Race and Social Problems

Latinos represent one of the fastest growing population segments in the United States. The 50 million or so Latinos in the United States, which comprise about 15% of the US population, are here to stay and these numbers will continue to grow. As a group, they have now surpassed the African American population. Up to about 1990, Latinos or Hispanics were mostly geographically confined to the US. Southwest and a handful of places outside that region (New York, Chicago and South Florida), but they now reside throughout the United States. Despite stereotypes about Latinos as immigrants, most are actually born in the United States including those whose families have been here for several generations. Nonetheless, there is a large immigrant component, including many whom are unauthorized, which feeds Latino population growth and complicates American attitudes and perceptions about the Latino population. Latinos are a diverse group of many nationalities, but the Mexican segment comprises fully 65% of the entire Latino population and is among the most disadvantaged. Moreover, Mexicans comprise about half of the entire US undocumented population, they have the longest and largest immigration trajectory and they have been largely concentrated in the Southwest US, though that is changing as Mexican immigrants are increasingly populating new desinations, especially in the South. For these reasons several of the articles focus on that population. Because of the wide diversity of the Latino population, we are thus careful to avoid generalization. We use the terms Latino and Hispanic interchangeably throughout this paper, even though technically they may refer to somewhat different populations. Hispanic may include the small number of Spanish people while excluding the small Brazilian population while Latino does the inverse. Perhaps with these tiny exceptions, they refer to virtually the same populations. An important issue is that this pan-ethnic label was crafted by the Spanish language media, businesses, the US Census and political leaders, as a way of simplifying the categorization of a population (for various reasons) that was mostly known and continues to mostly identify by its national origins (Mora, in progress). Though there are certainly objections to the use of either term, the authors of these chapters tend to favor one or the other, a decision they may have made for various reasons. Whether you call them Latinos or Hispanics, Americans often voice strong feelings about their presence. Pundits like Samuel Huntington and Patrick Buchanan have written strongly against immigration from Latin America. They argue that Latin Americans, particularly Mexicans, are unwilling to assimilate and they therefore represent a serious threat to the American nation. Their followers are numerous, as a scan at the immigration blogs and some mainstream media reveal. Moreover, an anti-immigration brand of politics has resulted in stringent laws against the undocumented, which end up affecting the larger Latino population in various ways, as the cases of Arizona and Alabama vividly show. On the other side of public opinion, many Americans tout the United States as a nation of immigrants, in which successive waves made contributions to American culture, its economy and its democracy. Employers, today as in the past, clearly see immigrants as fueling the economy in many sectors. Latinos, who comprise the majority of the current wave, are seen as no different from previous immigrants. Unfortunately, there are many Americans on either side of a polarized debate and not enough that have an informed or nuanced opinion. Moreover, opinions about immigration and Latinos are E. Telles (&) Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: etelles@princeton.edu