nation: Mexico

Katrin brought our attention to a report from the Brookings Institution about the educational levels of immigrants to the U.S., based on data from the 2009 American Community Survey as well as Census data between 1900 and 2000. As a group, immigrants have significantly more education than common stereotypes might lead you to believe. In fact, there are now more immigrants with at least a 4-year college degree than with less than a high-school diploma (27.8%):

Overall, immigrants still have lower levels of education than native-born U.S. citizens. While the proportion with a college degree is comparable (32% of the native-born and 29.6% of immigrants have a 4-year degree or higher), the immigrant population is much more likely to have less than a high school diploma (27.8% vs. 7% for the native-born).

The proportion of immigrants falling into the high- or low-education categories varies significantly by destination city. The study authors calculated the ratio of high-skill to low-skill immigrants  (where skill is defined as education level, as in the graph above) for the 100 largest metro areas. High-skill destinations have more than 125 college-educated immigrants per 100 immigrants with less than a high school diploma; low-skill cities have fewer than 75. A city was defined as “balanced” if there were between 75 and 125 high-skill immigrants per 100 low-skill immigrants.

A map of the ratios shows that of the 100 largest metro areas, those in the eastern half of the U.S. (especially the Northeast) attract more educated immigrants, while the Great Plains and West (especially California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) have lower-educated immigrant population. Balanced-skills cities are concentrated in the Midwest and Southeast:

Not surprisingly, cities with universities attract more  highly-educated immigrants, while those with economies based on agriculture or food processing are more likely to be destination sites for immigrants with less education.

Here’s a video of one of the authors, Audrey Singer, discussing the study and its implications:

You can also see the detailed information about the 100 largest metro areas. In the areas studied here, immigrants with less than a high school diploma are disproportionately from Mexico (57.3%, but with wide geographic variation — Mexican immigrants make up only 6.2% of low-skill immigrants in Buffalo but 85.8% in Austin), lack English skills (only 16.4% are proficient), and are unlikely to be naturalized citizens (26.2%). Among immigrants with a college degree, 5.5% are Mexican, 71.5% are English-proficient, and 54% are naturalized citizens. The full report has a detailed discussion of the factors at play here–historical immigrant settlement patterns, changes in which cities are gateways for arriving immigrants, and so on. If you’re interested in immigration issues and how they impact economic development, it’s definitely worth a read.

Dolores and Diego sent in a new study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  The study measured time use in 30 countries, demonstrating significant differences in the amount of work and leisure enjoyed, on average.

The country reporting the fewest work hours was Belgium at just about 7 hours a day.  The country reporting the most was Mexico; Mexicans reported working almost 10 hours per day.  That’s enough hours to translate into 45.5 extra days a year that Mexicans work in excess of Belgians, and a month of extra work hours compared to the average country in this study (at 8 hours a day).

The OECD has also reported gender gaps in leisure across countries (Norway had the smallest gap in that study; Italy the largest) and we’ve seen the gender leisure gap reflected in American advertising.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Does American prosperity translate into long retirements?  Not compared to other developed countries in the world.  Flowing Data borrowed OECD numbers on life expectancy and age of retirement to calculate the average number of years in retirement for men and women across many different countries.  The portion of each bar with the line is the average number of years working, while the non-lined portion represents years in retirement.

Largely because of life expectancy, women enjoy more years than men in all states except Turkey, but the number of years varies quite tremendously, from an average of zero years for men in Mexico, to an average of 26 years for women in Austria and Italy.  The United States is way down on this list, not doing so well relatively after all.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Deeb K. sent in a story from the New York Times about who does unpaid work — that is, the housework, carework, and volunteering that people do without financial compensation. Based on time-use surveys by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this chart shows how many more minutes per day women in various nations spend doing such activities compared to men:

Childcare stuck out as an area with a particularly large gap:

On child care in particular, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do: 1 hour 40 minutes for mothers, on average, compared to 42 minutes for fathers…On average, working fathers spend only 10 minutes more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much time (144 minutes vs. 74) when not working.

The full OECD report breaks down types of unpaid work (this is overall, including data for both men and women):

The study also found that non-working fathers spend less time on childcare than working mothers in almost every country in the study (p. 19). And mothers and fathers do different types of childcare, with dads doing more of what we might think of as the “fun stuff” (p. 20):

Source: Miranda, V. 2011. “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work around the World.” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 116. OECD Publishing.

Katrin sent us a link to a image at GOOD that illustrates the geopolitics of first-person shooter video games. The image was created by a group at Complex to illustrate the way that the changing actual political landscape can be seen in the nationality of villains in video games. Peter Rubin, of Complex, explains, “Gone are the days of all FPSes being either World War II or sci-fi; in the new milennium, developers are on the hunt for enemies that are speculative but still plausible.”

They looked at 20 FPS games from the past decade (unfortunately, they give no details about how those 20 games were chosen

The selected titles:

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001): Germany
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Desert Siege (2002): Ethiopia
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Island Thunder (2003): Cuba
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down (2003): Somalia
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm (2004): Colombia
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2 (2004): North Korea
Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising (2004): Indonesia
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike (2005): Afghanistan
Delta Force Xtreme (2005): Chad
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (2006): Mexico
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007): Russia/Afghanistan
Army of Two (2008): Somalia/Afghanistan/China/Iraq
Frontlines: Fuel of War (2008): Russia/China
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009): Russia/Afghanistan/Brazil
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (2009): China/Russia
Singularity (2010): Russia
MAG (2010): Russia/China/India
Army of Two: The 40th Day (2010): China
Homefront (2011): Korea (They don’t specify if it’s North or South Korea)
Operation Flashpoint: Red River (2011): China

Anyway, it provides a nice little illustration of the way that global politics seeps into this element of pop culture, as well as a snapshot of nations currently perceived as rivals or even enemies of the U.S. — a mixture of old tensions (Russia, Germany), ongoing anxiety about China, and emerging focal points.

On January 30th a video was uploaded to youtube featuring among the most blatantly racist banter I have ever heard on or off screen.   The conversation occurred among the hosts of a BBC program called Top Gear: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.  They discuss a new sports car made in Mexico and the racist “hilarity” ensues.  It is pretty damn horrible… and it goes on and on… so, trigger warning.

There’s a full transcript after the jump, but here are some high points:

They say the car is like the Mexican people: “lazy, feckless, flatulent, [indecipherable] leaning against a fence asleep”

They call Mexican food “sick with cheese on it.”

Hammond says, “Just imagine waking up and remembering that you’re Mexican.” Everyone laughs. Clarkson replies, “It’d be brilliant because you could just go back to sleep again.”

Hammond is the ring leader in this example, but Clarkson appears to make a habit of racist commentary. Here’s just a sampling from Wikipedia:

In October 1998 Hyundai complained to the BBC about what they described as “bigoted and racist” comments he made at the Birmingham Motor Show, where he was reported as saying that the people working on the Hyundai stand had “eaten a dog” and that the designer of the Hyundai XG had probably eaten a spaniel for his lunch…

In April 2007 he was criticised in the Malaysian parliament for having described one of their cars, the Perodua Kelisa, as the worst in the world, built “in jungles by people who wear leaves for shoes”…

This clip reminds us that there are still people out there who will make race-based attacks and plenty of people, note the audience, who will laugh.  Many white people truly do oppose racism and they want people of color to trust them; they want the benefit of the doubt.  But occasional exposure to people like this, even if just on television, and the ongoing daily experience of prejudice, some mild, some severe, plus the hundreds of things that happen every week that may have been racism or may have been somebody having a bad day, add up.  This makes it very scary to trust white people.  Every “benefit of the doubt” has the potential to backfire.

Given the daily experience of race that most people of color must endure, blind trust is too much to ask for.

(Transcript after the jump, borrowed from Racialicious.)

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Safa S.-Y., of Naked Lady in a White (Silk) Dress, and K. sent us a link to a story about the recent collaboration between MAC cosmetics and the Rodarte clothing line to create a collection of makeup and clothing the sisters who own and design for Rodarte said was inspired by the city of Juárez and female maquiladora workers:

…the sisters explained that a long drive from El Paso to Marfa, Texas, got them thinking they might like to explore their Mexican roots. From there, they became interested in the troubled border town of Ciudad Juárez; the hazy, dreamlike quality of the landscape there; and the maquiladora workers going to the factory in the middle of the night. And that, according to the designers, who certainly know how to romance a pitch, led to this conclusion: They’d build a collection off the idea of sleepwalking. [source]

The cosmetics received names such as Factory, Ghost Town, Juárez, and del Norte. The eyeshadows are meant to give wearers an ashen, tired appearance. After many in the fashion blogsphere criticized the line, both MAC and Rodarte issued apologies, said they will change the names of some of the products, and promised to donate a portion of proceeds to charities working in Juárez.

Just for some context, MAC is a mid-range cosmetics company; a single color of eyeshadow runs about $14.50, lipsticks are generally $13-15 but some are $18-19. This is less than high-end lines like Chanel and Estée Lauder, but more than drugstore brands such as Cover Girl. Rodarte, on the other hand, is a luxury fashion line, selling t-shirts for $120+, sweaters for nearly $3,000, and dresses for $4,000 or more. They do have a much cheaper Rodarte for Target line, however.

Safa argues that it is problematic that these companies, both completely beyond the financial resources of maquiladora workers (and most people in the U.S., for that matter, particularly Rodarte), to use pale White women made even paler with cosmetics to represent low-wage workers in Mexico, none of whom they met or spoke to. Most of the online critics point out that Juárez is quite dangerous, and hundreds of women, many workers at maquiladoras on their way to or from work, have been raped and killed (NPR had a story about the murders in 2003). These numbers don’t include women who simply disappeared, since authorities don’t have proof they were murdered without a body, though most officials and activists believe that at least some of those women were also killed. The vast majority of the crimes are unsolved.

Safa says,

These women [the Rodarte designers], who had never been to Juarez, but nearby Texas towns, entitled themselves and their clothing line to represent the stories of women they never met.

Female factory workers in Juárez thus become exoticized Others for U.S. companies to represent and claim to speak for — that is, they are supposedly concerned about the problems faced by Mexican women workers (or anyway, they said so after all the criticism) and by creating a line in which White women are made up to look like zombies, or as though perhaps they got punched in the eye, they are actually helping women in Juárez by bringing attention to them…in some undefined way that most women who buy their products are unlikely, I think, to pick up and which probably isn’t going to lead to much concrete action to improve these women’s lives.

I think Safa sums it up nicely, so I’ll let her have the last word:

Human suffering became a look of glamour.  They presented social consciousness in the form of consumerism, and with that, female oppression became another commodity that could be measured not in statistics, but in revenue sales.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

The Center for American Progress released a report detailing the state of border policing and the projected impact of immigration policies.  First, notice that spending on border patrol and the number of border patrol agents in the southwest have increased significantly between 1992 and 2009:

Still, despite this, the number of people illegally crossing the border has increased:

So the policing hasn’t deterred a rise in disallowed border crossings, but it has made it more dangerous:

So, the U.S. is spending a lot of money trying to keep undocumented non-citizens out.  Is it worth it?

The report also discusses projected changes in the GDP under three different scenarios: immigration reform, allowing temporary workers only, and mass deportation.

The figure suggests that undocumented workers are making a substantial contribution to the well-being of the U.S. economy, one that would decrease under conditions of mass deportation.  Temporary workers are helpful, but real immigration reform that would bring in greater numbers of permanent and temporary workers is the best thing for America.

Hat tip to Graphic Sociology.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.