Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute cites facts and figures that give me no pleasure to pass on. Frankly, I am shocked. Though I had blogged about the myth of Hispanic family strength before (last July), I had forgotten some of the contents of that earlier post.
MacDonald disagrees with Michael Gerson's Washington Post column. She says Powerlineblog.com’s Paul Mirengoff has dismantled Gerson’s key arguments. She goes on say:
What planet is Gerson living on? Far from being “focused on education,” Hispanics have the highest drop-out rate in the country — 47 percent nationally, and far worse in heavily Hispanic areas. Schools in illegal-immigrant-saturated southern California spend enormous sums trying to persuade Latino students to stay in school and study, without avail. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 40 percent of Hispanics graduate, and those students who do finish school come out with abysmal skills. A controversial high school exit exam in California would require seniors to correctly answer just 51 percent of questions testing eighth-grade-level math and ninth-grade-level English in order to receive a diploma. Naturally, immigrant advocates have fiercely
opposed this all-too-meager measure for school and student accountability. The California Research Bureau predicts that the exam will result in a Hispanic graduation rate of below 30 percent.
Behind Hispanic educational failure rate lies an apathy towards learning, as the Manhattan Institute’s Herman Badillo argues in One Nation, One Standard. Hostility towards academic achievement is higher among Hispanics than among blacks. Factor in gang involvement and teenage pregnancy, and the Hispanic drop-out rate looks almost inevitable. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that a whopping 15 percent to 20 percent of illegal immigrants may not qualify for the proposed amnesty because of their criminal records, according to the Wall Street Journal. Gerson’s claim of a culture “focused on education” is pure delusion.
Gerson’s hackneyed invocation of Hispanic “family values” is equally laughable. Nearly 50 percent of all Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, compared to 24 percent of white children and 15 percent of Asian children. Black out-of-wedlock births are higher — 68 percent — but the black population is not growing rapidly. And the fertility rate among unmarried Hispanic women is the highest in the country — over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women. The Hispanic teen-fertility rate also far outstrips other groups. Among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. As conservative policymakers such as Gerson should know, there is no better predictor of future social pathologies than out-of-wedlock childrearing.
Low levels of education and high levels of illegitimacy help explain why, contrary to Gerson’s myths, Hispanics are not showing the “social mobility” of other immigrant groups past and present, as Harvard’s George Borjas has documented and City Journal’s Steve Malanga has reported.
This is sad. I repeat, I am both surprised and saddened to read these figures, and that is why I am putting it on my blog.