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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (84838)	8/12/2007 3:31:10 PM
From: Poet	Respond to of 306849

Hi Les, The CSM's a good paper and it looks like they've done their homework on that piece you posted about first- and second-generation immigrants. It's particularly interesting given the recent discussion on the thread wrt the impending foreclosure disaster. The educational mix of immigrants has remained relatively constant. The proportion of those with advanced degrees, at 12 percent, and those with a high school degree or less, at 52 percent, is about the same today as it was before 1970, according to Pew. . However, the educational differences between immigrants from different regions of the world is "stark," in Pew's terminology. Half of Asian immigrants have at least a bachelor's degree. Half of Latin American immigrants haven't finished high school. Not surprisingly, education plays a large role in the lives of many immigrants who have done well. This is more evidence that areas that have been saturated with Hispanic (predominantly Mexican) immigrants over the last decade or so may well be overrepresented in terms of the foreclosure crisis. And where will these families go, what kind of housing will they be able to obtain? It really gets me worrying about a shift in the general social structure due to the impending crisis in the mortgage business. Overall, however, second-generation immigrants are not doing quite as well as they used to. Their income lead over nonimmigrant workers has shrunk, from 14.6 percent in 1970 to 6.3 percent today. In part this is because their parents aren't doing as well, either. In 1970, the relative wages of first-generation immigrants were slightly higher than those of nonimmigrants. By 2000, their wages had fallen to 19.7 percent below those of nonimmigrants, according to Pew. If this decline continues apace, wages of second-generation immigrants will fall below nonimmigrant pay by 2030. "If low wages persist into the second and subsequent generations for substantial numbers of immigrants, economic hardship may persist beyond the first generation and assimilation into American society may become more difficult," says the Pew report on immigrants and economic mobility.