Posted on June 20, 2012

Liberal Study: Anchor Babies, Immigrant Kids Destroying Economy, Fastest Growing Population Group

Debbie Schlussel, June 18, 2012

Here’s more hard evidence that Barack Obama’s newly announced amnesty for “kids” under age 30 is creating long-term damage to America. And it’s a policy, by the way, which Mitt Romney wouldn’t say he’d reverse . . . because he won’t. We’ve long known that anchor babies — not just their illegal alien parents — are a huge drain on American society and our dying economy. They cost the State of California — just that state — billions of dollars. But now even a liberal children’s foundation is sounding the clarion call through a study that says America’s future will be undermined by the children of immigrants, that they will destroy an economy which is already pretty sick and wounded.

The education, health and socioeconomic lot of the children of immigrants, the fastest-growing population group in the U.S., has raised concerns about how those children will perform when they enter the workforce.

Many of the parents are Hispanic and speak little or no English. And though the story of the U.S. is one of immigrants whose children assimilate, some researchers worry about the prospects for this generation. Their performance, they say, could undermine the U.S. economy as the children grow up, affecting everything from medical services for baby boomers to home prices.

“The baby-boom generation … will increasingly depend on children of immigrants to ensure the economy is productive,” said Donald Hernandez, a sociology professor at Hunter College who wrote a report on the children of immigrants.

The report, released Wednesday, was funded by the Foundation for Child Development, a New York-based philanthropy that sponsors research on children’s well-being. The report analyzed official demographic, education and health data collected between 1994 and 2010. . . . Now, a quarter of all children in the U.S. have at least one foreign-born parent. Ninety percent of those 18 million children are U.S. citizens who will begin to reach adulthood next year. . . . A quarter drop out of high school, as opposed to 18% for the children of native-born parents, the report said. . . . Children with origins in Mexico and Central America are least likely of any group to finish school, followed by those whose parents are from the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Africa.

More than a third of Hispanic fourth graders were identified by their schools as English language learners, according to a 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Education. By the time they are in middle school, English language learners tend to show the poorest performance in math and reading of all groups.

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