Illegal Immigration’s Family Breakdown

By: Heather MacDonald Human Events (Part II of II)

As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped five percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.

The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls.
 

For a long time, conservatives have been uniquely willing to sound the alarm about the costs of illegitimacy.  Children raised in single-parent homes, they have warned, are at far higher risk of school failure, juvenile delinquency, emotional problems, teen pregnancy, and poverty than children raised by married parents.  Yet when it comes to Hispanics, open-borders advocates, fearless about decrying family break-down among blacks, suddenly go silent.  

Ditto the other social problems that are showing up above all in the second and third generations of Hispanic immigrants.  Hispanics have the highest school drop-out rate in the country — a recipe for economic decline.  In the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is 73% Hispanic, just 40% of Hispanic students graduate. 

Immigrant advocates have fiercely opposed in court a long-deferred California high school exit exam, which would require students to answer just over 50% of questions testing eighth-grade-level math and ninth-grade-level English. The California Research Bureau predicts that if the exam becomes a reality, Hispanic graduation rates would drop well below 30%.

Gang life is thriving in L.A.’s schools, and is spreading across the country with the migration of Hispanic immigrants.  The incarceration rate of Mexican-Americans is 3.45 times higher than that of whites. 

Sociologists Alejandro Portes of Princeton and Rubén G. Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, followed the children of immigrants in San Diego and Miami from 1992 to 2003. A whopping 28% of Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 reported having been arrested since 1995, and 20%reported having been incarcerated — a rate twice that of other immigrant groups.

Anyone who speaks to Hispanic students in immigrant-saturated schools in Southern California will invariably hear the estimate that 50% of a student’s peers have ended up in gangs or other criminal activities.

These are the social facts about which open-borders conservatives never speak. If the current level of immigration flows continues, they will only get worse. 

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, from which this article was adapted.