Immigrant Education: A Query
One of the responses to my previous post cited Samuel P. Huntington, a scholar who argued in a recent article against Mexican immigration. Looking at the article, I was struck by an oddity in his statistics. He gives figures for educational attainment of first, second, third and fourth generation Mexicans, as of 1990. The odd thing is that overall educational attainment rises from first to second and from second to third, but then drops substantially for fourth generation Mexicans.
Elsewhere in the article, the author gives figures for the foreign born population of the U.S. as of 1960. He lists the five most common ethnicities--and Mexican is not one of them. Fourth generation Mexicans would be descendants of immigrants from considerably earlier than that--sometime before 1930--which suggests that there may not be very many of them and their circumstances might be quite different from those of later immigrants. Checking an old stat abstract, there seem to have been about 1.4 million Mexicans in the U.S. in 1930, or about 1% of the population. I don't know how many were foreign born.
Does anyone have data on who fourth generation Mexicans were as of 1990 and why, assuming Huntington's figures are correct, their educational attainment is relatively low?