Assimulation

 

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The average black family has been in America longer than the average white family. Why then should blacks be hyphenated as African-American when they are more centuries removed from Africa than most Europeans are from Europe? Does anyone speak of European-Americans? How long should a hyphen persist?--Sowell

This is White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on the problem of Central American immigrants:
"They’re not MS-13… . But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills."

The vast majority of Central American immigrants do not speak English when they arrive in the United States. In 2016, according to data from the American Community Survey, 82 percent of Central American immigrant adults over the age of 25 who arrived that year spoke English “not well” or “not at all,” but length of residence does appear to result in greater language acquisition, with nearly three quarters knowing English after three decades or more in the United States.
With less than a year in the United States, already nearly half of Central American adults had found employment in 2016. Employment rates increase with the length of residence in the United States. Those with more than five years in the United States had an employment rate over 70 percent, more than 10 percentage points higher than the rate for all U.S. adults.
Poverty among Central American adult immigrants who have lived in the United States in 2016 drops substantially, and those with 30 or more years experience in the United States had a lower poverty rate in 2016 than all U.S. adults.
English language assimilation continues even faster into the second generation. There is an impressive difference between first-generation immigrants with Central American ancestry and their descendants born in the United States (i.e. “natives”). 91 percent of Americans with Central American ancestry speak English “very well” with another 6 percent speaking it “well”. Only 3 percent speak it poorly or not at all. This compares with 49 percent in the first generation.
Central American immigrants have little formal schooling—half had dropped out of high school, and just eight percent had a college degree in 2016. Adults with Central American ancestry who were born in the United States had the exact same level of educational attainment as all other natives—30 percent had a college degree, and only 10 percent dropped out of high school.
Central American native-born adults have no fall-off in terms of finding jobs either. In 2016, 78 percent of them were employed—a higher rate than Central American immigrant adults and nearly 20 percentage points higher than all other adults born in the United States.
American adults with Central American ancestry were more than twice as likely to be an active duty member of the military than other U.S.-born American adults