Spanish beats out others including Urdu, Cantonese, Gaellic for the #2 spot

Pew reports "Spanish is the most spoken non-English language in U.S. homes". In other news, the sun rose in the east this morning and is projected to set in the west later this evening.

In seriousness, predictable social data like these are valuable, even when they're not 'controversial'. But while Pew is deserving of admiration for its acts of data-reporting commission, it often disappoints by way of omission.

Case in point in this very report, conveniently enough. After spending a seemingly inordinate amount of time on the tangential non-Hispanic Spanish speaking population in the US (numbering 2.8 million, compared to the country's 34.8 million Hispanic Spanish speakers), the report closes by informing us about English language proficiency rates of non-Hispanics who speak Spanish in their homes (2.8 million) and of non-Hispanics who do not speak Spanish in their homes (roughly 290 million):

When it comes to English proficiency, eight-in-ten (80%) non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home say they speak English “very well”, 11% say they speak English “well”, and 9% say they speak English “not well” or do not speak English. This compares with 96% of all non-Hispanics 5 years and older who speak English only or speak it “very well”, 2% who speak English “well”, and 2% who speak English “not well” or do not speak English.

Leaves something to be desired, doesn't it? We get nationwide English language proficiency rates but with the glaring exclusion of the 34.8 million Spanish-speaking Hispanics residing in the US, the figure most readers--especially Dark Enlightenment types like us--are presumably the most curious about.

I've asked the authors to provide a similar breakdown of English proficiency rates among Hispanic Spanish speakers in the US. The comment thread is quite manageable and it looks fairly interactive between readers and the reports' authors, so feel free to ask for the same data I've asked for. Strength in numbers!

Good old fashioned family values, on which we used to rely

Pew Research delivers some inspiring Saturday morning reading, of the diversity-is-strength variety:

Never married mothers are significantly younger, disproportionally non-white, and have lower education and income. Close to half of never married mothers in 2011 (46%) are ages 30 and younger, six-in-ten are either black (40%) or Hispanic (24%), and nearly half (49%) have a high school education or less [sic*]. Their median family income was $17,400 in 2011, the lowest among all families with children.

In fidelity to the blog's raison d'etre, let's look at the risk factors among women of becoming never-married single mothers by comparing non-whites to the non-Hispanic white rate of bastard birthing. The following table shows the rates of this strain of alternative family formation (that is, one in which the state and/or extended family serve as substantial providers, since no one is providing for themselves and their spawn on less than $20k a year) relative to the non-Hispanic white rate:

Illegitimacy	vs. whites
Black	608.5%
Hispanic	258.2%
Asian/PI	49.6%

The Pew figures excluded those aged 65 or older, so I've made the necessary corresponding adjustments using 2010 Census data.

Look, my fellow Republicans, if we stop comparing Hispanics to our own voters and instead compare them to other minorities--which, since we must exclude Asians as they are too inconvenient to think about when we use the term "minority", means blacks--we see that indeed they do display both a penchant for traditional family values and a propensity to vote for the GOP. We need to pass the comprehensive immigration reform now, or, as Bill O'Reilly argues so convincingly, we'll "lose the Hispanic vote and never win another national election, ever!"

It's Marge Simpson's weight loss logic at work: "For low-fat, this pudding is pretty good. Mmm, mmm, I can just feel the pounds melting off."

* This probably should read "less than a high school education", compared to a national high school graduation rate of nearly 80%. As is, it insinuates that 51% of single mothers have gone to college, which, in a country where one-fourth of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher, would be quite 'impressive' (at least from the contemporary education-as-panacea viewpoint).

Hey Zeus, meet Jesus

Forget the bible belt, now we've got the Jesus belt:

From the blurb at BabyNameWizard, "unlike most Christians, who decline to use the name Jesus out of respect, Christians in the Spanish-speaking world commonly bestow it to bring the bearer under the special protection of the son of God."

In government we trust?

Just in time for the bipartisan, full-court amnesty press, Pew provides some insight into why our political class is so eager to elect a new people. The research center surveyed people in the US on the levels of trust they have in the federal government.

Guess which group was the most likely to say that they can "trust the government in Washington to do what is right". This group reports higher levels of trust in the federal government than blacks or even self-described liberal Democrats do. Hint: The GOP's response to Obama's state of the union address will be given by an invade-the-world, invite-the-world neocon who will be delivering said response in both English and Spanish.

Black shoots unarmed Hispanic. Whatever, stuff happens. Now, justice for Travyon!

Given the utter lack of national media attention devoted to this story out of Phoenix, I'm not surprised to only be reading about it in the Steveosphere a week after it happened:

About 7:30 p.m., a 22-year-old man and his girlfriend ordered food at the Taco Bell drive-thru and were told to pull up while their order was prepared.

At the same time, Adkins stepped around a corner into the path of the vehicle and angry words were exchanged between he and the driver.

They got into an altercation and Adkins was shot once by the driver. He died at the scene.

The driver, a 22-year-old black male, called police but has not been arrested.

At first, the couple claimed that Adkins had a metal pipe that he swung at them -- but it turns out he was holding a dog leash with his yellow lab on the other end.

Family members want that driver arrested, but he's claiming self-defense.

As Blode explains, this case is quite similar to the Trayvon Martin one, except that in the Taco Bell tussle, the victim--a mentally-disabled 'white Hispanic' man, presumably of Mexican descent--appears to be less culpable than Martin was. While Martin allegedly broke Zimmerman's nose, subjugated him, and then pummeled a supine Zimmerman, it sounds like Adkins swung at and possibly pounded the shooter's car with his fist a few times before being shot. Arizona, like Florida, has a stand-your-ground-law on the books, and perhaps unlike the Martin case, it could conceivably turn out to be relevant here.

Despite (or, more cynically, because of) the potential racial angles the Phoenix shooting presents, the national media aren't running with it. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the New Black Panther Party are nowhere to be found. President Obama hasn't said a word. As Steve Sailer soberly notes, in a huge country of over 300 million people, tragedies like this occur with much greater regularity than we'd like them to, and it's of course absurd to expect nationally known figures to descend on every crime scene braying righteously about the need for justice.

More interesting than the predictable indifference of the usual suspects, however, is the lack of grassroots outrage in the Phoenix case as compared to the Martin case. With the latter, we're seeing bounties being announced, cop cars being shot up, random whites being savagely attacked by blacks as a way, I guess, of avenging Martin's death, and public gatherings clamoring for the shooter to be shackled up or killed. In the former, the slain man's sister sounds pretty upset about the whole thing, but that's about it.

The contrasts between what has transpired in the wakes of the Phoenix and Sanford incidents highlight the differences between the cohesiveness, or lack thereof, of the black and Hispanic 'communities' in contemporary America. There are plenty of self-anointed Hispanic activists willing to spit out foam-flecked hysteria to a soliciting media organ, as a recent profile piece on Kris Kobach in my local paper demonstrated last weekend:

"He definitely is very focused on putting forth at the local and state level anti-immigrant proposals that seem to be progressively more punitive and more and more repressive," said Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration at the National Council of La Raza.

"From our perspective, it just seems he is more interested in pursuing the scorched-Earth, anti-immigrant tactics that he believes in than in the well-being -- economic or otherwise -- of the jurisdictions that follow his misguided lead on these issues," Martinez added.

But the people they claim to represent aren't much stirred by their war cries, if they even know who they are at all. The Pew Hispanic Center found that by more than a 2-to-1 margin, Hispanics in the US do not think of themselves as sharing a broad social culture with other Hispanics, but instead as being comprised of lots of different communities tracing back to their particular countries (or regions within those countries) of descent.

In contrast, every urban hip hop station evinces just how plugged in blacks are to the concerns and going-ons of the 'black community'. The black guy on the street knows who Juicy J, MLK, Barack Obama, and Taye Diggs are. Precious few blacks could identify any policy differences between Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process, but no doubt existed in their minds as to who they had to support.

The Hispanic on the street probably can't do much better than Jennifer Lopez or maybe Cesar Chavez since the Cesar Chavez Boulevard trend has started picking up (though it has a long way to go before it attains Martin Luther King Boulevard infamy). As for voting, si, Democrat is berry good, if they bother voting at all.

I'm making some assumptions here, but the gist is that when black cultural kingpins say "jump", blacks around the country start hopping. When Hispanic activists say whatever it is that they say, Puerto Ricans in New York, Cubans in Florida, and Mexicans in California don't know they're speaking and don't make an effort to hear them. By persistently clamoring about the coming Hispanic electoral tidal wave and censuring Republican pols who say anything about border security, the media establishment is trying to get Hispanics to adopt the same kind of visceral tribalism blacks exhibit in the US, but up to this point it hasn't had much of an impact.

Hispanics favor big, activist government

As the Hispanic tidal wave perpetually approaches election cycle after election cycle, always just about to crash upon the shoreline of US politics, establishment types repeatedly talk about the urgency with which Republicans need to Hispander or face electoral oblivion. This latest WSJ article is just the most recent incarnation of the phenomenon:

Congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney's presidential campaign are working to fashion proposals that could make up ground with Hispanic voters, concerned rhetoric on immigration from many in the party is turning away the increasingly powerful constituency.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) [what a great vice presidential candidate he would make!] is developing a scaled-back version of the Dream Act, which would allow people brought to the U.S. as children to gain legal status, but not citizenship, if they enroll in college or the military. Several Senate Republicans have signed on to bipartisan legislation aimed at broadening access to the legal immigrant visa system.

The Romney campaign is looking for new proposals that would show he backs legal immigration, trying to pivot from a primary campaign in which he has taken a tough line on assistance to those here illegally.

That there were ten non-Hispanic white voters for every one Hispanic voter in the 2008 Presidential election, and that swing states are less Hispanic than the country as a whole is are never mentioned in articles like these, of course. While this undue emphasis is annoying, though, it's the self-immolating idiocy of Republican pols that really goads me:

Many Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), argue that if the party could get past the immigration issue, it would be the natural home for many more Latino voters, who are often socially conservative and value entrepreneurship.

The mantra about Hispanic social conservatism (to the extent that it rests on any actual evidence at all) rests almost entirely on modestly stronger opposition to abortion among Hispanics than among non-Hispanics. Well, black opposition to abortion is similarly stronger than non-black opposition is. Maybe Graham has read Jeffrey Kuhner and plans to have the GOP steal black votes from Obama next!

The Pew Hispanic Center provides a dose of reality in a report on Hispanics in the US released earlier this week. The following table breaks down Hispanic and non-Hispanic responses to a dichotomous question on whether one would "rather have a small government providing fewer services or a bigger government providing more services":

	Small gov't	Big gov't	DK/Refused
Hispanics	19%	75%	6%
Non-Hispanics	48%	41%	11%

The non-Hispanic figure includes blacks, so the non-Hispanic white/Hispanic gap is even larger than the table makes it appear to be. Hispanics, who tend to be poorer than whites, are more likely to receive government benefits and less likely to pay for them than white Americans are, so it's hardly a surprise that they are more favorably inclined towards big government and the associated wealth transfers that come with it than whites are.

Some other interesting findings from the Pew report:

- Despite the push from above to rebrand Hispanics as "Latinos", actual Hispanics, er, Latinos, actually prefer the "Hispanic" descriptor by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

- Similarly, by a more than 2-to-1 margin, Hispanics (I'll defer to them and continue to employ this term rather than adopt SWPL's favored pet name) do not think of themselves as an umbrella ethnic group sharing a common culture. This is lost on media types and obtuse pols like Newt Gingrich, who were surprised to find that Cubans in Florida don't care much about illegal immigration from Mexico into the US' Southwest.

- Hispanics primarily think of themselves with regard to their country of origin. While 51% of Hispanics think of themselves in this way (as Mexicans, Cubans, Guatemalans, etc), 24% think of themselves as Hispanic/Latino. Only 21% think of themselves as Americans.

- A staggering 95% of Hispanics say it is either "very important" or "somewhat important" that future generations of Hispanics living in the US are able to speak Spanish. See, they're assimilating just like my German grandmother did when she schooled my mother, who of course schooled me, in the German language I speak so fluently today! Fortunately, 87% of Hispanics also assert that Hispanics in the US need to learn English to succeed here. Bilingualism for all!

Hispanics vote Democrat because of economic concerns and health care, not immigration

Though it is persistently asserted by self-proclaimed 'Latino activists'*, media types, and Establishment Republicans alike that taking a restrictionist stance on immigration is to commit political hara kiri, Hispanics are not particularly concerned with immigration (and to the extent that they do care, their opinions are far more ambiguous than the casual observer has been led to believe).

Pew just released the results of a survey on Hispanics in the US headlining with their reactions to an uptick in deportations carried out under the Obama administration as compared to the Bush administration. The report also contains other points of interest, including the emphasis placed on the question of immigration. Of the six issues participants were asked about, immigration came in dead last in the percentage of Hispanic voters who say they are "extremely concerned" about it. From most to least important: Jobs (50%), Education (49%), Health care (45%), Taxes (34%), Federal budget deficit (!) (34%), Immigration (33%).

Hispanics primarily favor Democrats because of the party's policies on health care and economics--policies that seek to transfer wealth from middle class whites to the (disproportionately Hispanic) poor. The GOP would have to move to the left of the Democratic party on both of these fronts to beat it at its own game and have a chance at winning over Hispanics, a move that would necessarily entail the Republican party ceasing to be conservative in any meaningful way.

Calling for open borders alone doesn't aid the Hispandering cause. The survey was conducted when the three big names in the GOP field were Romney, Perry, and Cain. Romney, whose relatively tough stance on illegal immigration is only outdone by Bachmann, was found to be running neck-and-neck with Perry and slightly ahead of Cain among Hispanic voters, even though Cain was running at the front of the pack among Republican primary voters at the time.

Perusing the rest of the report, I was reminded of a one of my favorite Simpsons moments, when, as the family shovels down low-fat pudding, Marge remarks that she can just feel the pounds melting off. The report shows that while Hispanics who are fluent English speakers, make $75,000+ per year, and/or have a college degree feel the Republican party is more inclined towards Hispanics as a group than the Democratic party is (14%, 19%, and 14%, respectively) than are Hispanics who primarily or exclusively speak Spanish, make under $30,000 per year, and/or have less than a high school education (6%, 10%, and 7%, respectively), an increase in even the more assimilated and successful portion of the Hispanic immigrant contingent is obviously bad news for Republicans.

* Despite an apparent upsurge in preference for the term "Latino" over the term "Hispanic" by 'activists' and SWPLs in the media over the course of the last decade or so, more people descended from south of the border prefer the latter descriptor, Hispanic, over the former, Latino. This remains the case whether those Latinos/Hispanics in question were born in the US or outside of it, by a margin of more than 2-to-1.

Percentage of ancestral Mexicans racially self-identifying as white by state

Razib Khan recently posted a table showing racial self-identification among those of Mexican ancestry in the US as well as the racial self-identification of those of Mexican ancestry in a selection of states using data from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey. A couple of commenters, including Steve Sailer, noticed an apparent relationship between Republican-leaning states and the percentage of ancestral Mexicans in those states who consider themselves to be white. With Idaho at the top of the list and New York at the bottom, that seems reasonable.

Presumably, the relationship would work via the more conservative, traditional ethos and culture of red states encouraging ancestral Mexicans in those states to identify more strongly with the majority rather than distinct from it, as they would tend to in places like California and Illinois.

To flesh out the accuracy of the observation, I looked at all 50 states (to see an accompanying map, click here*). There looks to be something to it, anyway. The correlation between the percentage of ancestral Mexicans who identify as white and McCain's share of the vote in 2008 is a positive but modest .25 (p = .08).

One issue in attempting to discover how voting patterns correlate with various other behaviors or attributes is the fact that blacks are so politically monolithic. The common perception of Mississippi is that it is a patriotic place, but over one-third of its population is black, so despite having the most conservative white population in the country, there are other more moderate states like Alaska and Utah that show up on electoral maps in a deeper shade of red than Mississippi does. The relationship between the percentage of ancestral Mexicans who identify as white and McCain's share of the non-Hispanic white vote, however, is even weaker, at .18 (p = .21).

What about ancestral Mexicans themselves? Unfortunately, state-level data on Hispanic voting patterns are only available for 13 states where the Hispanic population is substantial enough to report on. Despite that limited sample size, though, the relationship is strongest here--the correlation between the percentage of ancestral Mexicans who identify as white and McCain's share of the Hispanic vote is .51 (p = .07). This appears to mesh well with the narrative presented above--the more Hispanics identify with traditional American values, the more likely they are to identify with the majority white population.

By way of the GSS, consider how well this seems to hold up on the individual level. The following table shows, among those of Mexican ancestry living in the US, political orientation by racial self-identification, with blacks excluded and extending back only as far as the year 2000 for contemporary relevance (n = 713):

Race	Conservative	Moderate	Liberal
White	29.4%	43.9%	26.7%
Other	30.9%	40.0%	29.2%

White ancestral Mexicans are only marginally less liberal than ancestral Mexicans who identify themselves as members of another non-black race are. To the extent that the effect exists, it's pretty weak.

Parenthetically, recall that among the broader American public, people are nearly twice as likely to call themselves conservatives as they are to call themselves liberals. The preceding table shows that among ancestral Mexicans, the conservative and liberal numbers are at parity. Excluding a Cuban population that is decreasing in relevance, Hispanics, irrespective of racial self-conception, are considerably more politically liberal than whites are.

ACS variables used: RACE(100), STATEICP, ANCESTR1(2101, 2102, 2110, 2111, 2130, 2183)

GSS variables used: ETHNIC(17), RACE(1, 3), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)

* North Carolina really stands out as having a low percentage of ancestral Mexicans who racially identify as white. Is there an obvious explanation for why this is the case that I'm unaware of?

Black-white and Hispanic-white incarceration rate ratios by state

In the previous post, an updated visualization of black-white incarceration rate ratios by state was provided. I have no good reason as to why a corresponding table was not included to go along with that, so here it is:

State	B:W
1. Iowa	13.59
2. Vermont	12.49
3. New Jersey	12.38
4. Connecticut	12.00
5. Wisconsin	10.64
6. New Mexico	10.29
7. North Dakota	10.05
8. South Dakota	10.02
9. Rhode Island	9.62
10. New York	9.35
11. Wyoming	9.24
12. New Hampshire	9.22
13. Pennsylvania	9.15
13. Utah	9.15
15. Minnesota	9.14
16. Illinois	9.06
17. Nebraska	8.34
18. Montana	8.24
19. Massachusetts	8.13
20. Maine	7.60
21. Kansas	6.99
22. Colorado	6.65
23. California	6.50
24. Washington	6.42
25. Ohio	6.38
26. Delaware	6.36
27. Virginia	5.89
28. Oregon	5.84
29. Arizona	5.58
29. West Virginia	5.58
31. Michigan	5.49
32. Maryland	5.48
33. Indiana	5.46
34. North Carolina	5.40
35. Missouri	5.25
36. Kentucky	4.98
37. Texas	4.74
38. Louisiana	4.69
39. Nevada	4.65
40. South Carolina	4.47
41. Florida	4.45
42. Oklahoma	4.39
43. Alaska	4.33
44. Idaho	4.25
45. Tennessee	4.12
46. Arkansas	3.86
47. Alabama	3.54
48. Mississippi	3.46
49. Georgia	3.32
50. Hawaii	1.88

The proximity-to-the-Canadian-border phenomenon is detectable. It's plausible to think that to some extent this is a consequence of whites behaving better the further north we go, while blacks are blacks, wherever they are. I'm skeptical, though, because it's not just whites who fare better as we head north--blacks do so as well, and the latitude-performance correlation is virtually identical for both races.

When Steve ran the numbers, he found a vigorous correlation of .62 between the 1997 black-white incarceration rate ratio and Kerry's share of the 2004 vote. As La Griffe du Lion has explained, this is largely attributable to stricter sentencing for criminal activity in red states than in blue states.

That remains the case with the fresher data, although the relationship has weakened. The correlation between the 2005 black-white rate ratio and McCain's share of the 2008 vote is .34 (p=.02). If red states were full of racist whites who wanted to irrationally throw large numbers of blacks in jail and blue states full of SWPLs who did not, we'd expect the correlation to run in the opposite direction. When it comes to closing the jail gap, red states do a better job of it than blue states do.

Fortunately for community organizers and activists everywhere, there is a silver lining in the (disgraceful!) nationwide trend towards tougher sentencing laws that has more people in the US behind bars now than ever before--the jail gap narrowed between 1997 and 2005 in a full 45 states. In only five lily white (and thus racist!) places--Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming--did it widen.

As someone who is keenly aware of the Hispanic tidal wave crashing onto our shores from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern end of our coastal border with the Pacific ocean, I would be remiss not to present a table showing Hispanic-white incarceration rate ratios by state. Unfortunately, data were not available in eleven states--AL, KS, ME, MD, MN, NM, NC, SD, VT, WI, and WY--that apparently do not inquire about (or at least publicly report on) whether or not prisoners are Hispanic:

State	H:W
1. Connecticut	6.64
2. Massachusetts	6.11
3. Pennsylvania	5.62
4. New York	4.47
5. New Hampshire	3.68
6. New Jersey	3.32
7. Rhode Island	3.30
8. North Dakota	3.18
9. Nebraska	2.55
10. Iowa	2.47
11. Idaho	2.45
12. Utah	2.14
13. Colorado	1.98
14. Montana	1.95
15. Illinois	1.86
16. Arizona	1.82
17. Ohio	1.78
18. Delaware	1.72
19. California	1.70
20. Kentucky	1.35
21. Washington	1.34
22. Indiana	1.25
23. Texas	1.24
24. Virginia	1.23
25. Mississippi	1.21
25. Missouri	1.21
27. Tennessee	1.15
27. South Carolina	1.15
29. Oregon	1.14
30. Oklahoma	1.12
31. Nevada	0.99
32. Michigan	0.96
33. Georgia	0.92
34. Alaska	0.76
35. Florida	0.65
36. Arkansas	0.60
37. West Virginia	0.54
38. Louisiana	0.47
39. Hawaii	0.41

As Peter explained in the comments of a previous post, Puerto Ricans (virtually all of whom are Hispanic) in the US are heavily concentrated in the Northeast and fare especially poorly among Hispanic immigrants and their descendants in the US. That is clearly evident above, as the Northeast takes all the top spots.

Florida's Cuban population, while no longer constituting a majority of the state's Hispanics still comprises a sizable chunk of it, presumably makes the state look great on this ranking.

Hawaii's combination of a large military presence and relatively unintelligent whites help to place it at the very bottom of the list. Accounting for the fact that the Aloha state's Asian/PI population is distinctly less prosperous than Asians in the US as a whole, it's probably the most racially egalitarian state in the country.

The biggest surprise to me is Nevada, where Hispanics and whites are incarcerated at almost identical rates. Excepting New Mexico for which data are unavailable, Hispanics in the border states predictably all end up in jail more frequently than whites in those states do. Any ideas as to why Nevada bucks this trend? Michigan is also unexpected.

Excluding Alaska (there are Hispanics in Alaska? Yes, though fewer than 40,000 of them), the rest of the states where Hispanics are better behaved than whites are in the South, where whites are more prone to criminal activity than they are in the Midwest, Northeast, or Old Northwest.

More on the myth of Hispanic social conservatism

From the Pew Research Center comes more evidence that the open borders Republicans' nonsense about Hispanics being natural Republicans because of their putative "family values" social conservatism is just that, nonsense.



Pew conducted a survey earlier this year in which respondents were queried about their positions on seven areas of contemporary change in family structure that has occurred in the US over the last several decades. The seven are "more single women having children without a male partner to help raise them", "more unmarried couples raising children", "more gay and lesbian couples raising children", "more people living together without getting married", "more mothers of young children working outside the home", "more people of different races marrying each other", and "more women not ever having children". Respondents rated each of the items as being "good for society", "bad for society", or "makes no difference".



From the responses, Pew categorized participants into three groups of roughly equal size ("accepters", "skeptics", and "rejecters"). Accepters were the most likely to render the changes as being good for society and rejecters the most likely to render them bad for society, while skeptics fell in between.



The following table displays a progressive index for various demographic groupings, computed by simply taking the percentage of each group classified as accepters and subtracting from that the percentage of the group classified as rejecters. Thus, the higher the value, the more progressive that group is:

Sex
Men	-8
Women	+7
Race
White	-5
Black	-1
Hispanic	+25
Age
18-29	+23
30-49	+2
50-64	-5
65+	-28
Marital status
Married	-15
Unmarried	+16
Political affiliation
Republican	-38
Democrat	+22
Independent	+1
Electoral status
Registered voter	-7
Unregistered	+19
Church attendance
Weekly+	-33
Monthly or less	+3
Seldom/never	+34

Hispanics hold far more 'progressive' views on the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family than blacks and whites do. Who would've thought blacks are even more natural Republicans than Hispanics are?! Hispanics are even slightly more progressive than self-described Democrats and those under the age of 30 are. Only the irreligious are more libertine in their views on the state of the family in contemporary America than Hispanics are.



The other results come as little surprise, meshing well with conventional wisdom, with a couple possible exceptions in the sex and registered voters gaps. After all, it's women who are said to suffer more from single parenthood, hence the recourse available to women through the legal system to force absent fathers to transfer resources to them. Regarding registered voters being more traditional than the population at large, it's yet another reason I'm an opponent of universal suffrage.

Pew on Hispa-, er, Latino youths in the US

Last December, the Pew Hispanic Center released a report entitled "Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos* Come of Age in America". For those with an interest in the future socio-cultural environment of the US, there is plenty to think about. Following are a few words on some of those things.

Steve Sailer has observed that subsequent generations of Hispanics are indeed assimilating to US norms of behavior. But they are black norms, not white ones. In a similar vein, they come into the US with socially conservative positions on high-visibility issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. Those who have been in country longer, however, are more liberal. Only 25% of young Hispanics feel abortion should be legal, compared to 38% and 58% of second- and third-generation Hispanics. When it comes to same-sex marriage, 39% of the same first-generation Hispanics support it, while 48% and 52% of second- and third-generation Hispanics do.

Relatedly, new arrivals place relatively more responsibility on the shoulders of Hispanics for their underwhelming levels of educational achievement. While 51% of first-generation Hispanics identify the tendency for Hispanic students not to work as hard as other students as a "major reason" for their struggles, only 22% and 11% of second- and third-generation Hispanics do.

First-generation Hispanics are also less perceptive of the relentless bigotry of their new host country than Hispanics who were born here are. Among first-generation Hispanics, 32% assert that they, a family member, or someone they know well has been discriminated against because of race or ethnicity. For those of second and third generations, 40% and 42% say the same. Funny that, in addition to wearing swarthy skin and having a last name like Lopez, being unable to speak English, eating out of a lunch pale under the shade of a tree in a convenience store lot, wearing pointy-toed boots, and listening to the same music one hears while waiting in line for a Six Flags' roller coaster actually makes one less of a target for racial discriminators than only having brown skin and a surname that ends in the letter z does!

To complement a recent post on future demography at the state level, the following table shows composite racial^ percentages of the US population by age cohort:

Age	White	Hispanic	Black	Asian	Other
0-15	55.3%	22.6%	14.2%	4.2%	3.7%
16-25	60.9%	18.1%	14.3%	4.2%	2.6%
26+	69.8%	12.9%	11.0%	4.8%	1.5%

(Pacific Islanders are included in the "Asian" category)

Drawing from this table, it looks as though four decades down the road, Hispanic representation among those living in the US will double at the expense of whites. Blacks will tread water, and the Asian share should stay pretty flat as well. Census projections, however, predict a doubling of Asian representation over the same time period. The Census also suggests that the Hispanic share is a little understated, and should be about one-quarter of the total population. These further increases again come at the expense of whites, who are predicted to constitute half of the US population by mid-century. The differences in the preceding table and the Census numbers, of course, are due to immigration--there are lots of people coming here from China and India, but the Asian total fertility rate in the US is right at 2.0, slightly below replenishment.

* Humorously, more than twice as many Hispanics prefer that descriptor over "Latino" (35% to 14%), while half (51%) don't express a preference one way or the other. Even though it is not favored by Hispanics and is less sensible than the term "Hispanic" (Hispanics speak Spanish, not Latin), media types--including Pew, apparently!--are apt to use "Latino". I presume this is because it is more difficult for native English speakers to correctly pronounce "Latino" than "Hispanic"--doing the lipsy thing with the "t" signals a level of cultural sophistication that is to be admired and emulated!

^ Unless otherwise noted, "non-Hispanic" should be assumed to precede each racial category except for "Hispanic".