“Immigrants and their children are integrating at essentially the same rate as our ancestors did,” says Audrey Singer in a recent discussion about a new report on immigrant integration by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. But, according to the new research, variations between and within immigrant groups can impede integration, especially in terms of race and legal status. Singer, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, was a member of the panel of experts who conducted the study and wrote the report. In the audio included below, which first appeared in an episode of the Brookings Cafeteria podcast, Singer explains some of the report’s key findings on English language acquisition, crime, and intermarriage.
“What I worry about,” Singer says, “is that immigration is often a fact-free zone … [and] we’ve collected the evidence, we’ve shared the evidence, and we have to remember what that says in order to be able to understand the changes that are happening all around us.”
Download a copy of the National Academies report, “The Integration of Immigrants into American Society.”