Sunday, March 27, 2011

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.

4 comments:

  1. I am coming to think there is no such thing as 'education' - it is, like 'immigration' a term which begs all the important questions - (such as how much, and of what type, and what kind of people are we talking about?).

    'Education' and 'Immigration' beg all the main questions in favour of leftism/ progressivism.

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  2. Anonymous9:28 PM

    Someone on the Internet said he doesn't want people to assimilate so we know who to kick out when the war comes.

    You advocate Protestantism. Won't they be using artificial birth control? Isn't that terrible? Won't they go to hell? lol That's all the Popes care about.

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  3. "Someone on the Internet said he doesn't want people to assimilate so we know who to kick out when the war comes."

    Half-Mexicans and quarter-Mexicans might fight on our side if they're well assimilated. Personally I think we should just build a giant wall and assimilate the ones who are here now. Worked in the Twenties. And encourage mobility. I don't think Mexicans in Chicago are interested in seceding.

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  4. Anonymous7:51 AM

    I prefer a long hard double dip recession or even an L-shaped recession to get them to leave and undermine the whole system of government entitlements. I would rather be poorer now and have them leave. Poor Americans can't leave. So, they can't take the low level jobs when the unemployment runs out.

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