Latino Assimilation Essay

The negative stereotype that Latinos are indefinitely stuck in poverty is created by the tendency to average the progress of new immigrants to those of older immigrants. “Since Latino immigration continues, averaging together the poverty rates or homeownership levels of large numbers of people who arrived recently with those who have been here for decades can provide a skewed view of progress,” (America’s Assimilating Hispanics). However, longitudinal studies, when properly measured and displayed, show that Latino immigrants are making economic progress.

Latino assimilation transcends the realms of politic and economic to touch culture, as English language acquisition shows. Supporters of anti- Latino immigration legislation tend to cite the prevalence of Spanish-speaking communities across the U.S, and even North Carolina, as evidence that Latino immigrants are failing to assimilate. Though it is true that a large amount of Latinos cannot claim English fluency, this is not completely true. The Pew Research Center estimates that in the United States as a whole, 15.7 million Hispanics do not speak English. This is thirty-two percent, of the Latino population between the ages five years old and older who lack English language proficiency

Second- generation Latinos and beyond speak English just as well as Natives, despite the fact that they live with their Spanish-speaking parents (Myers and Pitkin, 20). Furthermore, it has been observed that even though second or third generations Latinos may retain their native language, the Spanish language will eventually die out by the third and fourth generations in many families, following the traditional three-generation model of linguistic assimilation that characterized European immigrants of the last century (Rumbaut and Massey,