U.S. immigrants prop up marriage

More immigrant families are traditional families

Shannon Roberts | Dec 12 2016 | comment

Some worry that immigrants are destroying the traditional ‘American’ way of life. It is understandable that many people seek to defend and preserve the values that American culture has traditionally been built on. Thus, it is worth considering that children of immigrants are morelikely, not less likely, than children of native-born Americans to be growing up in traditional families, that is with two married parents.

The latest data from the Census Bureau on the family living arrangements of U.S. children show that 75 percent of immigrant children live in married-couple families, compared to 61 percent of children of U.S.-born parents. The figure is the same for immigrant children who were born in the U.S. as for those who were foreign-born. Research clearly shows that children from stronger family structures have better life outcomes and are more emotionally stable.

Given that one-quarter of all children in the United States have first-generation immigrant parents, births outside of marriage are also declining in the United States for the first time in decades. The trend may represent the end of an era of increase in unmarried mothers in a society in which marriage is and always has been a deeply rooted good.

The following table from the Institute of Family Studies summarises the figures:

More conservative views among immigrants stemming from religious observance may help explain stronger marriages. For instance, the Pew Research Center’s 2013 National Survey of Latinos and Religion found that a majority of Latino adults living in the U.S. identify as Catholic (55%). Indeed, sixty percent of Catholics in the U.S. younger than 18 are now Latino. A further 22 percent identify as Protestant Christian.

Whatever your views on changes to future immigration policy, American society should recognise the family values that many immigrant families exemplify.

Violence of all kinds, from political rhetoric to slaughtering civiians, continues to mark 2016. On Sunday, a blast in the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo killed at least 25, mostly women and children, and bombs in Turkey have killed 38, mostly police.

As the year draws to a close and we approach Christmas, it becomes ever clearer that society needs mercy if we are not to fall into a spiral of hatred. David Lapp has written a very thought-provoking article about the power of mercy in drawing a drug addict back from the brink.

"A merciful response is by no means naïve about the capacity for human evil," he writes, "but it insists that the good is ultimately more powerful than evil. Thus, a response of mercy recognizes that if we want to deploy the most powerful weapons against things like drug abuse and delinquent fathers and other thorny social problems, we must seek out the good in a person’s life—to look for the 'space in which the good seed can grow,' as Pope Francis put it."