National Review ignored overwhelming evidence showing second-generation Latinos besting their parents by every socioeconomic indicator to claim that the Latino community in America has “so far been unable to achieve the upward mobility of previous immigrant groups.” 

On March 20, National Review published an article by Washington Examiner's Michael Barone suggesting that the Latino community in America has “so far been unable to achieve the upward mobility of previous immigrant groups.” Barone pointed to “second-generation Hispanics hav[ing] more negative health outcomes, higher divorce rates, and higher incarceration rates than their immigrant elders” to argue that "so far the Hispanics who crossed the southern border don't seem to have moved upward as rapidly as Italian-Americans did in the last century.

But Barone ignored key economic indicators illustrating that U.S. born children of Latino immigrants are substantially better off than their immigrant parents. According to a 2013 report from the Pew Research Center, second-generation Latinos have higher household incomes than immigrant Hispanics, more of them complete college, and 93% of second-generation Latinos speak English “well or very well, a stark difference from first-generation Hispanics.”

Furthermore, a recent study by Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ) and the Asian American Federation found that immigrants have a major positive impact on the American economy, noting that Latino immigrants started more small businesses than non-immigrants, and have increased their buying power by 155% between 2000 and 2014.