EDUCATION OF IMMIGRANTS DURING THE 1970’S
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eliminated hard quotas on countries previously considered undesirable and ushered in a new era of ethnic, racial and religious diversity. Though in its first iteration, the law privileged skilled and educated workers; in its final iteration, it biased family unification. The children, spouses and siblings of legal residents took precedence, along with scientists, artists, professionals and skilled manual workers.In the first years of its enactment, the new law opened the door to large numbers of professionals, particularly from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. Whereas fewer than 2 percent of immigrants in 1900 qualified as skilled workers, by 1973 roughly 10 percent met that qualification. More than 50,000 physicians and nurses emigrated to the U.S. between 1969 and 1973 alone, most of them from countries like the Philippines, South Korea, Pakistan and China. Within two decades, upward of 80 percent of staff physicians at some New York hospitals were Asian immigrants.
Several factors determine the educational level of immigrants to the United States. One is the educational level of the source countries. The average schooling in Mexico and the Philippines is similar, yet 36% of immigrants from the Philippines, but only 3% of Mexican immigrants are college graduates (Borjas, 1990, p. 52). The self-selection of immigrants from the Philippines is apparently more positive than from Mexico, presumably because of differences in migration costs by level of schooling and in the returns to college education in the two countries, among other factors.
The Asian immigrant data, however, includes a high proportion of low-education refugees from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, who arrived in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Although the initial group of refugees had a high educational attainment (11.5 years for the 1975-79 cohort), subsequent immigrant cohorts, many of whom Bed by boat, included many farmers and fisherman and have less than 9 years of schooling on average. Immigrants from Asia other than Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam have a very high educational level 14.6 years overall with a level of 15.2 years in the period just after the 1965 Immigration Amendments, after which the schooling level declined. In the 1980’s it increased to 14.9 years (1982-88).
The decline in the relative educational level of immigrants in the 1970s may be due to some factors: The first is the shift in the main source countries for immigration from Europe and Canada in the 1950s and 1960s to the generally lower education Latin American countries during the 1970s. Thus, part of the decline in immigrant schooling during the 1970s is explained by the level of schooling in the countries they come from.
The second factor is the rationing mechanism for immigration visas introduced in the 1965 Immigration Amendments (Chiswick, 1986; Reimers 1982). The 1965 Act abolished the pernicious national origins quota system in favor of kinship preferences. Potential immigrants from Asia were no longer barred because of their national origin but because of the absence of immediate relatives in the United States. Those with high levels of education are able to make use of the occupational preferences, thereby increasing both the number and schooling level of immigrant streams from several source countries. As these immigrants became sponsors for their relatives, schooling levels tended to decline.
Sources: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/14/education-levels-of-u-s-immigrants-are-on-the-rise/
http://www.columbia.edu/~yc2444/The%20Educational%20Attainment%20of%20Immigrants-Changes%20Over%20Time.pdf
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