From the NYT comes one of those Local News articles about The Gap that are always breathlessly reported as if local disparities reflect some unique problem:
By KIRK SEMPLE
In the past two decades, the Mexican population in New York City has grown more than fivefold, with immigrants settling across the five boroughs. Many adults have demonstrated remarkable success at finding work, filling restaurant kitchens and construction sites, and opening hundreds of businesses.
But their children, in one crucial respect, have fared far differently.
About 41 percent of all Mexicans between ages 16 and 19 in the city have dropped out of school, according to census data.
No other major immigrant group has a dropout rate higher than 20 percent, and the overall rate for the city is less than 9 percent, the statistics show.
I find "9 percent" implausibly low, but, whatever.
This crisis endures at the college level.
How exactly is it a "crisis" if it "endures?" There's very little evidence that Mexican-Americans en masse consider their children's or grand-children's or great-grandchildren's relative lack of education to be a crisis.
Much of the punditry on immigration coming out of the dominant NY-DC Axis of Obliviousness assumes that immigration from Mexico is a brand new phenomenon, so the future is wide open. Anything could happen! To New York journalists, the most plausible model would be Mexicans as not the new Jews, but at least as the new Italians. After all, their names sometimes end in vowels, so they must be pretty similar. Thus, we should be seeing tons of Mexican-American Scalias, Mondavis, Gianninis, Scorseses, Giamattis, Coppolas, and Paglias any day now.
From a Southwestern U.S. perspective, however, as amply documented by social science research, none of this looks like a crisis, a crossroads where something has to change. Instead, a relative lack of education among Mexican-Americans just looks like Situation Normal for at least four or five generations at a stretch.
