Defining "us" with fuzzy numbers
"Is it possible to create a really inclusive 'us' without a 'them'?"
After I hit send on the last newsletter, I went to the gym and listened to an episode of "The Curiosity Shop" with Brené Brown and Adam Grant, where they were speaking to John Green about sports and belonging.
The conversation covers why the world wants to create groups in opposition to other groups, so much so that infants, Grant mentioned, already discriminate against out groups.
Weft is about building and defining an "us" that is inclusive of anyone who feels like they hold two identities at once. The struggle in trying to create a community of belonging is that if I can’t give you a "them" that is based on exclusion, what does "us" really mean?
Definition and data serve to prove a point
Regardless of whether you use legal definitions or social ones, there are times when a number matters.
Kids of immigrants is the easiest way of framing the larger group of people who are both American and something else and have felt the pull. However, when I introduce this idea to folks, I often say complex identity.
A biracial person is both Mexican and Chinese and faces the same uphill battle of figuring out who they are. Same for the families of migrant workers.
Definition and data serve to prove a point. The biggest point to prove is "we exist and we are worth paying attention to." We are an audience. A market.
The Census Bureau's Current Population Survey has counted population by generation, detailed in tables that range from 2005 to 2025. The bureau’s 2025 estimate puts second-generation immigrants at somewhere around 13.1% of the U.S. population - about 44.25 million people in the country - with a margin of error of 690,000. That is a cut-and-dry number for U.S.-born people who have at least one immigrant parent. But it got fuzzier when I started looking at a broader definition of complex identity.
"Most Latino immigrants (71%) consider being Latino extremely or very important to how they think about themselves. By contrast, fewer second-generation Latinos (57%) and those of third or higher generations (51%) feel that way. Despite these differences across immigrant generations, half or more in each group say their Latino identity is important to how they see themselves."
This bit from the Pew Research Center in July clarifies it. While Latino immigrants feel very Latino, and second or third generation Latinos feel they are "typical" American, they also still feel Latino. They are both. And then there are second- and third-or-higher generation Latinos who identify as American alone (22% and 40%, respectively). Complex, no?
Granted, Pew is only talking about Latinos here, and it might be possible that this does not extend to other groups, but it might be possible that it does.
The count that matters (to some)
The type of counting that matters in defining marketing audiences or even journalistic audiences, though, is money.
Earlier this year a number was released that was the closest thing to what I’ve been looking for for three years - economic impact. The headline: Beneficiaries of birthright citizenship will have contributed $7.7 trillion to the U.S. economy through their income between 1975 and 2074, according to research done by Phillip Connor, Matthew Hall and Francesc Ortega and released in the Journal on Migration and Human Security.
That number is based off a calculation of 3.9 million people including working adults, current children and projected future children in that time frame.
Connor, research fellow at Princeton University's Center for Migration and Development and a lecturer at the School of Public and International Affairs, confirmed via email to me that this is a conservative estimate of the fuller number I’ve been seeking. It includes people with parents who are both undocumented or on temporary visas.
"It is a conservative estimate as it excludes single-parent-led families where the head is an undocumented person, those with undocumented parents that have since died or left the U.S., or future flows of undocumented immigrants during the time frame, among other limitations to the population," Connor wrote.
Look deeper into this paper and you’ll understand how conservative it is and how $7.7 trillion is one slice of a larger pie. On top of the exclusions Connor mentioned, multigenerational households were excluded and the adult group was based in part on probabilities calculated for parentage from some Mexican and Central American countries.
The complexities of this single paper underline the difficulty of defining even one slice of us through numbers and especially dollars.
The borders remain squishy and the definition is shifting constantly. The courts remain a venue for debating how to define birthright citizenship (a challenge to one of Trump’s most recent executive orders has been filed).
Three pieces, about 3,000 words and many research paper rabbit holes later, there is still no way of talking about this identity without talking about the intricacies of identity itself. To create an us without a them, we’re going to have to employ an old networking idea - when in a group, if someone is standing at the edges, open the circle up. Pac-Man is the ideal. Like the video game, becoming us means opening up to some thems along the way.
Reading List
Links I came across while writing this piece that didn't make it into the actual piece
📊 The many ways U.S. Hispanics describe their identity - Pew Research
🔗 Why we must unlearn belonging - Mochi Magazine
📖 A 2015 look at data on integration of immigrants - National Academies
Random bits
I'm going to start dropping fun/interesting culture stuff each issue.