OP-ED: “The Great Assimilation Machine,” by Linda Chavez, Wall Street Journal, 5 June 2007, p. A23.
The killer stat: “96% of third-generation Mexican Americans prefer to speak English at home.”
So to the extent we're bilingual, it's simply a processing function that sequentially solves itself--cohort by cohort.
Another: one out of four Hispanic immigrants intermarry with whites, but one out of three U.S.-born Hispanics do the same, suggesting an absorption trend.
Chavez ends by noting that the oft-cited prediction about Hispanics making up one-third of the U.S. population by 2050 ignores the profound trend, because it really speaks to one-third of Americans having a partial Hispanic heritage--not all of them being “pure” Hispanics (much less isolated and ghettoized).
The reality is that:
… increasing numbers of these so-called Hispanics will have only one grandparent or great-grandparent of Hispanic heritage. At which point Hispanic ethnicity will mean little more than German, Italian or Irish ethnicity does today.”
That, my friends, is an observation--based on decades and decades of American history--that’s worth remembering. You string together bits like that and you’ve got a systematic understanding of the future, one in which “black swans” possess no more capacity to disturb your thinking than the obvious “shocks” associated with personal aging (which really stun me!).
Or you can wander around being shocked and awed all the time, feeding on the fear mongering that passes for strategic thought.
Who are we? Come on! We’re the same package we’ve always been. We just alter the ingredients over time.
Let Europe freak out, but let’s remember how we got here and how we’ll get there.
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