Will Hispanics fire up America?

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

"Firing up America" is the cover line on the March 20 issue of The Economist, heralding a 16-page special report on America's Latinos. Its tone is resolutely upbeat — perhaps a bit too much so.

 

"America is lucky to have millions of energetic young people filling its schools with kids who will eventually pay taxes and fund pensions and health care for the old," The Economist writes. "Like other immigrants, they talk a lot about the American Dream. By that they mean the baby boomers' hopes of home ownership, a college education and upward mobility."

 

Unfortunately, it's not clear how many young Hispanics will achieve those elements of the American dream or whether they'll provide quite as bounteous a source of funding for Social Security and Medicare as the Economist's cheery summary suggests.

 

As the article notes, successive generations of Hispanics are not, so far, turning out to be as upwardly mobile as some other immigrant groups. Second-generation Hispanics have more negative health outcomes, higher divorce rates and higher incarceration rates than their immigrant elders.

 

Almost all second and third-generation Hispanics are "confident" of their command of English — a good trend that may owe something to California voters' 1998 decision to limit "bilingual" instruction to one year. But third-generation students' test scores are lower than those of their parents.