John Tierney’s column today focuses on a Mexican immigrant success story, save for the fact that the guy may well be deported. He rightly points out that contrary to what anti-immigration activists would have you believe, Hispanics are assmiliating rather well:

Espinoza started off making less than $4 an hour as a dishwasher in a restaurant that flouted the minimum-wage law. But he became a cook and worked up to $15 an hour. He switched to driving a street-cleaning truck, a job that now pays him $17 an hour, minus taxes and Social Security.

By age 24, he and his wife, Anita, had saved enough to buy a house for about $200,000 in Villa Park, a suburb where most people don’t speak Spanish. Now 27, Espinoza’s still working on his English (we spoke in Spanish), but his daughter is already speaking English at her preschool.

There’s nothing unusual about his progress. More than half of the Mexican immigrants in Chicago own their own homes, and many are moving to the suburbs. No matter where they live, their children learn English.

You can hear this on the sidewalks and school corridors in Mexican neighborhoods like Pilsen, where most teenagers speak to one another in English. A national survey by the Pew Hispanic Center found that nearly all second-generation Latinos are either bilingual or English-dominant, and by the next generation 80 percent are English-dominant and virtually none speak just Spanish.

I’m not expert, this is consistent with much of what I’ve read, which suggest that Mexican immigrants are fully assimilated within a generation or two, just like the waves of immigration from other parts of the world before them.

I don’t doubt that Mexican immigrants are influencing American culture. I guess I’m just not particularly alarmed by it. Every boomlet of immigration has impacted our culture, including the waves from Ireland, Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, and East and South Asia. All, I’d argue, mostly for the better. I don’t know why Hispanic immigrants would be any different.

I guess I just don’t understand all the anti-immigrant fervor. Mexican immigrants (yes, the illegal ones) risk life and limb to come to the U.S. so they can work long, hard hours for low wages, in a bid to provide a better life for their families. Hard work. Supporting one’s family, even at the risk of one’s own safety. Close-knit kin. Religious faith. Aren’t these purported conservative values?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 8th, 2006 at 11:29 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.