The Inductivist admits that culture matters

A pure naturist would claim that the culture of East Asians would not change after moving to America. Let's test this with one question from the General Social Survey that should differentiate Asians and whites: whether a not a child should learn to think for himself. Answers ranged from "most important for a child" (5) to least important (1).

Research has found that Westerners value independent-mindedness, while the East emphasizes fitting in. Here are the means for 1) American whites (n = 19,602), 2) Chinese (n = 102) and Japanese immigrants (n = 31), and 3) American-born Chinese ( n = 25) and Japanese (n = 26).

Mean score--valuing thinking for yourself

Native-born whites  4.00

American-born Japanese   4.00

American-born Chinese   3.72

Japanese immigrants   3.45

Chinese immigrants   3.18

Asians with individualist attitudes might choose to move to America, so the most relevant comparison is between immigrants and American-born Asians. The mean for Japanese immigrants is close to a half of a standard deviation less individualist than whites, but the American-borns do not differ from whites. 

Chinese immigrants are less individualist than Japanese immigrants, and while they do assimilate the same distance as the Japanese (roughly 1/2 sd), there remains a small difference between American-born Chinese and white Americans. 

So, the GSS data suggests that while genes might play a small role in the case of the Chinese, culture seems more important here. It might be the case that culture can influence attitudes quite a bit, but might have less impact on behavior (e.g., time studying) or abilities (e.g., IQ). 

UPDATE: I thought of a way that the Asian American embrace of independent-mindedness could be genetic: Asians might be predisposed to conform to whatever the mainstream culture is even if it's individualistic! 

Are Muslims in America assimilating or not?

Since today is the anniversary of 9/11, let's take a moment to see how well Muslims are assimilating in American society.  The General Social Survey (GSS) asked respondents, "Consider a person who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community claiming that Blacks are inferior, should he be allowed to speak, or not?"

In my view, a core value of the American system is free speech.  If you don't believe in allowing people to state controversial opinions in public, you're not much of an American.

Here are the percentages in favor of free speech by religion.  Many American Muslims are blacks--I excluded them since we would expect many of them to oppose free speech for people with messages that make blacks look bad:

Of all religions, Muslims are the least supportive of free speech.

Have attitudes among Muslims improved or worsened over time?  I divided the data into two periods: 1) pre-2010 and 2) this decade:

Unfortunately, support for allowing someone with controversial racial views to speak in public has fallen among Muslims in this decade from 50.0% to 31.8%.  Not good.

Non-whites are clannish because they are non-whites, not because they are outnumbered

Using General Social Survey day, I've shown before that non-white Americans are much more ethnocentric or clannish than whites.

Now this could be due to whites, especially those with ancestors from northwestern Europe, being more universalistic than other groups, or it could be due to the self-consciousness that comes from being in a very small group. You feel surrounded, so you stick together. This would mean that tiny whites groups would be clannish, too. Are Greek Americans, for example, somewhat clannish because they are a tiny slice of America, or because they are naturally ethnocentric?

I looked at this by creating a variable for ethnic group size. The group was scored 1, 2, or 3 depending on whether it was small, medium, or large.  English, Italians, and Finns, respectively, serve as examples.

Next, I regressed how important your ethnic group is to you on to variables I thought might be related to clannishness.  Here I show the standardized OLS coefficients (sample size = 1,959):

Importance of ethnic group to you

Age   .10***
Male   .00
Non-white  .32***
Immigrant   .06*
City size  .02   
Education   -.03
Ethnic group size  .03

The variables that significantly predict clannishness from strongest to weakest are: non-white, being older, and being an immigrant. The other variables, including ethnic group size, don't matter.

(For age, perhaps people tend to "come home" as they get older, similar to what you see with religious involvement.)

So non-whites are not clannish because they're small and thus feel they need to stick together; rather, they are ethnocentric because that's who they are. Whites tend to be universalistic because that's who they are.

This has implications for assimilation. Evidently, non-whites will remain clannish even after being here for generations, as blacks and Native Americans have done. (I should mention that there is variation: according to GSS data, Japanese Americans are not ethnocentric, while Orthodox Jews are.)

If you want immigrants to become true blue Americans with no other loyalties, invite whites to move here.

Want Americans to identify as Americans? Being white helps

The US will function more effectively if its inhabitants define themselves as one people, as Americans.

The General Social Survey asked 1,450 participants: "When you think of social and political issues, do you think of yourself mainly as a member of a particular ethnic, racial, or nationality group or do you think of yourself mainly as just an American?"

Here are the percentages by race of immigrants who responded, "Just an American."

Percent of immigrants who say they are just Americans

Whites  76.8

Blacks  36.4

Other Non-Whites  57.1

Even when all people compared are born in other countries, whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to say their identity is American. While not as severe as blacks, a majority of other non-whites also do not feel they are simply American. 

What happens when people are born here?

Percent of people born in US who say they are just Americans

Whites  96.0

Blacks  68.3

Other non-whites  74.2

Being born here makes almost all whites define themselves as Americans, and while native-born non-whites feel more American than non-white immigrants, there is still a large segment that has ethnic loyalties. 

It looks like the "melting pot" idea works best for whites. White immigrants moved here and sooner or later melted into Americans. This doesn't seem to be working so well for non-whites. Many black families have been here for centuries, and Natives have been her for millennia, but the melt for them is still far from complete. 

A similar dynamic seems to be happening to recent non-white immigrants. Some melting happens, but not like it has been for whites. 

Is this difference due to the fact that immigrants were expected to assimilate when most whites emigrated? And now that most immigrants are non-white, US elites encourage people to hold on to their ethnic identity? Maybe, but recent white immigrants don't seem follow the liberal desire for them to hold on to their roots.

Maybe non-whites are simply more clannish than whites. 

Liberals would say it's due to discrimination, but 95% of Americans of Irish descent identify as American only, and they weren't received with a big wet kiss. America has gotten more and more welcoming, yet it's the New Immigrants who are more reluctant to let the ethnic loyalties go.       

Whatever the case, Americans are on a course to be less and less on the same page about where to take the country. And that's putting it nicely.    

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.

Few Hispanic dropouts earn their GED

From Pew:

Just one-in-ten Hispanic high school dropouts has a General Educational Development (GED) credential, widely regarded as the best "second chance" pathway to college, vocational training and military service for adults who have not graduated from high school. By contrast, two-in-ten black high school dropouts and three-in-ten white high school dropouts have a GED, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of newly available educational attainment data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey.

The relatively low level of GED credentialing among Hispanic high school dropouts is especially notable because Hispanics have a much higher high school dropout rate than do blacks or whites. Some 41% of Hispanics ages 20 and older in the United States do not have a regular high school diploma, versus 23% of comparably aged blacks and 14% of whites.

"This is so tasty, we'd like an extra helping!"

In the journal Intelligence, Peter Hartmann and colleagues analyzed two American data sets and and found that: 1) there is a 0.8 standard deviation difference (that means large) between whites (W) and Hispanics (H) in general intelligence (g); and 2) correlations between g loadings and H-W differences for each subtest demonstrate that much of the difference in IQ is due to differences in g. According to Arthur Jensen's default hypothesis, group differences are assumed to be caused by the same factors as within-group differences, and we know individual variation in g is at least 50 percent heritable. 

Bottom line: the white-Hispanic intelligence gap is 80 percent as wide as the black-white gap (which is huge), and like the black-white gap, it ain't goin' anywhere quick. 

I get misty-eyed at the wisdom of our leaders. Upon seeing all the 1960s poverty and social turmoil in the black ghetto, they said to themselves, "This is so tasty, we'd like an extra helping!" 

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.

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.

Religiosity and assimilation: Razib, over that Gene Expression II, shows that Muslims are better integrated in America than England or France because there is a better fit here in terms of religiosity. Muslims tend to be religious, and so do other Americans.

I wanted to see if there was a general pattern of religiosity and assimilation. The General Social Survey asked 202 immigrants how often they attend religious services, and how proud they are of America's history. It's high time I used the proper statistic, so I calculated gamma, which turned out to be .16. So there is a positive association, albeit a small one. On average, religious immigrants have a better attitude about America.

I think I just found an area where Mexican immmigrants look good, or at least seem like a good match with American culture. They are more religious than immigrants in general, more religious than American-born people of Mexican ancestry, and they attend church more often than native-born Americans in general. They are as likely as other immigrants to be proud of America's history, and Mex-Ams born in this country are more likely than the typical American to be proud of the country's past. (Results are not shown 'cuz I got no damn time!)

Do minorities feel that they have more in common with each other or with whites? The question of assimilation is one of the concerns of this blog. The General Social Survey asked more than 1,200 Americans with whom they had the most in common (other than their own group): whites, Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, all equally, or nothing in common with any of them. Here are the percentages (those who broke the rules and indicated their own group are not listed):


Percent distribution

Blacks
Whites 31.2
Equal in common with all groups 17.4
Hispanics 16.5
Nothing in common 8.3
Jews 3.7
Asians 3.7

Mexicans
Whites 44.4
Blacks 22.2
Asians 4.4
Equal in common with all groups 2.2
Jews 0.0
Nothing in common 0.0

Jews
Whites 25.7
Equal in common with all groups 22.2
Blacks 14.3
Asians 8.6
Nothing in common 5.7
Hispanics 0.0

Update: Whites
Equal in common with all groups 17.9
Jews 16.8
Blacks 16.5
Hispanics 14.2
Asians 8.5
Nothing in common 7.5


First, we can see that the largest percentage in all three groups say they are most like whites. This suggests that more minorities see themselves as more connected to the mainstream than to other minorities. Look, for example, at how no Hispanics or Jews think they have a lot in common. Some blacks and Hispanics do think they have the most in common: this is probably due to the fact that they are both poor minority groups.

And look at these PC robots who can't even admit that some groups are more like them than others.

Jews are interesting because one might predict that most of them would answer white since almost all of them self-identify as white, but more blacks and Mexicans than Jews think they have a lot in common with whites! A noticeable number of Jews feel they are very much like blacks: presumably, these folks are thinking of histories of abuse by white Christians.

In America, who is white? The General Social Survey has asked people over the years where their ancestors came from, and they routinely ask respondents what race do they consider themselves to be--white, black, or other. You might expect that no Japanese, East Indian, or American Indian would answer anything but "other", but you'd be wrong. Look at how individuals from different groups see themselves racially:


Percent who see themselves as a particular race

Chinese
White 7.5
Black 3.2
Other 89.3

Japanese
White 18.9
Black 3.3
Other 77.9

Greeks
White 99.4
Black 0.6
Other 0.0

Mexicans
White 54.0
Black 0.2
Other 45.8

Filipinos
White 17.5
Black 0.0
Other 82.5

Puerto Ricans
White 54.8
Black 9.5
Other 35.7

Spanish
White 77.0
Black 1.5
Other 21.5

West Indies
White 5.6
Black 94.4
Other 0.0

American Indian
White 68.4
Black 18.4
Other 13.2

India
White 16.9
Black 16.3
Other 66.9

African
White 1.0
Black 98.8
Other 0.2

Arabic
White 73.8
Black 7.1
Other 19.0

American only
White 37.5
Black 59.7
Other 2.8

Jews
White 98.0
Black 1.2
Other 0.8

Clearly, many people are describing the color of their skin; that is what they understand "race" to mean. But I suspect that another factor is how you see yourself with respect to Americans descended from Europeans. If you identify with them, you are more likely to say you are white.

If people were merely describing their skin pigmentation, I would have expected more Greeks, Arabs, American Indians, and Mexicans to report "other." I'm sure many "American Indians" are whites who are so proud of their small amount of Indian ancestry, they claim it as their ethnicity.

Notice how almost no one whose ancestors were from Africa thinks of himself as white, and how quite of few blacks think of themselves as "Americans only", with no connection to Africa whatsoever.

Most important for this blog, most Mexican Americans see themselves as white, which is a positive sign that they identify with white Americans and want to integrate with them.


Update: I added American Jews to the bottom of the list. There is no indication that some in this group want to distance themselves from whites by saying their race is "other."

If conservatives want to conserve themselves, they need to be against all immigration--or at least all non-white immigration: My last two post have shown that, contrary to neocon nonsense, immigrants move left as they move into mainstream American society. I have, however, focused on non-white (or mixed raced) immigrants, while white immigrants have been left out of the picture. Below I show the percent of immigrants who voted for Bush in 2000 by race and by various indicators of assimilation:


Percent who voted for Bush

White
Less than high school 44.4
High school 45.0
Junior college 76.5
Bachelors 56.7
Grad school 25.0

Non-white
Less than high school 35.0
High school 43.9
Junior college 33.3
Bachelors 27.3
Grad school 33.3

White
Low-income 50.0
High-income 60.0

Non-white
Low-income 28.1
High-income 37.5

White
Low-prestige job 49.3
High-prestige job 46.9

Non-white
Low-prestige job 31.9
High-prestige job 22.8

The differences are clear. While white immigrants appear to help Republicans to some degree, non-white immigrants, regardless of the ease to which they move to America's mainstream, push the country left. As white immigrants make more money, they become more conservative. So do non-whites, but 38% of high-income non-white immigrants voting for Bush is still a big loss to Republicans.

So the lesson here to conservatives is that if you want to ever win elections in the future, you had better shut down illegal and legal immigration--at least from non-white countries. Or just maintain the status quo, and allow neocons to eventually convince the country that universal health care is actually a conservative idea. Your choice.

Do immigrant groups move right as their income increases? In the last post, we saw that immigrants as a group move left, not right, as they become more educated, but a skeptic might argue that we need to look at income since education is a liberalizing experience. The problem with income is that that the sample size is smaller--especially for high-income individuals--so I have to merge all the groups from the last analysis (Chinese, Mexican, Filipino, Puerto Rican, West Indian, Asian Indian). Mexicans are perhaps large enough to show separately as well. "Low-income" is defined as a personal income under $50,000; "high-income" is $50,000 plus:


Percent who voted for Bush in 2000

All immigrant groups
low-income 45.5
high-income 30.8

Mexicans
low-income 46.3
high-income 37.5


Focusing on income rather than education doesn't change a thing: money moves them left. Contrary to expectations, poorer, less assimilated folks are not especially liberal. It's more accurate to say they lean Democrat. They become hardcore as they assimilate. Assimilation for immigrants leads them to become politically more and more like blacks.

Let's look at one more indicator that immigrant groups are moving to the social mainstream--job prestige:


Percent who voted for Bush in 2000

All immigrant groups
low-prestige 52.7
high-prestige 30.3

Mexicans
low-prestige 50.0
high-prestige 39.2

Same story. As immigrants move up, they move left and vote Democrat roughly 2 to 1. If conservatives want to survive as a viable political force, they must oppose immigration across the board.

So, what has all the pandering to immigrants gotten the Republican Party? A very clear message: go to hell.

And I'll say it again: neocons are either fools or liars, or both.

Which immigrant groups become more conservative as they assimilate? The General Social Survey aksed 33,197 people living in America their ethnic group, their highest degree earned, and where they fall on the political spectrum. Answers on political views range from:

Extremely liberal=1
Liberal=2
Slightly liberal=3
Moderate=4
Slightly conservative=5
Conservative=6
Extremely conservative=7

I've listed below the mean scores:


Mean conservative score

Chinese
Less than high school 4.12
High school 4.02
Junior college 3.50
Bachelors 3.81
Graduate school 3.93

Mexican
Less than high school 4.03
High school 4.02
Junior college 4.08
Bachelors 3.89
Graduate school 3.57

Filipino
Less than high school 3.14
High school 4.21
Junior college 4.33
Bachelors 4.13
Graduate school 4.40

Puerto Rican
Less than high school 3.74
High school 3.97
Junior college 3.65
Bachelors 3.67
Graduate school 3.20

West Indian
Less than high school 4.31
High school 3.30
Junior college 3.00
Bachelors 4.11
Graduate school 3.67

Asian Indians
Less than high school 4.05
High school 3.73
Junior college 4.14
Bachelors 3.69
Graduate school 3.65

Neocons concede that most immigrants are liberal when they get off the boat, but their upward mobility and Old Country values gradually move them right. Well, looking at the numbers above--data that any yahoo can access--we see a grand total of one immigrant group following the path they predict: Filipinos. One outta six ain't bad, right? And our largest group--Mexicans--beats a path to the left as they become more educated. Neocons are either incompetent analysts, or they secretly want this country to move left, and are simply lying to us.

(I'm sure skeptics will say that I need to analyze income and voting behavior rather than education and orientation. I'll do that next).

Indian Americans are least supportive of free speech; Mexicans are 2nd worst: A reader named "hicsto" claims that free speech is a male, northwestern European (MNWE) phenomenon; Jews don't support it as much; and as the influence of MNWEs declines, so will the freedom to speak freely. What do the data tell us (about the American context, anyway)? General Social Survey respondents (all Americans) were asked if a person who believed blacks were inferior should be allowed to speak in public. This is the percent of men by ethnic background who said yes (groups with at least 50 respondents are included with two noted exceptions):


Percent in favor of allowing someone speaking in public about black inferiority

Japanese 82.5 (N=28)
Swedes 78.9
Hungarians 77.8
Scots 74.3
English/Welsh 74.2
Filipinos 72.5 (N=40)
Irish 72.3
Poles 71.0
Danes 70.5
French 70.3
Jews 69.8
Germans 69.8
Norwegians 69.3
Czechs 68.3

USA 67.5

French Canadians 67.2
Austrians 67.2
Italians 66.5
Russians 62.7
Spain 60.8
Chinese 60.0
Dutch 59.1
Blacks 58.8
American Indians 59.5
Puerto Ricans 58.5
Mexicans 49.1
Indians 46.1

Support for free speech among whites may be higher as we move north and west, but the pattern is not perfect. Jews are in the top half of the table, and clearly are not less supportive than other whites. Among non-whites, East Asians are split with Japanese and Filipinos toward the top and Chinese in the bottom half. Other non-whites congregate at the bottom, with the very large immigration group of Mexicans bringing anti-free speech values with them. One's attitude toward free speech is a good indicator of assimilation to mainstream American values, and Mexicans are almost ten percentage points behind blacks on a question about black inferiority!

Mex-Ams are tied to their group almost as much as blacks: The General Social Survey asked a large sample of Americans if their ethnic group was important to who they are. Here is the percent of each group that answered "very important":

Black 66.7
Mexican 58.3
American Indian 41.5
Jews 35.4
Polish 27.3
Italian 24.9
Scottish 23.5
German 23.5
Irish 22.9
English/Welsh 22.2
French 16.7

Mex-Ams are almost as ethnocentric as blacks! And they totally outdo American Indians and Jews. Hundreds of years in America hasn't fully assimilated blacks and Indians: how long will it take Mexicans who receive fresh blood from the Old Country every day, and when they do assimilate, it's often toward black ghetto norms?

Seeing oneself as white faciliates assimilation: I sometimes treat American Hispanic groups as if they are all the same, but some are much more assimilated than others. Educational attainment is a nice indicator of just how far a person has entered the cultural mainstream, so using the American Community Survey I looked at mean educational levels of the different Latino groups. I wish the scores made more sense: a 7 means 12 years of education, a 6 is 11 years, and a 5 is 10 years.


Mean education score (percent white in parentheses)

Argentinean 6.80 (87.9)
Venezuelan 6.77 (74.8)
Chilean 6.63 (78.1)
Peruvian 6.55 (62.1)

Not Hispanic 6.50 (84.1)

Panamanian 6.52 (42.6)
Spaniard 6.41 (81.4)
Bolivian 6.38 (72.5)
South American 6.37 (69.8)
Columbian 6.35 (71.5)
Costa Rican 6.24 (68.5)
Cuban 6.22 (86.9)
Uruguayan 6.11 (86.6)
Ecuadorian 5.98 (57.9)
Nicaraguan 5.88 (65.0)
Central American 5.56 (44.7)
Puerto Rican 5.47 (57.8)
Dominican 5.31 (36.3)
Honduran 5.13 (54.6)
Mexican 4.82 (58.8)
Guatemalan 4.76 (51.4)
Salvadoran 4.76 (52.3)

As you can see, four South American groups are higher than the non-Hispanic average. (Keep in mind that non-Hispanics are older which lowers the mean, and the mean is further reduced by inclusion of blacks). My favorite group, Mexicans, along with two Central American countries, are at the bottom. Caribbean groups are also on the bottom half. Evidently, educational levels tend to be higher among people who've come from more distant Latin American countries.

I suspected that greater numbers of white Hispanics would assimilate, so I calculated the percent in each group that is white (shown in parentheses). Race is self-described, and it is clear that, unlike with some other minority groups, there is a bias to see oneself as white. I take this as a good sign that many Latinos identify with mainstream American society. I calculated the Pearson correlation between mean educational score and percent white: it's .62. This squares with the idea that, in general, being white faciliates assimilation in American society. Or more accurately, seeing oneself as white, rather than being seen as white, facilitates assimilation.

Mexicans are (almost) least in favor of free speech: One important indication of assimilation to American society is a belief in free speech. Nothing upsets me more than to hear about some eccentric locked up in a European prison for saying wacky things like there was no Holocaust. They won't lock up actual criminals, but are only too happy to imprison people who say the wrong thing. So let's see which ethnic groups are best assimilated in terms of free speech values. The General Social Survey asked Americans if they feel that anti-religionists should be allowed to speak in their communities. Here is the percent who said yes:


Percent saying anti-religionists should be allowed to speak

Hungarians 81.5
Greeks 79.6
Russians 79.2
Scots 78.9
Yugoslavs 78.2
Swedes 77.8
French 77.3
Norwegians 77.0
Lithuanians 76.5
Filipinos 76.5
English/Welsh 75.4
Italians 74.5
Japanese 73.8
Danes 73.0
Swiss 72.8
Poles 72.8
Irish 72.7
Germans 71.4
Spain 71.4
Finns 71.3

USA 71.2

Belgians 70.7
French Canadians 69.5
Chinese 67.7
Czechs 67.7
Rumanians 67.4
Austrians 66.9
Portuguese 66.2
West Indians 66.0
American Indian 65.1
Blacks 64.8
India 63.2
Arabs 62.5
Mexicans 62.0
Netherlands 61.2
Puerto Ricans 59.3

Roughly speaking, whites and Asians are free speechers, others less so. This, with other evidence I've seen, suggests that white immigrants assimilate best to American society, with Asians being an exception to the rule. Blacks and American Indians show how difficult it can be for non-whites to adopt American ways: they have had hundreds of years to develop a belief in free speech, but have been left behind by even the most recent immigrants. And speaking of recent immigrants (I can never pass up the opportunity to address the Mexican question) Mexicans are almost at the bottom of this list. In an earlier post, they had a similar ranking on the question about allowing racists to speak in public. As Hispanics become a more powerful influence at the ballot box, we might see the day where the things I am writing on this blog could get me a long stretch in the pen.