Washington Post looks at “second generation” of Mexican (illegal) immigrants. (Who are doing really crappily, by the way.)
Cuz, like, they all just started coming here a few years ago, right…? No?
Nobody in Washington–or in New York, for that matter–ever noticed any Mexicans around before a few years ago. How could we in the East Coast media centers have foreseen that they would reproduce?
And just think, that implies that there will someday be a third generation of Latinos!
And, it turns out, that this second generation of Mexicans isn’t doing all that well. Who could have possibly predicted that? Doesn’t it say on the Statue of Liberty that all immigrants will rapidly join the middle class?
I realize that nobody in the East ever heard of Mexican-Americans before recently, but there are actually more than two generations in the U.S.
The UCLA sociology department [me: that hotbed of rightwing racist extremism!!] tracked first through fifth generation Mexican-Americans, parents, children, and grandchildren in LA and San Antonio from 1965 through 2000. (…)
They found that education progress stopped with the second generation, and that the fourth generation (whose grandparents were born in America) was particularly unaccomplished:
“Sadly and directly in contradistinction to assimilation theory, the fourth generation differs the most from whites, with a college completion rate of only 6 percent [compared to 35 percent for whites of that era].”
