Mexicans arrive in the United States with less education than other immigrants, often having spent just seven or eight years in school. Nearly 40 percent have less than a ninth-grade education, and on most measures they never catch up. Their American-born children go much further, but improvement stalls in the third and fourth generations, with Mexican-descended students a full year of schooling behind their non-Hispanic white counterparts and one-third of a year behind their African-American peers.

These deficits in learning have presumably bolstered the politically potent idea that unauthorized Mexicans, who comprise about half of U.S. immigrants from that country, are a threat to national prosperity.

A study published recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, however, found that Mexican Americans assimilate more successfully than they are credited for; their academic gains have been masked by commonly used data sources that don’t identify a child as being of Mexican descent if parents no longer identify that way. Working with newly available data, researchers determined that parents who changed how they identify tend to have more education and much higher-performing children.

The study indicates that Mexican Americans as a group had effectively been penalized for assimilating quickly.

Our findings suggest that Mexican Americans do indeed experience substantial progress,” Brian Duncan and his co-authors write. “This progress is obscured by limitations of the data sources commonly used to look for it.”

Unlike school-age newcomers from other countries with large immigrant populations, like India and China, Mexican students often arrive without both parents or may suffer from unstable or undocumented legal status, both of which are associated with lower academic performance.

Read the full article by David Cantor about Mexican American assimilation from The 74