Note: This post was crossposted from the Lauren Policy blog by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Late last year, Vivek Ramaswamy - an Indian-American Republican - published an essay about America as a creedal nation, one defined by ideals rather than by nationality.
This led to a rather bizarre national conversation about if Ramaswamy himself is truly an American. Is he - a second-generation immigrant - even qualified to opine on such things? The conversation about what it means to be American has continued as ICE seeks to detain anyone who they believe looks like an undocumented immigrant.
So, it seems worth asking: when do immigrants - and their children - become American?
Many asking these questions are not looking for the dates that one gains permanent residency or takes the oath of citizenship. They are asking something fuzzier: when do immigrants socially integrate into American culture such that they are “one of us”?
These are not questions that economists usually seek to answer. In general, economists tend to think about assimilation in terms of economic integration, rather than cultural integration. But no one thinks Ramaswamy has done poorly economically; rather, they question his cultural identity.
My own field, political science, tends to spend a bit more time on fuzzy concepts like culture and belonging. This post will thus pull as much from the political science literature as it does from the economics literature. And economics is not a field that believes any question is beyond its all-consuming reach; economists Leah Boustan, Ran Abramitzky, and Katherine Eriksson, in particular, have done some great work on these questions.
But even with the best data we have, we can’t truly measure when other people think someone has become an American. However, we can measure some of the traits Americans think make an American. These includes speaking English, civic engagement, and participating in American traditions and culture.
Language
Let’s begin with language. The US is an English-speaking nation, but it is not an exclusively English-speaking nation. About 22% of people in the US primarily use another language at home (though this may be in addition to at least some English). 13% speak Spanish at home, with around 9% speaking a non-English non-Spanish language at home.
A bit less than half of US immigrants speak English “very well” upon arrival. (They are, after all, generally coming from non-English-speaking countries.) One of the first signs of integration into America is generally improving one’s English skills.
There are significant economic benefits to learning English. If you only speak Spanish, you are restricted to employers who also speak Spanish at work. This is quite a significant decrease in possible employment opportunities. It also rules out many educational opportunities; while there are a handful of universities in the US that teach their B.A. degrees in Spanish language/literature entirely in Spanish, you’re probably out of luck should you want a degree in anything else. Being randomly assigned to an English language class increases income by $2,400; arriving in the US when you are young enough to become a near-native speaker increases your income significantly more.
English language skills are also useful in social integration. When people are more comfortable in English, they tend to become more civically engaged - being randomly assigned to an ESL class doubled the likelihood of registering to vote. Fluent English speakers are less likely to live in ethnic enclaves and are more likely to marry people of other ethnicities.
Of course, learning English takes time. In general, the longer an immigrant has been in the United States, the more likely they are to speak English very well. These things are most useful if you plan to stay in the US long-term; if you plan to move back to your home country in a few years, you’re less likely to invest in the multi-year project that is becoming fluent in English. While we cannot always determine which immigrants want to stay in the US, there is one group of immigrants who do not want to (or cannot) return to their home countries. Refugees are generally expecting to spend the rest of their lives in the US, as their home country is no longer safe for them. They therefore learn English more comprehensively than other types of immigrants.
There does seem to be a ceiling, though; even after 30 years in the US, only about 70% of immigrants can speak English very well. The likelihood of any particular immigrant becoming fluent in English appears to be heavily dependent on age; almost all immigrants who arrived as children become fluent in English, while it is likely less than half of non-English-speaking immigrants who arrive as adults do.
Even if they don’t become fluent, though, there is some benefit to trying to learn English. In an experiment, people felt more positively towards immigrants who speak heavily accented English - that is, signaling that they were in the process of making a costly investment to assimilate. Americans know English is hard to learn, and they respect the effort it takes.
Interestingly, coercing people to learn English does not seem to be very effective in turning them into Americans. Fouka 2020 examines the case of German-Americans. Before 1917, some US schools taught in German as well as English. Some states banned this practice when the US entered WWI against Germany. Forcing German-American children to learn in their second language only strengthened their identity as Germans. They were more likely to marry other people of German descent, less likely to give their children “American” names, and less likely to volunteer to fight against Germany in WWII.
Another paper that studies English-only schooling around the same time period (1910-1930) finds similar results. While English-only schooling did improve English fluency, it didn’t improve labor market outcomes or social integration.
Ethnic Enclaves
Ethnic enclaves are neighborhoods where a particular ethnic group clusters. They are common in cities where there is a large number of immigrants. The most well-known variant is probably the various Chinatowns around the United States, but there are also ethnic enclaves for Korean-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Somali-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, as well as historic enclaves for Jews, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans…
For decades, if not centuries, ethnic enclaves have been a common first destination after arriving in the United States. This makes some sense. If you speak limited English, you are probably going to move to an area where 1) you may know people, and 2) where other people speak the same language that you do. Many new immigrants prefer to live in communities that share at least some similarities to where they’re coming from.
Many native-born Americans also dislike ethnic enclaves. There is a perception that the residents of ethnic enclaves are not integrating into American society; indeed, that living in an ethnic enclave is a sign that you are resisting integration into American society.
This is, to some extent, true. It seems that moving to an ethnic enclave does reduce integration relative to moving to a place where there are fewer people of your ethnicity. In the twentieth century, residents of ethnic enclaves were less likely to change their names to fit in with Americans. When Italian-Americans attended Italian churches (often located in enclaves), they took longer to integrate into wider American society. They were less likely to intermarry and less likely to naturalize.
Living in an ethnic enclave might also harm economic outcomes. During the Age of Mass Migration, Norwegians who lived in ethnic enclaves earned less and were less likely to work in white-collar jobs. When Jews were funded to leave their ethnic enclaves, they earned more. And yet: people tended to live in enclaves for decades, perhaps significantly delaying assimilation.
Given all these negatives, are (some) Americans right when they criticize ethnic enclaves? My considered opinion is “ehhh, maybe, but also maybe not”.
There is also some evidence that enclaves can be beneficial because they provide a soft landing point for people new to the United States. Living in one can make it much easier to find a job with limited English skills, and appears to increase employment rates for newly-arrived immigrants. In some cases, it seems that people make more in enclaves than they do outside them, so it is not universal that ethnic enclaves harm economic integration.
Why are there contradictory results on the economic effects of enclaves? Some of it appears to be selection - that is, who else lives in an ethnic enclave. Is your enclave full of low-earning people or high-earning people? Do people tend to be highly educated? Did people choose to live there to avoid integration or was it just convenient? The character of the enclave seems to matter a lot.
It also seems plausible to me that enclaves are helpful in providing a soft landing when immigrants first arrive, but are net negative for immigrants who have been in the US longer and could be on the broader job market. Thus, there might be an optimal amount of time to live in an enclave.
More importantly than any of that, though, enclaves just don’t seem like a problem. Yes, they are common, but enclaves are neither more nor less prevalent now than they were in the 1920s.
And they also seem to be temporary. The groups that populate today’s enclaves are not the same as those who populated enclaves in the 1920s. Even if Norwegians did stay in enclaves longer than would have been optimal, they eventually integrated into wider American society. In 2025, one would be very hard-pressed to find someone who complains about all those Norwegians and their distinct cultural practices.
Measures of Assimilation
The modern US is not the same as the US of the Age of Mass Migration, though. Should we expect similar integration outcomes for modern immigrants?
One way to measure cultural integration is through the names immigrants choose for their children. Naming your child “Inaya” or “Aarya” is quite popular in India, but these names are less common in the United States. If parents instead choose to name their child “Emma” or “Amelia”, this is suggestive that parents care more about their child being perceived as “normal” in the United States than they do about their child being perceived as “normal” in India. Indeed, it goes a bit further; choosing an “American” name is a sign that one wants to be perceived as “normal” by white Americans, rather than by co-ethnics.
Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson and Hao argue that naming is a particularly good way to measure assimilation for several reasons. Naming a child is a relatively unconstrained choice available to all types of immigrants. It does not cost more to name a child “Emma” as opposed to “Inaya”, meaning that such a choice is equally available to rich and poor immigrants. Unlike measures like intermarriage, it does not require the cooperation of anyone outside the immigrant family unit - after all, to marry someone from another ethnic group, that person also has to want to marry you. The only constraint on choosing a Generic American Name is one’s desire to have a child with a Generic American Name.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people are more likely to choose “American” names for their children the longer they have been in the US. More surprisingly, the rate at which people converge to “American” names is relatively unchanged over the last 100 years. People transitioned from the Greek “Giorgios” to the English “George” in the 1910s at roughly the same rate as people transition from “Juan” to “John” today. By this metric, then, immigrants integrate just as well today as they did in the Age of Mass Migration. Furthermore, the groups of immigrants most often accused of not being interested in assimilation are often the fastest to shift towards American names.
There is a notable exception to the narrative that immigrants want to assimilate and be perceived as American. As they adopt mainstream cultural markers, African immigrants can be perceived as African-Americans. African-Americans are, of course, a marginalized group that also faces discrimination. If an immigrant thinks the discrimination they’d face as a (perceived) African-American would be worse than the discrimination they’d face as an immigrant, they might logically choose to maintain attributes that mark them as not-American. And this is just what Adida and Robinson find. Somali immigrants who look similar to African-Americans are less likely to adopt American-sounding names.
This is suggestive that name assimilation is something immigrants do only when they perceive it to be advantageous. If assimilation would lower their social standing, they will choose to assimilate less.
One last caveat to choosing an American name: if this was an investment in pursuit of better economic outcomes for one’s children, it wasn’t a very good one. When Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson and Hao looked at brothers whose names varied in their level of “ethnicness”, there was little difference in their level of education achieved or likelihood of employment. Learning English might matter for your integration into American society, but at least in 1920, no one cared if your name was Hyman or John.
The US Also Assimilates To Immigrants
It would be remiss if I did not point out that assimilation is not a one-way street. Even as immigrants (mostly) move towards the dominant American culture, the dominant American culture moves towards them. If we conceptualize the US as a melting pot, the composition of the melt is affected by additional ingredients.
We can see this in names - some of the names that were once distinctively “ethnic” are now just… names. In the Age of Mass Migration, “Eric” and “Kurt” were names that one could easily identify as belonging to an immigrant from Germany or Scandinavia. In 2025, those are names one might choose in order to assimilate into American society.
It is likely we will see some of the same things in future - names, foods, and practices once thought to be foreign that become Just How Americans Do Things. Being American is a dynamic thing, but US immigrants seem more than happy to try to meet that moving target.
So: what does this all mean for Vivek Ramaswamy and the other second-generation immigrants like him? Is he - are they - truly American?
The empirical evidence suggests yes. Current immigrants are following (largely) the same path of past immigrants. Over decades, today’s immigrants will become the long-ago ancestors of tomorrow’s “just Americans.”
Indeed, Ramaswamy himself clearly views himself as American; he is so invested in the American project that he ran for office. It is true that he still follows some distinct cultural practices, but in ways, that only makes him more American.
Over the last two and a half centuries, millions of Americans have done the same, slowly flavoring the melting pot with a few new spices.
Many thanks to Claire Adida for sharing her politics of migrant exclusion and inclusion syllabus. All mistakes are my own.
