STRANGERS AMONG US April 29, 1998 NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT

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David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Roberto Suro, author of "Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration is Transforming America," in a conversation about the Latino population in America.

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A RealAudio version of this segment is available. NEWSHOUR LINKS: July 9, 1998 A dialogue on race with President Clinton. Browse NewsHour essays , Gergen dialogues, and coverage of race issues.

DAVID GERGEN: Roberto, a word of background about this book. You were an overseas correspondent in the 1980's for The New York Times, came back and found America transformed.

America's growing Latino population.

ROBERTO SURO, Author, "Strangers Among Us:" Yes. I was struck by how--the enormous growth of the Latino population--how it seemed to change the face of American cities. And basically, the size of the Latino population had more than doubled over the 1980's. And it was clear that this demographic force had gained momentum and was continuing to grow.

DAVID GERGEN: Latinos by the year 2003 or so are going to be the largest minority in the country.

ROBERTO SURO: That's right. That size population will be--it will be a larger population than that of African-Americans.

DAVID GERGEN: What was very gripping, I thought, among many aspects of the book was what was happening to the children of Latino immigrants.

ROBERTO SURO: Well, indeed, it was that which really got me started. Let me tell you the story that sort of set me off on this. When I moved back to Houston in 1989, shortly afterwards, I was doing interviews in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood and interviewed a young girl just then turned 15. She came from a family of very hard working parents. Both of them worked janitorial jobs at night. They had worked on factory jobs during the day. Both of them were Mexicans. He had come over illegal initially and had gotten papers in the amnesty in the 1980's, a very solid family, four children, as I recall, and with very strong sort of Mexican family values, and sort of the typical manner that they organized a 15th birthday party for her, the quincenera, where girls sort of--it's their of coming out party. And for a Mexican immigrant this is a big deal. They spent a lot of money, invited all their friends. They wanted to show off everything they had gained by working in the United States.

DAVID GERGEN: One of the great family traditions.

ROBERTO SURO: Yes. It's a great family tradition, and for immigrants it's a big deal to sort of show that you've accomplished something here, when you throw one of these parties. They ordered a dress for her from Mexico. And the next day she sat down at breakfast and announced to her father that (a) she was pregnant, (b) she was dropping out of school, and (c) she was going to move in with her boyfriend, who was a Mexican-American, who didn't speak Spanish, and whose family lived on welfare. The father and mother had no idea, had absolutely no idea that she had been living an entirely different and very American life. And what--

DAVID GERGEN: Was that representative of what you found?

ROBERTO SURO: Well, it represents something. It represents one of the problems that can develop when the children of immigrants get way out ahead of their parents. And that happens a lot, where they are--they grow up American; they grow up in American inner-city high schools; they assimilate and absorb not the best parts of our culture. And their parents tend to be very removed from that and very focused on the very narrow goals of working and saving money, and as a result, she get dropout rates among Hispanics that are higher than for any other group, particularly among the children of immigrants.

DAVID GERGEN: And they're rising.

ROBERTO SURO: And they're rising. The teen pregnancy rates--

DAVID GERGEN: The black dropout rate has fallen dramatically.

ROBERTO SURO: Yes, indeed.

From peddler to plumber to professional.

DAVID GERGEN: But it's such a reversal to the immigrant story. You've said that--you had such a nice phrase for it--that the old notion was to move up in three generations from peddler to plumber to professional.

ROBERTO SURO: Right.

DAVID GERGEN: And that that dream is now fading for many of these families.

ROBERTO SURO: Well, it, in part, reflects the changes in the structure of our economy. There are fewer of the blue collar jobs that allow that movement from the immigrant's very poor existence, to the suburbs, to the kind of opportunity that allows you to send your children to college. And the one--education is the key to upward mobility in our society. There aren't, to speak, massive industrial jobs that somebody who is good with their hands can work at and make a solid living, at least the same way as there were a hundred years ago, for sure.

DAVID GERGEN: We've known for a long time that the Latino population is not monolithic. The Puerto Ricans in New York are very different from the Cubans in Miami or the Mexicans in Houston and Los Angeles. Do you find there are differences in the way they work through this problem of immigrant children?

ROBERTO SURO: Indeed. I mean, there are--and the important thing about these differences is that I think it makes it very hard to try and treat them as a group, and our fundamental means of dealing with social differences in this country is to define people and put a sort of group label, call them non-white minorities, Hispanics, Asians, blacks. It doesn't work when you've got a population that's in the kind of ferment that the immigration population has, where a lot of people are doing quite well. I mean, make no mistake about it. There are a lot of Latinos that come here and achieve the kind of stability of the working class, but about a third of Latino immigrant families live in poverty, so his theory is it's kind of a zero sum gain, what I try to describe. You either win or lose very quickly here these days

DAVID GERGEN: Are there differences by groups about which ones succeed better than others?

ROBERTO SURO: It's--I think every group is experiencing this kind of division where you've got some people who do well, who move on out of the neighborhoods of entry, the first ports where they land, then move out to the suburbs, and do rather well, and some who get stuck. And that kind of split is happening in virtually every community.

DAVID GERGEN: And a very large portion of the Latino population is young.

ROBERTO SURO: Exceptionally. I mean, it's a much higher proportion than any other segment of the population. About a third of the Latino population is under 18.

DAVID GERGEN: These are the ones who are most susceptible then to becoming the teenage pregnancies, dropouts, gangs, that sort of thing.

ROBERTO SURO: Absolutely, yes. And when you've got, you know, as much as 40 percent of the young adult population without a high school diploma, that forecast, the possibility of a large population of people who have no economic opportunities, who really aren't going to be able to move up, we know what the fate of a high school dropout is in our economy.

DAVID GERGEN: Roberto, you've obviously had to think long and hard about, okay, I see the trap that some of these children are falling into, many of them. How do they avoid the trap? How do they stay out of--how do they move on?

ROBERTO SURO: Well, there are a lot of different things that have to happen. I think, for one thing, we have to look at the whole nature of poverty a little bit differently and look at, for example, the funding of schools, the need to have education programs, particularly language programs--I'm not talking about bilingual education. I'm talking about ensuring that both the parents and the children get plenty of access to English language education.

DAVID GERGEN: Learn English?

ROBERTO SURO: Exactly. And there's a great eagerness for that. There's a tremendous appetite for English language education and Latino communities. And the other thing I argue is that I think that illegal immigration is a bad thing for Latinos, and that they are going to have to come to that conclusion, and that they will, and that it's time for that discussion to begin.

DAVID GERGEN: You suggested in your book that you thought not only stronger border patrols and stronger sanctions against employers, but that there were steps Latinos ought to take within their own communities.

ROBERTO SURO: Well, I think if this conversation gets going and people come to this realization, at a certain point, you know, when your uncle or brother says I want to come, you say, look, wait until you get papers; it's not good for you to come here illegally; it's not good for us; and it's not going to be good for you. You're going to have to take a job that's going to pay you less than what you deserve. It's harmful for all of us. I think that's possible. I don't know.

DAVID GERGEN: In a country--let me ask you this final question--in a country that is very ambivalent now about immigration, what is the positive side of this great flow of Latinos here to the United States?

Reinventing the nation.

ROBERTO SURO: Well, I think that, you know, it's tremendous demographic energy. It presents challenges. The United States has reinvented itself as a nation, has reinvented its identity, has reinvented its culture by absorbing new groups of people. That's the way we've grown as a country. It often involves conflict. It's often painful. But on the other side of it, this country's always emerged stronger and with a better sense of itself. And I think the next few decades might have some real challenges and some real rough spots. But on the far side of it, we'll come out the better for it.

DAVID GERGEN: Roberto Suro, thank you very much.

ROBERTO SURO: Thank you very much.

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