Roughly 10% of Mexico's population of about 107 million is now living in the United States, estimates show. About 15% of Mexico's labor force is working in the United States. One in every seven Mexican workers migrates to the United States.
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Friday, April 20, 2007

How "Hispanic" became a racial category

"With the beginning of large-scale non-European immigration in the late 1960s as a result of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, entrants from Europe fell from over 50%, 1955-64, to less than 10% in 1985-90, while Third World entrants rose rapidly. This opened an opportunity for lobbies to create new categories of 'disadvantaged minorities.' Thus the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a powerful interest-group in alliance with the Democratic Party, succeeded in establishing a racial category known as 'Hispanic,' which included latin mestizos, people of predominantly European, black, and American Indian descent, descendants of long-assimilated Californios and Tejanos, and other groups who once spoke Spanish--almost anyone in fact who found it advantageous to belong, so long as they could not be accused of being 'Caucasian' or 'Aryan.' This pseudo-race came into existence as the result of statistical classification by bureaucrats." Paul Johnson, A history of the American people, Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 956-57





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