tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post4594854772416488322..comments2024-03-28T12:16:12.797-07:00Comments on Inductivist: Ron Guhnamehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06421460508647618774noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-36812367510902068422008-10-11T05:23:00.000-07:002008-10-11T05:23:00.000-07:00The population of Italian born Americans is extrem...The population of Italian born Americans is extremely old, average age is probably in the high 70's.<BR/><BR/>You can see this if you look at "language spoken at home" in Census data, the number of native Italian (and German, French, and Yiddish) speakers is dropping very quickly as the last of the early 20th century european immigrants die off.<BR/><BR/>It is also heavily female, since women outlive men.<BR/><BR/>In summary, most Italian immigrants in the USA are women born 1915-1935. Of course average education will be very low in such a group, few native females born those years went to college either. The small number of recent immigrants from rich Western European countries is extremely educated, but they are a demographic drop in the bucket.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-82905686063188616772008-10-05T20:12:00.000-07:002008-10-05T20:12:00.000-07:00Possible explanation: Italians stopped emigrating,...<I>Possible explanation: Italians stopped emigrating, while Poland is still a big people-exporting country.</I><BR/><BR/>As I explained in an e-mail to Ron, this issue intrigues me as I'm partly of Italian descent. On further consideration, my earlier comment, about the advanced age of many Italian immigrants, probably isn't true. European immigration largely dried up in the 1920's and even people who came as children then are mostly gone today. Similarly, not many of the post-WWII Italian war brides (see <I>The Bridges of Madison County</I>) are still around.<BR/><BR/>Growing up in the 1970's in a Connecticut city that long has had a big Italian-American population, I actually went to school with a handful of recent Italian immigrants. Apparently, there was a trickle of immigration in the 1960's and 1970's, sort of a last gasp. I wouldn't imagine that the numbers would be sufficient to cause the strange GSS results even if most of these immigrants weren't college material, however.<BR/><BR/>It still remains a bit of a mystery why Italian immigrants score so poorly on the attended-college scale.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-63655050182675709532008-10-05T18:27:00.000-07:002008-10-05T18:27:00.000-07:00Possible explanation: Italians stopped emigrating...Possible explanation: Italians stopped emigrating, while Poland is still a big people-exporting country.<BR/><BR/>Re "England" and France: I'd bet that a huge percentage of those who immigrate to the US are not ethnic English or French and really don't have anything like the attachment to those counties that Italians tend to have toward Italy. <BR/>Of course England is really not a place that anyone seems to have much of an attachment to anymore.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26188478.post-51386534756358037222008-10-05T07:38:00.000-07:002008-10-05T07:38:00.000-07:00Switching focus a bit, I would have said that the ...Switching focus a bit, I would have said that the very low college numbers for Italian immigrants are attributable to the fact that many of them are elderly people who came to America as children in the last pre-WWII surge of European immigration, and grew up in America when going to college wasn't so popular. But the same would likely be true for the other European groups on the list, except perhaps the Polish, and these groups have much higher college numbers. I'm at a loss to explain the Italians.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com