[Marxism] Portrait of a community under siege

[Joaquin Bustelo]

The Pew Hispanic Center has published results of a poll of 2,000 Latinos in
the United States that presents a picture of a community that is
increasingly under siege. 

The survey was carefully designed to try to include all segments of the
community (i.e., including the undocumented). That said, the weight of the
undocumented in the survey is probably substantially underrepresented,
because the survey results were massaged on the basis of the census bureau's
Current Population Survey. The polling was done fully bilingually, with
those surveyed preferring to answer in Spanish outnumbering those who
preferred English by a two-to-one margin. 

Some of the most significant results are these: more than half of all
Latinos say they worry about deportation -- either of themselves, a family
member or a close friend. Two thirds of the foreign born say they worry
about this. But even among native-born Latinos, one third say they worry
about the deportation of someone close to them.

Two thirds of all Latinos say that what Pew calls "the immigration debate"
has made life more difficult for Latinos in this country; among the foreign
born, the figure is three out of four. 

About half report they have been personally impacted by having a harder time
getting a job (12%) or housing (15%) or being harassed more often for their
documents than in the past (19%). 

Again, these figures underrepresent the undocumented immigrant segment of
the community -- by how much is hard to guess, but here in Georgia, the
undercount of Latinas was so great following the 2000 census that on the
basis of the "official" figures the fertility rate of Hispanic women works
out to an average family having 4-5 kids, which isn't true, and is almost or
fully double what the real fertility rate is likely to be. Using this kind
of demographic data, the Bear Sterns brokerage house calculated a couple of
years ago that the number of undocumented immigrants in the country was
really about 20 million, not the up to 12 million officially estimated.

The full Pew report is here:

http://www.laopinion.com/primerapagina/PEW.pdf

Joaquín