The "retreat" from assimilation isn't all that it's splintered up to be
Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 12:09AM 
WSJ story.
Recent study suggests that Hispanics are less often marrying non-Hispanic whites, hence the fear of lessening assimilation.
The trend of past decades for both Hispanics and Asians immigrants was that successive generations married outside their race in ever higher percentages. So are we seeing a reversal!
Clearly, social taboos on interracial marriage have faded dramatically over my lifetime (almost 5 decades), but here’s the trick with the last two decades seeing a serious upsurge in Asian and Hispanic immigrants: now there’s a lot more of them available in the marriage pool, so, what was assimilation in the past due to limited choice, is now lessened.
As a “retreat from intermarriage” goes, this one is fairly defensible and hardly anything to get worked up about. I mean, Hispanic women now marry outside the pool in the range of 15-20% (2000s) versus 20-25% (1990s).
The benefits seem clear enough for the individuals in question:
The massive influx of new immigrants from Latin America and Asia has not only fueled the opportunity to marry one’s co-ethnics, but also revitalized ancestral and cultural identity.
So says a researcher.
Meanwhile, we’re told that the rate of Asian women marrying white men “stagnated” at 40% between 1980 and 2008. Oh my!
Long-term, though, experts expect plenty of inter-marrying. Why? Workplaces are far more integrated than in the past.
Still, plenty of anti-immigrant feeling post-9/11 and with the hard economic times, so the current “retreat,” such as it is, underwhelms me.
Reader Comments (2)
Latin immigration is somewhat different compared to Asian immigration because there is some overlap in culture, with the Spanish and European influence...so much that roughly 1/3 of the Latin world is white, or "fully" European. Mexico is a special case, because of the nationalism (contrary to conventional wisdom, there is more nationalism and resentment for the "other" in Mexico than in the US)....part of the "anti-immigrant" feeling in the US is a counter to this Mexican nationalism. There is a real sense of racism and anti-immigrant feeling in the US, but in comparison to most countries, this is not as strong a criticism in my view, frankly pretty weak. This criticism is used to deflect Mexican nationalism.
Obviously, the other end is the mestizo population which is the majority, and they are easily identified, even if they aren't from Mexico. But I always say to people who think I am "anti-immigrant" , "compared to what?" Most latin immigrants, legal or illegal, do extremely well in the US compared to what they can do in Mexico, or Central America etc.
A big problem is that our K-12 schools and many colleges don't tell the broader significant roles of other cultures. How many students learn that our transcontinental railroad would not have been completed as soon, and as well, as it was without Chinese worker teams. They were smart cooperative teams that represented Chinese experience in big projects in China involving dams and canals. They replaced the US gold guys who just wanted part time work until they could do new gold digging. The Chinese team effort became a management model for US. Their community cooperation became a model for family development and childhood education.
Still fewer Americans know how China pioneered land and sea globalized economic networks long before the Europeans repeated the process.
I have not heard that Chinese education system covers these topics much either. Just 'old stuff' before the terrible 19th and 20th century important stuff.
Still, us old folks need to try to overcome history ignorance.