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.