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The Great Assimilation Machine
By LINDA CHAVEZ
June 5, 2007

For more than 200 years the United States has been the great assimilation machine, churning Germans, Swedes, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Russians, Lebanese, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis and myriad others into Americans. There are many Americans today who believe, or worry, that the largest group of recent immigrants -- the nearly 20 million Hispanics who have come here in the last several decades -- are unwilling or unable to do the same.

In his 2004 book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to National Identity," Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington warned that "Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s," a sentiment I hear echoed frequently in the debate over immigration reform. Others warn that the country is playing host to a burgeoning new underclass of poorly educated, welfare-dependent Hispanics who will overwhelm us with social pathologies. Still others marshal statistics that appear to support their view that Hispanics are indeed failing to assimilate as have previous ethnic groups.

The real story of Hispanic assimilation, however, is a lot less gloomy -- although a bit more complicated -- than the critics charge. Part of the problem is the interpretation of statistics: As we are in the midst of a huge influx of new immigrants, legal and illegal, including seven million Mexicans who have arrived since 1990, any statistical snapshot that includes these newcomers (who make up about half the adult Hispanic population) will distort the overall moving picture.

Take Hispanic dropout rates. A snapshot looks bad: 42% of Hispanics, according to the Current Population Survey, had not finished high school in 2005. But nearly half of the people counted aren't dropouts in the usual sense; they've never dropped in to an American school. They are immigrants who completed their schooling, such as it was, before coming here in their late teens or 20s. Granted, low education levels will make their climb up the economic ladder slower -- 60% of Mexican-born adults have not completed high school. But the earnings of Hispanic immigrants will improve as they gain work skills and experience, and the evidence is strong that they will do so. Mexican-born men, for example, had higher labor force participation rates than native-born male workers, 88% compared with 83%, and lower unemployment rates than native workers, 4.4% compared with 5.1% in 2006. Labor force participation rates of illegal aliens are higher yet, a whopping 94%.

More importantly, the children of Hispanic immigrants are graduating from high school. The high school completion rate for young, U.S.-born Hispanics is 86%, only slightly lower than the 92% of non-Hispanic whites. Hispanic immigrant children who do enroll in school after they come here are as likely as American-born Hispanics to earn a high school diploma (although half of Mexican immigrants 15-17 years-old do not enroll in school).

Hispanics are more likely than either whites or blacks to continue their education at two-year institutions; in 2000 they represented 14% of all students enrolled in two-year institutions. Only 12% of U.S.-born Hispanics earn four-year degrees compared with 26% of non-Hispanic whites. Nonetheless, the economic returns on education are substantial for Hispanics. As a 2006 study on Hispanics by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences reported, "We consistently find that, after adjusting for the levels of human capital (e.g., schooling and English language proficiency), Hispanics do almost as well as whites with respect to both employment and labor market earnings," which the authors note is not the case for blacks, who still lag behind whites even after adjusting for observable measures of human capital.

English proficiency is, of course, essential if Hispanics are to fully assimilate into the mainstream, and one issue many Americans have expressed great concern over. But despite anxiety that Hispanics aren't learning English and will soon insist that the U.S. become bilingual, the evidence suggests otherwise. True enough, most Hispanic immigrants have poor English skills: The 2000 Census reported that 26 million people spoke Spanish at home, and of these, 14 million were unable to speak English well. But there is nothing unusual about this; historically most immigrant groups have taken a generation or more to produce fluent English speakers. In 1900, nearly 50 years after the peak period of German immigration, 600,000 students attended German bilingual schools in the U.S.

But if Hispanic immigrants have been slow to learn English, their American-born progeny have quickly adapted. English is the preferred language of virtually all U.S.-born Hispanics; according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, indeed, 78% of third-generation Hispanics cannot speak Spanish at all. Even in Southern California, an area with the largest population of Spanish speakers in the nation, 96% of third-generation Mexican Americans prefer to speak English at home, according to a recent study by sociologists Ruben Rumbaut, Douglas Massey and Frank Bean.

The fear that Hispanics are or will become an isolated, economically alienated group within the larger American society also does not jibe with a variety of other measures. A 2006 Commerce Department study reported that Hispanics are opening businesses at a rate three times faster than the national average. In 2002, the last year for which detailed data are available, there were 1.6 million Hispanic-owned businesses generating $222 billion in revenue. Most of these businesses are family affairs, with few employees, but some 1,500 Hispanic businesses employed 100 or more people, generating $42 billion in gross receipts.

Half of all Hispanics own homes. This is substantially below the 76% of non-Hispanic whites that are homeowners. A Department of Housing and Urban Development analysis of Hispanic home ownership trends suggests that the gap can be explained by a number of factors, including age. Home ownership increases with age, but nearly twice as many Hispanics as non-Hispanic whites are under 35, while only 10% of Hispanics, but nearly one quarter of whites, are over 65.

One genuinely disturbing trend is the increase in out-of-wedlock births among Hispanics, which has risen to 46% in 2004 from 24% in 1980, compared with 24.5% for non-Hispanic whites and 69% for blacks. (Mexican immigrants have a somewhat lower rate of unmarried childbearing, 35%.) This is not good, but it is not clear that these unmarried mothers remain so for long or that their children grow up in fatherless homes. Marriage rates for Hispanics are virtually the same as for non-Hispanic whites, suggesting many unwed mothers make it to the altar eventually, and they are no more likely to divorce than whites. The most comprehensive study of marriage and cohabitation, produced by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2002, shows that 77% of Hispanic women will marry by age 30, compared with 81% of non-Hispanic whites but only 52% of blacks. Moreover, 67% of Mexican origin children live in two parent families, compared with about 77% of whites, but only 37% of blacks.

Finally, consider that ultimate indicator of assimilation, intermarriage. One in four Hispanics marries a non-Hispanic white spouse, but nearly one-third of all U.S.-born Hispanics who are married have non-Hispanic spouses; and the percentage is slightly higher among college-educated Hispanic women (35%). There is a curious, and provocative fact buried in all this. The Population Reference Bureau notes in its 2005 study of intermarriage that, because most children of intermarriages are reported as Hispanic on Census data, "Hispanic intermarriage may have been a factor in the phenomenal growth of the U.S. Hispanic population in recent years, and it has important implications for future growth and characteristics of the Hispanic population." In other words, the widely cited prediction that by mid-century Hispanics will represent fully one third of the U.S. population fails to take into account that increasing numbers of these so-called Hispanics will have only one grandparent or great-grandparent of Hispanic heritage. At which point Hispanic ethnicity will mean little more than German, Italian or Irish ethnicity does today.

Ms. Chavez is chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity and the author of a number of books, including "Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation" (Basic Books, 1991).

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