Posted on 03/20/2015 6:39:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Firing up America" is the cover line on the March 20 issue of The Economist, heralding a 16-page special report on America's Latinos. Its tone is resolutely upbeat -- perhaps a bit too much so.
"America is lucky to have millions of energetic young people filling its schools with kids who will eventually pay taxes and fund pensions and health care for the old," The Economist writes. "Like other immigrants, they talk a lot about the American Dream. By that they mean the baby boomers' hopes of home ownership, a college education and upward mobility."
Unfortunately, it's not clear how many young Hispanics will achieve those elements of the American dream or whether they'll provide quite as bounteous a source of funding for Social Security and Medicare as The Economist's cheery summary suggests.
As the article notes, successive generations of Hispanics are not, so far, turning out to be as upwardly mobile as some other immigrant groups. Second-generation Hispanics have more negative health outcomes, higher divorce rates and higher incarceration rates than their immigrant elders.
Almost all second- and third-generation Hispanics are "confident" of their command of English -- a good trend that may owe something to California voters' 1998 decision to limit "bilingual" instruction to one year. But third-generation students' test scores are lower than those of their parents.
In my 2001 book "The New Americans," I likened the Hispanic immigrants of today to the Italians who came through Ellis Island a century ago. Both came from low-trust societies; both tended to have close family ties and a willingness to work hard. Both headed to big metro areas with lots of job opportunities. But so far the Hispanics who crossed the southern border don't seem to have moved upward as rapidly as Italian-Americans did in the last century.
There are some encouraging signs, as The Economist points out. Teenage pregnancy rates have been declining among Hispanics, as among blacks and non-Hispanic whites. Perhaps as they grow older, these Millennials' marriage rates will be higher and divorce rates lower than those who are just a little older. We can hope, but we don't know.
What we do know is something The Economist mostly skates over: The vast immigration from Latin America, mostly from Mexico, between 1982 and 2007, is over -- at least for now. Net migration from Mexico in 2007-12 was zero, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
One result is that an increasing majority of young Hispanics here were born here, and so are U.S. citizens. That means that, absent a new wave of illegal immigrants, the debate over legalization and/or a path to citizenship will become less relevant over time. The immigration restrictionists who argued that the "pause" in immigration after the restrictive 1924 legislation encouraged assimilation now have something like the pause for which they called.
But whether assimilation midcentury-America-style will follow is unclear. From The Economist's London perspective, it looks far easier than the task of assimilating Britain's and Europe's Muslim immigrants. Few American Hispanics, despite the efforts of Chicano studies professors, take an oppositional stance toward the larger society.
At the same time, racial quotas and preferences give Hispanics -- or at least Hispanic group leaders and politicians -- a vested interest in maintaining a separate racial identity. The federal government created the Hispanic category in the 1970s on the theory that Hispanics had suffered or would suffer similar adverse treatment to that of blacks.
Historically, that's wrong: Slavery and segregation, as black history scholars rightly teach, were unique. Anti-Hispanic segregation was spotty and had essentially disappeared before the 1982-2007 immigration wave.
An interesting question going forward is the persistence of Hispanic identity. One-quarter of recent Hispanic marriages have been to non-Hispanics. Will their children identify themselves as Hispanics on Census forms? Census bureaucrats are contemplating rewriting their questions so more people will describe themselves as both Hispanic and non-white.
That points to an America in which a majority of citizens are classified as minorities eligible for benefits and preferences. As Christopher Caldwell argues in the Claremont Review, there is a tension between that state of affairs and the national motto of e pluribus unum.
The Economist rightly argues that America's Hispanics can be a national asset. But how much of an asset depends on whether they can be assimilated and encouraged to move upward as the Ellis Islanders were a century ago.
If, by Hispanics meaning illegals made legal (eventual citizens) then I would reword the title by changing “fire up” to “set fire.”
“Both came from low-trust societies”
Oh, is THAT what they are?
LOL
Well said, but on the other hand white America seems to have abdicated their birthright. Nature abhors a vacuum, and some population is going to fill it.
So the Hispanics are going to save us from ourselves?
Gracias.
What you say is true also. There are far too many who live only for now and could give a crap about those that follow them. All too often for these leeches, those that follow them are only just tick marks on some government form that gets them more welfare money.
Fire it up or turn it into another third world urinal?
Lord help save us from these destructive idiots
Most people from Spanish-speaking countries will work hard and become part of American culture.
Now, let’s ask the question, why is there a group that is perpetually indolent, always whining, never pulling its own weight, that has been here for a long time, that presumably speaks English, and is not contributing to America? Eh?
This, it should be noted, is the very same Economist that predicted a couple of years back that 47% of jobs would go poof in 20 years. If the jobs go away and never come back due to technological disruption, since when is loading us up with a ton of new people to educate and feed a good thing? Our own birthrate has plunged because young women have had quite a job on their hands just trying to get enough stability to consider having kids and this is going to make it worse!
Enough of this Masters of the Universe bullsqueeze, and who knows, Barone may finally get enough of it and throw up all over America v. 2.0, "the North American Union".
“America is lucky to have millions of energetic young people filling its schools with kids who will eventually pay taxes and fund pensions and health care for the old.”
Maybe the “old” people could take care of themselves if their earnings weren’t stolen so it could be given to these “energetic young people” in the form of EBT, etc. Anyone that thinks they will just blend into this society is having hallucinations.
They will come in and live 2-4 families in one house. Fifteen of them will work and some menial job while the other 5 take care of the kids. Doesn’t cost much for each family. Get all their food on EBT and other benefits such as emergency room care. Most of them never learn English and have no intention of moving out of their old country ways and culture. You end up with another country within this country.
That’s what is happening now, but with what is forecast it just looks like we are being loaded up with our hemisphere’s excess in preparation for when the jobs all get done by robots.
More propaganda from The Ministry Of Propaganda on behalf of The Cheap Labor Express.
They’re trying to convince us to give up our country without a fight.
I’m not done fighting.....
Maybe so, but out-of-wedlock births have been increasing for all groups, now something like 74% for blacks, 54% for Hispanics, 28% for whites, 17% for Asians and 42% overall.
So, more people are having kids out-of-wedlock at a little bit older age? Some improvement.
Yes, through birth control, abortion, Political Correctness, and our forsaking of God we sure did toss our birthright down the crapshoot.
Better late than never.
There is no justification for what the politicians and corporate greed bags are doing to this country demographically. None whatsoever.
But, since Teddy K's excellent "Immigration Reform Act of 1965," 35 million Mexicans alone have shown up, not to mention the illegal aliens of song and story. Latinos of one sort or another already far outnumber any other "ethnic group," rapidly heading toward 30% of "us."
In fact, within 75 years ...or less, our new amigos are going to become a majority, making us the northernmost Latin American "republic."
IMNVHO, the biggest problem? The Latinos have already undeniably reduced the gibsmedat population's chances of ever finding work, and are soaking up more of the welfare money we used to reserve for them. In the meantime, the Latinos ain't doing so hot over at la escuela, and their illegitimacy rates are soaring, too.
¡Ay Chihuahua! We sure about this?
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