Are Mexican immigrants less tidy than others?

The debate continues on Twitter about whether Hispanic immigrants tend to litter more.

On a related issue, General Social Survey interviewers rated the homes of respondents in terms of cleanliness from 'very clean' (1) to 'dirty' (5).  I calculated the means for those born in the US and those who were not (sample size = 7,062). The mean for native-borns is 1.96, the mean for immigrants is 1.86, so immigrants are not messier, they're cleaner.

What if we look by ethnic group and immigrant status? Let's limit the analysis to groups with at least 100 respondents. I'll put immigrant means in parentheses.

Mean unclean house score

Blacks 2.17  (2.02)
Mexican  2.00 (2.05)
Irish  1.98 (1.60)
Scottish  1.95 (1.89)
German  1.88 (1.68)
English/Welsh  1.84 (1.68)
Polish  1.84 (1.55)
Italian  1.77 (1.89)

Immigrants tend to be cleaner than native-borns. Mexican and Italian immigrants are the exceptions with slightly higher means than their American-born counterparts. On the question of Mexican immigrants, their score is only surpassed by blacks.

UPDATE: As I indicated, the debate actually focuses on Hispanics, not just Mexicans. The mean for all Hispanic immigrants is 1.90. For native-born Latinos, it's 2.03--a mean that is very close to that of Mex-Ams, and is only surpassed by blacks.

Data: A negative Flynn Effect among Mexican Americans

About a decade ago, I documented an impressive rise in the mean IQ of Mexican-Americans born in the US.  Using GSS data, what is the trend in this decade?  Look at the graph (N = 609):

The mean was only 85.0 in the 1970s and 84.7 in the 1980s, but it rose all the way to 94.7 by the 2000s.  From this trend, one might get the hope that Mex-Ams might someday converge with the white average of 100.

But it was not to be. The trend has reversed in this decade, and the mean has fallen back down to 91.5.

I don't know how we explain these trends. Dysgenic trends would manifest themselves slowly.  We have seen a recent downward turn among several European populations.

The samples sizes for each decade are not large (this decade included 217 people) so some of the trend might be noise.

Assuming the 91.5 average is more or less correct, this is a bad sign for America.  A person with an IQ in the low 90s will be unable to do many of the jobs that we need done.  Such a population will have more social problems and little high-level achievement.

UPDATE:  I looked at all Americans born in the US (N = 25,116) and found a seven-tenths of a point drop in IQ from the last decade to this one.

Race and belief in evolution

When people cite stats that seem to show that Americans are dumb, I suspect that many people get a mental image of a redneck.  I discussed in an earlier post that some people think Republicans are dumb even though the data contradicts this. In all probability, white liberals are comparing themselves with white hicks and conveniently forgetting that a big chunk of their party is made up of low IQ blacks and Latinos.  I'm willing to bet that with controversial attitudes that suggest intelligence or the lack of it, non-Asian minorities often have the worst numbers. Let's try belief in evolution as a first try.

General Social Survey respondents were asked in 2012, "According to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. Is that true or false?" Here are the answers for white, blacks and people of Mexican ancestry:

Percent answering false (N = 390)

Black  33.3
Mexican  27.3
White  18.4

Blacks are almost twice as likely as whites to believe we did not develop from earlier species. People of Mexican descent reject science here at 1 1/2 times the rate of whites.

By the way, these percentages are lower than the--what--40 percent number cited as the percent of Americans who reject evolution.

Trends in Catholic religiosity

In his new book Suicide of a Superpower, Pat Buchanan claims that since Vatican II, American Catholics have gotten less religious and more culturally liberal. The graph (GSS data, sample size = 13,432) shows that he's right. Attending more than weekly (gray) or weekly (pink) is down. The following are up: 2-3 times a month (magenta), once a month (gold), once a year (green), and never (red).

This graph shows that Catholics are slightly more approving of abortion for any reason than they were in the 1970s.

Trends for Mexican Americans (data not shown) are more conservative. Attendance has basically held steady over the past four decades, and support for abortion on demand has actually dropped from 38 to 23 percent. My guess is that the constant infusion of new immigrants from Mexico keeps Catholic Mex-Ams religious and comparatively conservative on abortion.   

Mex-Am fertility is now driving their growth

Here's a good analysis by Pew which shows that even if the U.S. closed its border today, we would still see amazing growth in the Mexican-American population since their age structure is so young, and since they have so many babies--especially immigrant parents. (They don't mention shorter generations, but that is part of the story as well). (Just last night, I took my wife to the ER for a kidney stone and sat next to a Mex-Am mom with six kids. Don't tell me a little Hispanic women has no power.)

The authors project that, based on current trends, Hispanics will be 29 percent of the total population by mid-century. That is more than double the size of any other ethnic group. Add blacks and Jews, and you're--what--about 45 percent of the country. That means that conservatives will have to get the vote of just about every non-Jewish white person to win elections. Given the white proclivity for self-destruction, good luck with that.

Interest in Mex-Ams

Some readers, I'm sure, think I have some odd interest in Mexican Americans. Well, it's not odd--it's simple math. New from Pew:

31.8 million people is roughly TEN million more people than all Americans who say they are of English ancestry. TEN million more!! (2006-2008 American Community Sample)

Peruvians are fascinating people, but who cares?

Mexican-American IQ

In a previous post, I used GSS vocabulary data to show a 10 point improvement in IQ among Mexican-Americans over the past four decades.  An increase from 85 and 95 is striking, but I didn't take the time to see if the change is statistically significant.

Setting the white IQ at 100, here are the means by decade for people born in America who are of Mexican descent. Sample sizes are shown in parentheses:

Mean IQ

Seventies 85.4 (12)
Eighties 85.6 (106)
Nineties 91.7* (140)
Two-Thousands 94.1* (182)

*significantly higher than the 80s mean

The means for the Nineties and the Two-Thousands are significantly higher than the Eighties' mean but do not differ significantly from each other. The estimate for the past decade is a bit lower than in my last analysis; this is due to the addition of 2008 data. (The mean for 2010 is 91.6, n = 46.)

A mean in the low nineties is not inconsistent with published studies. The low mean of 85 observed in the 1970s and 80s might be due to a lower average level of education. The average respondent in a GSS survey is in his mid-40s which means that if he participated in a survey in the 70s or 80s, he would have gone to school in the 1930s and 40s.  

Education, religion, and Mex-Am assimilation

Ethnic and racial diversification is hurting the long-term interests of the United States, and it needs to stop. But we now have 50 million Hispanics in the country, and many of those folks need to be assimilated (if it can be done). What might help bring them into the mainstream? An obvious answer is to return to the model used for immigrants a century ago: unyielding pressure on people to shed the folkways of the Old Country, to embrace an American identity, and to become self-reliant; or to return home. The push by multiculturalists to Balkanize the country must be discredited and abandoned.

Let's look at four markers of assimilation from a conservative perspective: income, job prestige, law abidingness, and a conservative political orientation. I regressed measures of each of these onto three predictors: IQ, education, and church attendance. My interest is to see if religion and/or education help in the process of assmiliation.  All slopes are standardized OLS coefficients except for the model of ever being arrest which employs logistic regression. All the samples are people of Mexican descent except for the arrest model where all Hispanics are included (in order to maximize sample size). I limited the analysis to those born in the U.S. since the vocabulary-based measure of IQ is not valid for Mexcian immigrants.

Income (sample size = 335)
IQ .11*
Education .32*
Church attendance .07

Job prestige (sample = 292)
IQ .09*
Education .47*
Church attendance .00

Ever arrested (sample = 163)
IQ -.03
Education .04
Church attendance -.18*

Conservatism (sample size = 326)
IQ -.01
Education -.01
Church attendance .18*

I included IQ to control its influence. Education strongly predicts greater income and job prestige, net of IQ's effect. By contrast, it is unrelated to being arrested or conservative (or liberal, for that matter). Church attendance exerts no influence on income or job prestige, but it does predict a lower risk of arrest and greater conservatism for Mexican Americans.

Education and religion (especially conservative Protestantism, I suspect) might help America with the assimilation challenges it faces. Elites who advocate multiculturalism and irreligion are working against the long-term interests of the country.

The monster ethnic group

According to the 2010 Census, Hispanics in America have now surpassed 50 million. That is 16.1 percent of the total population. I've listed the 2000-2008 GSS percentages for large ethnic groups (sample size = 11,840) :

Percent of total U.S. population

Hispanic 16.1 (2010 Census)
German 15.1
Black 14.3
Irish 12.3
English/Welsh 11.4
Italian 5.5
American only 3.0

Hispanics are now the largest group. Demographically speaking, America is more Hispanic than it is German, black, Irish, English, etc. On the other hand, "Hispanic" is a contrived category. If we focus on Mexican Americans only-- a real ethnic group--they are two-thirds of Hispanics which would put them currently at 10.6 percent of the U.S. population. That is larger than any other ethnic group except for Germans. And as big as they are, Germans do not stick out in American society; Mexicans do.

Demographers project that Hispanics will be one-third of the population by 2050. (That will only happen if we let it.) Considered as an ethnic group, they will dwarf every other ethnicity. They might become the monster ethnic group, but then again, their growing presence, along with that of other non-white immigrant groups, might forge whites into a real, monster ethnic group.

Is going to church a low-status or high-status activity?

In the last post, there was some discussion about the relationship between race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), and church attendance. Among some in the HBD community, involvement in church seems to be a low-status activity.

My first step was to divide General Social Survey respondents into low-, middle-, and high-status groups based on a measure of job prestige (one third of the sample in each group). Then I calculated mean church attendance for the years 2000 through 2008 for each SES category for whites, blacks, and Mexican Americans separately.  

Mean church attendance score by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status

Whites
Low 3.15
Middle 3.49
High 3.73

Blacks
Low 4.27
Middle 4.47
High 4.90

Mex-Ams
Low 3.81
Middle 3.73
High 3.79

As HBD-ers know, whites are the least churchgoing, and blacks are the most. If you assign a ranking to races and are comparing them, religiosity seems low-status.

But the plot thickens. Of all groups, the least religious category is low-status whites. Among whites, religiosity increases with SES. This is also the case with blacks. By contrast, low-status Mex-Ams go to church as often as their high-status counterparts.  So, for blacks and whites, if you are comparing yourself to other members of your race, religiosity is a high-status activity.

I should note that part of what is going on here is that young folks are both less religious and have less prestigious jobs.

Bet the other way

Vicente Fox was recently asked in an interview by the New York Times, "What do you think Mexicans have contributed to American culture?  His answer:

While we can be confident that Fox wants to put the best spin he can on Mexican contributions to the country, we can assume that he knows what he is talking about on this subject. 

"Oh, starting with Mexican food! The jalapeños and the tacos and the rest. I think they have contributed family values. And then we have our culture. When you were killing Indian Apaches there, we had built Mayan cities, the pyramids, Mexico City."

A well-informed Mexican lets us know that Mexican Americans have given us good food and family values. Perhaps Mexico has benefited from its Aztec past, but I don't see how that is connected to improving America. And the "family values" cliche is just a neocon talking point. American families are not not stronger because of some Mexican influence.

So, based on Fox himself, Mexicans, compared to other American groups, have not contributed much to the country. Don't get me wrong--every American who lives a decent life is contributing to the well-being of the country, but "cultural contribution" is a different question.

General Social Survey respondents were asked, "Since the beginning of our country, people of many different races, nationalities, and religions have come here and settled. As I name some of these groups please tell me if the group has made: 1) one of the most important positive contributions to this country, 2) an important contribution, 3) some contribution, or 4) little positive contribution to this community." 

Respondents were asked about many groups, and Mexican Americans were on the list.  I identified factors predicting that a person thinks Mexicans have done a lot by estimating a model with ordinary least squares regression. If a factor, for example sex, turned out to be unrelated to one's attitude, I removed it from the model. Here's the final list:

Thinking Mexicans have contributed a lot (OLS regression coefficients--standardized, N = 1,033)

Age -.15
Education .14
Job prestige .10
Church attendance -.05
Political conservatism -.08

The profile of someone who gives Mexicans a lot of credit looks like this: young, educated, prestigious job, not religious, and liberal.  Objectively, this immigrant group has not contributed a lot compared to others--even Fox doesn't make a contrary case--but SWPLs, supposedly our best and brightest, are most likely to view Mexicans as playing a key role. If a SWPL feels strongly about something, the smart move is to bet the other way.

Ugly racism?

From David Frum's CNN piece:

Many Americans carry in their minds a family memory of upward mobility, from great-grandpa stepping off the boat at Ellis Island to a present generation of professionals and technology workers. This story no longer holds true for the largest single U.S. immigrant group, Mexican-Americans. 

Stephen Trejo and Jeffrey Groger studied the intergenerational progress of Mexican-American immigrants in their scholarly work, "Falling Behind or Moving Up?"

They discovered that third-generation Mexican-Americans were no more likely to finish high school than second-generation Mexican-Americans. Fourth-generation Mexican-Americans did no better than third.

If these results continue to hold, the low skills of yesterday's illegal immigrant will negatively shape the U.S. work force into the 22nd century.

Long story short: illegal Mexicans are in the process of damaging the U.S. economy for the next 100 years plus.

Aren't those the words of an ugly racist, or at least an unpatriotic conservative?

Educational levels among Mexican Americans

One indicator of an immigrant group's ability to assimilate is the speed with which they depart from other poor groups and become as educated as the mainstream. Eastern European Jews, who came to America with nothing, reached average levels of education within a generation, and quickly surpassed by leaps and bounds the national average. 

Mexicans were in the American Southwest before American settlers arrived, but most Mexicans have arrived here in the past few decades. Using General Social Survey data, I calculated the mean years of school completed for Mexican Americans born in the United States and compared them with black Americans.

I merged the 70s and 80s to get a sufficiently large sample. During that period, Mex-Ams were more than one year below the black mean. They made gains in the 90s, but dropped back in the past decade. In four decades, they have failed to reach the black level of education.

Race and altruism

As a follow-up to the last post, I used GSS data to investigate racial differences in altruism. The only significant differences are that Mexican Americans are more likely to give money to a needy neighbor, and both Mex-Ams and blacks are more likely to loan money to friends, family, etc. This can be explained in terms of greater opportunities to help: both groups have more friends, relatives, and neighbors who are in need. The overall picture here seems to be no differences, or whites slightly lower.

In the first three years of life, Hispanics fall behind in cognitive skills

Heather McDonald nails it on education and Hispanic immigration:

A forthcoming study on Hispanic children’s cognitive skills underlines the challenges the country faces in aspiring to close the achievement gap between these children and their white and Asian counterparts. Hispanic “children fall behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach grade school, and the gap tends to widen as they get older,” reports the New York Times. “The drop-off in the cognitive scores of Hispanic toddlers, especially those from Mexican backgrounds, was steeper than for other [low-income] groups and could not be explained by economic status alone. . . . From 24 to 36 months, the Hispanic children fell about six months behind their white peers on measures like word comprehension, more complex speech and working with their mothers on simple tasks.” ...

But the more interesting implications of the study and others like it are for immigration policy. Our de facto immigration policy is currently weighted to a population that appears to require massive additional government education spending — even before formal schooling begins — to be made academically competitive. This choice would not seem to be economically rational, at least so long as we aspire to universal college-going. If the country remains committed to sending a far greater number of students to college, as even many conservatives continue to be, we better get ourselves a different mix of immigrants if we don’t want to bankrupt our education budgets. Alternatively, if the open-borders lobby prevails and Latin American migration continues to dominate our immigration flows, it’s time to acknowledge that many students never will be college material, nor do they need to be to lead productive, fulfilling lives.

Among Mex-Ams, is there a relationship between race and education?

I get very few Mexican American students who are Amerindian looking.  Is that a reality or is it just me?

I looked at GSS data for Mexican Americans from this decade between the ages of 30 and 49 (N = 382). The mean years of education for those who give "other" as their race is 10.93. For self-described white Mex-Ams, it's 11.78.  The difference disappears, however, if I limit the analysis to those born in the U.S. The racial gap is created by less educated, non-white immigrants.

I checked, and there is no racial gap in mean IQ (WORDSUM) for the two groups if we limit the sample to American-born people of Mexican descent.

Notice how educational levels stink for both the white and non-white groups. The average Mex-Am, white or brown, can't seem to finish high school.

Mex-Am incomes are rising but still way behind: One way to assess an immigrant group's progress in terms of assimilation is to look at trends in income. Readers are aware that I am most concerned about Mexican immigrant since the group is large, lacking in human capital, and concentrated in one region--the Southwest. I'm currently reading Mexicano Political Experience in Occupied Aztlan by UC Riverside professor Armando Navarro. It looks like another case of a white guy trying to prove he's not by adopting radical, idiotic positions. I've lived in the Southwest before but was under the mistaken belief that it belonged to the United States. These brown nationalist types have their ideology all worked out--the book is around 700 pages long--but the question is, will Mexican Americans have enough success in America to reject this kind of nonsense.

Using GSS data, let's look at mean family income in 1986 dollars across four decades. The sample doesn't capture any Warren Buffets, so I think we're okay using means:


Mean family income for Mexican Americans in 1986 dollars (N = 1,325)

Seventies 20,331
Eighties 19,512
Nineties 25,365
This decade 24,874

You might be thinking that the increase is due to larger households, but those have shrunk not grown for Mexican Americans over the past four decades. I see progress here, but let's compare these numbers to other immigrant groups:


Mean family income in 1986 dollars

Chinese Americans (N = 162)
Seventies 39,894
Eighties 41,772
Nineties 41,095
This decade 61,976

Filipino Americans (N = 171)
Seventies 31,909
Eighties 33,026
Nineties 32,300
This decade 42,593

Indian Americans (N = 145)
Seventies 38,105
Eighties 28,473
Nineties 39,072
This decade 45,661

So the good news is that Mex-Ams are improving, but the bad news is that they are lagging significantly behind other groups. The gap is not closing with other immigrants or whites (data not shown), and that's a problem.

Dramatic declines in whiteness among Mexican Americans

American-born Mex-Ams N = 843

Mexican immigrants, N = 466


You can see in the two GSS graphs that the percent of Mexican Americans who say they are white has fallen precipitously over the past four decades. This is true of those born here and for immigrants. In the 70s, 100% of respondents said they were white; by this decade, only 43% of U.S.-born and a third of Mexican immigrants did.

Steve Sailer has written about how recent immigrants from Mexico are more Amerindian and less white. I'm sure this explains much of what we see in these graphs. But since Mexicans have large amounts of both European and Native American ancestry, I wonder how much of the change in racial identity we see is cultural.

Many of the students I see every day could easily describe themselves as white or "other" depending on their preference. All the Mex-Ams I knew in the seventies when I was a kid looked like Mexicans to me, but they saw themselves as white racially. If my suspicion is correct that more Mex-Ams are now rejecting a white identity, that is BAD news for people like me who worry about assimilation. This is on top of Steve's point about the changing biological composition of Mexican Americans.

Mexican Americans and social conservatism: Let me follow-up the last analysis by linking to a recent post by Razib. Using General Social Survey data, he shows that, while blacks are less in favor of gay marriage than whites, Mexican Americans are not.

Social conservatives who think we can win future battles by importing loads of Mexican immigrants are wrong. (I'll concede that it's not an argument I see many social conservatives making). Mexicans who come to this country tend to absorb liberal social values. I showed in a previous analysis that Mexican immigrants are a somewhat less in favor of abortion than whites, but the gap basically disappears within a generation. As Steve Sailer has written, behaviorally they assimilate more toward the black mean than the white one, and the white mean ain't so hot. Anyone who claims that this group is giving America a traditionalist shot in the arm is ignorant of the facts. Unless he means treating one's wife like crap.

Whites are more neighborly than NAMs

It's funny how accusations of racism always make me want to look at statistics. After the Church Ladies over at TPM predictably called Steve Sailer a racist--and thus conveniently passed over his insights--I felt like looking at racial stats. I'll grow tired of posting hatefacts the day the hysteria ceases. When hell freezes over, in other words.

The General Social Survey asked 2,069 respondents how often they looked after a person's plant or a pet in the past year. The graph shows that whites help out much more often. Sixty-six percent of blacks and 54 percent of "others" never did it, compared to only 36 percent of whites. Fifty-nine percent of Mex-Ams never did it (graph not shown).

Of course, the Big Bad White Man made them unneighborly.


Variables: RACE, ETHNIC, HELPAWAY