Immigration of Hispanics in the United States
... dehumanization and depersonalizing demands of the dominant society. This family, community, language, and culture are a source of pride for many Hispanics. In most American ethnic groups, the term “generation” refers to nativity in reference to the homeland. Thus “first-generation” people are immigrants from the homeland; the “second-generation” refers to their children, and so on, and each successive generation is more acculturated. Because Hispanics are one of the few American ethnic groups still immigrating in large numbers, the relationship of Hispanics to their community is far more complex in terms of legal status, age, and class than with most other ethnic groups. First-generation immigrants are complex in terms of legal status. There are four types of legal status: island born Puerto Ricans (who are American citizens), refugees, legal immigrants (temporary and permanent), and undocumented immigrants (temporary and permanent). Legal status can make a great deal of difference to the communities. Neither island-born Puerto Ricans nor Cuban refugees have any fears about deportations, while many immigrants are fearful of deportation even when they have a legal status in this country. Despite generally encouraging economic indicators for Hispanics, poverty rates are quite high; 26 percent of all Hispanics live below the poverty line. Hispanics are more than twice as likely to be living in poverty than are persons in the general population. Two factors, however, distort the poverty data: the inclusion of Puerto Ricans, who make up about 10 percent of Hispanics, one-third of who live in poverty; and the low earnings of new immigrants. The persistence of poverty among Puerto Ricans is one of the most troubling features of the Hispanic population. Puerto Ricans occupy the lowest rung of the social and economic ladder among Hispanics, and a disturbing number of them show little hope of climbing higher. Puerto Ricans are not simply the poorest of all Hispanic groups; they experience the highest degree of social dysfunction of any Hispanic group and exceed that of blacks on some indicators. Thirty-nine percent of all Puerto Rican families are headed by single women; 53 percent of all Puerto Rican children are born out of wedlock; the proportion of men in the labor force is lower than any other group. Puerto Ricans have the highest welfare participation rate of any group in New York, where nearly half of all Puerto Ricans in the United States live. Yet on the average, Puerto Ricans are better educated than Mexicans and nearly as well educated as Cubans, with a median education of twelve years. Despite the overall poor performance of Puerto Ricans, there are some bright spots in their achievement-which make their poverty seem all the more stark. While the median family earnings of Puerto Ricans are the lowest of any Hispanic group, individual earnings of both male and female Puerto Ricans are actually higher than those of any other Hispanic subgroup except Cubans. Moreover, the occupational distribution of Puerto Ricans shows that substantial numbers work in white collar jobs. The crisis facing the Puerto Rican community is not simply one of poverty and neglect. So long as significant numbers of young Puerto Rican men remain alienated from the work force, living by means of crime or charity, fathering children toward whom they feel no responsibility, the prospects of Puerto Ricans in the United States will dim. For most Hispanics the last few decades have brought greater economic opportunity and social mobility. They are building solid lower-middle and middle-class lives that include two parent households, with a male head who works full-time and earns a wage commensurate with his education and training. Their educational level has been steadily rising, their earnings no longer reflect wide disparities with those of non-Hispanics, and their occupational distribution is coming to resemble more closely that of the general population. They are buying homes- 42 percent of all Hispanics owned or were purchasing their home in 1989,including 47 percent of all Mexican Americans and moving away from inner cities. There is much optimism about the progress of Hispanics in the United States. Mexican Americans, the oldest and largest Hispanic group, are moving steadily into the middle-class, with the majority having established solid, working-and middle-class lives. Even Mexican immigrants and those from other Latin American countries, many of whom have very little formal education, appear to be largely self-sufficient. The vast majority of such immigrants-two thirds-live above the poverty line, having achieved a standard of living far above that attainable by them in their countries of origin. Any reliance on the aggregate category “Hispanic” has a high potential to mislead. For analytical purposes beyond the most superficial generalizations, it is crucial that social and economic trends among Hispanics studied be as fully disaggregated as possible if an inquiry is to reveal rather than obscure the dynamics underlying the statistical indicators. The major research on minority poverty have produced little relevance to the Latino population, in part because of the lack of research directed toward the group as a whole, and the failure to consider the individual national groupings separately. These analysis need to be interpreted with careful attention paid to the appropriate historic and contemporary circumstances surrounding the various Hispanic groups incorporated in the society. While the diverse groups that comprise the remainder of the Latino population have not yet been numerous enough to have a great impact on the indicators for all Hispanics, it does not follow that their experiences have been trouble free. As noted by the Policy Center Report (Greenstein et al. 1988), available data suggests that many of these other groups are experiencing substantial poverty. Contrasting sharply with the Cuban experience, the processes whereby Mexicans and Puerto Ricans entered the main-stream urban economy entailed a number of common features. Characteristics shared by ...