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Snapshot for December 3, 2008.
Downward economic mobility among Mexican Americans
by Algernon Austin
The American Dream holds out the prospect that the children of immigrants to the United States will be better off economically than their parents. This expectation is realized for second-generation1 Mexican Americans, but upward economic mobility stalls in the third generation and begins to reverse in subsequent generations.
In Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race, Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz show that, measured by average family income, third-generation Mexican Americans are not much better off than those who are second-generation (see chart). Even more surprisingly, fourth-generation Mexican Americans have substantially lower family incomes than their second- and third-generation peers. The authors conclude that the first- and second-generation's optimism about life in the United States fades by the third-generation, and third- and later-generations finally succumb to the lower-quality education and prejudice that they experience.
Endnotes
1. The first generation is the foreign-born immigrant generation. The second generation is the U.S.-born children of the first generation. Each generation of children is one generation higher than their parents. Telles and Ortiz use the respondent parent to determine the parents' generation.
References
Austin, Algernon, and Marie Mora. 2008. Hispanics and the Economy: Economic Stagnation for Hispanic American Workers, Throughout the 2000s. Briefing Paper, Washington, D.C.: EPI.
Telles, Edward E., and Vilma Ortiz. 2008. Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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