Hispanics are the largest and youngest minority group in the United States. One-
in-five schoolchildren is Hispanic. One-in-four newborns is Hispanic.
Never
before in this country's history has a minority ethnic group made up so large a
share of the youngest Americans. By force of numbers alone, the kinds of adults
these young Latinos become will help shape the kind of society America becomes
in the 21
st century.
This report takes an in-depth look at Hispanics who are ages 16 to 25, a
phase of life when young people make choices that-for better and worse-set their
path to adulthood. For this particular ethnic group, it is also a time when they
navigate the intricate, often porous borders between the two cultures they
inhabit-American and Latin American.
The report explores the attitudes, values, social behaviors, family
characteristics, economic well-being, educational attainment and labor force
outcomes of these young Latinos. It is based on a new Pew Hispanic Center
telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 2,012 Latinos,
supplemented by the Center's analysis of government demographic, economic,
education and health data sets.
The data paint a mixed picture. Young Latinos are satisfied with their lives,
optimistic about their futures and place a high value on education, hard work
and career success. Yet they are much more likely than other American youths to
drop out of school and to become teenage parents. They are more likely than
white and Asian youths to live in poverty. And they have high levels of exposure
to gangs.
These are attitudes and behaviors that, through history, have often been
associated with the immigrant experience. But most Latino youths are not
immigrants. Two-thirds were born in the United States, many of them
descendants of the big, ongoing wave of Latin American immigrants who began
coming to this country around 1965.
As might be expected, they do better than their foreign-born counterparts on
many key economic, social and acculturation indicators analyzed in this report.
They are much more proficient in English and are less likely to drop out of high
school, live in poverty or become a teen parent.
But on a number of other measures, U.S.-born Latino youths do no better than
the foreign born. And on some fronts, they do worse.
For example, native-born Latino youths are about twice as likely as the
foreign born to have ties to a gang or to have gotten into a fight or to have
carried a weapon in the past year. They are also more likely to be in prison.
The picture becomes even more murky when comparisons are made among youths
who are first generation (immigrants themselves), second generation (U.S.-born
children of immigrants) and third and higher generation (U.S.-born grandchildren
or more far-removed descendants of immigrants).1
For example, teen parenthood rates and high school dropout rates are much
lower among the second generation than the first, but they appear higher among
the third generation than the second. The same is true for poverty rates.
Identity and Assimilation
Throughout this nation's history, immigrant assimilation has always meant
something more than the sum of the sorts of economic and social measures
outlined above. It also has a psychological dimension. Over the course of
several generations, the immigrant family typically loosens its sense of
identity from the old country and binds it to the new.
It is too soon to tell if this process will play out for today's Hispanic
immigrants and their offspring in the same way it did for the European
immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But
whatever the ultimate trajectory, it is clear that many of today's Latino
youths, be they first or second generation, are straddling two worlds as they
adapt to the new homeland.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center's National Survey of Latinos, more than
half (52%) of Latinos ages 16 to 25 identify themselves first by their family's
country of origin, be it Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador or
any of more than a dozen other Spanish-speaking countries. An additional 20%
generally use the terms "Hispanic" or "Latino" first when describing themselves.
Only about one-in-four (24%) generally use the term "American" first.
Among the U.S.-born children of immigrants, "American" is somewhat more
commonly used as a primary term of self-identification. Even so, just 33% of
these young second generation Latinos use American first, while 21% refer to
themselves first by the terms Hispanic or Latino, and the plurality-41%-refer to
themselves first by the country their parents left in order to settle and raise
their children in this country.
Only in the third and higher generations do a majority of Hispanic youths
(50%) use "American" as their first term of self-description.
Immigration in Historical Perspective
Measured in raw numbers, the modern Latin American-dominated immigration wave
is by far the largest in U.S. history. Nearly 40 million immigrants have come to
the United States since 1965. About half are from Latin America, a quarter from
Asia and the remainder from Europe, Canada, the Middle East and Africa. By
contrast, about 14 million immigrants came during the big Northern and Western
European immigration wave of the 19th century and about 18 million
came during the big Southern and Eastern European-dominated immigration wave of
the early 20th century.2
However, the population of the United States was much smaller during those
earlier waves. When measured against the size of the U.S. population during the
period when the immigration occurred, the modern wave's average annual rate of
4.6 new immigrants per 1,000 population falls well below the 7.7 annual rate
that prevailed in the mid- to late 19th century and the 8.8 rate at
the beginning of the 20th century.
All immigration waves produce backlashes of one kind or another, and the
latest one is no exception. Illegal immigration, in particular, has become a
highly-charged political issue in recent times. It is also a relatively new
phenomenon; past immigration waves did not generate large numbers of illegal
immigrants because the U.S. imposed fewer restrictions on immigration flow in
the past than it does now.
The current wave may differ from earlier waves in other ways as well. More
than a few immigration scholars have voiced skepticism that the children and
grandchildren of today's Hispanic immigrants will enjoy the same upward mobility
experienced by the offspring of European immigrants in previous
centuries.3
Their reasons vary, and not all are consistent with one another. Some
scholars point to structural changes in modern economies that make it more
difficult for unskilled laborers to climb into the middle class. Some say the
illegal status of so many of today's immigrants is a major obstacle to their
upward mobility. Some say the close proximity of today's sending countries and
the relative ease of modern global communication reduce the felt need of
immigrants and their families to acculturate to their new country. Some say the
fatalism of Latin American cultures is a poor fit in a society built on
Anglo-Saxon values. Some say that America's growing tolerance for cultural
diversity may encourage modern immigrants and their offspring to retain ethnic
identities that were seen by yesterday's immigrants as a handicap. (The
melting pot is dead. Long live the salad bowl.) Alternatively, some say
that Latinos' brown skin makes assimilation difficult in a country where white
remains the racial norm.
It will probably take at least another generation's worth of new facts on the
ground to know whether these theories have merit. But it is not too soon to take
some snapshots and lay down some markers. This report does so by assembling a
wide range of empirical evidence (some generated by our own new survey; some by
our analysis of government data) and subjecting it to a series of comparisons:
between Latinos and non-Latinos; between young Latinos and older Latinos;
between foreign-born Latinos and native-born Latinos; and between first, second,
and third and higher generations of Latinos.
The generational analyses presented here do not compare the outcomes
of individual Latino immigrants with those of their own children or
grandchildren. Instead, our generational analysis compares today's young Latino
immigrants with today's children and grandchildren of yesterday's immigrants. As
such, the report can provide some insights into the intergenerational mobility
of an immigrant group over time. But it cannot fully disentangle the many
factors that may help explain the observed patterns-be they compositional
effects (the different skills, education levels and other forms of human capital
that different cohorts of immigrants bring) or period effects (the
different economic conditions that confront immigrants in different time
periods).
Readers should be especially careful when interpreting findings about the
third and higher generation, for this is a very diverse group. We estimate that
about 40% are the grandchildren of Latin American immigrants, while the
remainder can trace their roots in this country much farther back in time.
For some in this mixed group, endemic poverty and its attendant social ills
have been a part of their families, barrios and colonias for
generations, even centuries. Meantime, others in the third and higher generation
have been upwardly mobile in ways consistent with the generational trajectories
of European immigrant groups. Because the data we use in this report do not
allow us to separate out the different demographic sub-groups within the third
and higher generation, the overall numbers we present are averages that often
mask large variances within this group.
Chapter Index
Chapter 1: Overview and Executive Summary
Chapter 2: Demography
Chapter 3: Identity
Chapter 4: Language Use
Chapter 5: Economic Well-Being
Chapter 6: Education: The Gap Between Expectations and Achievement
Chapter 7: Life Satisfaction, Priorities and Values
Chapter 8: Family, Fertility, Sexual Behaviors and Attitudes
Chapter 9: Gangs, Fights and Prison
Appendix A: Hispanic Population by State
Appendix B: 2009 National Survey of Latinos, Survey Methodology and Topline
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