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    Analysis: California's demographic dilemma

    Analysis: California's demographic dilemma

    Since 2000, more college graduates have been exiting California than entering

    March 22, 2012 3:33 PM


    California's soaring Latino population is reweaving the state's political, educational and social fabric.

    A significant portion of Hispanic children lag cognitively, a problem that led
    David Figueroa Ortega, the Mexican consul general of Los Angeles, to sound the alarm this past October:Our children, when they arrive in primary school, sometimes arrive behind in skills. They don’t have sufficient training to keep up with the rest of the group.”

    Nationally, 42 percent of Latino children entering kindergarten are in the lowest quartile of reading preparedness, compared with 18 percent of white children. By eighth grade, 43 percent of whites and 47 percent of Asians nationally are proficient or better in reading, compared with only 19 percent of Latino students.

    True, Hispanics’ cognitive skills have been improving over the last decade; the percentage of Hispanic eighth-graders deemed proficient in math and reading on the California Standards Tests doubled from 2004 to 2010. But the gap between Hispanics’ performance and that of whites and Asians narrowed only modestly, since white and Asian scores rose as well. Latino students’ rate of B.A. completion from the University of California and California State University is the lowest of all student groups and has slightly declined in recent years.

    Since the 1980s, California’s economic growth has been powered by skilled labor. Silicon Valley, for example, added jobs at a rate of 3.2 percent for the year beginning in November 2010, despite the continuing economic slump. If current labor-market trends continue, 41 percent of California’s workers will need a B.A. by 2025, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. But California already has trouble finding skilled employees. Because it can’t produce all the skilled workers that it needs, it imports them: in 2006, for example, 33 percent of all college-educated California workers had been born in other states and 31 percent had been born abroad, PPIC says.

    Moreover, since 2000, more college graduates have been exiting California than entering. California will need to attract almost 160,000 college-educated workers annually for 20 years in a row to meet the projected demand, PPIC estimates — three times the number who have been arriving from elsewhere since 2000.

    Unfortunately, though Hispanics will make up 40 percent of the state’s working-age population by 2020, just 12 percent of them are projected to have bachelor’s degrees by then, up from 10 percent in 2006. Moreover, their fields of academic concentration are not where the most economically fertile growth will probably occur.

    The future mismatch between labor supply and demand is likely to raise wages for college-educated workers, while a glut of workers with a high school diploma or less will depress wages on the low end and contribute to an increased demand for government services, especially among the less educated Hispanic population.

    U.S.-born Hispanic households in California already use welfare programs (such as cash welfare, food stamps and housing assistance) at twice the rate of U.S.-born non-Hispanic households, according to an analysis of the March 2011 Current Population Survey by the Center for Immigration Studies. Welfare use by immigrants is higher still. In 2008–09, the fraction of households using some form of welfare was 82 percent for households headed by an illegal immigrant and 61 percent for households headed by a legal immigrant.

    Higher rates of Hispanic poverty drive this disparity in welfare consumption. Hispanics made up nearly 60 percent of California’s poor in 2010, despite being less than 38 percent of the population. Nearly one-quarter of all Hispanics in California are poor, compared with a little over one-tenth of non-Hispanics. Nationally, the poverty rate of Hispanic adults drops from 25.5 percent in the first generation — the immigrant generation, that is — to 17 percent in the second but rises to 19 percent in the third, according to a Center for Immigration Studies analysis. (The poverty rate for white adults is 9 percent.) That frustrating third-generation economic stall repeats the pattern in high school graduation and college completion rates as well.

    Hispanics’ reliance on the government safety net helps explain their ongoing support for the Democratic Party. Indeed, liberal spending policies are a more important consideration for Hispanic voters than ethnic identification or the so-called values issues that they are often said to favor.

    John Echeveste, founder of the oldest Latino marketing firm in Southern California and a player in California Latino politics, puts it this way, “What Republicans mean by ‘family values’ and what Hispanics mean are two completely different things.”

    Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Research for her article was supported by the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation.

    High Valley Daily Press
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