Thread by @Noahpinion

1/I apparently forgot to do a threat about this @bopinion post back in October when I wrote it, so here we go.

Hispanic Americans and upward mobility.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

2/People sometimes think of Hispanic Americans as a perpetually underprivileged group. But while Hispanics still lag whites in economic terms, the gap has been shrinking recently.

3/This isn't just on paper, either. Most Hispanic Americans FEEL upwardly mobile. And this has been true for a while.

pewresearch.org/hispanic/2012/…

4/Some of the apparent LACK of upward mobility in the 90s and 00s was just a composition effect. Poor Hispanic immigrants kept arriving, even as earlier immigrants and their children bettered their situation rapidly.

That inflow ended in 2007.

migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-…

5/Hispanic American upward mobility is real. A recent paper by Chetty et al. found that although they started from a lower base, Hispanic Americans are as upwardly mobile as White Americans.

equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documen…

6/A report by sociologist Van C. Tran found the same.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

7/And this is also true for Mexican Americans specifically -- the largest Hispanic subgroup.

inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/…

8/Why are Hispanic Americans moving up in the economic world?

One reason is education. Hispanic college enrollment rates surpassed Non-Hispanic White college enrollment rates back in 2012.

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013…

9/And the Hispanic high school dropout rate has absolutely plummeted.

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017…

10/Another factor is geographic diffusion.

Research shows that when immigrants and their children leave immigrant enclaves, their fortunes increase.

And Hispanic Americans are diffusing across the country, leaving the Southwest.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

11/Just to give one example, Chicago is now one-third Hispanic.

chicagotribune.com/hoy/ct-mexican…

12/This success does not prove that racism doesn't exist against Hispanics in America; in fact, acts of overt racial discrimination are still reasonably common.

pewresearch.org/hispanic/2018/…

13/And of course, Trump's words and actions have fanned those flames:

abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-lang…

14/In addition, though income gaps are closing, the Hispanic-White wealth gap has a LONG way to go.

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017…

15/Part of this is because of the income gap. Part is because many Hispanic families haven't yet had time to build up wealth. And part is because of much lower homeownership rates among Hispanic Americans.

16/Just to put in a plug for one of my pet ideas: A national program to assist first-time homebuyers would help close that gap faster.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

17/But anyway, despite these continued obstacles, Hispanic Americans are on the path of upward mobility. There are many things to lament about the modern American economy, but this is a bright spot.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…