Posted on 10/10/2008 2:42:24 PM PDT by neverdem
A provocative new book doesn’t flinch from delivering the bad news.
John McCain and Barack Obama have largely avoided discussing immigration during the presidential campaign. But when it comes to the legal side of the issue, they both seem to support the status quo: an official policy centered around low-skilled, predominately Hispanic immigrants. A forthcoming book shows just how misguided that policy is, especially in light of the nation’s current economic woes. The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, by Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras, offers an unflinching portrait of Hispanics’ educational problems and reaches a scary conclusion about those problems’ costs. The book’s analysis is all the more surprising given that its authors are liberals committed to bilingual education, affirmative action, and the usual slate of left-wing social programs. Yet Gandara and Contreras, education professors at UCLA and the University of Washington, respectively, are more honest than many conservative open-borders advocates in acknowledging the bad news about Hispanic assimilation.
Hispanics are underachieving academically at an alarming rate, the authors report. Though second- and third-generation Hispanics make some progress over their first-generation parents, that progress starts from an extremely low base and stalls out at high school completion. High school drop-out rates—around 50 percent—remain steady across generations. Latinos’ grades and test scores are at the bottom of the bell curve. The very low share of college degrees earned by Latinos has not changed for more than two decades. Currently only one in ten Latinos has a college degree.
One hundred years ago, when the U.S. still required a large industrial and agricultural labor force, Hispanics’ lagging educational performance would not have been such a problem. Our current information-based economy is unforgiving to the less-educated, however. When you couple U.S. demographics with the Hispanic education crisis, things look worrisome indeed. By 2025, one in four students nationally will be Latino; in many Southwest cities, Latinos are already about 70 percent of the school population. For the first time in history, the authors observe, the ethnic group with the lowest academic achievement will become the majority in significant parts of the country.
California provides a glimpse of what such changes might mean for America’s economic future. The Center for Public Policy and Higher Education predicts that unless the rate of college matriculation among “underrepresented” minorities (that is, Hispanics) immediately rises, the state will face an 11 percent drop in per capita income by 2020.
Federal, state, and local governments have already spent billions trying to overcome the Latino education gap, with little success. That gap persists in part because of the stigma against academic achievement among many Latino males. Contreras and Gandara recount a typical classroom episode: a boy correctly answered a math question, only to be greeted by chants of “schoolboy, schoolboy” from the other male children, followed by the comment: “Now you think you are smart.”
The Latino Education Crisis pulls no punches in its conclusions: “With no evidence of an imminent turnaround in the rate at which Latino students are either graduating from high school or obtaining college degrees, it appears that both a regional and national catastrophe are at hand.” The United States is well on its way to creating a “permanent underclass,” the authors write. They even have the nerve to discuss the calamity of Latinos’ rapidly rising illegitimacy rate—which now stands at 50 percent. Gandara and Contreras had better get used to being called racists from open-borders supporters, as anyone who dares to point out Hispanic family breakdown can attest.
Some readers may disagree with the book’s policy recommendations—more benefits for illegal immigrants, more spending on social services and schools, more Section-8 housing vouchers, more bilingual education. Such programs have all been tried and have failed miserably. A more common-sensical solution is required. Certainly we should create more schools with an ethic of self discipline and hard work and continue doing everything we can to help Hispanic students succeed. But American immigration policy also needs to change. It should favor educated, skilled foreigners over low-skilled family members of existing immigrants. Law enforcement efforts against illegal immigration—targeting employers especially—must expand.
But however debatable some of the book’s proposals, the evidence it presents for the “grave . . . economic and social consequences” of Hispanic educational failure is overwhelming. No matter who our next president is, The Latino Education Crisis should be required reading in the White House.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.
That's great. And we want to import more folks who not only don't want to "act white," but who also don't want to assimilate and who don't get along with the other minority that doesn't want to "act white"?
Actually, Hussein voted against Immigration Reform. But that doesn’t make him a decent person.
That’s because it wasn’t extremely welcoming enough to the illegal population for his tastes.
By the way, I hate to say this as I risk sounding an academic snob - but “Education Professors” are lightweights. I don’t know why they have colleges of education - someone who majors in Education doesn’t make a good teacher. They need to major in the field they are going to teach. I happen to be married to a Professor, an Economist. Anyone with a college degree should be able to teach - I have seen what they teach in these so called colleges of education and I am really underwhelmed.
When I was in school (yeah, ok in the dark ages, in the early 60’s thru the early 70’s) there were separated ESL classes (English as 2nd language) and immigrant kids from places like Eastern Europe were placed there until they got a firm grasp on the English language, and THEN they were mainstreamed into regular classes. It worked really well - many of them graduated with honors. I don’t know why we’ve gotten away from that. This was in the suburbs of Cleveland where we had LOTS of immigration back then.
LOL!!!! He’s such a hypocrit!
The problem, of course, is that educated, skilled Asians are less likely to vote socialist and be manipulated by the far Left for race-hustling purposes than the uneducated, poor Mexican and Central American masses. So clearly we can't have that.
Bump for later read.
Let’s be clear about a few things. The major immigration problem in the US is made up of Mexicans. Not “Latino”, which technically means “An American whose primary language is Spanish”, or the ridiculous abstraction “Hispanic”, which was invented during the Reagan administration and means nothing at all.
That is, Mexican nationals in the US are the problem, not Americans who are ethnically Mexican or Indian. And I mean “Mexican or Indian”, because before the nation of Mexico invented its complex list of some 40 or so ethnic groups and common ethnic blends to describe their races, their legal definition of the difference between Mexicans and Indians was that “Mexicans wore shoes.”
To further complicate things, Mexican nationals living in the United States are unique among American immigrants. Typically, immigrants coming to the US would take three generations to integrate, with the second generation being the most problematic, because it was neither “old country” or integrated yet. This second generation created Mafias and street gangs, etc.
And Mexicans, legal or illegal, fit this integration pattern as well. However, because they have arrived in a steady flow instead of in a big wave, all three generations coexist at the same time. To make matters worse, some of the Mexican nationals return to Mexico at times, which refreshes their attachment to that country, while others leave Mexico for good, losing all attachments as soon as possible.
What matters to their integration is where in the US they decide to live. If a Mexican neighborhood is established, it enables their not integrating, but if forced to integrate by living among non-Mexicans, they do so rapidly.
So we end up with strange situations like adults who are illegal aliens, yet have spent their life since infancy in the US, speak English fluently, have an American education, and want to become full citizens, work in jobs they were trained for and enter the middle class with both feet.
At the same time, full American citizens who are ethnically Mexican, do not speak English, remain in the Mexican community or frequently visit Mexico, have no desire to integrate, and are generally parasites to the US.
Mexicans are unique also because of Revanchism. They think the US owes them something because of the Mexican-American war.
A few Mexicans believe this. Others reject it completely. Something that utterly perplexes the MSM is why Mexican-Americans are not like blacks, in utter fealty to the Democrat party.
Simply put, Mexicans are smarter than that. They learned in their own bloody and protracted civil war that political alliances can get you killed. And this was a profound educational experience as well.
There are some significant paradoxes in Mexican culture that way. For example, while most Mexicans shy away from higher education, they often have high respect for those who are highly educated.
In old Mexico, taxes were based on number of windows and the outdoor appearance of homes. So Mexicans adopted the style of few windows and poor looking exteriors. Yet indoors, their homes are often clean, tasteful and attractive.
Though Mexicans thoroughly cross breed in Mexico, only a fraction of a percent will marry a Spanish speaking person from another country. Otherwise they will marry whites, blacks, orientals, etc.
I have known some ethnic Mexican families evenly divided between legal and illegal members, adults and children. Politically I’ve known ethnic Mexicans who were extreme left, liberal, moderate, conservative and far right. Many who were steadfast in their opposition to illegal immigration, surprisingly enough, most were ambivalent to it.
When there were the big protests about the crackdowns on illegal aliens, a large percentage of the mob were afraid that they were being singled out as a despised ethnic group. And this scared the heck out of them, because in Mexico, it could get you killed. The leaders, however, tried to pretend that they all spoke with one political voice opposing restrictions on illegal immigration.
The most integrated of ethnic Mexicans, more than anything else, want to become legitimate American citizens, but are frustrated with the legal immigration process that forces them to live out of the US for the better part of 20 years in some cases, before they would be allowed to return and do what they are doing now. Add that to having no roots left in Mexico, and thoroughly Americanized children, and they are under a great deal of stress.
The Mexican civil war brutalized the heck out of them. The Yaqui Indians of northern Mexico, especially. It just went on and on, in several different incarnations. Groups of people would encounter armed men who would demand to know what side they were on. If they answered incorrectly, they would be slaughtered on the spot.
Here is an interesting survey of the later wars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Farell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajem%C3%A9
To their credit, the Conquistadors never defeated the Yaqui Indians, but in subsequent revolts, the Mexicans punished them horribly. They even came close to defeating the Mexican army. But finally as a people they were deported by train to southern Mexico as slaves, with free license to kill them at will.
They were only allowed to return home in the 1940s.
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