Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [50]
That’s why it’s important to remember, when considering “averages,” that Latino migration is ongoing. The public is fed a lot of snapshot data on English-language skills and high school dropout rates, but they are of little use in measuring assimilation. What we really want to know is how immigrants are faring over time, and only longitudinal studies can provide that information. As Michael Barone writes in The New Americans, “The statistics showing that the average Latino has only slightly improved mastery of English, education levels, and incomes are actually evidence of substantial gains.” How so? Because “overall statistics that average in huge numbers of new arrivals mask the progress that pre-existing immigrants have made.”
In Immigrants and Boomers, Dowell Myers expands on this point, calling it the Peter Pan fallacy. Many observers, consciously or not, embrace a misconception that immigrants never change and retain all the characteristics they possessed on arrival. “Many of us assume, unwittingly, that immigrants are like Peter Pan,” says Myers, “forever frozen in their status as newcomers, never aging, never advancing economically, and never assimilating.” In this naive view, he says, “the mounting numbers of foreign-born residents imply that our nation is becoming dominated by growing numbers of people who perpetually resemble newcomers.” Myers goes on to present evidence that real progress is being made by Latinos. Granted, progress is slower in some areas, such as the education level of adult immigrants, and faster in others, such as income and homeownership rates. But there is no doubt that both assimilation and upward mobility are occurring over time.
EUROPEANS THEN, LATIN AMERICANS NOW
Linguistic assimilation is key, not least because it amounts to a job skill that can increase earnings. And while restrictionists claim otherwise, there’s simply no evidence that Latinos are rejecting English. “The model that we have from the European experience,” sociologist Richard Alba told me in an interview, “is that the children of immigrants born in the U.S. grow up in homes where they learn, to some extent, the mother tongue. They understand it and may speak it, but they prefer English. And when they grow up, they establish homes where English is the dominant language.”
According to 2005 census data, just one-third of immigrants who are in the country for less than a decade speak English well, but that fraction climbs to nearly three-quarters for those here thirty years or more. There may be more bilingualism today among the children of immigrants, but there’s no indication that Spanish is dominant in the second generation. The 2000 census found that 91 percent of the children and 97 percent of the grandchildren of Mexican immigrants spoke English well. Nor are there signs, bilingual-education advocates notwithstanding, that immigrant parents want their children speaking Spanish. A 2002 Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Foundation survey found that 89 percent of Latinos “believe immigrants need to learn to speak English to succeed in the United States.”
Longitudinal analyses also reveal that homeownership is up and poverty is down among the Latino immigrants. Using as his sample California, which has the country’s largest concentration of Mexican foreign nationals, Myers notes that 16 percent of Latinos arriving in the Golden State in the 1970s owned homes by 1980. But more than 33 percent owned homes by 1990, and over half