"Natural Republican Voters"
For years, Republican leaders have been assuring anxious followers that the post-1970 wave of very low-skilled Hispanic migrants from Mexico and Central America are guided by conservative values. They came from Catholic countries after all - they worked hard - and they sometimes told pollsters they opposed abortion. They omitted to note that the children of these immigrants would follow a very different path. The Washington Post this morning offers a very different glimpse of the future American electorate.
When the Marquez sisters set out to get pregnant, Edelmira was 14 and Angela was 15. ... As many as one in four Hispanics born in the United States to immigrant parents gives birth to a child before her 20th birthday, according to a statistical analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center. Only Hispanics who come to the United States as immigrants have a higher teen birth rate.
One of the fathers of the girls' children is an illegal Salvadoran immigrant now serving time in prison for burglary. The other father is working, but is also present illegally. One mother has dropped out of high school already, the other soon will. Neither is working.
The Post's sidebars note an interesting culture gap: while Hispanic teens born outside the U.S. are less sexually active than either white or black teens, U.S.-born Hispanic teens are more sexually active than whites (although still less than blacks). Both U.S.-born and foreign-born Hispanic teens are much more likely to give birth before age 20 - and they are much more likely to have become pregnant intentionally.
Are these the makings of another underclass? Very possibly - but one thing it's not is the social basis for cultural conservatism.