Bravo to VDH’s column this morning rejecting the open-borders crowd’s claims of moral superiority. There’s a tangential point in his column that I think is worth expanding on:
In fact, illegal immigration has unfairly warped perceptions of Hispanic success. If one does not include millions of recently arrived, poor Latin American foreign nationals in federal and state surveys, then Hispanic-American citizens prove statistically to be assimilating, intermarrying, integrating, and finding economic success at rates comparable to those of many other immigrant groups of the past.
The “intermarrying” part of this is clear from a new Pew study on the subject (the report is here, and today’s WaPo write-up is here). Despite significant increases in intermarriage rates among whites and blacks, Hispanic and Asian intermarriage rates have not increased at all over the past three decades because of ongoing mass immigration. In fact, the percentage of people of Asian origin who marry non-Asians has actually decreased.
Apart from economic and security concerns, we need to reduce future immigration levels to allow intermarriage to increase and help blur ethnic lines. If anything, because of the utter failure of our educational system to create a broadly shared sense of patriotic solidarity among young people, it’s more important than ever for the government to avoid creating disincentives to intermarriage through ongoing mass immigration. Ideally, our society would foster both a strong sense of historical kinship with our predecessors (as with the Nisei kids in 1920s Hawaii who spoke of “our Pilgrim forefathers”) and we would see the natural fusion of the various ethnic strains of our people through intermarriage. But while we fight our post-American elites to restore the first, we need to remove the roadblocks to the second, and mass immigration is the chief roadblock.