It
began in the 1970s, unnoticed.
As baby boomers came of age, they put off having children; many
never had any.
A flow of immigrants from Latin America, especially Mexico,
began to grow.
Two trends, entirely unrelated in their origins, gathered momentum
across decades.
One created a dearth of people.
The other produced an abundance.
In this decade they come together. In the next their confluence
transforms the nation.
This is a done deal. It is time to get ready.
History rarely affords a society the opportunity to prepare
for important transitions. Often, unintended interactions and
unanticipated results only become clear when historians construct
patterns in retrospect. This case is different because the driving
forces are demographic and readily measured. It is just a matter
of counting people. We know that the baby boomers are headed for
retirement without having bred enough children to replace themselves.
And we know that the gap is being filled by Latino immigrants
and their offspring. Put the two together, and we know that there
will be important consequences for schools and universities, employers
and marketers and every level of government.
Predicting those consequences is not so easy. What is happening
in the United States is unique in modern history: A native-born
age cohort of unprecedented size is aging out of the workforce.
Meanwhile Latino immigrants and their offspring are the largest
source of new entrants to the labor market. In the first year
after the U.S. economy started adding jobs in early 2003, foreign-born
Hispanic workers or their children accounted for about a third
of the net increase in employment. That share can only increase.
The outgoing and the incoming populations differ in one important
respect: education. On average, both Latino immigrants and, more
importantly, their U.S.-born children have less schooling than
the U.S. norm, especially if we are talking about non-Hispanic
whites, that racial/ethnic majority that I am going to refer to
as "Anglos" for lack of a better term. If the educational outcomes
for Latino kids going through U.S. schools do not improve, the
country will have a hard time keeping up the improvement in the
quality of its workforce and, in turn, keeping up the productivity
gains that have been so important to growth for the past decade.
The demographics are set and unchangeable. The boomers are pretty
well done reproducing, and there is no way to rewind the biological
clock to the 1980s and '90s to generate more non-Hispanic babies.
However, much else can still be changed. As a society, we have
some say over our education system, our economy, our government
institutions and politics. We are embarked on a journey, and there
is no going back. But we can decide the course we take and where
we end up. We need to look at the landscape that lies ahead and
identify the challenges to come.
But first we need to ask, how did we get here?
Start with the boomers, that massive generation born between
1946 and 1964. They came of age at a time when urbanization and
increasing affluence were producing lower birth rates here, as
they have in all kinds of societies. Factors unique to the moment
also contributed, including the sexual revolution, the women's
movement, the rise of the two-income household, the self-absorption
of the "me decade" and even the improvement in levels of education,
which added college tuition to most parents' calculations of the
costs of raising children. The net result was that annual U.S.
birth rates, which had been more than 20 births per thousand people
since 1946, began to drop after 1964. The rates hit a low of 13.6
in 1975. It was not until the late 1980s that the boomers got
around to producing the baby boom echo, and it was a faint echo
at that. From 1988 to 1992 annual birth rates moved just above
15 births per thousand.
As a result, the boomers have moved into late middle age without
many natural successors following close behind it. The easiest
way to visualize this is with a demographic tool called an "age
pyramid." In the natural course of things, a population should
be smallest in the oldest age categories and largest in the youngest,
creating a distribution that can be graphed as a pyramid. In the
age pyramid for the Anglo population, the baby boom generation
and the decline in fertility that followed it have combined to
produce an unusual case of midriff bulge.
The total population of the United States has a much more natural
slope to its age pyramid. That's because the Hispanic population,
which is much younger, fills in the bottom. That, too, is the
result of a demographic trajectory that started in the middle
of the last century. When the farm boys went off to fight World
War II, the government arranged for the import of temporary workers
from Mexico known as braceros. The ready supply of cheap
labor proved so convenient to farmers and fruit growers that the
program was continued until 1962, by which time more than 3 million
Mexicans had followed well-worn routes north to earn dollar wages.
When the bracero program was shut down, the legal flow
ended, but the migration continued illicitly with little government
intervention.
In 1965, Washington overhauled a system of national origin quotas
that had tightly restricted legal immigration from anywhere except
Western Europe. As a result of these measures, a steady flow of
migration from Mexico, both legal and not, began to take shape
in the 1970s and has steadily gained momentum since then. Political
conditions in Cuba and Central America have prompted additional
flows. The numbers are hard to track because over the years many
migrants, Mexicans in particular, have gone back and forth across
the border and because a sizeable portion of the flow does not
operate through legal channels. Nonetheless, the net effect is
clear. In 2000 the U.S. Census Bureau counted 11.5 million more
foreign-born Latinos as part of the resident population than it
had in 1970.
Migration, however, accounts for only part of Latinos' demographic
impact on the United States, and it is neither the largest nor
the most important impact. For the most part, picking up and leaving
home to go to another country is an activity pursued by young
adults. That has been true across history and around the world.
Most migrants to the United States come from countries in the
developing world where big families are the norm. The result is
a fertility rate for foreign-born Hispanics in the United States
that is almost double that of Anglos (3.51 versus 1.84 live births
per woman).
In the first quarter of the 21st century, the United States
will experience the full demographic effect of all the immigration
that took place in the last quarter of the 20th century. The impact
will come not from the migrants but from their children. This
is what demographers refer to as the "second generation" -- people
born in the United States of at least one parent who was born
abroad (the first generation is the immigrant generation, the
people who were born outside the country). Despite record levels
of immigration, the Latino second generation grew faster than
the first in the 1990s, and that trend will continue. So larger
numbers of Latino immigrants will produce larger numbers of second-generation
Latinos.
This wave of demographic change has been gathering momentum
and is now about to make itself felt. Between 2000 and 2020, the
Latino second generation is expected to grow by nearly 120 percent,
adding some 11.7 million people to the population, according to
a series of estimates produced by the Pew Hispanic Center. Over
those two decades, the children of Latino immigrants alone will
account for 78 percent of the increase in the total U.S. school-age
population (ages 5 to 19). If it were not for the Hispanic contribution,
the school-age population would be shrinking in the first two
decades of this century. Even if it were big enough, the baby
boom echo is not old enough to fill the gap with its own children.
The story is much the same when it comes to the labor force.
With the boomers moving into retirement, the non-Hispanic population
of working age will actually shrink slightly between 2010 and
2030. Meanwhile, the number of Latino workers will increase by
55 percent, and the children of immigrants will account for the
lion's share of that growth.
Given these irreversible demographic realities, it should be
evident that the nation has a sizeable stake in ensuring the best
possible outcomes for the children of today's Latino immigrants.
We are not talking about foreigners now but rather native-born
U.S. citizens. In this regard, the policy issues that need attention
are quite different from those normally associated with the Hispanic
population. Whether the immigration system needs reform, whether
immigrant flows are too big or too small, whether the prevalence
of English and traditional American ways are in any way threatened
by the influx, these are all matters worthy of debate. But they
are largely irrelevant when considering the future of the second
generation. These kids, who will be added to the U.S. population
at a rate of more than a half a million a year in the next decade,
will be the products of our institutions, our schools and our
economy. Even if their parents were born somewhere else, these
are our kids now.
Although it has been steadily improving since at least the 1980s,
the high school dropout rate for native-born Latinos is still
considerably higher than for their white peers, 14 percent versus
8 percent in 2000. The educational lag is actually more notable
among those who do finish high school. While Latino high school
graduates enroll in college at the same rate as Anglos, about
half as many end up with bachelor's degrees, 16 percent versus
36 percent. There are many reasons for this. Many more Hispanics
come out of high school poorly prepared for college work than
Anglos. But even after taking preparation into account, Latinos
earn fewer degrees than their Anglo peers. Latino students come
from poorer families and face greater financial obligations. They
are more likely to delay the start of their college studies and
prolong the process as well. Many more start out at community
colleges even when they are prepared for, and aspire to, baccalaureate
studies.
There seems to be no reason to insist that all young people
should graduate from four-year colleges. After all, the U.S. economy
offers plenty of good opportunities for workers with other qualifications,
and it needs a steady supply of individuals for those jobs. But
the education gap between Latinos and the Anglo majority cannot
be waved away so easily for several reasons. Earnings in this
country are increasingly tied to education, and the differential
in rewards is widening between those who have at least a baccalaureate
degree and those who do not. Thus, differences in educational
outcomes translate in our society into significant differences
in income and status. We know from hard experience that social
costs escalate when race becomes equated with class, when a group
of people that is readily distinguishable is largely relegated
to an inferior social and economic status.
As a society, we struggled hard in the second half of the 20th
century to break the linkage between blackness and poverty, between
African-American heritage and outsider status. Much was accomplished
but much also was left undone. It would seem foolhardy now to
double back on our history. We have made some important progress
toward fulfilling America's promise of a society that offers equal
opportunities to all. While there is room for debate on how to
proceed, it does seem indubitable that the goal should be continued
progress. Certainly, it would be foolhardy to relegate a new ethnic
group to outsider status, particularly if that group is growing
faster than any other segment of our population.
Could that happen? Latinos will never suffer the African-American
fate that was shaped by centuries of slavery and segregation.
But nothing so terribly dire has to occur to produce a regrettable
result. If educational outcomes for U.S.-born Latino youth do
not improve, they will be headed disproportionately to the lower
end of the work force, and a sizeable share will be relegated
to the limited horizons available to someone with less than a
high school education. Changing those outcomes presents distinct
but not insurmountable challenges.
For the most part, the Latino second generation is coming into
U.S. schools from households where the adults have no firsthand
familiarity with the U.S. education system, have limited knowledge
of English and have low levels of education themselves -- more
than half of Latino immigrants lack a high school education. Moreover,
they are coming into our schools at a time when the public education
system is in the process of implementing the sweeping reforms
mandated by Congress in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
This is not, however, a challenge that awaits some great intellectual
breakthrough, like discovering a vaccine for the AIDS virus. Educators
can and do debate the best ways to handle the children of immigrants,
but there is no doubt that it can be done, that it can be done
well, and that there are a number of good models out there. It
is a matter of public will and a concerted effort by Latino parents,
their children, the schools, political leaders and taxpayers.
This can be approached entirely as a question of collective self-interest.
Given the size of the Latino second generation and the crucial
role it will play in the nation's future, no altruism is necessary
to realize there are benefits in ensuring these kids become the
best workers, citizens and parents they can be.
They are here. They are not going away. They are our children
now.
Roberto Suro is director of the Pew Hispanic Center. He has
worked as a reporter for the Washington Post and as a
foreign correspondent for Time magazine and The
New York Times.
(October 2004)
