Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [52]
ALL LATINOS AREN’T IMMIGRANTS
A bigger concern is education, though here, too, context is important. The correlation between higher levels of education and higher paychecks has never been stronger than it is today. Apprenticeships and other types of on-the-job training also tend to increase earnings, but education is the safest bet. In 2003 the average full-time worker in the United States with a four-year college degree earned $49,900, 62 percent more than someone with a high school diploma and 131 percent more than someone who never completed high school. Just finishing twelfth grade can push a worker’s annual earnings more than 40 percent above someone who doesn’t.
Among first-generation Mexican immigrants, 59 percent lack a high school degree. The good news is that the number falls dramatically in subsequent generations. According to 2004 census data, only 17 percent of the children of Mexican immigrants don’t earn diplomas. The bad news is that very few go on to earn a college degree. The percentage of second-generation Mexicans who do grew from 3.2 percent in 1970 to 14.1 percent in 2004. But the corresponding increases among native whites possessing college degrees (from 11.8 percent to 31.7 percent) and among the total U.S. population (10.2 percent to 29.8 percent) means that Mexicans in effect have been losing ground.
A college education is far more common in 2004 than it was in 1970 among almost all groups except Mexican immigrants, explain sociologists Roger Waldinger and Renee Reichl in Securing the Future. And because the economy continues to put a premium on education, these low levels of college completion will almost certainly depress the earnings of second-generation Mexicans. The concern is echoed in a 2006 National Research Council report. On the one hand, rising numbers of Hispanic young people will slow the nation’s overall population aging and can partially offset the growing burden of dependency produced by an aging majority. But the study goes on to say that their success in doing so “depends on the level of their earnings, which in turn depends on their education and acquisition of job-rated skills.”
It’s also important to keep in mind that all Latinos aren’t immigrants, an obvious point that’s conveniently forgotten among those trying to portray Hispanics in the worst possible light. For example, school completion rate data for Hispanics that don’t disaggregate for the foreign born inevitably will overstate the achievement of immigrants and understate it for their U.S.-born children. Why? Because half of all adult Latinos in the country are foreign born, and more than half of the Mexicans who comprise most of the foreign-born population never completed high school.
When social conservatives cite Hispanic school dropout rates and teen pregnancy figures, the implication is that the dysfunctions of the inner-city black underclass can automatically be projected onto Mexican immigrants. But that’s not necessarily the case. First-generation Mexicans may be the group least likely to be in school, but they are also the group most likely to be working; more than 81 percent of the men not in school hold a job. By contrast, note Waldinger and Reichl, “out-of-school African Americans appear the least likely to have moved from school to a job.” What’s more, “the employment rate of second-generation Mexican men is close to white men and diverges widely from that of African American men, among whom there is the weakest attachment to work.”
Similarly, high teen pregnancy rates among Mexicans, while certainly troublesome in the abstract, should be put in perspective. If the black underclass is our frame of reference, we link out-of-wedlock births to single-parent