal status. Undocumented immigrants and their children have a harder time because their undocumented status limits their ability to apply to college, seek higher-paying jobs and receive government benefits.

The report, which is the National Academies’ first review of the process of immigrant assimilation and integration since 1997, does have its caveats. The editors acknowledge that they need to delve deeper into the subject to strengthen some of their findings -- a compilation of prior research by a large, interdisciplinary panel of experts in economics, political science, sociology and anthropology, among other fields. One of the big limitations, they wrote, is a “dearth of available longitudinal data to measure immigrant integration.”

In general, immigrant assimilation and integration is a complicated process that can be hard to define and measure. The way immigrants navigate and adapt to the United States depends on a lot of factors, like their socioeconomic status and where in the country they settle. As the report’s authors explained, it also relies on a feedback system involving both immigrants and native populations.

“Integration is a two-way process: it happens both because immigrants experience change once they arrive and because native-born Americans change in response to immigration,” they wrote.

What the report does prove quite effectively is that, when making immigrants the target of attacks, the GOP candidates are mostly spouting falsehoods.

Sadly, their claims are nothing new. Immigration to America has occurred in several different waves, with people arriving from different areas of the world. During each wave, anti-immigrant lawmakers accused the new arrivals of causing more crime and presenting a threat to native populations. They also lamented that immigrants were not learning English, and consequently, there have been perennial efforts to make English the official U.S. language.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the child of Indian immigrants and perhaps the biggest voice on immigrant assimilation in the GOP field, continually rails against “hyphenated Americans” and claims that “immigration without assimilation is invasion” -- a favorite catchphrase of his.

“We need to insist people that want to come to our country should come legally, should learn English and adopt our values, roll up their sleeves, and get to work,” he said last month.

But the report’s findings demonstrate that Jindal and his fellow GOP hopefuls are operating on an increasingly antiquated and inaccurate theory of immigrant assimilation. Most immigrants are doing exactly what the GOP field says they are not doing -- and to some extent, doing much more. 

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