Redstate

By Stilichio Posted in Immigration — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

One key issue in the current debate about immigration is: "Will Hispanics assimilate?". By the term "assimilate", what is usually meant is "do as well as Italian, Swedish and Irish immigrants?". Some people, like Robert Novak believe that the answer is yes by historical default.

When looking at actual data on Hispanic assimilation compiled last year by a pro-immigration group (the AILF), more than a hundred years worth actually, a much bleaker picture emerges, however. The data was analyzed extensively a year ago by David Frum of NRO (giving a black eye to Matt Yglesias in the process).

The report tracks the family histories of Latino immigrant men born between 1885 and 1919. This is roughly a hundred years worth of data, covering three generations.

The data sample is likely to overestimate the success of Hispanics in the US, however, as the demographic makeup of Hispanics in the late 19:th and early 20:th century was quite different than today, with poor Mexicans making up a larger portion of Hispanic immigrants today compared to earlier times.

Not very surprisingly, the AILF spins results in a positive way:

"Latinos experience substantial socioeconomic progress across generations compared to both their immigrant forefathers and native Anglos."

What the report actually shows however, as David Frum notes, is that:

"Their own data show that even the grandchildren of the pre-1965 Mexican and Latino population still lag substantially behind native Anglos.

Their data show that today’s native-born Hispanics continue to drop out of school at rates nearly double those of Anglos.

Frum concludes:

And yet on the basis of this same disturbing data, the AILF authors conclude that the very poor, very rural, very uneducated Mexicans arriving illegally today will assimilate just fine over the decades to come."

For more information, regarding Mexican-american social statistics, see my earlier post on the subject