Mexicans are not the same as Ellis Is. Italians

People of Mexican descent in New York City are far more likely to be living in poor or near-poor households than other Latinos, blacks, whites or Asians, according to a study to be released on Thursday.

Nearly two-thirds of the city’s Mexican residents, including immigrants and the native-born, are living in low-income households, compared with 55 percent of all Latinos; 42 percent of blacks and Asians; and 25 percent of whites, said the report by the Community Service Society, a research and advocacy group in New York City that focuses on poverty.

The rates are even more pronounced for children: About 79 percent of all Mexicans under age 16 in New York City live in low-income households, with about 45 percent living below the poverty line — significantly higher percentages than any other major Latino group as well as the broader population.

While the Mexican immigrants enjoy exceptionally high rates of employment, their salaries are not sufficient to support young families, the study’s authors said.

“Immigrant Mexicans appear to be having great difficulty making ends meet as they start families here,” said the study, which sought to assess socio-economic trends among young people of Mexican origin in New York City. “Incomes that might support one individual on their own or in a shared household are not enough to support a family.”

“The result could be a cycle of poverty that will pass down from generation to generation,” the authors warned.

The study defined low-income households as those making below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is equivalent to about $38,000 for a family of three.

The study was commissioned by the Deutsche Bank Foundation following the publication of an article in The New York Times in 2011 about extraordinarily low educational achievement among Mexican immigrants in New York City. The foundation has also started an initiative intended to improve the educational and economic achievement of the Mexican population in New York City, with an emphasis on children and their families.

The study reaffirmed The Times’s statistical and anecdotal findings about low educational achievement among first-generation Mexican immigrants. Based largely on data from the American Community Survey, the report did not try to analyze the legal status of its focus populations.

The researchers identified what they called “a promising sign” for the city’s growing Mexican population: about 67 percent of all native-born Mexicans between 16 and 24 living in the city were enrolled in school, a higher percentage than Puerto Ricans (54 percent) as well as native-born Dominicans (64 percent), native-born blacks (60 percent) and native-born whites (64 percent), though lower than native-born Asians (78 percent).

Still, even this finding was cast in shadow by more bleak data: Mexican youth who have left school — native-born and foreign-born alike — have considerably lower levels of educational attainment than their peers, with more than half lacking a high school diploma.

“The fact that native-born Mexican young people are less likely than other Latinos (and other racial/ethnic groups) to attain high school diplomas and enroll in college is extremely troubling,” the report said.

The authors concluded their study by recommending policy initiatives that would provide more educational and social support for Mexican children, families and low-wage workers, including increasing access to job training and English-language programs and raising the minimum wage, something that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and state lawmakers are hoping to achieve.

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Why we on the British Left made an epic mistake on immigration

By David Goodhart

Among Left-leaning ‘Hampstead’ liberals like me, there has long been what you might call a ‘discrimination assumption’ when it comes to the highly charged issue of immigration.

Our instinctive reaction has been that Britain is a relentlessly racist country bent on thwarting the lives of ethnic minorities, that the only decent policy is to throw open our doors to all and that those with doubts about how we run our multi-racial society are guilty of prejudice.

And that view — echoed in Whitehall, Westminster and town halls around the country — has been the prevailing ideology, setting the tone for the immigration debate.

But for some years, this has troubled me and, gradually, I have changed my mind.

Over 18 months of touring the country to talk to people about their lives for a new book, I have discovered minority Britons thriving more than many liberals suppose possible. But I also saw the mess of division and conflict we have got ourselves into in other places.

I am now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly.

For 30 years, the Left has blinded itself with sentiment about diversity. But we got it wrong.

I still believe that large-scale immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than it would otherwise have been. I believe, too, that this country is significantly less racist than it once was.

In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should with a degree of harmony, with minorities upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in mixed suburbs.

But it has also resulted in too many areas in which ethnic minorities lead almost segregated lives — notably in the northern ‘mill towns’ and other declining industrial regions, which in the Sixties and Seventies attracted one of the most clannish minorities of modern times, rural Kashmiri Pakistanis.

In Leicester and Bradford, almost half of the ethnic population live in what are technically ghettos (defined as areas where minorities form more than two-thirds of the population). Meanwhile, parts of white working-class Britain have been left feeling neither valued nor useful, believing that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself.

Those in the race lobby have been slow to recognise that strong collective identities are legitimate for majorities as well as minorities, for white as well as for black people.

For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must ‘belong’ to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been.

The justification for such a large and unpopular change has to be that the economic benefits are significant and measurable. But they are not.

One of the liberal elite’s myths is that we are a ‘mongrel nation’ that has always experienced high inflows of outsiders. But this isn’t true. From 1066 until 1950, immigration was almost non-existent (excluding Ireland) — a quarter of a million at the most, mainly Huguenots and Jews.

Post-World War II immigration has been on a completely different scale from anything that went before. These days, more people arrive on our shores as immigrants in a single year than did so in the entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime.

Much of this happened by accident. When the 1948 Nationality Act was passed — giving all citizens of the Empire and Commonwealth the right to live and work in Britain — it was not expected that the ordinary people of poor former colonies would arrive in their hundreds of thousands.

Nor was it expected after 1997 that a combination of quite small decisions would lead to 1.5 million East Europeans arriving, about half to settle. But come they did, and a net immigration of around four million foreign-born citizens since 1997 has produced easily the most dramatic demographic revolution in British history.

Yet there was no general discussion in the New Labour Cabinet of the day about who Britain wanted to let in and in what numbers; no discussion about how the country could absorb them without pressure on public services.

By the time of the next census in 2021, the non-white minority population will have risen to around 20 per cent, a trebling in just 25 years.

By 2066, according to one demographer, white Britons will be in a minority.

This is already the case in some towns and cities, including London, Leicester, Slough and Luton, with Birmingham expected to follow in the near future.

If Britain had a clear and confident sense of its national culture and was good at integrating people, then perhaps this speed of change would be of little concern. But this is not the case.

We are deep into a huge social experiment. To give it a chance of working, we need to heed the ‘slow down’ signs that the electorate is waving. And all the more so given that the low economic growth era we are now in means people’s grievances cannot easily be bought off with rising wages and public spending.

The fact is that the whole post-war process of immigration has been badly managed or, rather, not managed at all.

It is often said that the importation of people from the Indian subcontinent to work in textile mills that were soon to close — ironically, partly thanks to competition from India and Pakistan itself — was a poor piece of social engineering.

But the whole point was that no one really engineered it. It just happened.

And then no one came forward to grasp the consequences or even acknowledge there might be a problem.

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’

I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

Such grand notions run counter to the way most people in this country think or arrange their priorities.

The British political class has never prepared existing citizens for something as game-changing as large-scale immigration, nor has it done a good job at explaining what the point of large-scale immigration was and whose interests it was meant to serve.

Crucially, they failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens. On the contrary, the idea that immigration should be unambiguously in the interests of existing citizens was blurred from the start.

Then, whenever there were problems with immigrant communities, the tendency was for the host society to be blamed for not being sufficiently accommodating or for being racist, rather than considering the self-inflicted wounds of some minority cultures.

Thus, the absence of fathers in many African-Caribbean households was excused as a cultural trait that just had to be accepted rather than a dereliction of duty that needed addressing.

Yes, being a newcomer can be hard, even in a liberal society such as Britain’s that today offers undreamed of protections and rights compared with earlier eras. But what has been largely ignored is that mass immigration makes big demands on host communities, too, and a successful strategy must engage the attention, consent and sympathy of the host majority as well.

Democratic common sense demands that politics and law cannot concern themselves only with the problems of minorities. The majority must have a voice, too, in how we manage a multi-racial society.

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