In 2019 the Hispanic population of the United States surpassed sixty million—or sixty-four million if the inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are included. Only Mexico is larger among Spanish-speaking countries in the world. The rapid growth of the Hispanic population—which had been estimated at only four million in 1950—has been stunning. The US Census Bureau has projected that, given moderate levels of immigration and natural increase, Hispanics would grow by 2060 to an estimated 111 million people (about 28 percent of the US population), significantly exceeding the proportions of other ethnic or racial minorities. And while Hispanic Americans now account for one of every six persons in the United States, their impact—social, cultural, political, and economic—is much more profound because of their concentration in particular states and localities. Hispanics are at once a new and an old population, made up both of recently arrived newcomers and of old timers with deeper roots in American soil than any other ethnic groups except for the indigenous peoples of the continent. They comprise a population that can claim both a history and a territory in what is now the United States that precede the establishment of the nation. At the same time, it is a population that has emerged seemingly suddenly, its growth driven by immigration from the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America—above all from Mexico—and by high rates of natural increase. Today, a third of the Hispanic population is foreign- born, and another third consists of a growing second generation of US-born children of immigrants. And the label itself—“Hispanic”— is new, an instance of a pan-ethnic category that was created by official edict in the 1970s. The ethnic groups subsumed under this label were not “Hispanics” or “Latinos” in their countries of origin; rather, they only became so in the United States. But the Spanish roots of the United States antedate by a century the creation of an English colony in North America and have left an indelible if ignored Spanish imprint, especially across the southern rim of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In US popular culture and in official narrative and ritual the American past has been portrayed as the story of the expansion of English America, suppressing if not silencing the Hispanic presence from the nation’s collective memory. But past is prologue, and no understanding of the Hispanic peoples in the United States today or of the category under which they are now grouped can ignore the historical and geographic contexts of their incorporation.

Immigration, it has been said, is the sincerest form of flattery. That may well be, but you wouldn't know it from the current political climate. It's open season on immigrants, from Europe to the United States. In Europe, migration and the control of external borders has become an issue of high politics, rising to the top of the policy agenda, even as the European Community (EC) was focusing on abolishing internal borders. In the U.S., it too has been a red-hot topic of public debate in states, focusing yet again with the policy triptych of legal immigrants, illegal aliens, and refugees and asylees. This article reviews a wide variety of policy-oriented books and reports informed by recent scholarship, aimed at once to sharpen the policy debate and to increase public understanding of the nature of immigration and of the policy dilemmas it poses for receiving nations. While the complexity of immigration processes makes them difficult to grasp fully, how a "problem" is perceived and framed (e.g., “illegal immigration”)--including conflicting ideologies, hidden and not-so-hidden agendas and assumptions that underlie many policy recommendations--largely dictates proposed solutions. Debates that serve to "define the situation" are thus critical to the policy process, and here is where rigorous research can make a difference in political discourse. Political compromises may help enact a policy, but they carry built-in contradictions that can plague the implementation process. Such complexities are among the primary sources of unintended consequences, yielding added reasons to reflect on the limits of public policies, particularly when what is sought is nothing less than to control a world on the move. Politics and policy-making, like life itself, are far more tangled and conflictual than the policy recommendations contained in the volumes reviewed here seem to suggest. Still, condemned to try to control a future they cannot predict by reacting to a past that will not be repeated, policymakers are nonetheless faced with an imperative need to act that cannot be ignored as a practical or political matter.

The Workshop to Examine Current and Potential Uses of NCES Longitudinal Surveys by the Education Research Community was held on November 5–6, 2013, in Washington, DC, with the aim of providing the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) with input on the changing needs of the education research community and to offer ideas on ways NCES longitudinal surveys could be organized to plan into the future—particularly in light of a changing U.S. student population due to growing and diverse flows of immigrants. The following provides an overview of the transformation of the United States into a new nation of immigrants over the past several decades, and of a rapidly growing second generation of children of immigrants; discusses immigration and generational contexts most relevant to situating the educational experience of a changing student population; takes note of a similar previous effort to incorporate immigration-relevant data into federal surveys and official statistics; and proposes a “common core” of questions in NCES longitudinal surveys (only some of which are already being used in some surveys, but not consistently).

On the occasion of the American Sociological Association's centennial, The Chronicle asked seven sociologists to discuss what attracted them to the field, what they consider to be the discipline's fortes and failings, and where they'd like to see it go from here.

Hearing on 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Becoming Americans - US Immigrant Integration,' Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Serial No. 110-27. May 16, 2007. Abstract: In this statement to a House Hearing on comprehensive immigration reform focusing on immigrant integration, English and foreign language competencies, preferences and use among immigrants and their children in the United States are examined, based on both historical and contemporary census and survey data. The findings of key studies measuring inter-generational language change are summarized, including longitudinal and cross-generational analyses. Data are then presented from research measuring the “linguistic life expectancies” of immigrant languages in Southern California, the region of main immigrant settlement in the U.S. - that is, the generational point at which an immigrant language (Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese) effectively “dies” and is replaced by English language preference and use. Responses are also provided to these post-hearing questions posed by House members: “Is there such a thing as too much immigration? Legal immigration? Illegal immigration? How many immigrants are too many? Is there a limit to how many immigrants we can successfully assimilate? What are the criteria? What are the consequences if the wrong judgment is made about how many immigrants we can assimilate? How did previous generations of immigrants learn English without federal programs?”