Land of Opportunity

By Mortimer B. Zuckerman

6/20/05

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We are a nation of immigrants, neatly epitomized in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ironic remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution: "Welcome, fellow immigrants." Immigrants come to America for many reasons, but mainly they come because it's the land of opportunity and upward mobility where achievement is more important than inheritance. Uprooting themselves from the familiarity of family, community, and even language and culture, they are self-selected risk-takers, which is why they tend to be hardworking, self-starting, creative, and smart. It's also why immigration has been such an economic plus for America and why so many of us look so favorably on legal immigrants.

Some Americans, however, have reservations, and some, perhaps driven by nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment or concern over the cost of illegal immigrants, decry the huge waves of legal and illegal Hispanic immigration we've seen over the past 50 years: Eleven million illegals live in a shadow world within our borders, reinforced annually by an influx of hundreds of thousands more. They are mainly from Mexico, just a car ride away, so they can maintain real and emotional ties to their home country. The anxiety is that Hispanics will retain their language and culture and thus remain separate from and isolated within America. The popular phrase is that they will acculturate rather than assimilate, for Hispanics can remain within their own culture given the easy accessibility to Spanish TV networks, newspapers, and radio stations--and the fact that many tend to live in large Spanish-speaking enclaves, in places like California--all of which raises the concern that we might become a bilingual country.

Roots. The concerns are understandable, but the thing to really watch is not how much Hispanics are changing America but how much America is changing Hispanics. They are learning English as fast as any immigrant group. True, they are retaining their native language longer, but the transition from Spanish to English is virtually completed in one generation, on average. Of the children born here to immigrants, only 7 percent rely on Spanish as their primary language, and nearly half have no Spanish skills at all. Of the third generation, that is, Latinos born of U.S.-born parents, virtually none speak only Spanish, and less than a quarter are bilingual. According to the Pew Hispanic Center poll of 2004, 96 percent believe English is fundamental to their future. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican-American children speak only English at home.

When Hispanics have children in America, they tend to sink deeper roots here and lose touch with the homes they left behind. That's why there is little difference, for example, between Mexican-American lifestyles and other American lifestyles. Hispanics are embracing the American way. Their goals are the essence of the American dream: economic opportunity and security, health and education, and home ownership. They place as much emphasis on the American values of hard work and family as any group in America.

They are also intermarrying at a rate similar to that of other immigrant groups. By the third generation, a third of Hispanic women marry non-Latinos. They serve and die in the military as much as any other group in proportion to their population and now compose about 10 percent of the U.S. military. They have also done relatively well financially for a community that came here with virtually nothing. Nearly 80 percent live above the poverty line, and 68 percent of those who have lived here for 30 years or more own their own homes. Their culture of hard work, in other words, has enabled them to climb out of poverty, and they are going through the same powerful process of change as any of the immigrant groups that have come to the United States, melting gradually but inexorably into our middle and working classes.

The one area where they lag is education. Roughly 60 percent of Hispanics graduate from high school, compared with 90 percent of nonimmigrant Americans; only 8 percent get college degrees, compared with 26 percent of whites. Their strong work ethic compounds the problem by drawing many young Latinos into the workforce before they finish high school, keeping high school graduation rates lower and trapping too many in low-wage service jobs. In fairness, the urban public schools that they typically attend have failed them, as they have failed so many others, for these are no longer the best schools with the best teachers, as they were a century ago.

Yes, the challenges of this wave of Hispanic immigration are daunting, especially the illegals. But there's no reason to be pessimistic. The evidence suggests strongly that we will be able to absorb the Hispanics--as we have earlier generations from Europe--and weave them into a dynamic American society. Not only that. Every new wave of immigrants has taught our nation something new and enriched our culture. This, in other words, is an opportunity, not a problem.

from: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/050620/20edit.htm