What inspired your latest study in Spain?

The idea of doing a study in Spain came because nothing was known about the process of the adaptation of children of immigrants in Europe. Originally I thought of doing it in France, because of the problematic nature of the second generation. But it is very difficult coming from North America to do a study in France, because of the attitude of the French state and the limitations it imposes: there are no data on ethnic groups, it’s difficult to access schools if you’re not from there and it’s a different academic tradition. So for that and other reasons, we decided to move it to Spain which was more familiar territory in terms of language and culture. My collaborators and I met very positive attitudes and reception from the authorities and the schools, which is what made the study possible. And as it turns out, there were a lot of immigrants there at the time we started the study. There had been a very rapid process of immigration to Spain. That will be my next book, Spanish Legacies: The Coming of Age of the Second Generation, which will come out in February.

In the areas you’ve studied, what has driven nativist or inclusionist sentiments? How has this differed by region/continent?

There is a big disconnect between the political economy of immigration and nativist attitudes. Perhaps the smallest of this gaps occurred in Spain, largely because it has no history of long-term immigration, so in a sense having so many immigrants took the country by surprise. But even in Spain there were nativist sentiments: that immigrants were taking welfare benefits, that they were crowding out the natives from the clinics — the usual. So that is almost a law-like regularity in migration, that the majority of the population tends to be relatively averse, especially if immigrants are numerous and tend to crowd in highly visible places. It is only at the higher echelons of political and economic power where people create favorable conditions for immigration. And in passing I must say that the more I read, the more I think the recent generosity of Germany in terms of letting all the immigrants in was not completely philanthropic. There is increasing evidence that the German authorities and elites saw the current immigration crisis as an opportunity for the country to fill in labor that was becoming increasingly scarce with people who were relatively well-educated. So it’s looking like once again, you have this divide where political and economic interests and authorities say, “Well, we need immigrants because otherwise things don’t work,” and the natives say, “They are taking jobs away. They are crowding us out.”

What were the most striking findings of your latest research outside of the U.S. American context (i.e., immigration in Spain)? What are the main similarities and differences in both phenomena?

What we found is that the process of adaptation of second-generation youths in Spain has been relatively nontraumatic. It has been relatively smooth, as evidenced by their identification with the country. The number of respondents calling themselves Spaniards — how you identify yourself is a very important variable in terms of social psychology — increased significantly during the course of the study. The first survey was done in 2007-08 with about seven thousand young students attending basic secondary school in metropolitan Madrid and metropolitan Barcelona. We followed the sample for four years and interviewed them again in 2012. The research was able to retrieve about 73 percent of the original cases, which is a very good figure for longitudinal studies like this one. What we found was that identification with the country, for children of immigrants born in Spain, the second generation proper, by 2012 was about 85 percent. What was even more remarkable was that, for those belonging to the 1.5 generation, born abroad and brought to Spain, identification doubled in the course of these four years from about 25 percent to 50. So by age 18, half called themselves Spaniards despite the fact that they were not born in Spain. That’s very remarkable given the experience of other European countries, where children of immigrants absolutely refuse to identify with the receiving country, like France or even Germany.

A number of this year's U.S. presidential candidates are second- and third-generation Hispanics. What does this say about the political incorporation of immigrant groups in the U.S.?

Well, the roster of candidates in the United States is peculiar. The roster on the Democratic side is very standard American. Hillary Clinton and her in-party opponents are all multi-generation Americans. It is actually in the Republican Party where there are these second-generation candidates, and they all have something to do with Cuba: Marco Rubio, a second generation Cuban American; Ted Cruz, also a second generation Cuban American; and Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican, but made his political career in Miami sponsored by the Cuban American political machine.

So more than the political integration of Latin American immigrants in general, it’s the structural assimilation of Cuban Americans.

Only Cubans, because of their favorable mode of incorporation as exiles of a communist regime, received a lot of support from the U.S. government. There was also their own know-how in terms of business and their own solidarity in terms of being refugees. For example, in Miami today, Cubans are outnumbered by other Latin Americans, but these communities have no unified voice. There are no Colombians or Brazilians in any position of authority, although there are hundreds of thousands of Colombians and Brazilians living there. The only group that rules Miami are Cuban Americans. And not all Cuban Americans for that matter; it is the older generation and their children, not the ones who came more recently. They made a stronghold of the politics in that area, but this may disappear with the passage of time. The Mexican American community, the great sleeping giant, has been slow in naturalizing and mobilizing, but it is growing. This is in part due to the fact that there is a growing second generation of Mexican Americans. These citizens are able to vote, so one can expect that the Hispanic vote—driven not by the small Cuban enclave in Miami but by the huge Mexican population together with other groups—will be increasingly important in U.S. politics.

How has the Cuban American community changed over time and as a result of different waves of migration to the United States? Do you think the political engagement of young Cuban Americans affected the United States’ decision to lift the embargo and if so, how?

U.S.-Cuban relations were for many years governed from Miami. No U.S. government would dare confront the Cuban American lobby in Congress. Cuban Americans were the second most powerful political lobby in the United States after the Jewish lobby. Whereas other populations may have gone to politicians asking for money, the Cubans called politicians and said, ‘Mr. So and So who is running for election—say, for senator in Indiana—what can we do for you?’

In 2013, the UAE had the fifth largest stock of migrants in the world, with 7.8 million migrants (out of a total population of 9.2 million people), most of whom are temporary target earners. What is your perspective on long-term consequences of this phenomenon?

I think that there is a need for much more work in this part of the world—close fieldwork, like what we have done on the second generation in Spain or in the United States. In this case, there is no second generation, to a large extent because immigrants are not allowed to stay for long. But from the outside, and from seeing what is happening here, you can see that the UAE is very different in how it recruits and receives migrants when compared to countries like the United States, Canada, France or Germany. Gulf countries are, first, very recent, only about fifty years old. Second, they are very thinly populated. Third, they have been blessed with a tremendous amount of resources that has allowed their leadership to deliberately build a society out of practically nothing. Fifty years ago there were sand and bedouin families in the desert. Nothing else. England was very happy to get rid of the Trucial States because they were very costly, not knowing that a few years later oil would be found in such great quantities. What the UAE leadership has constructed here is contrary to most other countries where immigrants are say seven, eight or ten percent of the population. Here we have the reversal. Natives are ten percent of the population and everybody else is from abroad.

There was a process of assimilation though, prior to the formation of the state. There are Emiratis who are of Persian origin, for example.

There is a lot to be researched here, but I don’t think it would be possible because of the difficulty of doing large surveys similar to the CILS (Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study). But there are other methodologies, more qualitative ones, that could be applied to different groups. There are groups that have been here for four generations, like groups of Indian entrepreneurs in Dubai who are now on the fourth generation. These are very significant because they want to stay, and it is interesting to see how that interacts with the general model of a nation.

How did you develop an interest in migration?

Migration is closely related to my own biography. I was forced by circumstances to leave my country at an early age, not understanding very well why one day I was in Havana and the next I was in Miami, unable to go back. So basically, one of the reasons why I became a sociologist was to understand the causes of the Cuban Revolution, a major event in our time and one I witnessed directly as an adolescent. From that derived other interests that have since largely dictated my research career, one focus being immigration, the sources and adaptation of immigrants and the second generation, and the other being development and urbanization, especially the successes and patterns of the Latin American experience. All of that stems from formative experience in early years.

How have you picked which countries, cities, and institutions to study?

I started my research on immigration in the 70’s, with a comparative study of Mexicans and Cubans arriving in the United States. That was my first major study when I was a professor at the University of Texas. We took samples of Mexicans arriving in border towns in Texas, and Cubans arriving in Miami. These were large samples, and we followed them over time. That was one of my first books, called Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Out of that came other interests in terms of extending the research to other communities, like we did with the first edition of Immigrant America: A Portrait with Rubén Rumbaut, which was published closely after Latin Journey, in 1990. This was the first of four editions. Sometime after we finished it, many years ago, we were having a lunch in Atlanta and we said, “Well, there is a lot of information on immigrants, but not on their children.” At that time there was nothing. Nothing had been done since the time of the European immigrants, and that led us to begin studying the adaptation of children of immigrants which eventually became the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS).

When will humanity throw off the yoke of national borders?

That is a leading question. It already uses the words “throwing off” and “yoke”. If we could put it in more sociological or neutral terms, what he or she is asking is: Will the nation-state system disappear anytime soon? We live in a globalized world where the economy is global, but there is a state system that controls it. There is no evidence that the state system will disappear anytime soon. The consolidation of national states will continue to be here for the foreseeable future. I think the United Nations will not in any way be capable of taking over. This is even more unlikely given the current scenario. There are centers of power in a number of places. There is no Pax Americana anymore. There is China, Russia, the European Union and a rising India. What we are seeing in the Middle East is all these actors converging and disagreeing over what should happen. There is no hegemony. All of these states are fighting for some kind of protagonism or hegemony. There is no chance that states like Russia, China, or England would disappear within my lifetime. Even the EU, which is an attempt to transcend national borders, is going back to them because it has become basically a Franco-German coalition that keeps the whole enterprise together. So to answer the question, not in the near future.