There's No Melting Pot

At 16 million, the number of naturalized citizens in the U.S. makes up a sizable demographic. But how quickly they adopt to democratic institution of voting varies widely depending on the country of their from, or so it seems. This chart shows the relationship between a country's rating on the Economist's Democracy Index and the voter turnout of naturalized U.S. citizens from those countries:

On the upper right are countries like Sweden, Australia, and Norway with both high levels of political freedom and expat voter turnout in the U.S. On the lower left are places like Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, and China, where free elections don't look like they'll be happening anytime soon.

While this might suggest that free countries can export their democratic practices to other parts of the world (or at least the U.S.), a new working paper by Courtney LaFountain of the University of Texas at Arlington and Noel Johnson of George Mason University argues that it's what happens once immigrants reach the U.S. that determines whether a foreign-born citizen will vote.

Looking at the voting behavior of naturalized citizens between 1996 through 2006, they find that people who've been in the U.S. longer are more likely to vote than more recent arrivals. And that's what appears to drive the results in the chart above since their results hold even when controlling for the year that an immigrant arrived, or their country of origin. Foreign-born citizens with more years in the U.S. are more likely to be from Europe, but with immigration law changes in 1965 newer generations of immigrants have been more likely to be from Latin America and Asia.

The reason why people with less time spent in the U.S. are less likely to vote, the researchers say, can in part be attributed to the "Bowling Alone" effect, or the rising disconnect between individuals and their communities. They argue that newer immigrants end up in diverse communities which have been shown to hurt civic life.

The end result that "there is no assimilation of immigrants into the franchise and, at least since the1950's, the melting pot analogy does not apply to American democracy."