Matthew Yglesias (May 13, 2008) - Assimilation Then and Now (Miscellaneous)

It's too bad Yiddish was lost, and I hope that the proximity of Mexico will insure that Spanish never is. I will never understand the notion that a monolingual, monocultural society is a good thing. Monocultures are as debilitating in human societies as they are in agriculture.

Posted by Steve LaBonne | May 13, 2008 11:19 AM

Cue the chorus of "My grandfather stepped off the boat from Sweden/Germany/Italy/wherever, went through the process perfectly legally, and never spoke [insert foreign language] again because he wanted to be an American, dammit."

Posted by Dragonfly | May 13, 2008 11:20 AM

The immigrants of the early 20th century, of course, weren't considered "white" at the time either, so skin color isn't an argument for exceptionalism.

What is different, of course, is the structure of U.S. immigration policy, which has to some extent incentivized immigrant communities (especially in the Southwest) to stick together and maintain a safe distance from everyone else--just because that's the best strategy to protect undocumented residents from getting caught. So it might be possible that the level of fear and distrust (on both sides) accompanying relations between immigrants and "natives" is higher than it used to be--but it's not the immigrants' fault.

Posted by Dara | May 13, 2008 11:25 AM

One problem is that in blog discussions of the issue there always seem to be pro-immigration commenters arguing that a bilingual society is nothing to fear and that people should be learning Spanish anyway. That's inconsistent with the argument that everyone will end up learning English and assimilating like previous generations.

Also, was the government printing ballots in Yiddish then, or providing instruction in Yiddish in the public schools? It seems like the level of provision of government services in non-English languages is a lot higher than it ever has been. Am I wrong?

I don't think there's a crisis, so I'm mostly just playing devil's advocate and wondering whether you're oversimplifying the situation.

Posted by KCinDC | May 13, 2008 11:25 AM

That's inconsistent with the argument that everyone will end up learning English and assimilating like previous generations.

Actually it's not inconsistent. One can wish that many of their descendants would keep their Spanish while recognizing that for the most part they probably won't.

Posted by Steve LaBonne | May 13, 2008 11:35 AM

IIRC, in Atrios' own Philadelphia, there were public schools taught entirely in German right up to WWI.

Posted by Kiril | May 13, 2008 11:36 AM

"It was always the case that linguistic, social, and economic integration was a complicated multigenerational process"

Sure, but after a "complicated multigenerational process" 41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans still don't graduate high school. If that were true of the descendants of the Ellis Island immigrants of 100 years ago, we'd all agree that the Jews, Italians, etc. had largely failed to assimilate. We keep giving Mexican-Americans mulligans.

Also, you may have noticed some differences between America today and 100 years ago. For starters, we no longer have industries such as textiles that require lots of uneducated, unskilled workers; today we need smarter immigrants. Another difference is that 100 years ago there was no welfare state -- no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal Welfare, food stamps, etc. About half of those Ellis Island-era immigrants couldn't hack it and went back home.

Posted by Fred | May 13, 2008 11:39 AM

IIRC, in Atrios' own Philadelphia, there were public schools taught entirely in German right up to WWI.

Right, the parochial schools in St. Louis only had one hour of Englisch in the late 19th century.

Also, in 1886, the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung had a considerably higher circulation than the New York Times.

Posted by Raghav | May 13, 2008 11:42 AM

Fred,

I'd like to know your sources for that statistic that 1/2 of Ellis Island immigrants went back home.

Posted by freddiemac | May 13, 2008 11:44 AM

The Constitution of Wisconsin is written in English and German.

Wikipedia link

Posted by KEn | May 13, 2008 11:44 AM

100 years ago? when matthew's dad and i were young, there was still yiddish radio in new york, which my grandparents listened to faithfully, and the forward was still published in yiddish (that continued at least through the '60s and conceivably quite a ways longer).

Posted by howard | May 13, 2008 11:44 AM

The Constitution of Wisconsin was written in English and German back in 1848.

Wikipedia link

Posted by KEn | May 13, 2008 11:44 AM

The Constitution of Wisconsin was written in English and German back in 1848.

Wikipedia link

Posted by KEn | May 13, 2008 11:46 AM

Matt's point is mostly correct, though I'd say notable differences, if we're trying to think about how immigration is different now than it once was, are the following:

1) The proximity of Mexico compared to Europe and advances in transportation surely make it easier to maintain a closeness to the former culture that immigrants in the great waves of the 1800s and pre-WWI didn't enjoy.

2) Though there were always immigrants who came here and went back home, my understanding is that a much higher proportion of immigrants today come to the United States not because they want to become citizens and live here forever after, but because they want to earn high American wages and either send money home to their family or save enough to return home, build a house etc.

3) I don't really worry much about the "reclaim Aztlan" groups, but they do exist, and it seems inevitable that as long as such radicals exist some people are going to worry about them, and not completely unreasonably.

I say all this as someone who supports higher levels of legal immigration than we have today, and as someone who isn't bothered in the least when someone is speaking a different language on the street or in line at the grocery store or whatever.

But a particular kind of assimilation -- enough English fluency to understand our political process and passing on to one's kids the habits of participatory democracy -- strikes me as a worthwhile goal.

Posted by Conor Friedersdorf | May 13, 2008 11:46 AM

After a little Googling, I end up at Wikipedia, as usual:

After two or three generations, German Americans adopted mainstream American customs—some of which they heavily influenced—and switched their language to English. As one scholar concludes, "The overwhelming evidence … indicates that the German-American school was a bilingual one much (perhaps a whole generation or more) earlier than 1917, and that the majority of the pupils may have been English-dominant bilinguals from the early 1880s on."[31] By 1914 the older members were attending German-language church services while the younger members were attending English services (in Lutheran, Evangelical and Catholic churches). In German parochial schools, the children spoke English among themselves, though some of their classes were in German. In 1917–18, after the US entry into WWI on the side of the British, nearly all German language instruction ended, as did most German-language church services.
During World War I, German Americans, especially those born abroad, were sometimes accused of being too sympathetic to the German Empire. Teddy Roosevelt denounced "hyphenated Americanism" and insisted that dual loyalties were impossible in wartime.

Only the names have changed.

Posted by Kiril | May 13, 2008 11:53 AM

KCinDC, historically, you are wrong about the level of services available to non-English speakers. For your example of ballots, government printed ballots (called an "Australian ballot") were relatively new and mostly limited to major cities with a strong progressive movement. Most areas still used ballots provided by political parties. The parties, in turn, made sure their ballots were comprehensible to non-English speakers, along with the large number of illiterate English speakers. The provisions to allow illiterate voters to cast ballots continued even as Australian ballots became more widespread. For example, in Alabama, parties had to have a unique symbol to put on the general election ballot, so illiterate white voters could make sure they voted Democratic (the Democratic Party's symbol was a white rooster - which is the genesis of the original Black Panther Party's logo, they wanted a cat because cats killed roosters). Even education often was in the native tongue, until World War I. As part of the crack down on civil liberties during the Great War, children were forced to switch to English only education. Before the war, 25% (roughly) of American school children were educated only in German. These types of sell sustaining non-English speaking communities were the norm through most of the country, until the stress of war and a more harsh type of progressive movement took hold of American policy.

Posted by Clashkid | May 13, 2008 11:55 AM

Kiril writes: "Only the names have changed."

But as Fred wrote above: "41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans still don't graduate high school.".

Long before the 4th generation, past immigrant groups had matched or exceeded (as in the case of Jews) the scholastic achievement of the host society.

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 11:59 AM

KCinDC, historically, you are wrong about the level of services available to non-English speakers. For your example of ballots, government printed ballots (called an "Australian ballot") were relatively new and mostly limited to major cities with a strong progressive movement. Most areas still used ballots provided by political parties. The parties, in turn, made sure their ballots were comprehensible to non-English speakers, along with the large number of illiterate English speakers. The provisions to allow illiterate voters to cast ballots continued even as Australian ballots became more widespread. For example, in Alabama, parties had to have a unique symbol to put on the general election ballot, so illiterate white voters could make sure they voted Democratic (the Democratic Party's symbol was a white rooster - which is the genesis of the original Black Panther Party's logo, they wanted a cat because cats killed roosters). Even education often was in the native tongue, until World War I. As part of the crack down on civil liberties during the Great War, children were forced to switch to English only education. Before the war, 25% (roughly) of American school children were educated only in German. These types of sell sustaining non-English speaking communities were the norm through most of the country, until the stress of war and a more harsh type of progressive movement took hold of American policy.

Posted by Clashkid | May 13, 2008 12:00 PM

Part of what killed Yiddish so thoroughly was Israel. American jews largely agreed to give up Yiddish, the language of their grandparents, in favor of teaching their children Hebrew. But that ended the continuity with their recent writing tradition. They even agreed to trade in their s's for t's in the name of unity.

As far as the other differences between today and one hundred years ago, they mostly don't hold up to well. I have read that Italian immigrants also came here with the intention of going back after finding money. (And that is a much more likely explanation that immigrants going home because they couldn't cut it here.

Similarly, it is not that we have anti-immigrant people now, and they were so pro-immigrant then. It is that many of the anti-immigrant people today are descendended from the immigrants then who faced the same anti-immigrant segment. So what is different is our current attitude towards past immigrants, not our current attitude towards current immigrants vs our past attitude towards past immigrants.

Posted by Lon | May 13, 2008 12:01 PM

"Sure, but after a "complicated multigenerational process" 41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans still don't graduate high school."

Fred,

Where's your support for this figure? The data source you previously reported was a mere snapshot taken back in 1990, and the 4th generation figure was suspect, since it appeared to be composed of all Mexican-Americans who were 4th generation or greater, which would include the descendants of Chicanos who were in the Southwest, and therefore don't really count as immigrants, since they were a conquered people like the Native Americans. In addition, if the 4th generation is really 4th generation and above as of 1992, then it would include a high proportion of elderly people who came of age in eras when high school graduation was far lower among people of all ethnic groups in the US. Finally, your source compared each 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gen Mexican-Americans to all other Americans. It did not provide a proper apples-to-apples comparison between 1st gen MAs and 1st gen others, 2nd Gen MAs and 2nd Gen others, etc.

Do you have a better source of data for your assertion with valid apples-to-apples comparisons?

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 12:02 PM

We're still living with the damage those 19th century immigrants caused. The Irish made a mess out of every city government from Boston to Chicago, corrupted the police forces, and lowered the tone of college frat parties considerably. The Italians imported crime, stupid hairstyles, chest hair and pedophile priests. The Jews have burdened our bookshelves with countless bad novels, maudlin memoirs of tenement life and New York baseball nostalgia, not to mention infiltrating our better golf clubs. The list of immigrants' descendants we would be better off without is endless - Caitlin Flanagan, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Antonin Scalia, Giuliani, all the Kagans and Kristols, on and on.

Posted by John Bull | May 13, 2008 12:04 PM

After a very long time trolling here, Old Fart Fred still has his One Fucking Factoid. Let's just say that he's not really come very far.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | May 13, 2008 12:15 PM

"Sure, but after a "complicated multigenerational process" 41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans still don't graduate high school. If that were true of the descendants of the Ellis Island immigrants of 100 years ago, we'd all agree that the Jews, Italians, etc. had largely failed to assimilate."

Fred,

Considering that a large portion of Latino immigrants are educated in our dysfunctional inner-city public schools, whose students as a whole, native-born and immigrant, suffer from low high school graduation rates, low high school graduation rates aren't necessarily a sign of a failure to assimilate. It could instead be a troubling sign that too many Latinos are assimilating the dysfunctional mores prevalent in many African American inner city communities.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 12:18 PM

I have read that Italian immigrants also came here with the intention of going back after finding money.

That was true of my great-grandfather Luigi. He originally intended to go back to Italy and sent money home to buy a farm, but his brother started managing the farm, and made it very clear the farm would do just fine without Luigi coming home. At least that was the story. I bet WWI had something to do with it as well, that cut a lot of people off from the old country and by the time the war ended Europe was in ruins and a life in the US looked pretty good.

Posted by vanya | May 13, 2008 12:29 PM

Eltoro writes: "It did not provide a proper apples-to-apples comparison between 1st gen MAs and 1st gen others, 2nd Gen MAs and 2nd Gen others, etc.

Do you have a better source of data for your assertion with valid apples-to-apples comparisons?"

I can't speak for Fred, but here is something that might interest you:

"Second-Generation Mexicans: Getting Ahead or Falling Behind?

By Roger Waldinger and Renee Reichl
University of California Los Angeles"
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=382

Table 3 shows 16.9% of 2nd generation Mexicans having less than a high school education in 2004, compared to 2.9% of 2nd gen. canadians/europeans/australians, 3.6% of 2nd gen. asians, and 2.4% of second gen. "other americas".

Table 4 shows 14.1% of second generation mexican adults (aged 25-64) having a college degree, compared to 42.6% of 2nd gen. canadians/europeans/australians, 57.4% of 2nd gen. asians, and 41.3% of second gen. "other americas".

2nd generation mexicans are doing exceptionally poor with regards to education when compared to other 2nd generation immigrants.

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 12:30 PM

El Toro,

"Where's your support for this figure?"

See pp.12-13 of The Hispanic Challenge (PDF) for the data and citations, one of which is the United States Census. As I wrote last time we had this discussion,

If they've already failed to assimilate to mainstream European-American norms after four generations, what makes you think the fifth generation will be a charm? The typical trajectory of successful immigrants in America is two or three generations of successively higher achievement followed by complacency and a reversion to a mean, and you see that with Mexican Americans too, the only difference is that because they start with less human capital, their arc is lower than that of higher-achieving groups. In the PDF I linked to above, it also shows the "no high school" numbers for the first three generations of Mexican Americans: the percentage of high school grads peaks in the third generation, at about 67% (33% with no high school), and then the fourth generation is worse.

"Considering that a large portion of Latino immigrants are educated in our dysfunctional inner-city public schools, whose students as a whole, native-born and immigrant, suffer from low high school graduation rates, low high school graduation rates aren't necessarily a sign of a failure to assimilate. It could instead be a troubling sign that too many Latinos are assimilating the dysfunctional mores prevalent in many African American inner city communities."

So you have now switched tacks and instead of denying that 41% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans don't graduate high school, you are now blaming their lack of educational attainment on proximity to African Americans? If this were true, then Mexican-Americans in New Mexico would be doing well academically, because New Mexico is only 2.5% black, compared to the national average of 12.8%. You're not going to stipulate this, are you?

Posted by Fred | May 13, 2008 12:43 PM

It was always the case that linguistic, social, and economic integration was a complicated multigenerational process

Some descendents of immigrants still cling to furrin-lookin spellings of their names, even. What are they up to?

Posted by FearItself | May 13, 2008 12:49 PM

Also, was the government printing ballots in Yiddish then, or providing instruction in Yiddish in the public schools? It seems like the level of provision of government services in non-English languages is a lot higher than it ever has been. Am I wrong?

In Colorado the state constitution originally recognized three official languages for the state: English, Spanish, and German. There is a Colorado Supreme Court decision from 1879 finding that Spanish-speakers could be empaneled as jurors at a criminal trial with an interpreter provided and translated copies of the jury instructions. Town of Trinidad v. Simpson, 5 Colo. 65 (1879)

Posted by Just Dropping By | May 13, 2008 12:57 PM

Pseudomonas,

Here's another fact for you, from the same study:

Percent of 4th Generation Mexican-Americans with household income over $50k: 10.7%. Percent of all other Americans (excluding Mexican-Americans) with a household income over $50k: 24.8%. So after four generations here, Mexican-Americans still earn less than half what other Americans earn. Another example of their successful assimilation?

Posted by Fred | May 13, 2008 1:01 PM

Ah, Fred, going to back to Samuel Huntington, the brilliant scholar who, as that eminent uber-liberal blogger Dan Drezner once noted, might have a wee-bit of an issue with brown-skinned people.

In their book, "Remaking the American Mainstream," Richard Alba of SUNY-Albany and Victor Nee of Cornell point out that though there are some border neighborhoods where immigrants are slow to learn English, Mexicans nationwide know they must learn it to get ahead. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican-American children speak only English at home.

Nor is it true that Mexican immigrants are scuttling along the bottom of the economic ladder. An analysis of 2000 census data by the USC urban planner Dowell Myers suggests that Latinos are quite adept at climbing out of poverty. Sixty-eight percent of those who have been in this country 30 years own their own homes.

Who wrote that? None other another uber-liberal blogger, David Brooks.

Posted by Shine | May 13, 2008 1:07 PM

It's too bad Yiddish was lost

Yiddish lives!

Posted by Tyro | May 13, 2008 1:20 PM

Shine,

"Ah, Fred, going to back to Samuel Huntington, the brilliant scholar who, as that eminent uber-liberal blogger Dan Drezner once noted, might have a wee-bit of an issue with brown-skinned people.">

These were the sources of Huntington's data that 41% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans don't graduate high school:

Source: Rodolfo O. De la Garza, Angelo Falcón, P. Chris García's "Mexican Immigrants, Mexican Americans, and American Political Culture," in Barry Edmonston and Jeffrey S. Passell's (eds.) Immigration and Ethnicity: The Integration of America's Newest Arrivals (Washington: Urban Institute Press, 1994); and "Census of Population: Persons of Hispanic Origin in the United States," Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 1990)

Are you claiming that Messrs De La Garza, Falcón, and García have a "wee-bit of an issue with brown-skinned people"? Are you claiming that the U.S. Census Bureau does? If not, then what's the point of your second hand allegation about Huntington?

Posted by Fred | May 13, 2008 1:21 PM

I suppose that if you only read the headline then this article allows one to self righteously crow about racist know-nothings who don't understand that if we only allowed millions of people with no appreciable education into a society that is moving more and more towards a "knowledge" economy they will easily assimilate and only provide positive benefits to America.

"The overall assimilation index also masks big differences between immigrants from certain countries. Mexicans, for example have an index of 13, while Vietnamese were at 41. And although immigrants who arrived as children tend to be nearly identical to their U.S.-born counterparts, apart from their lower rates of citizenship, those who come from Mexico are less assimilated and have higher incidences of teenage pregnancy and incarceration."

Posted by bbk | May 13, 2008 1:22 PM

Eltoro, the achievement gap between blacks and hispanics on one side and whites and asians on the other is also present within well-funded suburban school districts. The "bad urban schools" story is not the whole story at all:

"Policy Issues 13: Closing the Achievement Gap in Urban and Suburban School Communities"

excerpt: "Middle-class, suburban schools often are overlooked in the achievement gap debate. Yet an achievement gap exists even in some of the most well-resourced, middle-class school districts in the nation. The No Child Left Behind legislation makes identifying and addressing achievement gaps a critical concern—not just for urban school districts, where attention has been focused for years, but for suburban school districts as well. This newer emphasis on suburban districts is especially compelling, given 2000 Census data that shows one-third of all black children and roughly half of all Hispanic, Asian, and white children live in suburban communities.
http://www.ncrel.org/policy/pubs/html/pivol13/dec2002d.htm

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 1:23 PM

"Ah, Fred, going to back to Samuel Huntington, the brilliant scholar who, as that eminent uber-liberal blogger Dan Drezner once noted, might have a wee-bit of an issue with brown-skinned people."

Do you have a citation? If Drezner resorted to such mindless comments then that lowers my opinion of him. Here's a Dan Drezner blog item on Huntington's "Hispanic Challange" thesis:

"The Controversial Sam Huntington"
excerpt: "..it would be dangerous to dismiss Huntington as some paleocon or crank -- he's neither. Read this Robert Kaplan biography of Huntington from the December 2001 Atlantic Monthly....... to get a sense of Huntington's career.

Second, most of the commentariat want Huntington to be wrong. That doesn't mean that he actually is wrong. Beware those who simply brand the argument as offensive and dismiss it out of hand -- Huntington is way too smart to be rejected without a sober evaluation of his thesis and evidence."

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 1:35 PM

Above D. Drezner blog post is found at:
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001120.html

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 1:37 PM

I always love how East Coast pundits assume that Mexican immigrants are this brand new phenomenon, a blank slate really, that could well turn out just like Yiddish-speaking immigrants of yore. Who knows how thy could turn out because they're so new!

In the American Southwest, however, it's an old, old story. People arrived from what's now Mexico and settled in what's now New Mexico around 1600. New Mexico comes in about 45th-49th worst out of all states on most measures of human welfare.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 1:40 PM

As bbk noted above, the happy-go-lucky WaPo title masks the many caveats and warnings in the actual article. Here's another:

"Vigdor also said his findings included cause for concern: most notably, the fact that the 2006 assimilation index of 28 is less than the previous low point of 42 in 1920. The difference indicates the substantial change in the composition of today's immigrants compared with earlier immigration waves."

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 1:42 PM

"So you have now switched tacks and instead of denying that 41% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans don't graduate high school, you are now blaming their lack of educational attainment on proximity to African Americans?"

I am not switching tacks, Fred.

First of all, I have pointed out you have nothing to back up your assertion that 41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans don't graduate high school. Even when I look at the table you refer to in Huntington's paper, the data doesn't really say that. What it says is that at a statistical snapshot taken circa 1990, 41% of 4th generation or greater Mexican-Americans did not graduate high school. That's all it says. A snapshot figure like that does not lead to your conclusion. There is no time series of data given for 4th gen or greater over a period of 80 years or more, indicating any progress or regress in that graduation rate. In addition, there is no breakout of that 4th gen population by age, which is a crucial variable in this comparison. If the 4th gen figure includes a large number of old people in 1990, who came of age in a era when high school graduation rates for even native-born Americans was much lower than it was in 1990 or even now, then the figure doesn't really inform us about the progress being made by Mexican-Americans today, in comparison to their native-born peers of other ethnicities.

Second, when I pointed out that many Latinos attend inner city public schools, where many of the native-born non-Latino students also suffer from low graduation rates, I was doing to counter your use of this figure as proof of a lack of assimiliation. I was merely pointing out that it could be a sign of the opposite conclusion, which is that Latinos in inner cities are assimiliating American culture, but unfortunately that American culture is the dysfunctional inner city African American culture. I was not using that argument as a replacement for my previous argument.

Third, as for low high school graduation rates among the Chicanos of New Mexico, I agree with you that the negative influence of dysfunctional inner city culture is not the cause. However, I wlll remind you that the Chicano community in New Mexico dates back to before the time that New Mexico was annexed by the US. Therefore, the Chicano culture established in NM is the culture of a conquered people, and thus displays many of the dysfunctional mores associated with Native American communities.

When looking at the high school graduation rates of Latinos in NM, we must at 2 distincit subsets. The 1st subset consists of the descendants of Mexicans who were already there when the Americans took over. The 2nd subset consists of Mexican-Americans who are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Do you have any data that controls for this?

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 1:48 PM

Nothing seems to quiet enthusiasts of unskilled immigration like facts. After a flurry of facts from Sailer and scottynx, you can hear crickets chirping here.

Posted by Fred | May 13, 2008 1:50 PM

Wait: MattY led off this post with a sleazy race-baiting LogicalFallacy from Atrios, and he didn't even know it was a sleazy race-baiting LogicalFallacy? The Atlantic really needs to give MattY a minder.

As for Conor Friedersdorf not worrying about the "reclaim Aztlan" groups, I'm not worried either! The fact that some former leaders/members of those groups now hold public office (as Dems of course) doesn't bother me, nor does the fact that those who've publicly expressed those views (like ArmandoNavarro) have links to even more Dem politicians, nor does the fact that per a ZogbyPoll 58% of Mexicans think the U.S. southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico bother me. It's not like there's widespread irredentist feelings and Democratic leaders willing to take advantage of them.

Maybe MattY's minder could help him do an intellectually honest version of this post where he mentions all the issues with the study, such as a definition of assimilation that doesn't deal with country-specific issues.

As usual, click my name's link and look through my archives to find out what's really going on with this issue.

Posted by TLB | May 13, 2008 1:51 PM

Another East Coast pundit's fantasy is the "Yiddish theatre" assumption that illegal immigrants and their descendants must be bringing us all this vibrant culture, just like their great-grandparents brought to NYC. Granted, they can't think of much, if any, but simple logic shows that everything must be getting vibrant in Van Nuys. Who are you going to believe: theory or your lying eyes?

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 1:54 PM

Wow, who would have ever dreamed that a bunch of dishonest racist little shits would swarm this post? Besides the usual Fred and Steve Sailer, I mean. Hey, Steve, did you ever get around to making your own emigration plans, in case a genetically inferior Negro becomes President in place of a member of the master race?

Posted by mds | May 13, 2008 1:55 PM

"2nd generation mexicans are doing exceptionally poor with regards to education when compared to other 2nd generation immigrants."

Scottynx,

I don't dispute that. 2nd generation Mexican need to greatly improve their educational attainments, just as many inner city African-Americans and Appalacian whites need to.

What I dispute is that this figure displays a failure to assimilate American mores. Instead, it might be a sign that too many 2nd generation Mexican-Americans are assimilating the dysfunctional mores of certain segments among native-born Americans, such as inner city African-Americans.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 1:59 PM

I would guess that the women of Yiddish theater were more modestly dressed than the women of Univision.

Posted by Tom | May 13, 2008 2:03 PM

Looks like I spoke too soon about the crickets chirping.

El Toro,

"First of all, I have pointed out you have nothing to back up your assertion that 41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans don't graduate high school."

Sure I do. I have the U.S. Census and the study by Messrs De La Garza, Falcón, and García cited as the sources of that statistic in Huntington's PDF. If you want to be ticky-tack about it, you could fault me for not adding the qualifying phrase "as of 1990", but I doubt more recent data will show much higher graduation rates among 4th generation Mexican-Americans. If you have such data, feel free to post it here.

"Second, when I pointed out that many Latinos attend inner city public schools, where many of the native-born non-Latino students also suffer from low graduation rates, I was doing to counter your use of this figure as proof of a lack of assimiliation. I was merely pointing out that it could be a sign of the opposite conclusion, which is that Latinos in inner cities are assimiliating American culture, but unfortunately that American culture is the dysfunctional inner city African American culture. I was not using that argument as a replacement for my previous argument."

Isn't this a fruitless argument for you? Even if I agreed with your hypothesis that Mexican-Americans assimilate to the "dysfunctional inner city African American culture", that hypothesis still supports the argument that Mexican-Americans have failed to assimilate to mainstream socio-economic norms and thus, can't be compared (except invidiously) to the Ellis-Island-era immigrants.

"Therefore, the Chicano culture established in NM is the culture of a conquered people, and thus displays many of the dysfunctional mores associated with Native American communities."

Any facts to support this bit of pop-psychology? The poor educational attainment could also be the result of lower aptitudes for academic study, on average, among Chicanos and Native Americans. If it were due to "conquered people syndrome" it ought to apply across-the-board to other peoples who were conquered. Does it? Does it apply to Vietnamese immigrants, whose country was conquered by North Vietnam? Does it apply to WWII-era Jewish immigrants, whose home countries were conquered by the Nazis?

Posted by Fred | May 13, 2008 2:10 PM

Matt,

Did you even read this article? Or did you just like the headline?

You have to weight that chart of assimilation rates per country of origin by the volume of immigrants. In other words, the poor scores for Mexico are a lot more important than higher scores for the other countries individually.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 2:13 PM

"In the PDF I linked to above, it also shows the "no high school" numbers for the first three generations of Mexican Americans: the percentage of high school grads peaks in the third generation, at about 67% (33% with no high school), and then the fourth generation is worse."

Fred,

Actually, the PDF shows that circa 1990, 2/3 of Mexican-Americans were high school graduates or better. The 4th generation number is really 4th generation or greater, and would have included a much older population than the 3rd generation population. Age is a crucial variable, since high school graducation rates for all Americans were much lower in the early 20th century than they were in the late 20th century and the early 21st. Since the 3rd generation population is a much younger population than the 4th generation number, it would no surprise that the high school graduation rate for the 4th generation is much lower than that of the 3rd generation population.

Do you any actual valid data showing the graduation rates of the children of that 3rd generation population? Are today's 4th generation Mexican-Americans graduating from high school at the same rate as those 3rd generation Mexican-Americans did circa 1990, or are they graduating at even higher rates? Provide some apples-to-apples data.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 2:18 PM

"2nd generation Mexican need to greatly improve their educational attainments, just as many inner city African-Americans and Appalacian whites need to."

One of these groups is not like the other. We haven't been importing anymore slaves from West Africa or Scots-Irish indentured servants for a long time. We are still importing millions of unskilled immigrants from Mexico. We should stop doing that. Claiming that African-Americans and Appalachian whites have socioeconomic characteristics just as bad as Mexican-Americans' isn't a selling point for importing more unskilled immigrants from Mexico.

Posted by Fred | May 13, 2008 2:22 PM

"Sure I do. I have the U.S. Census and the study by Messrs De La Garza, Falcón, and García cited as the sources of that statistic in Huntington's PDF. If you want to be ticky-tack about it, you could fault me for not adding the qualifying phrase "as of 1990", but I doubt more recent data will show much higher graduation rates among 4th generation Mexican-Americans. If you have such data, feel free to post it here."

Fred,

You don't have support for your assertion, even from the date that Huntington compiled from his sources. Huntington shows that as of 1990, 67 % of 3rd generation Mexican-Americans, while 59% of 4th generation or greater Mexicam-Americans had not graduated high school. There are no adjustments made for the different age demographics of each population (the 4th gen population is a much older population than the 3rd gen, and those older people came of age in an America where high school graduation rates across the board were much lower than they were in the late 20th century and the early 21st.). Therefore, Huntington's table is not showing the true picture of the graduation rates of 4th generation Mexican-Americans circa 1990, since he is not limiting his data to the children of the 3rd generation circa 1990.

Since you are the one making the assertion, Fred, the onus is on you to provide the relevant backup data, not me.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 2:37 PM

One of the reasons Washington DC pundits just don't get the rest of the country's concerns about illegal immigration is because in DC itself, it's raining white people. More white trust funders move in to DC each year, pushing out African-Americans. The Washington Post recently reported:

" The District, which the census treats as a state, stands in marked exception to that trend. As once-affordable neighborhoods have gentrified over the past decade, the city has been losing black residents while gaining white newcomers, steadily diminishing its longtime status as a majority-black metropolis.

" The latest census figures confirm that pattern, with non-Hispanic blacks accounting for 54 percent of the District's population in 2007, compared with 60 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, the number of non-Hispanic whites increased from 28 to 33 percent in that period, while the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian population remained at 8 and 3 percent, respectively."

Don't forget, the ethnic clearing of African-Americans from D.C. is actually happening faster than these numbers for "non-Hispanic blacks" indicate -- the African-Americans are being replaced by black immigrants, who tend to be more obsequious and thus make better service workers for white Washingtonians.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-dc-elite-thinks-immigration-is.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 2:40 PM

el toro writes: "Since the 3rd generation population is a much younger population than the 4th generation number, it would no surprise that the high school graduation rate for the 4th generation is much lower than that of the 3rd generation population."

Ok, I think I see what you might getting at. So earlier generation hispanics probably have a higher birthrate and younger age at first birth, thus skewing 4th generation hispanics as being slightly older on average than 3rd generation hispanics. Is that what you are getting at? If that is, I still don't see how the effect could be much more than trivial. Could the 4th generation (and above even, if that's what the statistic meant, which is far from certain) really be more than 1 or 2 years older on average than the 3rd generation?

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 2:40 PM

I don't need to tell you this, but you can't trust MattY or the WaPo. Someone who covers these issues for the Austin AmericanStatesman says:

Current immigrants — especially Mexicans — are less assimilated than those 100 years ago, a study released Tuesday found...

But the progress "is not present for all groups and in particular, it's not present among some of the Latin American immigrants that are at the heart of the immigration debate these days," [the study author] added.

In Austin, the assimilation index is 22, lower than the national average, according to the study. However, immigrants in the area had a high rate of economic assimilation, 78.

In Waco, Texas, the assimilation index is 14, far below the national average, according to the study. In addition, the economic index rate is 63.

For Mexicans, the assimilation rate is 13, according to the index. By comparison, Canadians have an assimilation index of 53 and Germans have an index of 87, the highest.

Posted by TLB | May 13, 2008 2:40 PM

"Isn't this a fruitless argument for you? Even if I agreed with your hypothesis that Mexican-Americans assimilate to the "dysfunctional inner city African American culture", that hypothesis still supports the argument that Mexican-Americans have failed to assimilate to mainstream socio-economic norms and thus, can't be compared (except invidiously) to the Ellis-Island-era immigrants."

Fred,

The argument is not about attaining the socio-economic norms of the American mainstream. It's about whether Mexican-Americans are assimilating or not. The study actually shows that Mexican-Americans have a high rate of cultural assimilation compared to other immigrant groups; where they fall behind is on the indexes for economic and civic assimilation. The authors of this study believe that is driven by the illegal status of many Mexican immigrants. Change that factor, and the indexes for economic and civic assimilation will improve greatly.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 2:47 PM

Fred: 41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans still don't graduate high school

The last time Fred (or was it Steve Sailer?)brought this up, a couple weeks ago, I took a look at the source he provided, and I noticed that the trend for 1st to 3rd-generation Mexican-Americans was of improved graduation rates over time, but that this reversed with the 4th generation. No explanation was offered for this, so in the absence of further study I would venture to say that this indicates that the 4th-generation Mexican-Americans represent a group with other significantly-different characteristics than the 1st-through-3rd generation Mexican-Americans.

In other words, I would find it unlikely that the great-grand-children of immigrants are suddenly reversing course and becoming less assimilated than their parents. In the absence of any evidence otherwise, I would expect that the children of today's 3rd-generation Mexican-Americans would likely follow the improving trend of the 1st through 3rd generations, and not resemble today's 4th generation.

In other words, the stat is interesting, but as currently used, misleading.

Posted by Adam Villani | May 13, 2008 2:51 PM

Part of the problem of assimilation for Hispanics is that they now have a grievance theater (ala African Americans) that encourages them to be separate. 40+% of your kids born out of wedlock? Blame the Man. Single parent homes with low academic achievement? Blame the Man and demand affirmative action. Can't get ahead economically? Blame the Man and attempt to blackmail him for subprime mortgages (Oops!). Meanwhile, Chinese people are stumbling out of shipping containers and kicking economic ass in a couple years. No excuses. Immigrants from the Ellis Island period focused on families and education and within a couple generations were the Man.

Posted by danceswithgoats | May 13, 2008 2:59 PM

As usual, click my name's link and look through my archives to find out what's really going on with this issue.

As usual, ignore the blogwhoring ladder-pulling shut-in.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | May 13, 2008 3:14 PM

The last time the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement tests asked students if they were born in America was 1992. Not surprisingly, foreign-born Hispanics did worse than African-Americans, winding up 5 to 6 grade levels behind whites, assuming they stuck it out through 12th grade, which is a big if.

But, what about American-born Hispanics, from the second through seventh generations? They did better than African-Americans, but the test score gap was still 67% as large as the notoriously deleterious white-black gap, putting them on pace to wind up 3.3 grade levels behind whites by 12th grade.

http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/new_underclass.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 3:17 PM

I shouldn't get involved in this cesspit. Well, with Fred and Steve Sailer, it's a cesspit. But hey, WTF. I know these numbers in a way that neither of those two posers do.

Unsurprisingly, the source data for the Huntington paper don't seem to have any relation to the graphs. Surprise!

Here's the 2000 data for native-born Americans of Mexican descent v. natives, aged 18 to 64:

H.S. dropouts 8.3 21.0
H.S. graduates 34.3 40.0
Some college 29.5 27.7
College grad 27.9 11.3

Clearly an issue. But 41%? Nope.

I could get into the problems of measuring intergenerational progress in a population with such a high exogamy rate (huge), or discuss the fiscal impact of immigrants (positive). Or we could talk about whether the U.S. needs more skilled-based immigration, even if we honestly disagreed, and the impact of immigration on unskilled Americans. We could compare educational attainment among immigrant groups controlling for legal status and parental education, and discuss policy solutions. We could have all sorts of conversations, we could honestly disagree, minds could be changed.

But not with this crowd. Ya me voy. Hasta.

Posted by Noel Maurer | May 13, 2008 3:19 PM

"Any facts to support this bit of pop-psychology? The poor educational attainment could also be the result of lower aptitudes for academic study, on average, among Chicanos and Native Americans. If it were due to "conquered people syndrome" it ought to apply across-the-board to other peoples who were conquered. Does it? Does it apply to Vietnamese immigrants, whose country was conquered by North Vietnam? Does it apply to WWII-era Jewish immigrants, whose home countries were conquered by the Nazis?"

Fred,

Are you being deliberately obtuse, or do you think that the Vietnamese and the Jews lived alongside Native Americans and Chicanos during the time when the latter were CONQUERED BY AMERICANS? Surely you understand that the American experience of people conquered by the United States is vastly different from people who immigrated to the United States from other countries? As usual, Fred, you have trouble providing apples-to-apples comparisons.

To help illustrate the difference between the experience of being a member of an oppressed native ethnic group and being an immigrant, look at the historical experience of Russian Jews within Russia and within the US. In czarist Russia, Jews were oppressed for centurities to the point that many of them were unable to be achieve anything more than being a peasant. However, when many of these Russian Jews emigrated to America, their societal status changed enormously. The children of someone like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof wound up assimilating not just mainstream American mores, but the mores of their high-achieving, middle-class Austro-German Jewish American cousins. The vast achievement gap that existed between Austro-German Jews and Russian Jews during the Ellis Island era has been erased.

Even with many of the Vietnamese, a similiar dynamic occurs. Not all Vietnamese who escaped after the fall of Saigon were middle-class refugees fearing liquidation by the Commies. Many were also peasants whose forebears had lived as peasants also for generatons and generations. When they came to America, however, the children and grandchildren of these peasants improved upon the socioeconomic achievements of their ancestors.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 3:30 PM

In the American Southwest, however, it's an old, old story. People arrived from what's now Mexico and settled in what's now New Mexico around 1600. New Mexico comes in about 45th-49th worst out of all states on most measures of human welfare.

Actually, Steve, the poorest, most backward, most-third-world-like states of the union are those that have been run for years by racist white conservatives. And California, with all our hispanic immigrants and our liberalism and our racial diversity, is rich as sin.

This must burn you up.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 13, 2008 3:33 PM

California now has about 13 million Hispanics, and a sizable fraction of the population has been Hispanic forever. So, there must be all these highly assimilated Latino high achievers in California, right? It's simple arithmetic!

So, in Silicon Valley, there's Hector Ruiz, CEO of second-string chip maker AMD. And then there's ... well, ...

Although people born in Mexico make up by far the largest immigrant group, they don't rank in top 20 immigrant groups in the United States in terms of patents awarded. Turkish immigrant get more patents than Mexican immigrants, and there aren't many immigrants from Turkey.

So, never mind Silicon Valley, let's look at Hollywood! There's the highly creative Richard Rodriguez, a classic Mexican-American from a family of ten in San Antonio. And then there's, well, there are a few actors and actresses and comedians. And then ... oh yeah, there are bunch of art house directors!

Except, they aren't exactly Mexican-Americans -- they're from the urban Mexican cultural elite and moved to Hollywood after making it big in Mexico. They're the kind of Mexicans who normally don't move their families to California.

This isn't for a lack of trying on the part of American corporations. They've been desperate for Mexican-American celebrities to endorse their products for the growing Mexican American market since they latched on to Nancy Lopez in 1978 and made her the lady golfer with the widest range of endorsements ever.

There just isn't a high level of achievement among American-born people of Mexican descent. That's because people from high achieving families in Mexico tend to stay in Mexico. They like it there. Mexico is a great place to live if you're on top of the heap. The richest man in the world lives in Mexico. (The few who do move to the U.S. tend to move to Miami rather than LA -- they don't like LA because it has too many lower class Mexicans in it.)

The bottom line is that illegal immigration brings in people without many skills, and they tend to pass on their lack of skills to their descendants. The next generation gets more education, but they continue to lag American norms, and there's little evidence of improvement in subsequent generations.

And then there's assimilation in the wrong direction: the illegitimacy rate is higher among American-born Hispanics than among foreign-born ones. And the crime rate appears to go up substantially among the American-born Hispanics compared to their fathers.

But all these facts that are obvious in the American southwest are a big surprise to DC journalists who feel entitled to make up little fantasies about what Mexicans will do next because Mexicans are so, so new to America.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 3:41 PM

A while back I had a test for Dilan Esper where I asked him to name the major IL group that's headed by someone linked to the MexicanGovernment. Silly me: as it turns out, he's not only an ImmigrationLawyer, but he writes for a site that links to that group in their sidebar.

As for CA, our situation is much more dire. We're developing an economy similar to BR, with large numbers of poor people and a small number of rich people who live in enclaves. Even DanWalters and others have warned about such a two-tier system. And, many of our legislators take actions that are indistinguishable from those that actual paid agents of the MexicanGovernment would take. Those include things like congratulating Mexico's president on helping block a law approved by 59% of voters.

As for our "diversity", I believe Dilan Esper is referring to the "liberal" variety of same, where neighborhoods that are 99% Hispanic are "heavily diverse".

Posted by TLB | May 13, 2008 3:52 PM

Most government high school graduation statistics are notoriously phony. The best analysis of dropout trends is the 2007 paper by Nobel economist and master statistician James Heckman. He looks at seven longitudinal studies and only includes Hispanics who were born in America or arrived as small children. The drop-out rate for these American raised Hispanics is around 35%, similar to the black rate, and about twice the white rate.

Heckman writes:

"In fact, we find no evidence of convergence in minority-majority graduation rates over the past 35 years."

The overall dropout rate bottomed out at around 20% around 1970, and has since gone up to about 25%. I calculate that the majority of that overall worsening was due to changing demographics.

For details and links, see:

http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080101_dropout.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 3:53 PM

By the way, in regard to the talk about how there were German-language schools in Wisconsin in 1900 -- the key fact is that Germany was way ahead of America in the 19th Century in educational standards. As bad as 21st century American education is, it's still a lot better than Mexico's.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 3:59 PM

Dilan Esper asserts:

"And California, with all our hispanic immigrants and our liberalism and our racial diversity, is rich as sin."

Are you kidding? The standard of living for the median-income family of four in California, adjusted for the very high cost of living, is behind even New Mexico, ahead of only Hawaii and DC.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/05/standard-of-living-by-state.html

Sure, there are a lot of rich people in California, just like there are a lot of billionaires in Mexico. But is Mexico the utopia of egalitarian liberals? That's the direction California is heading.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 4:15 PM

Steve Sailer:
...illegal immigrants and their descendants must be bringing us all this vibrant culture... simple logic shows that everything must be getting vibrant in Van Nuys. Who are you going to believe: theory or your lying eyes?

Posts like this make it even more difficult to believe that you're some kind of concerned factual researcher and not just a garden variety racist.

First off, people were making fun of Van Nuys even when it was mostly white. Woodland Hills is mostly white and it's hardly a cultural mecca.

Second, so your point here is that Mexican-Americans have no vibrant culture? That's something of a jaw-dropper, man. You do realize there are several TV networks full of Spanish-language entertainment, and that's not including the Latinos on TV? The list of Mexican-American contributors to culture goes a lot farther than Robert Rodriguez. Just off the top of my head: Sergio Aragones, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Ted Williams, Nomar Garciaparra, Salma Hayek, Oscar de la Hoya, Anthony Quinn, Cesar Chavez, Carlos Santana, Cypress Hill, Jessica Alba, Linda Ronstadt, etc. etc.

Posted by Adam Villani | May 13, 2008 4:30 PM

Eltoro,

I gave you the citations for the data that, as of 1990, 41% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans hadn't graduated high school. None of your objections refute that data. No "apples to apples" comparison is necessary because there is only one apple in this case: the number isn't a comparison of one group to another, it is a statistic about one group (4th generation Mexican-Americans).

Your claim that

"The argument is not about attaining the socio-economic norms of the American mainstream. It's about whether Mexican-Americans are assimilating or not."

Is pure sophistry, if not deliberate obtuseness on your part. It's obvious from Matt's Yiddish Theater reference that when he (and everyone else except you) makes reassuring parallels about assimilation between today's Spanish-speaking immigrants and Ellis Island-era immigrants, the assimilation he is alluding to isn't to the "dysfunctional inner-city African-American culture" you described. No advocate for continuing the status quo of importing more unskilled immigrants from Mexico would claim that.

"Surely you understand that the American experience of people conquered by the United States is vastly different from people who immigrated to the United States from other countries?"

Hence the sorry state of affairs of today's Germans and Japanese, the descendants of people conquered by Americans? Or does your "conquered people syndrome" only happen in the Southwest?

Posted by Fred | May 13, 2008 4:43 PM

You forgot Raquel Welch!

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 4:46 PM

There are 30 million people of Mexican background in the U.S., one tenth of all residents. One big reason illegal immigration is so much more popular among elite Americans than among working class Americans is because illegal immigrants and their descendants provide such negligible competition for American elites and their children.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 4:51 PM

Steve, I can't help but notice that in that wonderful picture on your website (you really couldn't find one less fuzzy? or at least newer?*) that you sort of have what some may consider a dark, even swarthy, countenance.

What's up with that?

*And what is it with aconmag guys and pictures, anyway? What's with the vanity? Raimondo went with a picture that was clearly more than a decade old for years until he finally udpated to his current dopey/squidgy modern pic.

Posted by SoCalJustice | May 13, 2008 4:58 PM

By the way, in regard to the talk about how there were German-language schools in Wisconsin in 1900 -- the key fact is that Germany was way ahead of America in the 19th Century in educational standards.

It still is.

Posted by vanya | May 13, 2008 5:10 PM

Adam Villani says a lot of stupid things, including Cypress Hill, Jessica Alba, Linda Ronstadt, etc.

If you're on a plane with any of those three, check it isn't headed to the sun. Moving to infamy, we've got the RailroadKiller, RickieRodriguez, and JuanCorona.

OTOH, HopeSandoval was a pretty good contribution.

Posted by TLB | May 13, 2008 5:17 PM

"I gave you the citations for the data that, as of 1990, 41% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans hadn't graduated high school. None of your objections refute that data."

I am not refuting the data. I am refuting your interpretation of this data. You claimed that 41% of Mexican-Americans still don't graduate high school, and used Huntington's data as support. As I have repeatedly pointed out, Huntington's data DOES NOT support that claim. All Huntington's data shows is that as of 1990, 41% of Mexican-Americans who were 4th generation or greater had not graduated high school. Neither you nor Huntington have providing tracking data covering the period since then. Until you show the children of that 3rd generation circa 1990 are graduating at lower rates today, you have not supported your assertion.

"No "apples to apples" comparison is necessary because there is only one apple in this case: the number isn't a comparison of one group to another, it is a statistic about one group"

The apples to apples comparison is necessary for 2 reasons. First, you can't really compare the 4th generation numbers to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation numbers if the 4th generation number really reprsents 4th generation or greater. If one item is a range, then the other items should also be a range. Second, in that table Huntington is comparing those 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th gen numbers to all other Americans. He doesn't compare 1st gen Mexican-Americans to 1st gen non Mexican Americans, 2nd gen Mexican-Americans to 2nd gen Mexican-Americans, etc. You and Huntington cannnot validly compare the progress of Mexican-Americans to non Mexican-Americans without creating this apples-to-apples situation.

"Hence the sorry state of affairs of today's Germans and Japanese, the descendants of people conquered by Americans? Or does your "conquered people syndrome" only happen in the Southwest?"

Are you being deliberately obtuse yet again? Last time I looked, the US did not annex Germany and Japan and make them part of the United States. Therefore, neither the Germans nor the Japanese constitute a people conquered by Americans. They were people we defeated in war and briefly occupied. However, we helped them rebuild their countries and ended our occupations of them.

That description does not apply to either Native Americans or the Chicanos of the Southwest. The land taken from the Native Americans by the US still is part of the US, as is the land that was taken from Mexico. The descendants of the people who were here before the Americans took over are therefore conquered peoples in the context of American history.

If native Americans or Chicanos immigrated to the UK and formed communities, those UK communities would not consist of conquered peoples. The historical context that those communities exist in would be a UK one, not a US one, and since those communities would exist in the UK due to IMMIGRATION, not conquest, those people would not be conquered people.

On the other hand, the Irish in Ireland for much of their history were a conquered people in the historical context of Great Britain. However, Irish-Americans were not a conquered people in the American historical context because the Irish-American community was created via immigration to the US; the US did not invade Ireland and make it part of the US.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 5:47 PM

I wrote:
that's not including the Latinos on TV
I meant to say "not including Latinos on English-language TV." Yglesias Disease seems to be catching.

Anyway, I'm not a big Linda Ronstadt fan either, but I was just pointing out that there are a number of Mexican-Americans with a cultural impact acros a fairly broad spectrum.

And I don't know what to say to somebody who wouldn't want to sit next to Jessica Alba on an airplane.

Posted by Adam Villani | May 13, 2008 5:59 PM

I wrote:
that's not including the Latinos on TV
I meant to say "not including Latinos on English-language TV." Yglesias Disease seems to be catching.

Anyway, I'm not a big Linda Ronstadt fan either, but I was just pointing out that there are a number of Mexican-Americans with a cultural impact acros a fairly broad spectrum.

And I don't know what to say to somebody who wouldn't want to sit next to Jessica Alba on an airplane.

Posted by Adam Villani | May 13, 2008 6:01 PM

Fred wrote at 1:01:

Percent of 4th Generation Mexican-Americans with household income over $50k: 10.7%. Percent of all other Americans (excluding Mexican-Americans) with a household income over $50k: 24.8%. So after four generations here, Mexican-Americans still earn less than half what other Americans earn.

I'm just pointing out that the third sentence does not in any way follow from the first two. Surprise, Fred's making dishonest and/or ignorant use of statistics.

(Do the math: suppose 10.7% of Mexican-Americans make 51K, and the rest make 49K. And suppose 24.8% of others make 51K, and the rest make 49K. This is totally consistent with the stats Fred cites, and yields numbers that do not in any way correspond to his claim.)

Posted by hello | May 13, 2008 6:06 PM

"It's obvious from Matt's Yiddish Theater reference that when he (and everyone else except you) makes reassuring parallels about assimilation between today's Spanish-speaking immigrants and Ellis Island-era immigrants, the assimilation he is alluding to isn't to the "dysfunctional inner-city African-American culture" you described."

Fred,

Matt's Yiddish reference makes it clear that is addressing the argument about CULTURAL assimilation, not economic or civic. He makes no references to socioeconomic attainment or civic participation. That's because most of the arguments made against immigration today are focused on cultural factors, such as whether or not Latinos are learning how to speak English.On the other hand, Fred, it is you who is conflating measures of economic and civic assimilation with measures of cultural assimilation. So the problem really is that you and Matt are having different discussions.

BTW, the study that Matt references shows that cultural assimilations doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with economic and civic assimilations. Mexican-Americans, who unfortunately show the lowest indexes for economic and civic assimilation, show a much higher index for cultural assimilation. In fact, groups like Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans, who have a high index of economic assimilation, actually have lower indexes of cultural assimilation than Mexican-Americans.
So the study actually supports both Matt's position and your position. So you can junk your old Huntington source and use this study instead, which has more valid and relevant data.

The study's authors also believe that the factor most responsible for the low economic and civic assimilation indexes for Mexican-Americans is due to the large proportion of illegals found in this community. Change that factor, and the economic and civic indexes will vastly improve.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 6:17 PM

eltoro writes: Mexican-Americans...show a much higher index for cultural assimilation.

Here's what "cultural assimilation" means to the author the study:

• Ability to speak English
• Intermarriage (whether an individual’s spouse is native-born)
• Number of children
• Marital status

One will note a few things missing, such as whether they buy in to our laws (or think they don't apply to them) and whether they support our borders (or think they have a BlutUndBoden-style right to move anywhere within the Americas).

An intellectually honest index would take those into account. The civic index has similar issues as well, one of which the author acknowledges (military service being a fast-track ToCitizenship).

Posted by TLB | May 13, 2008 6:32 PM

Mexican immigrants don't strike me as posing much of a separatist threat to America because they haven't shown much of an inclination for getting themselves organized much beyond the extended family level (other than in, say, street gangs). As columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the L.A. Times: “In Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity.”

In contrast, German-Americans were widely suspected in 1917 of being a subversive force, in part because of the very high level of cultural capital they had. Before WWI, German-Americans formed German organizations like crazy. Thus, the kulturkampf against German-Americans of 1917-1918 in which American orchestras (many of them founded by German-Americans) stopped playing Beethoven, and there were lots of other idiocies now remembered mostly by readers of H.L. Mencken. This was stupid because of there was little evidence of German-American unpatriotism; but it wasn't stupid in the sense that if German-Americans had wanted to cause trouble during WWI, they had the cultural capital to do it.

In the wake of this 1917-18 culture war, lots of Americans changed their name from Schmidt to Smith and German-Americans in general made strong efforts to fade into the old American background.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 8:06 PM

"Could the 4th generation (and above even, if that's what the statistic meant, which is far from certain) really be more than 1 or 2 years older on average than the 3rd generation?"

Scottynx,

Because of the patterns of Mexican immigration during the 20th century (a large wave from 1915 to 1930, and then a 2nd large wave after 1965), the average age of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd gen population of high school graduate age in 1990 will tend to skew higher in the 1st than in the 2nd, and higher in the 2nd than in the 3rd.

The lst generation (the immigrant generation) wiil stretch from people who came in the post 1965 wave to the people who came in the 1915-1930 wave.

The 2nd generation (the 1st native-born generation) will consist primarily of people born to the 1st immigrant wave and people born to the second wave, so they will skew younger than the 1st generation.

The 3rd generation (the grandchildren of the immigrants) who would have been of high school graduation age by 1990 would not be descended from immigrants who came from the post 1965 wave; they would have descended from immigrants who came in the 1st wave from 1915-1930. They would also tend to skew younger than the 1st and 2nd generations. Because most of the 3rd generation were descended from immigrants in the 1915-1930 wave, the 3rd generation population of high school graduate age in 1990 tend to be people born from 1960 to 1972. This age group is not old enough to give us the bulk of the 4th generation population who were of high school graduate age in 1990.

Since most of that 4th generation group of high school graduates in 1990 are not the children of most of the 3rd generation of high school graduates in 1990, the 4th generation average age is not going to follow the age trend that the 1st to 3rd followed. I would expect the 4th generation to skew at least as old as the 3rd generation, if not older.

Knowing that age is correlated with high school graduation (people in America graduated from high school far less in the early 20th century than they did in the late 20th century),
that most of those 4th generation graduates are not the children of most of the 3rd generation graduates, and that the 4th generation would on average be more culturally assimilated than the 3rd generation, the drop in graduation rates from the 3rd to the 4th doesn't fit the rise in graduation rates from the 1st to the 3rd.

As the gnerations get younger and more assimilated, the graduation rates rise. If the 4th skewed around the same age as the 3rd, you would expect its graduation rate to be at least as high as that of the 3rd generation, but it isn't. It's lower by quite a bit. That's why I suspect that the 4th generation population as of 1990 skewed older than the 3rd generation population.

Now, I could be leaping to conclusions, but that 4th generation figure from the Huntington table just doesn't fit with the pattern shown by the rest of the data in that table.

Do you have any data of more recent vintage that might shine a better light on this question? After all, by this decade, most of the 4th generation high school graduates will be the children of most of the 3rd generation high school graduates.

Posted by eltoro | May 13, 2008 9:58 PM

Unfortunately, people don't really have to organize to form a power base for others, such as Democratic Party racial demagogues like TonyVillar and the like. And, radio DJs were able to get hundreds of thousands to take to the streets a couple years ago.

In Chicago it was DJs but also persons linked to the MexicanGovernment, with one of the main organizers being a member of an advisory council to that government at the same time as he has links to the IL machine and even bloggers like FDL and C&L. Yes, that's right: a bloggers' PAC is working with someone linked to the MexicanGovernment.

The subversive issue isn't so much from the millions of Mexican citizens or Mexican-Americans, but from their leaders who have and will use racial demagoguery to obtain power. Some of them, such as FabianNunez, have divided loyalties that can be seen from space.

Posted by TLB | May 13, 2008 10:33 PM

Shorter Whack O'Mole Chris Kelly. You are either:

a) with me and my POS blogs' 5000 daily visitors in resisting Teh Brown Menace!1!;

b) in league with the MexicanGovernment.

He's the ScaryMexicansWillKillUsAll equivalent of the 9/11 Truthers.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | May 13, 2008 10:45 PM

Eltoro, here is a more recent study (released in early 2008) that may address your question about the relevance of the 4th generation Mexican data that Huntington referenced. Much of the this thread has been taken up by that issue so I will take the liberty of this long posting:

[Mexican American integration slow, education stalled, study finds

UCLA report charts Chicano experience over four decades
By
Letisia Marquez
| 3/20/2008
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. It found little assimilation among Mexican Americans, even those who had lived in the United States for several generations.

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, were surprised to find that the third and fourth generation in this current study had not achieved more gains, particularly in the educational arena.

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."]
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-study-of-four-generations-46372.aspx

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 10:47 PM

Money quotes from the UCLA study published in early 2008:
"Telles and Ortiz, like Moore, were surprised to find that the third and fourth generation in this current study had not achieved more gains, particularly in the educational arena."

"* 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."

Posted by scottynx | May 13, 2008 10:56 PM

scottynx:

Thanks. Very timely information.

I don't think anybody who lives in a city with a long-established Mexican-American population will be surprised by these 2008 findings, at least if you're not completely oblivious to the obvious. This isn't a disastrous performance by Mexican immigrants, it's just mediocre, below average.

But, the data are not at all like the fantasies about assimilation peddled by East Coast pundits.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 11:43 PM

It's clear that American-born Mexican-Americans would make more progress toward higher incomes if they weren't constantly swamped by new Mexican immigrants competing down wages for blue-collar work. (That's why union leader Cesar Chavez had his brother lead UFW patrols along the Mexican border to keep illegal aliens out. Unlike the contemporary Minutemen, however, the Chavez patrols would sometimes beat up border crossers.)

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 11:48 PM

It would be nice if Mexican-Americans worked harder at school. Most test scores suggest that Hispanics average about 5 or 6 IQ points higher than Africans-Americans, so American-born Latinos should be able to graduate from high school and college at higher rates than blacks, but they don't.

To their credit, lots of Mexican-American dropouts just want to get paying jobs and get to work. Still, this anti-academic bias is deep-seated in Mexican culture, as this UCLA study shows. In LA and San Antonio, it's been around for generations, so we can't just assume it away, as so many of the "Yiddish theatre" assumptions popular among East Coast pundits do.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 13, 2008 11:59 PM

Fred, all you are showing is that you can't do math and don't understand population statistics. Give it up. You are only making yourself look stupid.

Why do people bother arguing with Steve Sailer and TLB? Their blogs' popularity depend on people arguing with them. If they stopped hating Mexicans, they would lose their livelihood. Do you think David Duke is going to wake up tomorrow and stop hating African-Americans and Jews because they heard an intelligent argument against bigotry?

Posted by Reality Man | May 14, 2008 12:39 AM

One important question is why do so many pundits constantly make assertions about Mexican immigration and assimilation that are clearly not true? Why is it the conventional wisdom, as spread by the John Podhoretzes, Michael Barones, and Tara Jacobys, that Mexican immigrants will advance to the same degree as their own Ellis Island ancestors? This weird "Yiddish theatre" ethno-nostalgia for 1908 that pervades so much of the discussion/fantasizing about the long run effects of illegal immigration in 2008 is very curious, indeed.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 14, 2008 1:11 AM

I don't have time now to respond to the most recent comments addressed to me here, but I'll be happy to do so tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll leave you with a New York Sun column by Howard Husock that is perhaps a little more clear-eyed about the results of the Manhattan Institute study. Excerpt:

But the most striking finding is much less positive. The current overall assimilation level for all immigrant groups combined, measured on a scale of zero to 100, is, at 28, lower now than it was during the great immigration wave of the early 20th century, when it never went below 32. What’s more, the immigrant group that is by far the largest is also the least assimilated. On the zero-to-100 scale, Mexicans — 11 million emigrated to America between 1980 and 2006 — score only 13.

Although Mexican assimilation does occur, it’s extremely slow. Mexicans who arrived in 1995 started out with Index scores around five — and increased only to around 10 by 2005. In other words, our largest immigrant group arrived with little education and even less knowledge of English, and they have stayed that way for an extended period.

By contrast, Vietnamese started at similar low levels and in 10 years rose to an Index level of more than 40. Notable, too, is that Generation 1.5 — Mexicans who came to this country as children aged five or younger — are also remaining distinct, and in some worrisome ways: they are less likely than other immigrant groups to become citizens, and more likely to be in prison or be a teen mother.

Posted by Fred | May 14, 2008 1:43 AM

So we're supposed to be impressed with scary stuff written in a wingnut tabloid about research done at a rightwing think tank? Yawn.

Posted by Reality Man | May 14, 2008 1:46 AM

"And I don't know what to say to somebody who wouldn't want to sit next to Jessica Alba on an airplane."

"May I have your seat?"

Posted by Dan S. | May 14, 2008 3:22 AM

Reality Man, about you saying Fred doesn't know statistics, I take it that you are siding with El Toro's objection to the 1990 data that S. P. Huntington referenced?

El Toro asked: "Do you have any data of more recent vintage that might shine a better light on this question? After all, by this decade, most of the 4th generation high school graduates will be the children of most of the 3rd generation high school graduates."

Well, I found a 2008 study on Mexican Americans:
"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."
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-study-of-four-generations-46372.aspx

Posted by scottynx | May 14, 2008 3:49 AM

El Toro did a good job of raising questions about the old Huntington numbers -- there are some tricky methodological questions involved that needed to be aired out.

But this new book mentioned by scottynx by the two sociologists, Telles and Ortiz, at the UCLA Chicano Studies department comparing surveys of Mexican-Americans in 1965 to themselves and their own descendants in 2000 seems definitive: They found healthy gains in education from the immigrants to their American-born children, but not much improvement among the third and fourth generations.

You can buy "Generations of Exclusion," published by the Russell Sage Foundation at Amazon at:

http://www.amazon.com/Generations-Exclusion-Mexican-Americans-Assimilation/dp/0871548488

I've placed an order for my copy.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 14, 2008 4:57 AM

Re: I gave you the citations for the data that, as of 1990, 41% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans hadn't graduated high school. None of your objections refute that data."

How do we even know who is a forth generation Mexican? After that many generations many people will have lost their Hispanic surnames (due to marriage of female ancestors) and have merged into the general population with no way to track them (unless they check the "Hispanic" box on the census). I'm foruth generatioon German on my mother's isde, but no one would know that from my last name or anything else about me. Seems to me these "fourth generation" stats depend on aanlyzing people who are still stuck in the barrio and who have not well assimilated, so of course we're going to find a lot of non-assimilation in them.

Re: Mexican immigrants don't strike me as posing much of a separatist threat to America because they haven't shown much of an inclination for getting themselves organized much beyond the extended family level

More to the point they came here to escape Mexico, if only for economic reasons. Why would they want to rejoin Mexico. (See: killing goose laying golden eggs).

Posted by JonF | May 14, 2008 6:30 AM

The 'problems' that we have assimilating Mexican-Americns , African Americans, etc. pale in comparison to the problems East European countries have in assimilating the Gypsies. There you actually do have a culture that (apparently) scorns education and work, exalts criminality, etc.

Which raises a challenge- if Sailer and co. are right and these problems are all genetic in origin then how come people of Indian origin in the US do so well, whereas people of similar racial background in Eastern Europe (Gypsies) do so poorly?

Posted by Hector | May 14, 2008 9:32 AM

It is kind of sad how the Latinophobes always try to twist the data to make it look as scary as possible and go hunting for poorly-substantiated data they can misrepresent or fail to understand correctly. They just want to be scared that Mexicans are going to cross the Rio Grande, eat their children and declare that Arizona is now part of Mexico again. It's also funny how many of them are the type of right-wingers who always talk about how great it would be that big blue states like California could go away. Then they believe that Mexicans are trying to take California away and they start pissing themselves. Some people just need something to be scared and angry about. It's probably just as healthy as the people who hunt in back rooms in Japantown for the sickest, goriest J-horror torture porn films.

Posted by Reality Man | May 14, 2008 9:35 AM

'Which raises a challenge- if Sailer and co. are right and these problems are all genetic in origin then how come people of Indian origin in the US do so well, whereas people of similar racial background in Eastern Europe (Gypsies) do so poorly?

Posted by Hector | May 14, 2008 9:32 AM"

Magic! Now here's AThousandLinks to my RarelyReadBlog that I am convinced MakesMeAnExpertDaddyWhyDontYouLoveMeWaaaWaaaWaaa!

Posted by Reality Man | May 14, 2008 9:39 AM

Which raises a challenge- if Sailer and co. are right and these problems are all genetic in origin then how come people of Indian origin in the US do so well, whereas people of similar racial background in Eastern Europe (Gypsies) do so poorly?

Simple. They're not of "similar racial background" at all. That doesn't mean Sailer's right, but your "challenge" is woefully ignorant of Indian history and diversity. There is not one group of "Indians", India is a patchwork of many different ethnic groups that arrived at different times and have intermarried with other groups at varying rates. A Parsi from Ahmedabad is probably more closely related genetically to a Greek than he is to a Tamil from Chennai. If discrimination is the origin of all problems why do Gypsies do so poorly in the US when Bengali immigrants from Kolkata seem to do so well?

Posted by vanya | May 14, 2008 10:20 AM

Re: There is not one group of "Indians", India is a patchwork of many different ethnic groups that arrived at different times and have intermarried with other groups at varying rates.

There are four major ethnic grousp in India, two small and two fairly large:
1. Tibetan peoples in the Himlayans (a small, spillover population)
2. The Vedda (I think that's the right spelling); a "negrito" people who probably derive from the Neolothic, pre-agriculture population, related distantly to the people of New Guinea etc.
3. The Dravidians (mainly in the south, but some few as far north as Pakistan)
and
4. The Indo-Aryans-- the vast majority.

The latter two groups especially have intermarried a lot, producing a blended population throughout much of India. The Romany, who may hav left India in the wake of Alexander the Great, are probably closer to full-blooded Aryan than most Indians.

Posted by JonF | May 14, 2008 11:22 AM

El Toro,

"I am not refuting the data."

OK, progress.

"I am refuting your interpretation of this data."

My interpretation of this data is that, even after four generations here, Mexican-Americans have failed to assimilate to mainstream norms of socioeconomic achievement.

"You claimed that 41% of Mexican-Americans still don't graduate high school, and used Huntington's data as support."

I subsequently acknowledged that I should have added the qualifying phrase, "as of 1990", because I don't have a similar statistic as of today. I doubt there would be a huge difference between now and then though.

"The apples to apples comparison is necessary for 2 reasons. First, you can't really compare the 4th generation numbers to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation numbers if the 4th generation number really reprsents 4th generation or greater."

What makes you think the 4th generation number doesn't just represent the 4th generation?

"Second, in that table Huntington is comparing those 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th gen numbers to all other Americans. He doesn't compare 1st gen Mexican-Americans to 1st gen non Mexican Americans, 2nd gen Mexican-Americans to 2nd gen Mexican-Americans, etc."

A reasonable point. It would have been helpful if he had done that.

"You and Huntington cannnot validly compare the progress of Mexican-Americans to non Mexican-Americans without creating this apples-to-apples situation."

It would be helpful if we had high school graduation percentages for 4th generation Americans, or, more specifically relevant to Matt's Ellis Island-era reference, percentages for 4th generation Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc., but if we did, the comparison would make the 4th generation Mexican-Americans look even worse. The "All Americans" number includes everyone excluding Mexican-Americans, including groups with worse average educational stats such as African Americans. The percentage of 4th generation Jewish- and Italian-Americans who didn't graduate high school in 1990 was probably in the single digits.

"Therefore, neither the Germans nor the Japanese constitute a people conquered by Americans."

By your idiosyncratic definition.

"On the other hand, the Irish in Ireland for much of their history were a conquered people in the historical context of Great Britain."

And today Ireland has a higher per-capita income than the UK. Maybe it's time to scrap your "conquered people" explanation?

Posted by Fred | May 14, 2008 12:44 PM

Hello,

Fred wrote at 1:01:

Percent of 4th Generation Mexican-Americans with household income over $50k: 10.7%. Percent of all other Americans (excluding Mexican-Americans) with a household income over $50k: 24.8%. So after four generations here, Mexican-Americans still earn less than half what other Americans earn.

I'm just pointing out that the third sentence does not in any way follow from the first two. Surprise, Fred's making dishonest and/or ignorant use of statistics.

No, that was just me making a sloppy mistake. You're right, the third sentence doesn't follow from the first two. Thanks for pointing that out. In any case, the first two sentences required no elaboration; they were telling enough.

Posted by Fred | May 14, 2008 12:50 PM

JonF,

"How do we even know who is a forth generation Mexican?"

The U.S. Census survey relies on self-identification. I don't know what methodology the other study cited by Huntington used.

Posted by Fred | May 14, 2008 1:05 PM

"There is not one group of "Indians", India is a patchwork of many different ethnic groups that arrived at different times"

Being of Indian ancestry himself, Hector is certainly well aware of this. He probably just asked the question thinking that it would stump Sailer, but Sailer has already written about India and the Roma/Gypsies on his blog.

Posted by Fred | May 14, 2008 1:11 PM

JonF,

I'm well aware of the ethnic diversity in India. I wasn't saying the Gypsies are racially similar to southerners (like me). But surely there is _some_ ethnic group in India to which the Gypsies are similar. (Perhaps Gujaratis or Punjabis? Or Marwaris who are famous traders and businessmen.) As far as I know _all_ Indian ethnicities in the USA tend to do well. (In England, not so much).

I'm also not sure how much _racial_ division there is anymore. 'Aryan' and 'Dravidian' seem these days to be more regional and linguistic markers than anything else. There are a lot of northerners who are pretty dark skinned, like Bengalis, as well as some quite light skinned southerners.

Parsis of course look very different but that's not really comparable since they are 1) recent migrants (1000 yrs or so) and 2) their religion requires strict endogamy.

Posted by Hector | May 14, 2008 2:29 PM

Silly me: as it turns out, he's not only an ImmigrationLawyer, but he writes for a site that links to that group in their sidebar.

For the record:

1. I am not an immigration lawyer.

2. I don't write for any site but my own.

3. I have no idea who links to what and what the tenuous connections are between one group linked to and some other group not linked to.

4. I don't see what any of this has to do with my post, which points out that if the immigration theories of TLB and Steve Sailer were true, California would be poor and Mississippi rich. In truth, it's the opposite. Turns out the last thing you want is to turn your state over to racist white religious conservatives.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 14, 2008 3:18 PM

The standard of living for the median-income family of four in California, adjusted for the very high cost of living, is behind even New Mexico, ahead of only Hawaii and DC.

What a lame response. As I type this from Paradise on Earth, Los Angeles, I can tell you that if you factor in cost of living, people in Manhattan, one of the richest places in America, aren't doing so well.

You see, a lot of that high cost of living you talk about is rent. And rents are high because we have high property values, because we are prosperous. Meanwhile, down in the South where the racist white religious conservatives run the show, you can buy property for a song-- because few people want to live there!

So I guess the Steve Sailer theory of prosperity is to keep us all poor so that property values go down and we have no inflation. Funny but people don't want to live in places like that. They do, however, want to live here-- which is why we, with our racial diversity and our riches and our high rents, are the most populous state in the union.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 14, 2008 3:23 PM

Dilan Esper,

Could part of the reason that Mississippi is poor be because about 40% of the state is black? And how, exactly, have the millions of Mexican immigrants made California richer? They make an insignificant contribution to California's two biggest industries, Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Last I checked, Google, Apple, etc. weren't founded by Mexicans. California seems to have prospered in spite of the Mexicans, rather than because of them. Take out the Jews, Indians, and East Asians, and where would California's economy be?

Even simpler, if having lots of Mexicans were such a boon, than why is Mexico such an under achieving country, despite having a similar climate and greater natural resources than California?

Posted by Harry | May 14, 2008 3:46 PM

Dilan Esper, why not do a finer grained analysis than simply looking at California as a whole? You could look at a much more disproportionately Mexican area of the US:

"Study Shines Light on Border Problems"
excerpt: "The study, "At the Cross Roads: U.S./Mexico Border Counties in Transition," was prepared for the U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition. The two-year study takes a unique approach by grouping the 24 counties along the border of Mexico as a "51st state" and comparing it to the rest of the country"

excerpt: - Border counties would rank No. 1 in federal crime as a 51st state, primarily because of drug and immigration arrests.

- If San Diego County is not included, border counties would rank last in per capita income. With San Diego County, border counties would rank 39th.

- If considered a 51st state, the border counties would rank 50th in percent of residents above the age of 25 who have completed high school.

- As a 51st state, border counties would rank last in the number of health care professionals available for residents. "
http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20060309.152910&time=15%2045%20PST&year=2006&public=1

Posted by scottynx | May 14, 2008 4:18 PM

Also, Dilan Esper should see this: "Immigrants disproportionately flock to gop districts:

Immigrants flocking to GOP districts
"Overall, GOP districts added about 3 million immigrants from 2000 to 2005, nearly twice the number that settled in districts represented by Democrats, according to an Associated Press analysis of census data.

The numbers help explain why illegal immigration is such a big issue in rural Georgia, eastern Pennsylvania and in suburbs throughout the United States."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/10/21/immigrants_flocking_to_gop_districts/

More Californians leave than others Americans come:

California Leavin’
"The latest Census Bureau data indicate that in 2005, 239,416 more Californians left the state than moved in; this was also the case in 2003 and 2004."
http://www.citywatchla.com/content/view/1164/75/

But according to Dilan Esper, having more Mexican Americans, more liberal politics, and higher rents is the key to the desirability of living in a place. I guess neither americans nor new immigrants recieved the memo.

Posted by scottynx | May 14, 2008 4:40 PM

If you study past immigration patterns, you tend to see that immigrants that resemble the mainstream of America are absorbed fairly easily, while those seen as outsiders are not. As an example, examine the history surrounding the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

See the Yiddish Radio Project for examples of separate culture.

Posted by The Pop View | May 14, 2008 5:03 PM

India is probably the most culturally and genetically diverse region on earth.

Gypsies/Roma are one small group that left India perhaps a 1000 years ago and developed an economy based around entertainment (especially music, at which they appear extremely talented) and, unfortunately, theft and cons. They have a classic in-group morality based on the legend that a gypsy boy stole the nail intended to nail Christ's head to the cross, so God allows them to steal from non-Roma. Fortunately, they're not very violent.

They have terrible problems with formal education, with dyslexia being a widespread problem. A famous pianist told me about how gypsy classmates at the top classical conservatory in Budapest got through on sheer musical talent without ever learning to read music.

At least one European group, the Irish Travelers, appears to have either borrowed or separately developed a quite similar economy / culture, kind of like how Russian Kossacks borrowed the culture of central Asian Kazakhs.

For more on the gypsies, see:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/euro_gypsies.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 14, 2008 5:34 PM

"But according to Dilan Esper, having more Mexican Americans, more liberal politics, and higher rents is the key to the desirability of living in a place."

Dilan Esper is right, in a way, that Mexican immigration to Southern California raises property values: by driving a steady stream of Californians up to Washington State, it raises property values in the Seattle area.

Posted by Fred | May 14, 2008 5:56 PM

Steve Sailer,

Well, yes, I don't deny that the Gypsies have a dysfunctional culture. The point is that I don't think that their lack of formal education is due to the fact that they are genetically stupid. I think it's because of cultural factors, specifically that they teach their children to devalue education and labor. If a Gypsy child was raised in a non-Gypsy household I would suspect they would be as intelligent and able to succeed as anyone else.

According to this site the Gypsies are of Punjabi/Rajasthani origin from Multan in modern Pakistan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_people

Posted by Hector | May 14, 2008 6:30 PM

"And today Ireland has a higher per-capita income than the UK. Maybe it's time to scrap your "conquered people" explanation?"

Fred,

You are being deliberately obtuse again. Today's Ireland, which is FREE OF BRITISH CONTROL, has a higher per-capita income than the UK. This was not the case when Ireland was under British control. Moreover, the Irish would not have made the economic progress they made in the 20th and 21st centuries had they remained under British control.

Being a subjugated people has a tendency to deprive you of economic opportunities, in case you upset the status quo that is favorable to your conqueror. That's why the Irish in the 19th century emigrated in such numbers to the US and Canada and Australia.

The success that Ireland is enjoying today is the direct result of the Irish having control over their country, and no longer being a conquered people. Therefore, Fred, the Irish example actually bolsters my argument.

Posted by eltoro | May 14, 2008 10:40 PM

Hector,

As I said, the Irish Travelers behave a lot like gypsies, so I'm not arguing that the low IQ (about 80 on average) seen among Gypsies in Europe is either genetic or cultural or both. We'll have the genome studies to prove it one way or another soon enough.

But, the more general point is that there's no reason to assume that one group from India much resembles another in IQ. They've had a caste system for thousands of years that splits the general population up into countless small in-marrying groups. That may help explain why you see very high levels of academic performance among, say, Parsis and Tamil Brahmins and very low levels among, say, Gypsies and Dalits. Add in malnutrition, discrimination, and you've got an incredibly complex system.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 14, 2008 10:59 PM

Eltoro,

"You are being deliberately obtuse again."

Pointing out examples that contradict your "conquered people" theory of under-achievement isn't being obtuse; ignoring them might be.

"The success that Ireland is enjoying today is the direct result of the Irish having control over their country, and no longer being a conquered people. Therefore, Fred, the Irish example actually bolsters my argument."

Three questions for you:

1) According your theory, presumably a Mexican-American whose ancestors lived in land that was conquered by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War would suffer from 'conquered peoples' syndrome, while a descendant of immigrants from what is currently Mexico wouldn't. Do you have any evidence that suggests any material difference in achievement between the first group and the second?

2) Why aren't Mexicans in Mexico more successful? After all, they aren't under the thumb of any foreign conquerer.

Posted by Fred | May 14, 2008 11:15 PM

Fred,

You fail to grasp the idea that if a conquered people gain independence from their conqueror, they are no longer a conquered people.

When the Irish were under the yoke of British imperialism, they were a conquered people. When the Poles had their country conquered first by the Nazis and then by the Red Army, they were a conquered people. When the people of Israel were under the control of the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Romans, they were a conquered people.

Ireland gained its independence in the 20th century, so the Irish are no longer a conquered people. The end of the Cold War led to Poland and other Warsaw Pact nations to becoming free & sovereign states, so the Poles are no longer a conquered people. Israel is not under the control of any foreign powers today, so the people are definitely not a conquered people today.

This applies also to the Germans and the Japanese. The defeat by the US of the Germans and the Japanese did not lead to the annexation of German and Japanese territory. Instead, Germany and Japan are independent and sovereign states, and not part of an American empire established in the aftermath of World War 2. That is why you are flat our wrong when you argue that the Germans and Japanese are conquered people.

(You're not some commie, are you? Claiming that that the Germans and Japanese are people conquered by the US sounds like Stalinist propaganda.)

Posted by eltoro | May 14, 2008 11:27 PM

"Pointing out examples that contradict your "conquered people" theory of under-achievement isn't being obtuse; ignoring them might be."

Fred,

You are not pointing out examples that contradict the conquered people theory, since your examples relate to people who are free of their former conquerors. So you were being obtuse when you provided those examples.

"According your theory, presumably a Mexican-American whose ancestors lived in land that was conquered by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War would suffer from 'conquered peoples' syndrome, while a descendant of immigrants from what is currently Mexico wouldn't. Do you have any evidence that suggests any material difference in achievement between the first group and the second?"

The Mexican immigrants who came to cities like Chicago during the early 2oth century had a very different experience from the Chicanos of the Southwest. The former worked in factories and lived in neighborhoods alongside white ethnics. They went to schools, both public and parochial, with white ethnics, graduated at the same rates as those white ethnics, and attained similar standards of living and rates of cultural assimilation. The Chicanos of the Southwest remained as agrarian workers for the most part, resisted adopting the cultural ways of the gringos, and stayed in a inferior socioeconomic position to their Anglo counterparts.

Apart from that, I guess there are no material differences.

"Why aren't Mexicans in Mexico more successful? After all, they aren't under the thumb of any foreign conquerer."

Actually, Fred, there many Mexicans in Mexico that are quite successful. These are the people that form the economic elite and the small middle-class. The problem is that Mexico, which was created through the conquest of indigenous peoples like the Mayas and the Aztecs by 16th century imperial Spain, has a very feudal socioeconomic structure, where wealth and economic power is disproportionately lodged in the hand of the economic elite. As a result, the Mexican economy doesn't operate with anything near the dynamism of the American economy.

That's why so many poor Mexicans come to the US, where they can be lot more successful than they would be if they stayed in Mexico.

Posted by eltoro | May 15, 2008 12:14 AM

Eltoro,

Since you ignored my last two questions, I assume you have given up trying to defend your 'conquered people' theory for explaining Mexican-American under-achievement. After all, according to your latest definition, neither Mexicans nor Mexican-Americans who descended from those who immigrated here after the Mexican-American War are conquered people; so consequently, your 'conquered people' theory can't explain their under-achievement. The rest of your post appears to be just squid ink to cover your retreat.

Posted by Fred | May 15, 2008 12:18 AM

Lots of great comments and statistics above. Didn't see listed though the amount of money sent to Mexico from immigrants living in the U.S. It is huge. I know and have worked with some illegals from Mexico.
They tend not to assimilate because they don't need to or have to. Lots of them are not planning on staying here. TV, radio, newpapers, banking, grocery stores are all available in a language they understand. This was only partially true at the turn of the century to all the Irish, Germans and other immigrants. They had their local little newspapers and local stores but nothing like we have
today for the Spanish speaking. My grandparents came from Portugal. They had to learn English to survive.
Personally, I think we should completely seal the border and only for one reason. An open border with Mexico has been acting as a safety valve for years for the continually corrupt governments down there. Seal the border, and then
the people who live there will have to stay there and overthrow and clean up their government. They
need to clean up the mess down there before it gets any worse.
And regarding Linda Rondstandt, she didn't remember she was Mexican until her pop music career went south.

Posted by keith2366 | May 15, 2008 12:57 AM

"After all, according to your latest definition, neither Mexicans nor Mexican-Americans who descended from those who immigrated here after the Mexican-American War are conquered people; so consequently, your 'conquered people' theory can't explain their under-achievement. The rest of your post appears to be just squid ink to cover your retreat."

Fred,

I am never used the conquered people argument to deal with the performance of the immigrant and immigrant descended portion of the Mexican-American community. I used the conquered people argument to deal strictly with the NON-IMMIGRANT DESCENDED portion of the Mexican-American community, which is found in the Southwest in places like New Mexico. Throughout my posts, I have distinguished between the 2 segments, because their historical experience is very different. The historical experience of the former is one of immigrants, the latter is one of a conquered people. Therefore, when you point out the underperformance of Mexican-American communities in places like New Mexico to talk about Mexican-American immigration, you are conflating cmmunities established by conquered people with communities established by immigrants.

I did not ignore your last 2 questions, Fred. I pointed out how the Mexican-American communities established by immigrants in places like Chicago at the beginning of the 20th century had a very different path of socioeconomic achievement compared to the Chicano communities in the Southwest. The former, which were created by immigrants, worked and lived among white ethnics and attained similar standards of living and attained similar levels of education. The latter did not.

I also dealt with the question of the poor in Mexico, by pointing how Mexico's socioeconomic structure has wealth and economic power under the stranglehold of the Mexican elite. This stranglehold keeps the Mexican elite in a very well-off position, but provides nothing to the masses of the working poor. Consequently, when the Mexican poor leave Mexico and find employment in the more dynamic American economy, their socioeconomi achievements increase enormously compared to their counterparts who stay behind in Mexico.

If anybody is squirting squid ink here, Fred, it is you. You keep on deliberately misstating or ignoring what I wrote, and give me counterarguments that are full of holes.

Posted by eltoro | May 15, 2008 10:13 AM

Look, I am not going to spend a long time refuting the misleading statistics offered above. I am too busy living and working in one of the richest places on earth.

I truly enjoy hearing conservatives telling me how this wonderful, wealthy place I live in, with all these Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in our midst, is really doing awful. I especially enjoy hearing it because the places that racist conservatives run in this country don't do nearly as well as we do.

Los Angeles and Southern California routinely get portrayed as a third world country. But I have been to the third world, and I know better. It is just sad to see that the conservative response to our amazing successes, far greater than anything that racist conservatives have ever achieved, is to try and ruin it. I guess envy runs deep in the soul.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 15, 2008 6:16 PM

Assimilation Then and Now

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