Abstract
It is no secret that the United States is undergoing a remarkable demographic transformation as a result of immigration from Latin America and subsequent childbearing among immigrant Latinas. In the past 40 years, Hispanics have been transformed from a small, regionally isolated, ethnically divided population into a national demographic force of great social, economic, and political import. In 1970, the Hispanic population of the United States stood at just 9.6 million people and comprised only 4.7 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly three-quarters were native born and the population was dominated by three disparate and regionally segmented groups. Sixty percent of all Hispanics were of Mexican origin and concentrated in the southwest, primarily Texas and California; 15 percent were Puerto Rican and lived in the northeast, mainly in and around New York City; another 7 percent were Cuban, who unlike the prior two groups were overwhelmingly foreign born and concentrated in South Florida, mostly in greater Miami. In 1970, very few Hispanics traced their origins to Central or South America and immigration from the Dominican Republic had only just begun. Occupying separate geographic spheres, members of the three principal Hispanic origin groups rarely came into contact with one another, except in Chicago, the one metropolitan area that housed significant numbers of all three origin groups.
Over the next four decades, this small, regionally divided and ethnically segmented population was radically transformed by mass immigration to the point where in 2010 it had grown to 50.5 million people and constituted 16.3 percent of the U.S. population, surpassing blacks as the nation’s largest minority by a significant margin. Moreover, the lower one goes in the American age distribution, the greater the share of Hispanics. Whereas only 8 percent of Americans aged 60-64 identified themselves as Hispanic in 2010, among those aged 0-4 the figure was 27 percent. Another 23 percent were black, Asian, or some multi-racial mixture, leaving just 50 percent for non-Hispanic whites. Clearly, the demographic future of the United States does not lie with white Europeans.
As the Hispanic population grew through immigration, the share of those born in the United States dropped to around 60 percent and the distribution of national origins also shifted, with Puerto Ricans and Cubans declining to just 9 percent and 3.5 percent of the total respectively, while Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans rose to comprise 63 percent, 7.9 and 5.5 percent. At present, more than three-quarters of all Latinos trace their origins to Mexico, Central America, or South America, compared with just 15 percent from the Caribbean; and whereas Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans are overwhelmingly legal residents or U.S. citizens, a substantial share of Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans are non-citizens and many lack documents entirely. According to the latest estimates from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 58 percent of Mexican immigrants are present illegally, compared with 57 percent of Salvadorans, 71 percent of Guatemalans, and 77 percent of Hondurans.
Thus undocumented migrants are no longer a small share of the Latino population. Among Mexicans and Central Americans they constitute a majority of all those born abroad; and even when one considers national origins as a whole, including the native born, undocumented migrants constitute 21 percent of all persons of Mexican origin, 38 percent of those of Salvadoran origin, 50 percent of those of Guatemalan origin, and 52 percent of those of Honduran origin. Never before have so many people from one ethnic group found themselves outside the law and so concentrated in such a small number of national origins.
The rising tide of illegality within the Latino population is critical to understanding its status in contemporary American society, for whereas Latinos may be a protected category under civil rights legislation, undocumented migrants are not. Indeed, U.S. law encourages and often compels employers, landlords, and service providers to discriminate against the undocumented, even as civil rights laws require them to treat Hispanics affirmatively. Indeed, in recent years the federal government has stripped away legal protections from all non-citizens, not just the unauthorized but legal permanent residents as well. Legislation has curtailed access to federally funded entitlements, taken away non-citizens’ rights to due process, retroactively declared earlier criminal convictions to constitute grounds for deportation, criminalized immigration infractions that formerly had been civil violations, and given the executive branch the right to declare any non-citizen deportable without a hearing or presentation of evidence.
As Congress stripped away rights from non-citizens, it steadily expanded the immigrant enforcement apparatus not only at the border but internally. Since 1990, deportations from the United States have risen exponentially, going from just 30,000 in that year to nearly 400,000 in 2010. Over the same period, the number of Border Patrol Agents has risen from 3,700 to more than 20,000. In sum, aside from spectacular demographic growth, the two most important structural transformations to affect Hispanics over the past 40 years are the rising share of exploitable people lacking civil liberties and economic rights, and the rising tide of enforcement and legal sanctions directed against them and anyone who employs, houses, or otherwise assists them.
The remarkable rise in illegality among Latinos has implications that extend far beyond the undocumented themselves. In addition to the 1.5 million undocumented children living with an unauthorized parent are four million U.S.-born citizen children, whose progress in society is held back by the very real fears and trepidations of their undocumented parents; and these numbers do not take into account the millions of other older children of undocumented migrants and more distant relatives. With so many Latinos living outside the protection of the law and even larger shares related to people who lack such legal protection, and with most rights stripped away from non-citizens, Hispanics have probably never been more vulnerable and their position in America more precarious.
In this context, the two books under review offer a timely assessment of recent trends in the status and well-being of Hispanics in the United States. The last major survey of Hispanics was done in 1988 by Frank Bean and Marta Tienda in their book The Hispanic Population of the United States, published as part of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Census Monograph Series and covering trends and patterns observable from the 1970 and 1980 censuses. In their book, Hispanics in the United States: A Demographic, Social, and Economic History, Laird Bergad and Herbert Klein pick up where Bean and Tienda left off, drawing on census data from 1980, 1990, and 2000 as well as tabulations from the 2005 American Community Survey to produce a comprehensive portrait of Hispanics today. After reviewing the history of immigration and demographic change through 1980, the authors proceed to chronicle what happened to Latinos between 1980 and 2005, successively analyzing trends in population growth, geographic dispersion, demographic structure, income and poverty, educational attainment, political participation, employment, English language use, business ownership, racial composition, and intermarriage patterns.
The book offers an excellent compendium of detailed census data on Hispanics that will be a useful reference for years to come. Each chapter is filled with figures and tables that pay careful attention to heterogeneity with respect to native versus foreign birth, region of U.S. residence, and national origin. Notable demographic trends that the authors document are the geographic diversification of Latinos away from historical areas of settlement in California and into new zones of incorporation throughout the Northeast, Southeast, and Midwest, as well as the growing importance of fertility in Hispanic population growth, the rising share of female-headed households, and lower levels of mortality relative to non-Hispanic whites on most causes of death, with the notable exceptions of liver disease, diabetes, AIDS, and homicide.
In terms of socioeconomic status, Hispanic income experienced slow growth from 1980 to 2000 and fell in real terms between 2000 and 2005. The Hispanic unemployment rate ranged from 8.6 percent to 10.3 percent with no real trend up or down and the poverty rate fluctuated between 21 percent and 25 percent. Although these rates are below those observed for blacks, they are nonetheless much higher than those observed for non-Hispanic whites and Asians. In terms of education, despite some improvement, achievement continues to lag behind other racial and ethnic groups, with especially low attainments prevailing among Mexicans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans.
Owing to immigration, the percentage of Hispanics who are U.S. citizens has fallen over time. Even though naturalization rates among eligible immigrant Hispanics have risen sharply in recent years, the relative number of migrants not eligible for citizenship has risen much faster. When combined with low rates of registration and voting, these data mean that in most states Hispanics still constitute a small share of the electorate. In all states except New Mexico, Texas, California, and Arizona they make up 13 percent or less of voters. Spanish continues to be widely spoken among Hispanics. Although 94 percent of foreign born Latinos and 64 percent of the native born speak Spanish at home, 95 percent of the native born speak English well and even among those born outside the United States, 53 percent speak English well. Fears of linguistic balkanization are thus overblown.
Racially, a majority of Hispanics (54 percent) identify themselves as white, and though very few identify themselves as black (1.5 percent), a substantial share see themselves as something other than white (44 percent), a mixed identity that is generally associated with lower socioeconomic status compared with those who consider themselves white. Although out-marriage rates are low among the foreign born, they are substantial among Hispanics born in the United States, with around 29 percent of both male and female household heads being married to non-Hispanic whites in 2005.
After reviewing these and other facts, Bergad and Klein conclude on an upbeat note, emphasizing improvements in education, income, and English language use between 1980 and 2005, and underscoring the relatively high rates of intermarriage to whites, a racial identity that defies America’s rigid black/white divide, and a social status and well-being that generally compares favorably to African Americans. Personally, I am less sanguine. Although Hispanics may have improved their status on many fronts, progress has been slow and in many cases the distance from non-Hispanic whites has increased. In addition, rosy conclusions based on census data need to be taken with a grain of salt. Neither the census nor the ACS allow the measurement of legal status, which as noted above has increasingly become a dimension of stratification in the United States; nor do these sources include a question on parental birthplace, making it impossible to analyze the status and well-being of second generation Hispanics, the critical question in assessing prospects for their long-term integration and incorporation. Finally, although the book’s tables are often quite detailed in describing variation with respect to native versus foreign birth, national origins, and region of U.S. residence, none of the analyses could be described as multivariate, making it difficult to characterize ongoing processes of Hispanic integration and social mobility except in very general terms.
The more focused and detailed multivariate analyses contained in the volume edited by Nancy Landale, Susan McHale, and Alan Booth, entitled Growing Up Hispanic: Health and Development of Children of Immigrants, thus yields a much more guarded and negative assessment of Hispanic well-being in the United States. The book represents a compilation of papers presented at the 2008 Annual Penn State Symposium on Family Issues, which focused on the development of Hispanic children in immigrant families. As in all conference volumes, the contributions vary in quality and importance. Nonetheless, a few standout chapters establish the foundations for a much more negative assessment of prospects for Hispanics in twenty-first century America.
In their analysis of neighborhood conditions, Richard Alba, Nancy Denton, Donald Hernandez, Ilir Disha, Brian McKenzie, and Jeffrey Napierala conclude that “even though Hispanics on the whole are only moderately segregated from whites, the conditions in the neighborhoods where their children are being raised are on average much worse than those confronting white children” (p. 42). Indeed, conditions in neighborhoods where Latin American immigrants live “are, on virtually all our measures, more distressed than the neighborhoods in which the average Hispanic and black children are found” (p. 43). Although neighborhood conditions do improve with rising socioeconomic status and greater time spent in the United States, “Hispanic children [n]ever catch up to white children…. Even when their families have high incomes, Hispanics appear to live in neighborhoods that are less favorable to development and integration than those in which poor white children live” (pp. 43-44).
This state of affairs represents a clear contrast to conditions facing Hispanics during prior decades, in which analyses indicated that over time Hispanics came to enjoy neighborhood circumstances similar to those of non-Hispanic whites. Although conditions for Latinos may have deteriorated in metropolitan areas, a related analysis by Randy Capps, Heather Koball, and William Kandel found that Latino immigrants in rural areas were able to reach parity with non-Hispanic whites in terms of wages and home ownership after five years living in traditional destinations and after ten years in new destinations. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Hispanics continue to live in the nation’s metropolitan areas.
In their chapter, Carola Suárez-Orozco, Francisco Gaytán, and Ha Yeon Kim undertake a review of work on the educational performance of Latino students and come to the grim conclusion that “tragically, over time, Latino youth especially those enrolled in highly impoverished and deeply segregated schools, face negative odds and uncertain prospects,” with “too many leaving our schools without developing and mastering the kinds of higher-order skills needed in today’s global economy”(p. 222). In her chapter, Deborah Graefe documents huge disparities in health care coverage among Hispanics compared to other groups, with more than 60 percent of Hispanic adults and nearly 30 percent of Hispanic children lacking coverage.
In contrast to Bergad and Klein’s conclusion that “more and more Latinos of every nationality have experienced improvements in their lives between 1980 and 2005” (p. 411), in Landale et al.’s final chapter Matthew Hall and Anna Soli conclude that “if a clear message is to be drawn from the chapters in this book, it is that the current state of affairs for the Hispanic community is bleak: accessibility and use of social and health services are limited, Hispanic neighborhoods are segregated and of low quality, Hispanic children exhibit many risk factors associated with poor school performance, and complex family arrangements potentially hinder sociocultural incorporation” (p. 345).
Although in some ways this stark difference in conclusions represents a glass half-empty/half-full debate, I think there is more to it than that and tend to side with the more pessimistic conclusion adumbrated in Hall and Soli’s conclusion. Although I do not doubt the accuracy or utility of Bergad and Klein’s many detailed tabulations, I find it odd that nowhere in their book do they mention undocumented migration as a phenomenon relevant to the interpretation of analytic results on Hispanics, nor do they cover the decidedly harsh turn in American immigration policy during the 1980s. The index contains no reference to undocumented, unauthorized, or illegal migration and no reference to immigration policy, although as noted above the growth of the undocumented population and the rise in enforcement actions and imposition of harsher sanctions against them are two of the most important structural transformations to affect the Hispanic population in recent decades. In contrast, Hall and Soli explicitly state that “undoubtedly the foremost institutional challenge for many Hispanic families is their legal status” (p. 347). I believe it is impossible to understand the situation of Hispanics in the United States today without taking undocumented migration and immigration policy into account.