Third Example of the "Americanization" Danger

In 2001 Dr. Carol L. Schmid wrote an article entitled Educational achievement language-minority students, and the new second generation. In this article she notes some disturbing research findings.

For example she mentions that Rumberger (1995) found that second-generation Mexican-Americans were less likely to drop out of school than were their third-generation counterparts, even though their SES (Socioeconomic status), on average, was lower. Driscoll's (1999) study of immigrant and native Latino youth found that U.S.-born students of U.S.-born parents were more than twice as likely to drop out of high school as were U.S.-born students with foreign-born parents. Furthermore, the third-generation sophomores in her sample were almost three times as likely to drop out as were the immigrant sophomores.

Although the exact cause (s) for this is unknown, Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco (1995) can provide some insight from what they found in the analysis of their comparison between recent Mexican immigrants and U.S-born Mexican Americans. They found from their primarily qualitative data that recent immigrants often have a "dual frame of reference." Such a frame of reference enabled the immigrants to believe their lives in the United States were markedly better than the lives they left behind. U.S.-born Mexican Americans who didn't have this dual frame of reference saw themselves as marginalized from the dominant culture so they strived to identify with the "dominant American paradigm of adolescent ambivalence." This resulted in recent Mexican immigrants being more achievement oriented than U.S.-born Mexican Americans.

In other words, striving to become "Americanized" resulted in lower academic achievement.

The Danger of Becoming Americanized

It is a sad commentary that the more "Americanized" Hispanic immigrants become, the more problems they experience. For example, a new study by Robert Sampson from Harvard that was recently released reveals that first-generation immigrants are more likely to be law-abiding than third-generation Americans of similar socioeconomic status.


Sampson mentions the phenomenon sociologists call the "Latino paradox" which is that even though Hispanic immigrants come into this country with low resources and high poverty which are related to a high propensity for violence do better on a range of social indicators than either Blacks or Whites.


In fact, Sampson was surprised to discover that a person's immigrant status emerged as a stronger indicator of a dispropensity to violence than any other factor, including poverty, ethnic background, and IQ. First-generation immigrants are 45 percent less likely to commit violence than third-generation immigrants, and second-generation immigrants are about 22 percent less likely to do so than the third-generation. Mexican-Americans were the least violent among those studied.


Another important finding of the study was that neighborhoods matter. Sampson said, "Kids living in neighborhoods with a high concentration of first-generation immigrants have lower rates of violence" going on to say, "even if they aren't immigrants themselves."


This data from Sampson that indicate that as immigration increases, "the culture of violence is diluted," should remind all of us that immigration is not our country's #1 enemy. Once again we're reminded of Walter Kelly's Pogo who tells us, "We have met the enemy...and he is us."