The Policy Implications of Mexican Immigration

There’s an interesting post at RealClearPolicy reflecting on the prospects for “upward mobility” among Hispanic immigrants:

The desire to increase social mobility has taken center stage in recent years, as lower-skill workers and their families struggle to join the middle class. A recent New York Times poll found that only 35 percent of Americans agree that “everyone has a fair chance to get ahead in the long run.” The explanations for insufficient mobility are many and varied, with some analysts citing technological changes that disproportionately benefit high-skill workers, while others point to cultural differences that tend to pass advantages (or disadvantages) to the next generation.

But whatever the root causes of class stratification, the political class tends to ignore a major policy that worsens the problem — namely, the mass immigration of low-skill workers.

The brief summary of the post is that what seems to be the case is that the recent immigrants and their children don’t pick up the best practices and traits of the majority population, e.g. higher levels of educational attainment, but do pick up some bad practices and traits, e.g. lower rates of employment and higher rates of incarceration. Let me articulate that more clearly: based on the statistics presented in the post second and third generation Mexican-Americans have lower rates of lower rates of educational attainment, higher rates of unemployment, and higher rates of incarceration than non-Hispanic whites do and higher rates of unemployment and higher rates of incarceration than first generation Mexican immigrants do. I wish those claims were normed for family income. Absent that it’s less than clear what those results might be attributed to.

At one level the results don’t concern me particularly since they might be completely consistent with the findings on the adoption of English as a primary language. The most commonly quoted study on the subject has convinced me that the claim that the children of Mexican immigrants, their children, etc. never learn English is a canard. I’ve cited the study around here before and I don’t feel like looking it up again.

Although the study did find, as advocates note, that Mexican-Americans ultimately do adopt English as their primary language, I can only presume they don’t read the complete study since it also found that Mexican-Americans become primary English a generation or so later than other immigrant groups. The pattern usually cited is that many immigrants never become primary English but their children are frequently true bilinguals while their grandchildren are often English-only (unless they studied the language their grandparents spoke in the Old Country in school, also commonplace). For example, I don’t know if my great-great-grandfather Schuler ever fully adopted English but I do know that my great-grandfather Schuler spoke both English and German while my grandfather spoke only a few words of German, presumably stuff he learned around the house. My dad spoke German fluently but that was because he studied it in school.

What I’m suggesting is that Mexican-Americans might have higher levels of educational attainment, higher levels of employment, and lower rates of incarceration by the fourth or fifth generation. I also don’t think there’s anything particularly extraordinary about Mexican-Americans slower rate of English acquisition. There are about as many Mexican-Americans now as there are Americans of German descent (17%). If the U. S. shared a 2,000 mile land border with Germany, I suspect that the rate of adoption of English by German-speaking Americans would be slowed as well.

I’d take more solace in all of this if the job and income prospects for people with high school educations or even four year college degrees were better. Sadly, the group with the greatest job and employment gains have been those with post-graduate degrees. It’s a Red Queen world out there: you’ve got to run twice as fast to stay in the same place.

All of this is by way of saying that if we’re going to come up with sane immigration, education, and anti-poverty policies, we should be considering the realities of our situation with a steelier eye. I doubt that we will which means our policies will become increasingly detached from reality over time.