Mexican Americans (
Spanish: Mexicano americano or Mexicano estadounidense) are
Americans of full or partial
Mexican descent.
As of July
2012, Mexican Americans make up 10.9% of the
United States' population with over 34 million Americans listed as being of full or partial Mexican ancestry. As of July 2012, Mexican Americans comprise 64.3% of all
Hispanics and Latinos in the
United States.
The United States is home to the second largest Mexican community in the world second only to
Mexico itself comprising nearly 22% of the entire Mexican origin population of the world.
Canada is a distant third with a small but fast-growing
Mexican Canadian population of 96,055 (0.3% of the population) as of
2011.
In addition, as of 2008 there were approximately 7,
000,000 undocumented
Mexicans living in the United States. Upgrading their legal status became a major issue in
2013. Over 60% of all Mexican Americans reside in the states of
California and
Texas.
Barrow (
2005) finds increases in average personal and household incomes for Mexican Americans in the
21st century. US-born Mexican Americans earn more and are represented more in the middle and upper-class segments more than most recently arriving Mexican immigrants.
Most immigrants from Mexico, as elsewhere, come from the lower classes and from families generationally employed in lower skilled jobs. They also are most likely from rural areas. Thus, many new Mexican immigrants are not skilled in white collar professions.
Recently, some professionals from Mexico have been migrating, but to make the transition from one country to another involves re-training and re-adjusting to conform to US laws —i.e. professional licensing is required.
According to
James P.
Smith of the
Research and Development Corporation, the children and grandchildren of
Latino immigrants tend to lessen educational and income gaps with native whites. Immigrant Latino men make about half of what native whites do, while second generation US-born
Latinos make about 78 percent of the salaries of their native white counterparts and by the third generation US-born Latinos make on average identical wages to their US-born white counterparts.[49]
Huntington (2005) argues that the sheer number, concentration, linguistic homogeneity, and other characteristics of
Latin American immigrants will erode the dominance of
English as a nationally unifying language, weaken the country's dominant cultural values, and promote ethnic allegiances over a primary identification as an
American. Testing these hypotheses with data from the
US Census and national and
Los Angeles opinion surveys, Citrin et al. (
2007) show that Hispanics generally acquire English and lose Spanish rapidly beginning with the second generation, and appear to be no more or less religious or committed to the work ethic than native-born non-Mexican American whites. However, the children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants were able to make close ties with their extended families in Mexico, since United States shares a 2,000 mile border with Mexico. Many had the opportunity to visit Mexico on a relatively frequent basis. As a result, many Mexicans were able to maintain a strong
Mexican culture, language, and relationship with others
.[50]
South et al. (2005) examine
Hispanic spatial assimilation and inter-neighborhood geographic mobility. Their longitudinal analysis of seven hundred Mexican,
Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants followed from
1990 to
1995 finds broad support for hypotheses derived from the classical account of assimilation into
American society.
High income,
English-language use, and embeddedness in American social contexts increased Latin American immigrants' geographic mobility into multi-ethnic neighborhoods.
US citizenship and years spent in the United States were positively associated with geographic mobility into different neighborhoods, and coethnic contact was inversely associated with this form of mobility, but these associations operated largely through other predictors. Prior experiences of ethnic discrimination increased and therefore decreased the likelihood that Latino immigrants would move from their original neighborhoods, while residing in metropolitan areas with large Latino populations led to geographic moves into "less Anglo" census tracts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_americans
- published: 06 Feb 2014
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