For anyone who needs or wants to understand US immigration

Our historical understanding of immigration to the United States is cloudy, full of misconceptions, and hard to make sense of. The legal rules which govern immigration in 2023 are tough to decipher -- and, aside from past eras when nativism successfully outlawed most migrant arrivals, always have been a tortuous maze.

In 1994 I was plunged into considerable responsibility for fighting against a state initiative campaign (Prop. 187) which aimed, unfortunately successfully, to make life hell ford California immigrants. I needed to learn about immigration, fast. It proved surprisingly difficult to find clear, authoritative information about migrants and the system they lived within as well as their true impact on existing California society -- not to mention what their individual lives and prospects were like.

Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by academic economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan provides an up-to-date primer on precisely these issues, as well as a history of immigration since 1850. I sure could have used something like it back in the day.

Our aim in this book is to rebuild the story of immigration to America from the ground up, uncovering the patterns that the patterns that emerge from data on millions of immigrants' lives. ... The data gives us clues about why immigrants chose to come to the United States, and tells us when they left school, how well they spoke English, the occupations they held over their work lives, their earnings, whom they married, the names they chose for their children, and their children's outcomes as they became adults.

Some of the myths and issues they examine include:

• the reality, and the difficulties, of economic mobility for newcomers
• whether current immigrants learn English rapidly (not in the first generation)
• whether current immigrants assimilate to US customs as quickly as previous migrant generations (yes)
• do new successful arrivals hurt the US born (no)
• does global diversity benefit all of us, culturally and economically (yes, emphatically)

What Abramitzky and Boustan bring to the subject is a database of immigrant history of which they are almost inordinately proud. They began their efforts by sucking information uploaded by amateur family historians out of the Ancestry.com service. When the company noticed their work, it "worried that some computer bot was downloading their data to package and resell." The company sent a "cease and desist" letter. After conversations, the site welcomed their project. They then added in everything they could find from historical census files, Social Security records, tax records and birth certificate files. They were both able to follow the life histories of individuals and put those histories in the context of the picture drawn by the entire data set.

Individually, each record reflects a life quietly lived -- perhaps as a beloved teacher, or a hopeful parent, or a kindly neighbor -- achieving no fame as a result of their strivings. Together, these stories paint a portrait of the immigrant experience that largely overturns conventional wisdom.

For anyone needing to learn the basics about US immigration history and policy, I would recommend this book unhesitatingly. People will keep on coming; that's not easy for them or simple for those of us already here. But when you steal a continent from its native inhabitants and make the resulting polity unimaginably prosperous and relatively safe and secure, expecting to keep the world out is criminal folly and impossible. And the newcomers benefit us all.