They live in poverty for a first generation? That's not going to change because they speak English. That's going to change once their degrees are recognized, their cultures receive equal treatment as Euro-trash degrees or they are able to integrate society without us putting the boundary of tens of thousands of dollars. As those things don't change, English speaking African engineers who immigrate will still be driving cabs, Caribbean doctors will still be busing tables and Greek kids will be working at their mom & pop restaurants.
You're still ignoring the fact that the dynamics of the US job market and it's native population has changed since the 1960's. For example, in 1960, the immigrant population was basically on par with the native population in number of collage degrees and number of high school dropouts. With the immigrant breakdown being 60% dropouts, compared to 50% Americans, with collage degree holders representing roughly an equal amount of both populations (10%).
Fast forward to today, and that mix is much more disproportional, with the dropout rate now shifting to 7% of Americans, but almost 30% of immigrants. So to argue the employment situation is similar to what it was in the 60's, and that these people are offered the same opportunities and hardships as the past, when we have a much more specialized economy and a much less competitive population is clearly a pipe dream.
The above pressures are also reflected in the research: <<<Economists often measure the rate of economic assimilation by calculating how the
wage gap between natives and a specific wave of immigrants narrows over time (see
Figure 1). Consider the group of immigrant men who arrived in the late 1960s at a
relatively young age (they were 25-34 years old in 1970). These immigrants earned 13
per cent less than comparably aged native workers at the time of entry. This wage gap
had narrowed to about 3 percentage points by 1998, when both immigrants and natives
were 53-62 years old. Overall, the process of economic assimilation reduced the initial
wage disadvantage of these immigrants by 10 percentage points over a thirty-year
period, and allowed them to almost ‘catch up’ with native earnings.
However, the young immigrants who arrived after 1970 face a much bleaker future –
simply because they start out with a much greater disadvantage. Consider those who
arrived in the late 1970s. By the late 1990s, twenty years after arrival, those immigrants
were still earning 12 per cent less than natives. The situation is even gloomier for those
who arrived in the late 1980s. They started out with a 23 per cent wage disadvantage,
but the wage gap actually grew, rather than narrowed, during the 1990s. If the historical
experience is used to extrapolate into the future, these cohorts should be able to
eventually narrow the gap by about 10 percentage points, so that these immigrants will
earn much less than natives throughout their working lives.
The Economic Integration of Immigrants in the United States: Lessons for Policy; Borjas
Perfect weather all the time.
