Thread: The Stalled Progress of Recent Immigrants' Children

The Immigrant Paradox: The Stalled Progress of Recent Immigrants’ Children

By David North

September 2009
Backgrounders and Reports

Click here to download a pdf version of this Backgrounder

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David S. North is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
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The American tradition, over the years, has been that the first generation of immigrants struggles, the second generation does better, and the third generation does even better in terms of income, education, personal health, and overall achievement. There is much statistical as well as anecdotal evidence of these trends in the past.

Currently, however, social scientists are finding that this overall pattern is not happening with the second and following generations of more recent immigrants; on many measures, the follow-on generations do not achieve as much as their forefathers, the immigrants. Interestingly, the scholars making these findings are deeply sympathetic with both the immigrants and their descendants; there is no stacking of the social science deck here.

These are some of the signs, many of them identified at a recent conference1 on the subject, of what has been termed the immigrant paradox:


Success in the education system declines from the first to the third generation, although knowledge of English rises sharply over the generations.

Violence and drug abuse rises among later generations.

Risky sexual behavior increases from the first to the third generation.

When socioeconomic standing is taken out of the equation, the health of children in most immigrant groups gets worse from the first to the third generation.

Among the descendants of the original respondents in a 1965 survey of Mexican-American immigrants to the United States, a follow-on study in 2000 showed flat earnings and homeownership patterns for the second through the fourth generations.


The trends noted above play out differently with different immigration flows; they are decidedly the case with Latin American immigration, the largest of the immigrant streams, but do not hold, generally, with the smaller flow of Asian immigrants, or the even smaller group of migrants from Europe.

This comprehensive Backgrounder, accompanied by charts and graphs, can be read in its entirety and/or downloaded in pdf version at:

http://cis.org/ImmigrantParadox

I thank that discrepancy is that many immigrants want to be Americans, but the Latinos want to absorb this country and live like kings in the old country traditions. They are here for the money, and amnesty.

I'm in California, and we have a lot of standardized state/national examinations for professionals like Attorneys, CPAs, Engineers, Architects, etc. We also have always had a large Hispanic population, and until very recently we had very discriminatory affirmative action in our public universities. I'm certain that these state licensing boards ask about your race when you apply for their exams. The bottom line: I'm guessing that the percentage of Hispanics sitting for these exams in 2009 is still not representative of their percentage of the population, even using 1970 figures, even after 30+ years of affirmative action. And I won't count attorneys. Any idiot can go to a night law school and pass the bar. Any NCLR basura moreno trolling here can dig through the numbers and prove me wrong. But I doubt it.

The American tradition, over the years, has been that the first generation of immigrants struggles, the second generation does better, and the third generation does even better in terms of income, education, personal health, and overall achievement. There is much statistical as well as anecdotal evidence of these trends in the past.

Why the accent on immigrants when millions of citizens are struggling..I'm sick and tired of writers like North writting about issues that shouldn't even be issues at all. The legal immigrants are going through what generations of citizens are going through and that is staggering wages with high inflation..been there, done that. How about mentioning citizens as well.