{"id":2864,"date":"2010-01-07T21:58:08","date_gmt":"2010-01-08T01:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thedustininmansociety.com\/blog\/?p=2864"},"modified":"2010-01-07T21:58:08","modified_gmt":"2010-01-08T01:58:08","slug":"new-us-underclass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/2010\/01\/07\/new-us-underclass\/","title":{"rendered":"New U.S. Underclass"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dallas Morning News<\/em><\/p>\n

Surge in Birth Rate Among Unwed Hispanics Creating New U.S. Underclass <\/strong>
\nJanuary 21, 2007 <\/p>\n

By Heather Mac Donald <\/p>\n

Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability.<\/p>\n

The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate \u2013 even more than unbounded levels of immigration \u2014 will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades.<\/p>\n

By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans will be Hispanic by midcentury, twice the current ratio.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country \u2014 over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly 1 \u00bd times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for unmarried white women, 22 for unmarried Asian women, and 66 for unmarried black women.<\/p>\n

Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent for whites and 15 percent for Asians. Only the percentage for blacks \u2014 68 percent \u2014 is higher. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.<\/p>\n

The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for teens from Mexico, part of the fastest-growing immigrant population in the U.S., greatly outstrips every other group.<\/p>\n

Acceptable illegitimacy<\/p>\n

To grasp the reality behind those numbers, one need only talk to people working on the front lines of family breakdown. Social workers in Southern California, the national epicenter for illegal Hispanic immigrants, are in despair over the epidemic of single parenting. Not only has illegitimacy become perfectly acceptable, they say, but so has the resort to welfare and social services to cope with it.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ana Sanchez delivers babies at St. Joseph\u2019s Hospital in the city of Orange, Calif., many of them to Hispanic teenagers. To her dismay, they view having a child at their age as normal. But what is \u201cmost alarming,\u201d Dr. Sanchez says, is that the \u201cteens\u2019 parents view having babies outside of marriage as normal, too. A lot of the grandmothers are single as well; they never married, or they had successive partners. So the mom sends the message to her daughter that it\u2019s OK to have children out of wedlock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Sanchez feels almost personally involved in the problem: \u201cI\u2019m Hispanic myself. I wish I could find out what the Asians are doing right.\u201d She guesses that Asian parents\u2019 passion for education inoculates their children against the underclass trap. \u201cHispanics are not picking that up like the Asian kids,\u201d she says with a sigh.<\/p>\n

Conservatives who support open borders are fond of invoking \u201cHispanic family values\u201d as a benefit of unlimited Hispanic immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of those family values. But other kinds of traditional Hispanic values have survived \u2013 not all of them necessarily ideal in a modern economy, however. One of them is the importance of having children early and often.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s considered almost a badge of honor for a young girl to have a baby,\u201d says Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis House, an adoption agency in Fresno. It is almost impossible to persuade young Hispanic mothers to give up a child for adoption, Ms. Schulze says. \u201cThe attitude is: \u2019How could you give away your baby?\u2019 I don\u2019t know how to break through.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most powerful Hispanic family value \u2014 the tight-knit extended family \u2014 facilitates unwed child rearing. Relatives often step in to make up for the absence of the baby\u2019s father. I asked Mona, a 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph\u2019s Church in Santa Ana, Calif., if she knew any single mothers.<\/p>\n

She laughed: \u201cThere are so many I can\u2019t even name them.\u201d Two of her cousins, 25 and 19, have children without having husbands. The situation didn\u2019t seem to trouble this churchgoer too much. \u201cThey\u2019ll be strong enough to raise them. It\u2019s totally OK with us,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re very close; we\u2019re there to support them. They\u2019ll do just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Mona\u2019s family suggests, out-of-wedlock child rearing among Hispanics is by no means confined to the underclass. The St. Joseph\u2019s parishioners are precisely the churchgoing, blue-collar workers whom open-borders conservatives celebrate. Yet they are as susceptible as others to illegitimacy.<\/p>\n

Fifty-year-old Irma and her husband, Rafael, came legally from Mexico in the early 1970s. Rafael works in a meatpacking plant in Brea; they have raised five husky boys who attend church with them. Yet Irma\u2019s sister \u2013 a homemaker like herself, also married to a factory hand \u2013 is now the grandmother of two illegitimate children, one by each daughter. \u201cI saw nothing in the way my sister and her husband raised her children to explain it,\u201d Irma says.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe gave them everything.\u201d One of the fathers of Irma\u2019s young nieces has four other children by a variety of different mothers. His construction wages are being garnished for child support, but he is otherwise not involved in raising his children.<\/p>\n

The tradition of starting families young and expanding them quickly can come into conflict with more modern U.S. mores. Ron Storm, director of the Hillview Acres foster home in Chino, tells of a 15-year-old girl who was taken away from the 21-year-old father of her child by a local child-welfare department. The boyfriend went to jail, charged with rape. But the girl\u2019s parents complained about the agency\u2019s interference, and eventually both the girl and her boyfriend ended up going back to Mexico.<\/p>\n

But though older men continue to take advantage of younger women, the age gap between the mother and the father of an illegitimate child is quickly closing. Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties tries to teach young fathers to take responsibility for their children. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot more 13- and 14-year-old fathers,\u201d says Kathleen Collins, vice president of health education.<\/p>\n

Normally, the fathers, of whatever age, take off. \u201cThe father may already be married or in prison or doing drugs,\u201d says Amanda Gan, director of operations for Toby\u2019s House, a maternity home in Dana Point, Calif. Mona, the 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph\u2019s, says the boys who impregnated her two cousins are \u201cnowhere to be found.\u201d Her family knows them but doesn\u2019t know if they are working or in jail.<\/p>\n

\u2019Married to the state\u2019<\/p>\n

Despite the strong family support, the prevalence of single parenting among Hispanics is producing the inevitable slide into the welfare system. \u201cThe girls aren\u2019t marrying the guys, so they are married to the state,\u201d Dr. Sanchez observes. Hispanics now dominate the federal Women, Infants and Children free food program; Hispanic enrollment grew more than 25 percent from 1996 to 2002, while black enrollment dropped 12 percent and white enrollment dropped 6.5 percent.<\/p>\n

Illegal immigrants can get welfare programs for their American-born children. Amy Braun works for Mary\u2019s Shelter, a home for young single mothers who are homeless or in crisis, in Orange County, Calif. It has become \u201cculturally OK\u201d for the Hispanic population to use the shelter and welfare system, Ms. Braun says.<\/p>\n

A case manager at a program for pregnant homeless women in the city of Orange observes the same acculturation to the social services sector, with its grievance mongering and sense of victimhood. \u201cI\u2019ll have women in my office on their fifth child, when the others have already been placed in foster care,\u201d says Anita Berry of Casa Teresa. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing shameful about having multiple children that you can\u2019t care for and to be pregnant again, because then you can blame the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

The consequences of family breakdown are now being passed down from one generation to the next. \u201cThe problems are deeper and wider,\u201d says Ms. Berry. \u201cNow you\u2019re getting the second generation of foster care and group home residents. The dysfunction is multigenerational.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet for all these markers of social dysfunction, fatherless Hispanic families differ from the black underclass in one significant area: Many of the mothers and the absent fathers work, even despite growing welfare use.<\/p>\n

How these two value systems \u2014 a lingering work ethic and underclass mating norms \u2014 will interact in the future is anyone\u2019s guess. From an intellectual standpoint, this is a fascinating social experiment, one that academicians are \u2014 predictably \u2014 not attuned to. But the consequences will be more than intellectual: They may severely strain the social fabric. Nevertheless, it is an experiment that we seem destined to see to its end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

..READ THE REST <\/p>\n

HERE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dallas Morning News Surge in Birth Rate Among Unwed Hispanics Creating New U.S. Underclass January 21, 2007 By Heather Mac Donald Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2864"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}