Immigrant, U.S. Peers Differ Starkly on Schools

Newly arrived Mexican immigrant youths and their American-born peers hold strikingly different views of the importance of school, a team of Harvard University researchers report in a unique study that challenges some of the key beliefs fueling the anti-immigration movement.

The immigrant youngsters, who attended middle and high schools near San Diego, reported liking school more and had greater respect for authority figures such as principals than classmates who were white or second-generation Mexican Americans.

The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that the Asian and Latino youths who emigrated to this country over the last decade bring with them the same high hopes and values as earlier waves of European immigrants. But the studies show that the attitudes that are conducive to a productive life in America are eroded in later generations, which have higher school failure rates and lower educational aspirations than the first generation.

“There is consensus in what I would call this paradox,” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who reported his findings at a recent meeting in Baltimore of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, the largest and most prestigious gathering of the scientific community.

“Immigrants arrive with tremendous positive energy. But the more exposed they are [to American life], the more their dreams fade. The data is very strong on this.”

Suarez-Orozco and his wife, Carola Suarez-Orozco, conducted extensive interviews with 189 adolescent students in Mexico and the United States between 1990 and 1992 to determine their attitudes toward school.

Their sample included non-Latino whites, second-generation Latinos and newly arrived Mexican immigrants attending middle and high schools in a community outside San Diego that researchers declined to identify.

To learn about the “psychocultural” roots of the Mexican immigrant experience, the researchers also examined a group of adolescents from Guanatajuato, a Mexican town that historically sends large numbers of emigrants to the United States.

What they found were stark differences in outlooks between the white youths and the immigrants, as well as between the immigrants and the second-generation Mexican Americans.

For example, 84% of the newcomers (and 75% of the Mexican students in Guanatajuato) said school was “the most important thing” in their life, compared to 40% of the white students and 55% of the Mexican Americans.

Almost 70% of the immigrant youths agreed with the statement that doing homework was “more important than helping friends”--more than triple the rate of the whites and almost double that of the Mexican and Mexican American youths.

The immigrants also liked school more than their U.S.-born peers.

Asked to complete the sentence, “My school is ----,” 42% of the white students gave negative responses, such as “boring,” “the worst,” “stupid,” “terrible” and “hell.” Only 20% offered positive responses, and the remainder gave neutral answers.

Among the immigrant youngsters, 88% described school in positive terms, such as “the greatest,” “pretty,” “beautiful” and “fabulous.”

The dichotomy extended to the students’ opinions of the school principal. Forty percent of white students offered unflattering views, describing the principal in such terms as “mean and dorky,” “idiot” or “a pain.”

Only 10% of the immigrants had such dim views. The majority--more than 60%--had positive impressions of the same principal, such as “very friendly,” “good and capable” or “an exciting person.”

Such sharp differences in outlook, Suarez-Orozco said, should cast doubt on the conventional wisdom that assimilation helps ensure success in American life. “The question is, assimilation to what? To a culture that is very anti-authority and where doing well in school is not cool?” he said.

The Harvard researcher observed that the whites in the study had a slightly higher socioeconomic status than the other groups, so the sample was slightly biased in their favor. “We were not comparing poor American whites with more middle-class Mexican kids,” Suarez-Orozco said. “But we found, very surprisingly, [whites] didn’t look very appealing.”

The second-generation Mexican Americans seemed to straddle the cultural gap, neither as alienated as the whites nor as optimistic as the immigrants.

Only one of the 48 immigrant students surveyed gave a negative description of their campus. But among the Mexican American youths, 20% offered negative depictions, such as “ugly” and “cheap.” Sixty-six percent gave positive descriptions.

About a third of the second-generation students used disrespectful terms to describe the principal, including “racist” and “a big jerk,” while an equal proportion used such positive words as “cool” and “fun.”

The group differences also showed up in the portion of the study that gauged the youths’ hopes, dreams and fears.

The students were asked to make up stories about a picture of an adolescent boy gazing pensively at a violin on a table before him. The white students tended to tell stories about a child being pressured by his parents to play the violin, while the immigrants generally told sad tales of a boy who wanted to master the instrument but was unsure he was up to the task, the researchers said.

But the second-generation youths expressed a striking concern with failure and strong sense of hopelessness. Twenty-eight percent told stories about the threat of failure to achieve the task at hand. Only 2% of the immigrants and 4% of the white Americans offered similarly downbeat themes.

These findings should concern policymakers as they debate the impact of immigration on American society and the economy, said Ruben G. Rumbaut, a Michigan State University sociologist who is conducting a longitudinal study that followed 5,000 children of immigrants in San Diego and Miami over several years.

He said his preliminary findings and the conclusions of other scholars studying immigrants support many of the patterns reported in the Suarez-Orozco study. Rumbaut has found that adolescents who had just one U.S.-born parent generally had lower grades and aspirations than foreign-born students.

“That kind of thing makes you pause,” he said. “You would think it would be exactly the opposite. But at the level of effort--which is what [grade-point average] reflects--and aspirations, it has a negative effect. It is very intriguing.”

No one is certain about the reasons for the drop in achievement, Rumbaut said. They could range from changes in the economic structure and corruptive influences in American culture--television being a major culprit--to factors such as national origin and ethnic identity.

Rumbaut has found that students who defined themselves as Chicano had much lower grade averages and educational ambitions than those who identified themselves as ethnically mixed or Hispanic.

Why such differences exist, he said, is “not at all clear.” But Rumbaut believes that the emerging research on immigrant cultures points to a different model of assimilation from the one forged in earlier eras by European immigrants, whose more Americanized offspring generally rose in education and status.

Today, “there isn’t a single America that people assimilate to,” Rumbaut said. “Becoming American takes many forms and reflects not only different origins but different destinations and locations where [immigrants and their children] grow up. For some there is the possibility of upward mobility, but for others there is the possibility of downward mobility.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Culture Gap

A Harvard University study comparing the attitudes toward school of whites and three Latino groups--adolescents who were Mexican immigrants, second-generation Mexican Americans and Mexican citizens--revealed some surprising differences. Here are the responses each group gave to two statements:

“To me, school is the most important thing.”

*--*

YES NO *White 40% 60% *Mexican 75% 25% *Immigrant 84% 16% *Mexican American 55% 45%

*--*

****

“Doing my homework is more important than helping my friends.”

*--*

YES NO *White 20% 80% *Mexican 34% 66% *Immigrant 68% 32% *Mexican American 36% 64%

*--*

Source: Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Carola Suarez-Orozco, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1996