NewsTaco

By Yvonne Marquez and Lule Winkie, Dallas Morning News

Hispanics have passed whites as the largest ethnic group in Texas schools, making up almost 51 percent of public school enrollment.

The influx of Hispanic students, many from poor families, has brought about many changes in classrooms, with more expected as that population continues to grow.

Some schools already struggle with how to teach an increasing number of poor children who don’t speak English. Others are preparing for a day when their enrollment primarily is made up of low-income students, most of them Hispanic.

Click on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo By SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget]

PRESS RELEASE

A record 33.7 million Hispanics of Mexican origin resided in the United States in 2012, according to anew analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center. This estimate includes 11.4 million immigrants born in Mexico and 22.3 million born in the U.S. who self-identify as Hispanics of Mexican origin.

Mexicans are by far the largest Hispanic-origin population in the U.S., accounting for nearly two-thirds (64%) of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2012. Hispanics of Mexican origin are also a significant portion of the U.S. population, accounting for 11% overall.

The size of the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. has risen dramatically over the past four decades as a result of one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. In 1970, fewer than one million Mexican immigrants lived in the U.S. By 2007 it reached a peak of 12.5 million. Since then, it has declined as the arrival of new Mexican immigrants has slowed significantly. Today, 35% of Hispanics of Mexican origin were born in Mexico. And while the remaining two-thirds (65%) were born in the U.S., 52% of them have at least one immigrant parent.

Before the 1980s, growth in the nation’s Mexican-origin population came mostly from Hispanics of Mexican origin born in the U.S. However, from 1980 to 2000, more growth in the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. could be attributed to the arrival of Mexican immigrants. That pattern reversed from 2000 to 2010 as births surpassed immigration as the main driver of population growth.

The 11.4 million Mexican immigrants who live in the U.S. make up the single largest country of origin group by far among the nation’s 40 million immigrants. The next largest foreign-born population group, from greater China at 2 million, is less than one-fifth the size of the Mexican-born population in the U.S.

Mexican immigrants comprise by far the largest share of the unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. More than half (55%) of the 11.1 million immigrants who are in the country illegally are from Mexico.

Internationally, the U.S. is far and away the top destination for immigrants from Mexico. Fully 96% of Mexicans who leave Mexico migrate to the U.S. Worldwide, nine percent of people born in Mexico live in the U.S. In addition, the U.S. has more immigrants from Mexico alone than any other country has immigrants.

The characteristics of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. have changed over the decades. Compared with 1990, Mexican immigrants in 2011 were less likely to be male, considerably older, better educated and have been in the U.S. for longer.

This report includes demographic, income and economic characteristics of the foreign-born and native-born Mexican-origin populations in the U.S. and compares them with the characteristics of all Hispanics. It covers immigration status, language, age, marital status, fertility, regional dispersion, educational attainment, income, poverty status, health insurance and homeownership.

The report, “A Demographic Portrait of Mexican-Origin Hispanics in the United States,” was written by Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, research associate with the Pew Hispanic Center, and Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. It is available at the Pew Research Center’s website, www.pewresearch.org.

Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan source of data and analysis. It does not take advocacy positions. Its Hispanic Center, founded in 2001, seeks to improve understanding of the U.S. Hispanic population and to chronicle Latinos’ growing impact on the nation.

###

[Photo by Narith5]

By Meghashyam Mali, The Hill

President Obama will host a naturalization ceremony on Monday for 28 new citizens, including 13 service members, at the White House.

The move comes as the president continues to press lawmakers to pass comprehensive immigration reform, one of his second-term priorities.

Obama will be joined by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas in the East Room. The president will deliver remarks at the ceremony, the White House announced.

Click on picture to read full story.

[Photo by Grand Canyon NPS]

By Miriam Jordan, Wall Street Journal

South Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans are settling among the existing U.S. population more readily than Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic group, a trend with implications for politics, the economy and other areas of daily life.

In another finding of a study of U.S. Hispanics to be released Wednesday, the number of Hondurans, Guatemalans and others has been growing more rapidly than Mexicans, who still make up six in 10 U.S. Hispanics, since 1990. In all, 50.5 million U.S. residents trace their origin to Spanish-speaking countries.

Every group except Mexicans has experienced a substantial decline in residential segregation from whites since 1990, according to the most common measure of segregation, the “dissimilarity index,” which measures the distribution of two groups in a neighborhood and how much one group is over- or under-represented in relation to the other.

Click on picture to read full story.

By Associated Press/ New York Daily News

WASHINGTON — Welcome to the new off-white America.

A historic decline in the number of U.S. whites and the fast growth of Latinos are blurring traditional black-white color lines, testing the limits of civil rights laws and reshaping political alliances as “whiteness” begins to lose its numerical dominance.

Long in coming, the demographic shift was most vividly illustrated in last November’s re-election of President Barack Obama, the first black president, despite a historically low percentage of white supporters.

Click on picture to read full story.

[Photo by Campanero Rumbero]

By Ryan D. Enos, Washington Post

…in 2008 I conducted an experiment in which I sent a letter to African American voters just before an election in Los Angeles. The content of the letter was simple: It reminded people to vote and included a map noting how often people on their block voted compared with a nearby block. In some randomly selected cases, the comparison block consisted of African American residents; in others, it was largely Latino. When the letter pointed to a majority-Latino block, African Americans were significantly more likely to vote, suggesting that they were concerned about political competition with Latinos — even though both groups vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

In that same year, I examined the voting of Latinos in Los Angeles and found that those who lived near predominantly African American neighborhoods were far less likely to vote for Obama than Latinos who lived farther away — suggesting that contact with their African American neighbors may have prompted them to vote against an African American candidate.

Click on picture to read full story.

[Photo by Ben Woosley]

By Emily Deruy, ABCNews/Univision

Latinos are anything but homogenous, a fact underscored by a newCensus Bureau report that shows a significant variance in poverty rates among different subgroups of Hispanics.

The overall poverty rate for Hispanics is about 23 percent, but that number alone doesn’t do the millions of diverse Latinos living in the United States justice. The average Mexican, for example, has a very different life story than the average Cuban.

Click on picture to read story.

[Photo By Naty Rive]

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

Here’s something to put into your bag of facts as we move into a full throttle debate on immigration reform. According to a study compiled by The Wilson Center Mexico Institute,  Mexicans are “by far the largest national-origin group eligible to become U.S. citizens.”

I know, it’s obvious and it’s great that someone has quantified it in a serious study. But if your mind is rattling with implications you’ll understand why this study is important – these numbers can and should be used to put together serious policy initiatives; to go from quantifying to codifying.

Here’s what the Wilson Center suggests:

These findings argue for the need to fashion policy and citizenship promotion efforts specifically addressed to unnaturalized immigrants in at least three distinguishable situations: the long-term eligible who may qualify to become citizens under an eased set of testing requirements; Mexican immigrants who have settled in non-traditional and rural areas of the country, at some distance from more established co-ethnic communities; and those immigrants who become newly eligible to apply for citizenship every year, but who may not be fully aware of their eligibility.

This is all new and unpublished data that looks a “legal” immigration from Mexico. And it’s important because it helps frame the immigration issue in a way that had, until now, been ignored.

The study is important as well in light of the fact that Mexican immigrants become citizens at lower rates than other immigrants. The relationship between the numbers is obvious, so we won’t go into it.

There’s a lot to digest here, so I’ll leave you the link to the study. And like I said, pack some of the data away for use in the ongoing immigration debate.

Read the full study HERE.

[Photo by ElvertBarnes]

[Graph courtesy Wilsoncenter.org]

PRESS RELEASE

The Pew Research Center today published a statistical profile of the U.S. Hispanic population. This profile, based on Pew Research tabulations from the Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey, features detailed characteristics of the U.S. Hispanic population at the national level. Topics covered include age, geographic dispersion, nativity, citizenship, origin, language proficiency, racial self-identification, living arrangements, marital status, fertility, schooling, health insurance coverage, earnings, poverty and other labor market outcomes. The data featured in the profile may be downloaded from the center’s website.

Besides the new data on Hispanics, the Pew Research Center also released two new slideshows on immigrants and Hispanics in the United States. The slideshow on immigrants highlights key findings from the statistical profile of the foreign-born population in the United States, which was released last month.

The statistical profile and slideshows on  immigrants and  Hispanics are for immediate release and available at www.pewhispanic.org.

The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, non-advocacy research organization based in Washington, D.C. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Its Hispanic Center, founded in 2001, seeks to improve understanding of the U.S. Hispanic population and to chronicle Latinos’ growing impact on the nation.

By Washington Post Editorial Board

A LITTLE MORE than one-third of the adult children of immigrants in this country are Hispanics, and it turns out that like previous generations of immigrants, they are generally doing well. That’s good news, and further evidence that the descendants of millions of undocumented immigrants, currently in the cross hairs of the national debate over immigration reform, will assimilate and become productive citizens.

Click on picture to read story.

[Photo by New America Media]

By Kent Jackson, Associated Press/Standard Speaker

The 2010 Census showed that Hazleton’s population increased by more than 2,000, the first gain in 70 years. An influx of Latinos, who now make up 37 percent of the city’s population, led the growth.

Click on picture to read story.

[Phooto by runningcauseicantfly]

By Jonathan V. Last, Los Angeles Times

When it comes to immigration, demographers have a general rule of thumb: Countries with fertility rates below the replacement level (2.1) tend to attract immigrants, not send them. And so, when a country’s fertility rate collapses, it often ceases to be a source of immigration. Many Latin American countries have already fallen below the replacement level.

Click on picture to read story.

[Photo by mahalie]

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

Love this Infographic!

It was done by our friends at MAP Political Communication, in Austin, Texas.

Very few things tell a story better than a picture, or in this case a well done graphic. It speaks for itself – about Latino attitudes concerning family planning and birth control, and it’s broken down into six important subsets: national origin; generation, education; gender; religious affiliation; and income.

Check it out, share.

PRESS RELEASE

Second-generation Americans—-the 20 million adult U.S.-born children of immigrants—-are substantially better off than immigrants themselves on key measures of socio-economic attainment, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. They have higher incomes; more are college graduates and homeowners; and fewer live in poverty. In all of these measures, their characteristics resemble those of the full U.S. adult population.

Hispanics and Asian Americans make up about seven-in-ten of today’s adult immigrants and about half of today’s adult second generation. The second-generation of both groups are much more likely than immigrants to speak English, to have friends and spouses outside their ethnic or racial group, to say their group gets along well with others and to think of themselves as “a typical American,” according to Pew Research surveys. The surveys also find that they place more importance than does the general public on hard work and career success. They are more inclined to call themselves liberal and less likely to identify as Republicans. And roughly seven-in-ten say their standard of living is higher than that of their parents at the same stage of life. In all of these measures, the second generation resembles the immigrant generation more closely than the general public.

As the U.S. Congress takes up immigration legislation, this Pew Research report projects that given current immigration trends and birth rates, virtually all (93%) of the growth of the nation’s working age population between now and 2050 will be accounted for by immigrants and their U.S.-born children. By then, the nation’s “immigrant stock” (first and second generation combined, adults and children combined) could grow from 76 million now to more than 160 million, at which point it would comprise a record share (37%) of the U.S. population.

This report provides a snapshot portrait of the second generation based on analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, supplemented by a look at attitudes, values, economic experiences, intergroup relations and identity markers, based on recent Pew Research Center surveys of Hispanics and Asian Americans. Here is a summary of the report’s key findings:

Educational and Economic Attainment: Adults in the second generation are doing better than those in the first generation in adjusted median household income ($58,000 versus $46,000); college degrees (36% versus 29%); and homeownership (64% versus 51%). They are less likely to be in poverty (11% versus 18%) and less likely to have not finished high school (10% versus 28%).

Identity: Pew Research surveys of Hispanics and Asian Americans find that roughly six-in-ten adults in the second generation consider themselves to be a “typical American,” about double the share of immigrants who say the same. Still, most in the second generation also have a strong sense of identity with their ancestral roots.

Intergroup Relations: About half of second-generation Hispanics (52%) and about two-thirds of Asian Americans (64%) say their group gets along well with all other major racial and ethnic groups in America; fewer immigrants in these groups say the same. The second generations of these groups are also more likely than the immigrants to say they have friends outside of their ethnic or country-of-origin group.

Intermarriage: About one-in-six (15%) married second-generation adults have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity from themselves, compared with 8% of all immigrants and 8% of all U.S. adults.

Belief in Hard Work: About three-quarters of second-generation Hispanics (78%) and Asian Americans (72%) say that most people can get ahead if they’re willing to work hard. Similar shares of the immigrant generations of these groups agree. By contrast, 58% of the full U.S. population of adults feels the same way.

Political and Social Values: Second-generation Hispanics and Asian Americans, as well the first generation of each group, identify more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party and characterize themselves as liberals at higher rates than the general public. About half or more of the second generation believe that abortion should be legal, and more than two-thirds say homosexuality should be accepted by society. The relative youth of the second generation contributes to, but does not fully explain, their liberal political leanings.

Nonmarital Childbearing: Second-generation women who recently gave birth are more likely to be unmarried than immigrant women (41% versus 23%).

Language Usage: About nine-in-ten second-generation Hispanic and Asian-American immigrants are proficient English speakers, substantially more than the immigrant generations of these groups.

Perceptions of Generational Mobility: Most second-generation Hispanics (67%) and Asian Americans (75%) say their standard of living is better than that of their parents at the same stage of life. Similar shares of the immigrant generations of both groups say the same. By contrast, 60% of the full U.S. population feels the same way.

The report is for immediate release and is available at the Pew Research Center’s website athttp://www.pewresearch.org.

The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, non-advocacy research organization based in Washington, D.C. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

###

[Photo by  moodboardphotography]