Look into the future: Hispanics 2.0

"600 Words by Esther J. Cepeda"

Would you like to know what this country is going to look like in about 15 years? This is as close to a crystal ball as you’re going to get.

According to "Hispanic Children: The Rise of the Second Generation" a study released today by the Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanics now make up 22% of all children in the United States. Projections by the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that by 2025, nearly three-in-ten children in this country will be of Latino ancestry.
 
Today, more than half of the nation's 16 million Hispanic children are "second generation," meaning they’re the U.S.-born sons or daughters of at least one foreign-born parent, typically someone who came to this country in the immigration wave from Mexico, Central America and South America that began around 1980.  Eleven percent of Latino children are not, in fact, "Latino," they are foreign-born and hail from a Latin American country but reside here today. In 1980, far fewer Hispanic children were second generation – I was one of them – while a significant majority were the U.S.-born sons or daughters of U.S.-born parents.
 
Shifts in the generational status of Hispanic children matter because analysis of the most recent Census data indicates that many social, economic and demographic characteristics of Latino children vary sharply by their generational status.  And the results are, as usual, horrifying:

For instance…

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43% of first-gen Latino kids, 21% in second generation, and a whopping 5% of Latino kids in the third generation (or higher) are NOT fluent in English

·

34% of first-gen latino kids live in poverty compared with 26% of those in the second generation and 24% in the third generation or higher

·

More promising is that 47% of first-gen, 40% second-gen, and only 16% of third-gen Latino kids have parents with less than a high school education.

What this means, generally, is that the expected socio-economic status for Hispanic children of U.S.-born parents is higher than for Hispanic children of immigrant parents, which is a no-brainer.

Less intuitive is that health-based and other indicators suggest Hispanic children in immigrant families fare better in some dimensions. For example, 69% of first-gen Latino kids live in married-couple families compared with 73% of second-generation children and just 52% in the third generation.

One of the most extensive investigations of the well-being and outcome s of the children of immigrants found that "Along a number of important dimensions, children and adolescents in immigrant families appear to experience better health and adjustment than do children and youth in native-born families (Hernandez, 1999 in "Children of Immigrants: Health, Adjustment and Public Assistance").

In fact, with the exception of obesity, second-generation Hispanic kids seem to have fewer physical health problems than their counterparts in the third generation or higher.

So, going back to the crystal ball: in about a decade or so a third of all of us will be Hispanic. Right now "second generation" children-of-immigrants Hispanic kids are making their way toward being healthy, better-educated, more-affluent adults than their parents through the years 2020-2050.

But they’re really going to have to step it up in order to help the first-gen kids who grew up alongside them and didn’t quite break out of poverty, and also help their older third-gen peers who, somewhere along the way, became stereotypical fat, unhealthy Americans.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the "600 Words" & "Pregunta del Dia" columns, and is also the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for the Illinois Student Assistance Commission. Her views and reporting do not necessarily reflect those of ISAC. "600 words" is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com