Among the 50.7 million Hispanics in the United States, nearly two-thirds (65%), or 33 million, self-identify as being of Mexican origin, according to tabulations of the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. No other Hispanic subgroup rivals the size of the Mexican-origin population. Puerto Ricans, the nation’s second largest Hispanic origin group, make up just 9% of the total Hispanic population in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Read the full report which includes these sections:

• The demographics of each group
• Educational attainment
• English proficiency and citizenship
• Economic and health insurance
• Regional distribution of Hispanic origin groups
• Changes in the characteristics of the Hispanic population

It has been nearly four decades since the United States government mandated the use by federal agencies of the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” to categorize Americans who trace their roots to Spanish-speaking countries, but the labels still haven’t been fully embraced by the group to which they have been affixed.

Only about one-quarter (24%) of Hispanic adults say they most often identify themselves by “Hispanic” or “Latino,” according to a new nationwide survey of Hispanic adults by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. About half (51%) say they identify themselves most often by their family’s country or place of origin-using such terms as Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran or Dominican. And 21% say they use the term “American” most often to describe themselves. The share rises to 40% among those who were born in the U.S.

By a ratio of more than two-to-one, survey respondents say that the more than 50 million Latinos in the U.S. have many different cultures rather than a common culture. Respondents do, however, express a strong, shared connection to the Spanish language. More than eight-in-ten Latino adults say they speak Spanish, and nearly all say it is important for future generations to continue to do so.

Hispanics are also divided over how much of a common identity they share with other Americans. Just under half say they consider themselves to be very different from the typical American. And just one-in-five say they use the term “American” most often to describe their identity.

Read the full report for detailed findings on these subjects:

• Identity, pan-ethnicity and race
• The American experience
• Language use among Latinos
• Politics, values and religion

Executive Summary

When it comes to socializing and communicating with friends, young Latinos (ages 16 to 25) make extensive use of mobile technology.

Half say they text message (50%) their friends daily, and 45% say they talk daily with friends on a cell phone. Other communication platforms are less widely used for socializing. For example, fewer than one-in-five young Latinos (18%) say they talk daily with their friends on a landline or home phone, and just 10% say they email their friends daily.

These findings are based on a new analysis of data from a nationwide telephone survey of Latinos conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

Use of mobile communication technologies differs notably among young Latinos by nativity. Two-thirds (65%) of the native born say they communicate with their friends by text message daily, while just 26% of the foreign born do so. And more than half (55%) of the native born talk daily by cell phone with their friends, while just 29% of the foreign born say they do the same.

These differences are explained in part by the fact that the native born are more likely than the foreign born to have a cell phone in the first place. Overall, eight-in-ten (79%) young Latinos say they use a cell phone, with use greater among the native born than the foreign born — 84% vs. 70%.

Even though text messaging and cell phone calls are the most widely used mediums of social communication among young Latinos, they use these platforms less extensively than do their non-Latino counterparts. Among 16- and 17-year-olds¹, just under half (49%) of Hispanics text daily, compared with 64% of non-Hispanics. When it comes to talking with friends daily via cell phone, there is less of a difference — 44% of Hispanics say they do, compared with half (51%) of non-Hispanics who say the same.

Hispanics are the nation’s largest and youngest minority ethnic group. In 2008, there were 46.9 million Hispanics in the U.S., representing 15.4% of the total U.S. population. Among young people, Hispanics represent an even larger share. Some 18%, or 7.5 million, of those ages 16 to 25 are Hispanic.

Other key findings:

• Language: While 68% of English-dominant and half (50%) of bilingual young Latinos use text messaging daily for communication, just 19% of Spanish-dominant young Latinos do the same.
• Gender: Young Hispanic males are less likely than young Hispanic females to use social networking sites for communication — 19% vs. 27%. In contrast, young female Hispanics are less likely than young Hispanic males to communicate face-to-face outside school or work with their friends — 15% vs. 26%.
• Hispanic Youths vs. Hispanic Adults: Hispanics ages 16 to 25 are more likely than Hispanics ages 26 and older to use mobile technologies to communicate with their friends. While half (50%) of young Latinos use texting to communicate, just 21% of older Latinos do the same.
• Latino Youths vs. Other Youths: Among those ages 16 to 17, Latino youths are less likely than non-Latino youths to communicate daily via a landline or home phone with their friends — 13% vs. 32%.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org.

_{1. This analysis is limited to people ages 16 and 17 as this is the age range for which comparable data for non-Hispanics is available from the Pew Research Center’s Pew Internet and American Life Project. For a description of the data, see the report “Teens and Mobile Phones.”}

Overview

Technology use among foreign-born Latinos continues to lag significantly behind that of their U.S.-born counterparts, according to a new analysis of survey data from the Pew Hispanic Center. The nativity differences are especially pronounced when it comes to internet use.

While 85% of native-born Latinos ages 16 and older go online, only about half (51%) of foreign-born Latinos do so.¹ When it comes to cell phones, 80% of native-born Latinos use one, compared with 72% of the foreign born.

Latinos are the largest minority group and largest immigrant group in the United States. Overall, they comprise 15.4% of the total U.S. population. Among Latinos ages 16 and older, 56% are foreign born and 44% were born in the U.S.²

While rates of technology use among native-born Hispanics are relatively high, technology use for the full population of Hispanics continues to lag behind the use rates of the non-Hispanic population. When it comes to internet use, some 64% of Latinos ages 18 and older go online,³ compared with 78% of non-Latinos. More than three-fourths (76%) of Latinos use a cell phone, compared with 86% of non-Latinos.⁴

Among youths ages 16 to 25, non-Hispanics are approaching near-universal internet use, but the rate is markedly lower for Hispanics.⁵ Some 95% of non-Hispanics ages 16 and 17 go online, as do 96% of those ages 18 to 25; for Hispanics ages 16 to 25, the internet use rate is 77%. The ethnic gap in cell phone use is less pronounced, though still significant. Some 82% of non-Hispanics ages 16 to 17 use a cell phone, compared with 72% of Hispanics. Among those ages 18 to 25, 94% of non-Hispanics use a cell phone, compared with eight-in-ten (80%) Hispanics.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org.

<sub>1. The results shown here are based on telephone surveys of both landlines and cell phones, so they are not directly comparable to findings in earlier Pew Hispanic Center reports on technology use, which were based on landline-only samples (Fox and Livingston 2007, Livingston, Parker and Fox 2009).
2. ‘Foreign-born’ Latinos are those born outside of the U.S., including those born in Puerto Rico.
3. While data are available for non-Hispanic respondents ages 16 and 17, they cannot easily be combined with the data for ages 18 and older. As such, for aggregate comparisons of Hispanics and non-Hispanics, only ages 18 and older are included, but for age-group analyses, 16- and 17-year olds are included.
4. Results for non-Hispanics ages 18 and older are based on the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s (PIAL) 2009 Reputation Management Survey, which was conducted on cellular as well as landline telephones from August 18 through September 14, 2009 among a nationally representative sample of 2,253 adults.
5. Results for non-Hispanics ages 16 and 17 are based on the PIAL 2009 Parent-Teen Cell Phone Survey, which was conducted on cellular as well as landline telephones from June 26 through September 24, 2009 among a nationally representative sample of 800 teens ages 12 to 17 and their parents. Race/ethnicity for the teens in this survey is based on the race/ethnicity of the parent respondent.</sub>

This is part of a Pew Research Center series of reports exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of the teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial Generation

Overview

Hispanics are the largest and youngest minority group in the United States. One- in-five schoolchildren is Hispanic. One-in-four newborns is Hispanic. Never before in this country’s history has a minority ethnic group made up so large a share of the youngest Americans. By force of numbers alone, the kinds of adults these young Latinos become will help shape the kind of society America becomes in the 21st century.

This report takes an in-depth look at Hispanics who are ages 16 to 25, a phase of life when young people make choices that — for better and worse — set their path to adulthood. For this particular ethnic group, it is also a time when they navigate the intricate, often porous borders between the two cultures they inhabit — American and Latin American.

The report explores the attitudes, values, social behaviors, family characteristics, economic well-being, educational attainment and labor force outcomes of these young Latinos. It is based on a new Pew Hispanic Center telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 2,012 Latinos, supplemented by the Pew Hispanic Center’s analysis of government demographic, economic, education and health data sets.

The data paint a mixed picture. Young Latinos are satisfied with their lives, optimistic about their futures and place a high value on education, hard work and career success. Yet they are much more likely than other American youths to drop out of school and to become teenage parents. They are more likely than white and Asian youths to live in poverty. And they have high levels of exposure to gangs.

These are attitudes and behaviors that, through history, have often been associated with the immigrant experience. But most Latino youths are not immigrants. Two-thirds were born in the United States, many of them descendants of the big, ongoing wave of Latin American immigrants who began coming to this country around 1965.

As might be expected, they do better than their foreign-born counterparts on many key economic, social and acculturation indicators analyzed in this report. They are much more proficient in English and are less likely to drop out of high school, live in poverty or become a teen parent.

But on a number of other measures, U.S.-born Latino youths do no better than the foreign born. And on some fronts, they do worse.

For example, native-born Latino youths are about twice as likely as the foreign born to have ties to a gang or to have gotten into a fight or carried a weapon in the past year. They are also more likely to be in prison.

The picture becomes even more murky when comparisons are made among youths who are first generation (immigrants themselves), second generation (U.S.-born children of immigrants) and third and higher generation (U.S.-born grandchildren or more far-removed descendants of immigrants).¹

For example, teen parenthood rates and high school drop-out rates are much lower among the second generation than the first, but they appear higher among the third generation than the second. The same is true for poverty rates.

Identity and Assimilation

Throughout this nation’s history, immigrant assimilation has always meant something more than the sum of the sorts of economic and social measures outlined above. It also has a psychological dimension. Over the course of several generations, the immigrant family typically loosens its sense of identity from the old country and binds it to the new.

It is too soon to tell if this process will play out for today’s Hispanic immigrants and their offspring in the same way it did for the European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But whatever the ultimate trajectory, it is clear that many of today’s Latino youths, be they first or second generation, are straddling two worlds as they adapt to the new homeland.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center’s National Survey of Latinos, more than half (52%) of Latinos ages 16 to 25 identify themselves first by their family’s country of origin, be it Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republican, El Salvador or any of more than a dozen other Spanish-speaking countries. An additional 20% generally use the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” first when describing themselves. Only about one-in-four (24%) generally use the term “American” first.

Among the U.S.-born children of immigrants, “American” is somewhat more commonly used as a primary term of self-identification. Even so, just 33% of these young second generation Latinos use American first, while 21% refer to themselves first by the terms Hispanic or Latino, and the plurality — 41% — refer to themselves first by the country their parents left in order to settle and raise their children in this country.

Only in the third and higher generations do a majority of Hispanic youths (50%) use “American” as their first term of self-description.

Immigration in Historical Perspective

Measured in raw numbers, the modern Latin American-dominated immigration wave is by far the largest in U.S. history. Nearly 40 million immigrants have come to the United States since 1965. About half are from Latin America, a quarter from Asia and the remainder from Europe, Canada, the Middle East and Africa. By contrast, about 14 million immigrants came during the big Northern and Western European immigration wave of the 19th century and about 18 million came during the big Southern and Eastern European-dominated immigration wave of the early 20th century.²

However, the population of the United States was much smaller during those earlier waves. When measured against the size of the U.S. population during the period when the immigration occurred, the modern wave’s average annual rate of 4.6 new immigrants per 1,000 population falls well below the 7.7 annual rate that prevailed in the mid- to late 19th century and the 8.8 rate at the beginning of the 20th century.

All immigration waves produce backlashes of one kind or another, and the latest one is no exception. Illegal immigration, in particular, has become a highly-charged political issue in recent times. It is also a relatively new phenomenon; past immigration waves did not generate large numbers of illegal immigrants because the U.S. imposed fewer restrictions on immigration flow in the past than it does now.

The current wave may differ from earlier waves in other ways as well. More than a few immigration scholars have voiced skepticism that the children and grandchildren of today’s Hispanic immigrants will enjoy the same upward mobility experienced by the offspring of European immigrants in previous centuries.³

Their reasons vary, and not all are consistent with one another. Some scholars point to structural changes in modern economies that make it more difficult for unskilled laborers to climb into the middle class. Some say the illegal status of so many of today’s immigrants is a major obstacle to their upward mobility. Some say the close proximity of today’s sending countries and the relative ease of modern global communication reduce the felt need of immigrants and their families to acculturate to their new country. Some say the fatalism of Latin American cultures is a poor fit in a society built on Anglo-Saxon values. Some say that America’s growing tolerance for cultural diversity may encourage modern immigrants and their offspring to retain ethnic identities that were seen by yesterday’s immigrants as a handicap. (The melting pot is dead. Long live the salad bowl.) Alternatively, some say that Latinos’ brown skin makes assimilation difficult in a country where white remains the racial norm.

It will probably take at least another generation’s worth of new facts on the ground to know whether these theories have merit. But it is not too soon to take some snapshots and lay down some markers. This report does so by assembling a wide range of empirical evidence (some generated by our own new survey; some by our analysis of government data) and subjecting it to a series of comparisons: between Latinos and non-Latinos; between young Latinos and older Latinos; between foreign-born Latinos and native-born Latinos; and between first, second, and third and higher generations of Latinos.

The generational analyses presented here do not compare the outcomes of individual Latino immigrants with those of their own children or grandchildren. Instead, our generational analysis compares today’s young Latino immigrants with today’s children and grandchildren of yesterday’s immigrants. As such, the report can provide some insights into the intergenerational mobility of an immigrant group over time. But it cannot fully disentangle the many factors that may help explain the observed patterns-be they compositional effects (the different skills, education levels and other forms of human capital that different cohorts of immigrants bring) or period effects (the different economic conditions that confront immigrants in different time periods).

Readers should be especially careful when interpreting findings about the third and higher generation, for this is a very diverse group. We estimate that about 40% are the grandchildren of Latin American immigrants, while the remainder can trace their roots in this country much farther back in time.

For some in this mixed group, endemic poverty and its attendant social ills have been a part of their families, barrios and colonias for generations, even centuries. Meantime, others in the third and higher generation have been upwardly mobile in ways consistent with the generational trajectories of European immigrant groups. Because the data we use in this report do not allow us to separate out the different demographic sub-groups within the third and higher generation, the overall numbers we present are averages that often mask large variances within this generation.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org

<sub>1. In this report when we refer to the third and higher generations of Latinos, we are describing a group with diverse family histories vis-à-vis the United States. We estimate that 40% of this group are grandchildren of immigrants. The rest are more far removed from the immigrants in their families. And a small share comes from families that never immigrated at all — their ancestors were living in what was then Mexico when their land became a part of the United States in the 19th century as a result of war, treaty, annexation and/or purchase.
2. These estimates do not include U.S. residents born in Puerto Rico. However, in the rest of the report, people born in Puerto Rico are included among the foreign born because they are from a Spanish-dominant culture and because on many points their attitudes, views and beliefs are much closer to Hispanics born abroad than to Latinos born in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
3. See, for example, Gans (1992) and Portes, Fernandez-Kelly and Haller (2008).</sub>

The number of Hispanic students in the nation’s public schools nearly doubled from 1990 to 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrollments over that period. There are now approximately 10 million Hispanic students in the nation’s public kindergartens and its elementary and high schools; they make up about one-in-five public school students in the United States. In 1990, just one-in-eight public school students were Hispanic.

Strong growth in Hispanic enrollment is expected to continue for decades, according to a recently released U.S. Census Bureau population projection. The bureau projects that the Hispanic school-age population will increase by 166% by 2050 (to 28 million from 11 million in 2006), while the non-Hispanic school-age population will grow by just 4% (to 45 million from 43 million) over this same period. In 2050, there will be more school-age Hispanic children than school-age non-Hispanic white children.

While Hispanics account for 20% of public school students nationally, their share of enrollment is greater in several states. In 2006 Hispanics were about half of all public school students in California, up from 36% in 1990. They were more than 40% of enrollments in three additional states (Arizona, New Mexico and Texas) and between 20% and 40% of all public school students in five states (Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, Florida and New York). Overall, Hispanics are the largest minority group in the public schools in 22 states.

Using data from the 2006 American Community Survey (ACS), this report presents information on the demographic characteristics of Hispanic students in public schools. It compares Hispanic public school students with their non-Hispanic counterparts. The large sample sizes available in the ACS also enable detailed comparison of Hispanic students across generational groups.

Highlighted Characteristics of Hispanic Public School Students

Demographics

• The vast majority of Hispanic public school students (84%) were born in the United States.
• More than half (52%) of all Hispanic students are enrolled in public schools in just two states, Texas and California.
• Although most Hispanic students live in the nine “established” Hispanic states, foreign-born Hispanic students are more likely than native-born Hispanic students to live in the “new” and “emerging” Hispanic states.
• Hispanic kindergartners in public schools are overwhelmingly born in the U.S. (93%), compared with 86% of Hispanic students in grades 1 through 8 and 77% in high school.
• The majority of Hispanic students are of Mexican origin (69%), followed by Puerto Rican (9%), Dominican (3%), Salvadoran (3%) and Cuban (2%).
• Nearly three-in-five Hispanic students (57%) live in households with both of their parents compared with 69% of non-Hispanic white students and 30% of non-Hispanic black students.
• More than seven-in-ten U.S. born Hispanic students of immigrant parents (71%) live with both parents. Smaller shares of foreign-born students (58%) and U.S.-born students of native parentage (48%) reside with both parents.
• More than a quarter of Hispanic students (28%) live in poverty, compared with 16% of non-Hispanic students. In comparison, more than a third of non-Hispanic black students (35%) reside in poverty and about one-in-ten (11%) non-Hispanic white students live in a poor household.
• Foreign-born Hispanic students (35%) are more likely than their native-born counterparts (27%) to live in poverty.
• A significant minority of Hispanic public school students (34%) have parents who have not completed high school. Fewer than one-in-ten (7%) non-Hispanic students have parents who have not finished high school.

Language Skills

• Seven-in-ten (70%) Hispanic students speak a language other than English at home.
• Almost 30% of Hispanic public school students report speaking only English at home, and an additional 52% of Hispanic public school students report speaking English “very well.” The remaining 18% of Hispanic students speak English with difficulty.
• Nearly half (44%) of first-generation students speak English with difficulty, compared with 20% of second-generation students and 5% of the third-and-higher generations.
• Most Hispanic students (78%) live in households in which at least one household member over the age of 13 speaks only English in the home or speaks English very well.

A Pew Hispanic Center analysis of public school data from key states finds that English language learners (ELL) students tend to go to public schools that have low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement by ELL students.

These same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of characteristics associated generally with poor standardized test performance–such as high student-teacher ratios, high student enrollments and high levels of students living in or near poverty.

When ELL students are not isolated in these low-achieving schools, their gap in test score results is considerably narrower, according to the analysis of newly available standardized testing data for public schools in the five states with the largest numbers of ELL students. These five states – Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas – educated about 70% of the nation’s 4 million ELL students in the 2003-04 school year.

Prior analyses of assessment data uniformly indicate that ELL students are much less likely than other students to score at or above proficient levels in both mathematics and reading/language arts. The new report quantifies the extent of ELL concentration in low-achieving public schools and the degree to which this isolation is associated with the large achievement gap in mathematics between ELL students and other major student groups.

In each of the five states examined, about 90% of the ELL students who took the state assessment test were educated in public schools that had at least a minimum threshold number of ELL students. ELL students tended to make up either a majority or substantial minority of the student populations of these schools. For example, in the California public schools in which ELL test-takers were concentrated, they constituted 45% of all test-takers. In the other California public schools (where the number of ELL students was below the minimum threshold), ELL test-takers were just 6% of all test-takers.

In all five states investigated and irrespective of grade levels, ELL students were much less likely than white students to score at or above the state’s proficient level. However, when ELL students attended public schools with at least a minimum threshold number of white students, the gap between the math proficiency scores of white students and ELL students was considerably narrower, the analysis found. This suggests that the lag in test score achievement of ELL students is attributable in part to the characteristics of the public schools they attend.

ELL students perform better on the state’s standardized math assessment test if they attend a public school with at least a minimum threshold number of white students. For example, among eighth-grade ELL students in Florida, about 30% score at or above the proficient level in math if they attend a middle school that has a minimum threshold number of white students. Among Florida ELL eighth-graders at middle schools that do not have a sufficient number of white eighth-grade students, only about 10% scored at or above the proficient level in math.

The relatively poor proficiency levels at public schools with high concentrations of ELL students is underscored by comparing the standardized test scores of white and black students who attend the schools in which ELL students are concentrated with the scores of white and black student who attend other public schools. In California, 75% of white third-grade students who attend public schools without the minimum threshold number of ELL students perform at or above the proficient level on the state’s mathematics assessment test, whereas just 67% of the white California third-graders who attend schools with the minimum threshold number of ELL students score at or above the proficient level.

The average proficiency rate in math for black third-graders who attend California public schools without the minimum threshold number of ELL third-grade students is 46%. In contrast, 34% of black third-grade students who attend California public schools with the minimum threshold number of ELL students score at or above the proficient level on the state’s mathematics assessment test.

Most of the new Pew Hispanic report’s findings are based on analyses using three U.S. Department of Education databases. The analysis of mathematics performance on state-designed assessments across different types of public schools utilizes the new National Longitudinal School-Level State Assessment Score Database. The NLSLSASD maintains state standardized assessment test results for every public school in a state. Because the NLSLSASD is a school-level data set, we can identify for the first time which public schools tested English language learner students and thus measure at the state level the degree of concentration of ELL students in particular schools. Using the NLSLSASD’s standardized testing results by subgroup, the analysis illuminates the potential role of school isolation in student test score performance.

Previous Pew Hispanic Center analyses of standardized testing data for public schools revealed a large achievement gap between ELL students and other students in math and reading proficiency (Fry, How Far Behind in Math and Reading are English Language Learners?, Pew Hispanic Center, June 6, 2007), and that black and Hispanic students are increasingly isolated from white students in the public schools (Fry, The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of U.S. Public Schools, Pew Hispanic Center, Aug. 30, 2007). The new report builds on those findings by illustrating that the educational isolation of ELL students is associated with the math proficiency gap between English language learners and other students. It also shows that white and black students who attend the public schools in which ELL students are concentrated are doing worse than their peers who attend public schools with few English language learner students.

Among the report’s other key findings:

• Nationally, the English language learner student population is expected to grow rapidly. The projected number of school-age children of immigrants will increase from 12.3 million in 2005 to 17.9 million in 2020, accounting for all the projected growth in the school-age population. A significant portion of these children of immigrants will likely require ELL services.
• In the five states with large ELL student populations, the proportion of ELL students scoring at or above the proficient level on the state mathematics test is often below the proportion of black students scoring at or above the proficient level. For example, in Texas 22% of ELL eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the math assessment, compared with 44% of black eighth-graders.
• In both elementary grades and middle school grades in these states, ELL students are much less likely than white students to score at or above the proficient level in mathematics. The measured gaps are in the double-digits. For example, in Florida 45% of ELL third-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the math assessment, compared with 78% of white third-graders, yielding a white-to-ELL gap of 34 percentage points.
• ELL students who took the state mathematics assessment were heavily concentrated in the public schools that had to disclose publicly the English language learner testing results — that is, public schools with a minimum threshold number of ELL students taking the test. White test-takers and black test-takers were much less concentrated in the public schools reporting ELL testing outcomes. For example, in New York more than 90% of the fourth-grade ELL students taking the math test attended the 763 elementary schools that reported their test scores. The New York public schools that reported results for ELL fourth-graders educated less than 20% of white fourth-grade test-takers in the state and slightly more than half of black fourth-grade test-takers.
• In the five states with large ELL student populations, the public schools in which ELL test-takers are concentrated are much more likely to be central city schools.
• The public schools in which ELL test-takers are concentrated have a much higher enrollment, on average, than other public schools in the state.
• The middle schools in which ELL test-takers are concentrated have, on average, significantly higher student-to-teacher ratios than other public schools in the state.
• The public schools in which ELL test-takers are concentrated have, on average, a substantially greater proportion of students qualifying for free or reduced-price school lunches.
• The public schools in which English language learner students are concentrated are significantly more likely to be designated Title I schools. A Title I school has a student body with a large proportion of economically disadvantaged students and receives additional federal funding. For example, in Arizona 92% of the schools that reported test results for ELL students on the third-grade math assessment were eligible for Title I funds. Of the other Arizona elementary schools, half were Title I-eligible.

Nearly all Hispanic adults born in the United States of immigrant parents report they are fluent in English. By contrast, only a small minority of their parents describe themselves as skilled English speakers. This finding of a dramatic increase in English-language ability from one generation of Hispanics to the next emerges from a new analysis of six Pew Hispanic Center surveys conducted this decade among a total of more than 14,000 Latino adults.¹ The surveys show that fewer than one-in-four (23%) Latino immigrants report being able to speak English very well. However, fully 88% of their U.S.-born adult children report that they speak English very well. Among later generations of Hispanic adults, the figure rises to 94%. Reading ability in English shows a similar trend.²

As fluency in English increases across generations, so, too, does the regular use of English by Hispanics, both at home and at work. For most immigrants, English is not the primary language they use in either setting. But for their grown children, it is.

The surveys also find that Latino immigrants are more likely to speak English very well, and to use it often, if they are highly educated, arrived in the United States as children or have spent many years here. College education, in particular, plays an important role in the ability to speak and read English. Among the major Hispanic origin groups, Puerto Ricans and South Americans are the most likely to say they are proficient in English; Mexicans are the least likely to say so.

The transition to English dominance occurs at a slower pace at home than it does at work. Just 7% of foreign-born Hispanics speak mainly or only English at home; about half of their adult children do. By contrast, four times as many foreign-born Latinos speak mainly or only English at work (29%). Fewer than half (43%) of foreign-born Latinos speak mainly or only Spanish on the job, versus the three-quarters who do so at home.

The main data sources for this report are six surveys conducted for the Pew Hispanic Center from April 2002 to October 2006. They included interviews with more than 14,000 native-born and foreign-born Latino adults, ages 18 and older, irrespective of legal status. Latinos born in Puerto Rico, many of whom arrive on the U.S. mainland as Spanish speakers, are included as foreign born.

In analyzing the data on English use and prevalence from these surveys, this report relies on four measures based on respondents’ ratings of their English-speaking skills, their English-reading skills, their level of English use at home, and their level of English use at work.

Two of these surveys, along with a more recent nationwide survey of Latinos taken by the Pew Hispanic Center in October and November of this year, also provide a clear measure of how Hispanics believe that insufficient English language skill is an obstacle to their acceptance in the U.S. In surveys taken in 2007, 2006 and 2002, respondents were asked about potential sources of discrimination against Hispanics. In all three surveys, deficiency in language skills was chosen more often than the other options as a cause of discrimination.

Among the report’s findings:

• Of adult first-generation Latinos, just 23% say they can carry on a conversation in English very well. That share rises sharply, to 88%, among the second generation of adults, and to 94% among the third and higher generations.
• A majority of foreign-born Hispanics (52%) report that they speak only Spanish at home. That is true of just 11% of their adult children and of 6% of the children of U.S.-born Hispanics.
• Half of the adult children of Latino immigrants speak some Spanish at home. By the third and higher generation, that has fallen to one-in-four.
• Nearly three-quarters of Mexican immigrants (71%) say they speak English just a little or not at all. Respondents born in South America (44%) and Puerto Rico (35%) are the least likely to say they speak English just a little or not at all.
• College education is closely tied to the ability to speak and read English. Among Hispanic immigrants with college degrees, 62% report that they speak English very well. That share drops to 34% among those with high school diplomas and 11% among those who did not complete high school.
• Immigrants are more likely to speak English very well, and to use it often, if they arrived in the United States as children or have spent many years here.
• Most Latino immigrants (67%) report that they use at least some English at work. Just 28% say they speak only Spanish on the job.
• Most Hispanics who are naturalized citizens (52%) speak English very well or pretty well. Most non-citizens (74%) speak just a little English or none at all.
• More than four-in-ten (44%) Latino adults—both foreign born and native born—are bilingual. This is especially true of the adult children of immigrants: More than two-thirds (68%) report that they can carry on a conversation in English or Spanish pretty well or very well.
• Latinos cite language skills more frequently than immigration status, income/education or skin color as an explanation for discrimination against them. In 2007, 46% said it was the biggest cause of discrimination against Latinos.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org

Notes

¹The terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” are used interchangeably in this report, as are the terms “foreign born” and “immigrant.”

²Unless otherwise noted, this report uses the following definitions of the first, second and third and higher generations: first generation – those born outside the United States including those born in Puerto Rico; second generation – born in the United States, with at least one first-generation parent; third generation and higher – born in the United States, with both parents born in the United States.