Thread: Mexican Integration over 4 decades...

UCLA report charts Chicano experience over four decades
By Letisia Marquez


Second-, third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans speak English fluently, and most prefer American music. They are increasingly Protestant, and some may even vote for a Republican candidate.

However, many Mexican Americans in these later generations do not graduate from college, and they continue to live in majority Hispanic neighborhoods. Most marry other Hispanics and think of themselves as "Mexican" or "Mexican American."

Such are the findings from the most comprehensive sociological report ever produced on the integration of Mexican Americans. The UCLA study, released today in a Russell Sage Foundation book titled "Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race," concludes that, unlike the descendants of European immigrants to the United States, Mexican Americans have not fully integrated by the third and fourth generation. The research spans a period of nearly 40 years.

The study's authors, UCLA sociologists Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, examined various markers of integration among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas, including educational attainment, economic advancement, English and Spanish proficiency, residential integration, intermarriage, ethnic identity and political involvement.

"The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more are troubling," said Telles, a UCLA professor of sociology. "Linguistically, Mexican Americans are assimilating into mainstream quite well, and by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency."

"However," said Ortiz, a UCLA associate professor of sociology, "institutional barriers, persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies and a reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the Southwestern states have made integration more difficult for Mexican Americans."

"Generations of Exclusions" revisits the 1970 book "The Mexican American People," which was the first in-depth sociological study of Mexican Americans and became a benchmark for future research.

The earlier study had been conducted at UCLA in the mid-1960s by Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzman. In 1992, construction workers retrofitting the UCLA College Library found boxes containing questionnaires from the original study.

Telles and Ortiz pored over the questionnaires and recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience had evolved in the decades since the first study. The researchers and their team then reinterviewed nearly 700 original respondents and approximately 800 of their children. The vast majority of the original respondents and all the children are U.S. citizens.

In the foreword to "The Mexican American People," researcher Moore had written that she was optimistic that a subsequent study would find much assimilation among Mexican Americans. Telles and Ortiz, like Moore,

Key findings from "Generations of Exclusion" include:

-- The educational levels of second-generation Mexican Americans improved dramatically. But the third and fourth generations failed to surpass, and to some extent fell behind, the educational level of the second generation. Moreover, the educational levels of all Mexican Americans still lag behind the national average.


-- Mexican Americans attained higher levels of education when they knew professionals as children, when their parents were more educated and when their parents were more involved in school and church activities. Those who attended Catholic schools were much better educated than those who attended public schools.


-- Economic status improved from the first to second generation but stalled in the third and fourth generation. Earnings, occupational status and homeownership were still alarmingly low for later generations. Low levels of schooling among Mexican Americans were the main reason for lower income, occupational status and other indicators of socioeconomic status.


-- All Mexican Americans were English-proficient by the second generation. Spanish proficiency declined from the first to the fourth generation, showing that the loss of Spanish was inevitable. However, Spanish declined only gradually, and approximately 36 percent of the fourth generation spoke Spanish fluently.


-- First-generation Mexican Americans were about 90 percent Catholic. By the fourth generation, only 58 percent were Catholic.


-- Intermarriage increased with each generation. Only 10 percent of immigrants were intermarried. In the third generation, 17 percent were married to non-Hispanics, as were 38 percent in the fourth generation.


-- Adult Mexican Americans in the third and fourth generation lived in more segregated neighborhoods than they did as youths. This was due to the high number of Latinos and immigrants moving into these neighborhoods, the researchers said.


-- Most Mexican Americans identified as "Mexican" or "Mexican American," even into the fourth generation. Only about 10 percent identified as "American." Moreover, many Mexican Americans felt their ethnicity was very important and many said they would like to pass it along to their children.


-- Third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans supported less restrictive immigration policies than the general population and generally supported bilingual education and affirmative action.


-- In the 1996 presidential election, 93 percent of first-generation Mexican Americans voted Democratic. The percentage of Democratic voters declined in each subsequent generation. By the fourth generation, 74 percent voted Democratic.

Telles and Ortiz noted that some Mexican Americans were able to move into the mainstream more easily than other minorities. Mexican immigrants who came to the United States as children and the children of immigrants tended to show the most progress, perhaps spurred by optimism and an untainted view of the American Dream.

"A disproportionate number, though, continue to occupy the lower ranks of the American class structure," the sociologists said. "Certainly, later-generation Mexican Americans and European Americans overlap in their class distributions. The difference is that the bulk of Mexican Americans are in lower class sectors but only a relatively small part of the European American population is similarly positioned."

More than any other factor, Telles and Ortiz said, education accounted for the slow assimilation of Mexican Americans in most social dimensions. The low educational levels of Mexican Americans have impeded most other types of integration.

"Their limited schooling locks many of them into a future of low socioeconomic status," they said. "Low levels of education also predict lower rates of intermarriage, a weaker American identity, and a lower likelihood of registering to vote and voting."

Telles and Ortiz believe that a "Marshall Plan" that invests heavily in public school education will address the issues that disadvantage many Mexican American students.

"For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive," they said. "The problem is not the unwillingness of Mexican Americans to adopt Americans values and culture but the failure of societal institutions, particularly public schools, to successfully integrate them as they did the descendants of European immigrants."

The research was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; the Ford, Rockefeller, Russell Sage, and Haynes foundations; the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center; and various UC and UCLA sources.

The book can be ordered by calling the Russell Sage Foundation at (800) 524-6401 or visiting www.rsage.org.

Letisia Marquez, lmarquez@support.ucla.edu
http://www.hispanicvista.com/HVC/Opinio ... 41008J.htm

..why do I keep getting the impression that those interested in "immigration" think only "Mexican" immigration.... no wonder we have a DE FACTO IMMIGRATION DISCRIMINATION THAT FAVORS MEXICANS... not only because of geographic proximity, but a deliberate attempt to establish significant political Latino influence in the US system...

"For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive,"

I'm I missing something here???? Don't they go to the same schools with the same teachers and take the same tests???? SO where is this comparison with education and whites???

Originally Posted by gofer

"For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive,"

I'm I missing something here???? Don't they go to the same schools with the same teachers and take the same tests???? SO where is this comparison with education and whites???

My thoughts exactly! In fact, LAUSD is probably 85% hispanic and 55% of them do not graduate! 48% of them do not speak English! They have destroyed the LAUSD system...we went from #2 in the nation to the 48th ranked school in the nation! We are at the bottom! It's not rocket science to connect the dots...no need to do any more 'studies'! The problem lies in the fact that we are importing a third world population!

It's a constant flow of drivel about "improving schools".....it's never-ending. Washington, D.C. spends an average of $25,000 per student and has the worse system in the U.S. The liberal agenda has wrecked the youth of the Nation. You have to do something about the students and disipline is the first place to start. Because of P.C., nobody is willing to discuss the real problems.

The U.S. is being "dumbed down" by the influx of illiterate, uneducated illegal immigrants. Sad to say, but it's the plain and simple truth.

there was a time in our early history when "immigrants" were paid more in salary than native born Americans...... ironic, isn't it?

"For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive,"

Yep, I felt the same way about that comment. My kids were almost totally ignored for the children of the illegals around here (yes, they are mainly of Mexican heritage). The children of illegals get pandered to in most public schools now, this is coming not only straight from me, but many parents with school aged kids say the same.

So what is their problem? It is this. My oldest, now 25, said in high school, the largest in the area (over 2500 students), there was a large percentage of the kids from illegal families. These kids had learned to milk the schools and system to not only get all they could out of it, but she said their main thing when they were causing trouble and also in class not wanting to participate, they would pull the "no habla Inglis" thing. They would pretend to "not understand" and slide by with almost no effort. She said they would trip other kids while walking by, and when confronted, they would shrug their shoulders and play the lame "I don;t understand" thing to keep from being held accountable for causing trouble (also after starting fights in hallways and such).

This mentallity, I am sure, was not just in her old school, but is an overall indifference that is pervasive in many towns and cities where they reside in large numbers and continue their self-balkanization (such as in marrying only other Mexicans), and seem to eschew a lot of effort towards their own education and futures. The mentallity I personally have seen is that of simply finding "a job" and not so much in finding one where there is much of a future, which seems to aid in the mentallity of perpetual victimhood as well.

a new report confirms the problem...

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/nat ... it-in.html

Mexican Immigrants Prove Slow to Fit In
Why Mexicans assimilate at rates lower than newcomers from other parts of the world
By Bret Schulte
Posted May 15, 2008

In the heart of California's iconic Orange County—home to Disneyland and the bourgeois teens of MTV's Laguna Beach—is troubled Santa Ana. The county seat of 353,000, where nearly 6out of every 10 adults over age 25 lack a high school diploma, suffers from crippling poverty and an explosion in crime. In 2004, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government placed Santa Ana at the very top of its Urban Hardship Index—officially dubbing it worse off than Miami, Detroit, Cleveland, and Newark, N.J. With 76 percent of its population Hispanic, mostly Mexican immigrants, Santa Ana is the poster child for the troubles of the country's immigration policies and of Mexican immigrants in particular.


Mexicans associate themselves with their native country before the United States.
(David Butow/Redux for USN&WR)


Now, a new study lays bare what sociologists and others have long argued: Mexican immigrants are assimilating to life in the United States less successfully than other immigrants. Sponsored by the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, "Measuring Immigrant Assimilation in the United States" by Jacob Vigdor, a professor of public policy studies and economics at Duke University, introduces a novel assimilation index that uses census and other survey data to measure how similar select immigrant groups are to native-born Americans. Using such factors as intermarriage, English ability, military service, homeownership, citizenship, and earnings, Vigdor assembled a 100-point assimilation index. The closer to 100, the more assimilated an immigrant group. Overall, the report shows immigrants are weaving into the American fabric at a remarkable clip, despite arriving poorer and knowing less English than immigrants of a century ago. And they are gaining speed, with new arrivals assimilating faster than those who came more than 20 years ago. With a score of 53, Canadians are the most assimilated, followed closely by Filipinos, Cubans, and Vietnamese. The main outlier: Mexicans, with a score of 13—followed by Salvadorans.

Why Mexicans are faring so poorly in the United States is complicated, experts say. But the root of the problem is no surprise: Many Mexicans are here illegally, depriving them of rungs on the economic ladder and the opportunity to gain citizenship. "There are certain jobs or certain services you just can't get [as an illegal immigrant]," Vigdor says. "There are plenty of indications here that for those Mexican immigrants who are interested in making a more permanent attachment to the United States, their legal status puts very severe barriers in that path."

Since the 1990s, Mexicans' immigrant story has differed from that of their peers. When comparing Mexicans and Asians, "Asians show up with a lot more money, oftentimes," notes Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California. "They have a higher education to begin with, and many of them are entrepreneurs." Past decades saw influxes of refugees from countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines. Today's Asian immigrants are some of the best and brightest, which puts them on a faster track to assimilation via economic success.

The Asian experience recalls a general rule of today's immigrants. The farther you have to migrate, the wealthier you probably were in your country of origin. "Poor people can't afford a plane trip across the ocean, but poor people can walk across the border," Myers says. "Poor Africans and poor Chinese can't do it." Because of their proximity to the United States, poor Mexicans can make the trip. Indeed, their poverty impels them to risk the border crossing. But when they arrive, they arrive significantly disadvantaged, and they often qualify for jobs that offer little opportunity for social advancement. Other factors may also contribute but are more difficult to quantify: [b]The leading contender is that the sheer number of Latinos in the United States has created a subculture that slows assimilation.[/b]

Indeed, in a unique multigenerational study spanning four decades, Generations of Exclusion, sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz found that many immigrants and their children had made slow progress assimilating for cultural and economic reasons. A large community means a large dating pool: Only 17 percent of third-generation Mexicans studied had married non-Hispanics. The authors found adult Mexican-Americans in the third and fourth generations lived in more segregated neighborhoods than they did as youths, largely because of the many new immigrant arrivals. Educational levels, meanwhile, lagged behind the national average. However, English ability was nearly universal, even among first-generation immigrants, which should ease the concerns of some lawmakers who want to make English the natural language. Significantly, though, 36 percent of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans studied could still speak Spanish.

Perhaps most telling: Of the approximately 1,500 surveyed in two distinct immigrant communities—Los Angeles and San Antonio—most identified as "Mexican" or "Mexican-American" even into the fourth generation. It's that kind of cultural signifier that has so many white Americans concerned that this is a group not interested in becoming American.

Ortiz says her interviews demonstrated that that was not the case. She argues that the above factors, especially segregated neighborhoods, "all probably lead to a stronger sense of identification of being Mexican or Mexican-American," she says. "The fact that they are maintaining a sense of Mexicanness is to some extent a reaction to how American society doesn't fully accept Mexican-origin folks." The continued ethnic identification is similar to that of other groups that have felt oppression from the majority, African-Americans and American Indians among them. Rubén Rumbaut, a professor of sociology at the University of California-Irvine, notes that "the people who have been most ostracized, stigmatized, and racialized...assert that now with pride, and they dig in their heels, and they become that which they had been labeled pejoratively."

Rumbaut, a leading researcher in immigrant studies, argues that assimilation is like a tango. Each party has to avoid stepping on the other's toes. "Assimilation, unlike acculturation...includes how they are welcomed or not by native groups," he says. In one study that included members of 77 nationalities, Rumbaut asked participants if they agreed that the United States was the best country in the world. Those most likely to agree were Vietnamese and Cubans or those who had benefited from refugee assistance. The least likely were Haitians, Jamaicans, and others with black skin "who bore the brunt of racial discrimination in their adoptive society," Rumbaut says. "The moral of the story is you reap what you sow. I see assimilation as a relationship and not some robotlike process of adaptation to a new environment that takes place only on the part of the assimilated."

The fact is that despite all this, Mexican immigrants and their children are advancing. That's because just about every immigrant, no matter what the country of origin, is here to work. "Couch potatoes don't emigrate," Rumbaut says. Indeed, Mexican immigrants start with nearly nothing "but actually climb more than Asians do," Myers points out. "The Mexican immigrants are the poorest of immigrants, by and large, but the majority become homeowners in the United States." That includes the folks here illegally. Myers calls that a far better measure of assimilation than self-identifiers such as "Mexican" or Mexican-American." He likens that to New Yorkers in Los Angeles rooting for the Yankees. "They wave the Mexican flags...but these are the same people who will enlist in the U.S. Army and be proud about it. Their identity is a composite of their heritage and current loyalty."

Rumbaut points out further, if less positive, proof of assimilation. Over time, Mexican immigrants and their children are more likely to become obese and get divorced. The incarceration levels of subsequent generations also spike. "That is a part of feeling more comfortable. Now you don't have to act like a guest," he says. "There are a lot of ways that becoming American is negative."

Tags: Mexico | immigration | U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

"The fact that they are maintaining a sense of Mexicanness is to some extent a reaction to how American society doesn't fully accept Mexican-origin folks"

which came first?

.......... the chicken or the egg?

.......... the "separedness" and overwhelming numbers of Mexicans (as opposed to other ethnic origins) or US society resentment.....


the current corrupted system is, IMO, de facto immigration discrimination that favors Mexicans above all else...