Hispanic teens are worse (at least with some behaviors) than blacks, Part II: I showed in an earlier analysis that, compared to blacks, Mexican-American teens have higher levels of truancy, marijuana and cocaine use, weapons carrying, bullying, and frequent fighting. I found a similar pattern looking at another national survey--Monitoring the Future. The sample is 3,180 high school seniors:


Percent who received traffic ticket after drinking--past year
Black 4.5
Hispanic 6.5

Percent who received traffic ticket after smoking marijuana--past year
Black 3.7
Hispanic 4.6

Skipped a whole day of school in past month
Black 30.6
Hispanic 35.6

Folks who claim that mass Mexican-American immigration improves our quality of life must never leave their Manhattan penthouses.

Myself, I got bored at Wal-Mart today while waiting for my car's oil to get changed. So I went to the huge magazine and book rack, and could not find one decent magazine to read. Roughly two-thirds of the customers are Latinos, and there was not a single news or political magazine except for one lonely Time review of 2007. There was one book on Che in Spanish, and I studied the language in college, but it is way too much of an effort. In fact, most of the books were in Spanish, and most of the others were self-help books, both religious and psychological. Yuck.

Since there was not a damn thing to read, I decided to count the ratio of Hispanic groups talking Spanish versus those speaking English that passed by. Thirty-four Spanish, eight English. Roughly 4 to 1. Mercifully, I was paged, I retrieved my car, flipped on the radio, and found an acceptable station out of the five that were in English. Don't imagine for a second that I would have found Placido Domingo if I had given the Spanish language stations a chance. I'm sure you wouldn't think that either unless you live in one of those penthouses.