Does Marriage Determine Level of Assimilation?
June 27, 2008Immigration
There's been a lot said about assimilation and whether or not today's immigrants are assimilating. A recent report published by the Manhattan Institute offers an inadequate approach to analyze the assimilation of the U.S. immigrant population. To discuss this further, I recently wrote an op-ed that was published by El Diario last Thursday. Here's the published Spanish version.
The op-ed's translation is following:
The complex debate on immigration has been full of myths about the assimilation of today's immigrant population. They don't want to learn English. They don't want to learn American ways. Is it true? Are they assimilating, or aren't they?
While some elements of this question are clear - for example, the vast majority of Latino immigrants believe that learning English is necessary to be successful in the U.S - a new study proposes to go deeper into the many measurements of assimilation. Unfortunately, however, Measuring Immigrant Assimilation in the United States, the latest report from The Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy organization, tries so hard to make a science out of the American story that it winds up diminishing the achievements of immigrants.
