Analysis: Digitized in part by amateur genealogists, the data shows that the current wave of immigrants is succeeding and assimilating at virtually the same rate as immigrants did a century ago.
One those volunteers, Laurel Peregrino, 66, has already reviewed more than 51,000 names and entered additional demographic data for more than 2,000 families, most in California and Texas — two of the many states in which she lived before settling down around Philadelphia. An avid genealogist, Peregrino has dug through her family history for a quarter-century and made half a dozen trips to the National Archives in D.C.
The data reveals there was nothing particularly special about Ellis Island immigrants. Most of them struggled their entire lives to make it in America and never caught up with their native-born peers. Many others abandoned the American experiment entirely and returned home where, Boustan said, they “were able to take what they learned or saved in America and apply it to success on European shores.
“Children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic today are just as likely to move up from their parents’ circumstances as were children of poor Swedes and Finns a hundred years ago,” the economists write in their new book, “According to Boustan and Abramitzky, the secret weapon deployed by immigrant parents wasn’t education.