Hispanic Families Becoming Like Black Families

The Washington Examiner May 5, 2017 reports,

More than three quarters of African American births are to unmarried women, nearly double the illegitimacy rate of all other births, according to new federal data.

The National Center for Health Statistics said that in 2015, 77.3 percent of non-immigrant black births were illegitimate. The national non-immigrant average is 42 percent, and it was 30 percent for whites.

The new numbers were in a Center for Immigration Studies analysis on the births to immigrants. That total is 32.7 percent, but to Hispanic immigrants it is 48.9 percent, according to Steven Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies...

Heather Mac Donald (April 14, 2008) in her report The Hispanic Family: The Case for National Action Looking at and for honest numbers notes the following trends. She takes on the open border conservatives such as McCain:

Add the Economist magazine to the group of entities and individuals who need scourging for their anti-Hispanic bias. In the March 19 issue, the magazine reports the "bad news from California: The vaunted Latino family is coming to resemble the black family." The magazine has the temerity to offer facts that are fighting words in some precincts of the right: "Half of all Hispanic children were born out of wedlock last year."

"The birth rate among unmarried Latinas is now much higher than the rate among black or white women." "In 1995 the unmarried teenage birth rate for Latinas was 20% lower than the rate for blacks. It is now 12% higher." "More than half of all young Hispanic children in families headed by a single mother are living below the federal poverty line, compared with 21% being raised by a married couple."

To be sure, The Economist notes, stating the obvious: the "Latino family is not in such a dire state as the black family, where 71% of children are born to single mothers." But the trends are not favorable: "the gap appears to be closing." And even if both Latino parents are living together, that arrangement is no guarantee of familial stability: "unmarried Mexican-American couples who have children while living together are slightly more likely to break up than are blacks or whites in similar circumstances."

Conservatives of all stripes routinely praise Daniel Patrick Moynihan's prescience for warning in 1965 that the breakdown of the black family threatened the achievement of racial equality. They rightly blast those liberals who denounced Moynihan's report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," as an expression of bigotry.

Conservatives are equally fond of Moynihan's 1993 article "Defining Deviancy Down." That essay, published in the American Scholar, observed that American culture had responded self-defeatingly to the breakdown of traditional social controls by redefining what was once deviant behavior, such as illegitimacy, as normal.

It turns out that open-borders conservatives are themselves flawless at defining deviancy down - when it suits their purposes. The black illegitimacy rate was 23.6 percent in 1965, when Moynihan declared a crisis in the black family. Today's Hispanic illegitimacy rate is over twice that, yet purveyors of the redemptive Hispanic myth tell us that all is well. So was Moynihan's analysis right then but wrong now?

View the Economist article http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10880945

Biography and Article List For James H. Lilley