Hispanic Immigrants' Descendants Prosper
 

May 24, 2004 -- Study finds them equaling European immigrants The children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants move up the economic and educational ladder in the United States as quickly as generations of European immigrants did, a new study says.

The finding contrasts with prevailing beliefs that Latin American immigrants haven't mirrored Europeans' generational advances because they make less of an effort to assimilate, take frequent trips back to their home countries and have faced discrimination, said James Smith, an economist at RAND, a nonprofit research group in Santa Monica, Calif.

"There's a widespread view among both scholars and the general public that the Hispanic immigrant experience has been very different than the European experience and the Asian experience," Smith said yesterday.

"That view is just wrong. Across generations, Hispanics have done just as well as the Europeans who came in the early part of this century, and in fact slightly better."

Smith said previous research has used data from a restricted time period. In his study, Smith examined census and other material to measure the progress of Hispanic men and their descendants over more than a century, up to those born in 1974.

The study found that Hispanic immigrants born between 1905 and 1909 averaged a fifth-grade education, but that their sons completed ninth grade and their grandsons graduated from high school. Those gains are greater than those of European immigrants born in the same time period, Smith said.

Immigrants born during those same years earned 75 percent as much as U.S.-born white men over their lifetimes, according to the study. Their sons earned about 79 percent as much, and their grandsons almost 83 percent as much.

In general, third-generation Hispanics' income is about 10 percent less than that of U.S.-born whites, taking into account educational differences, he said.