Daily life for Marlen Lopez sounds anything but easy: The undocumented worker cleans offices to pay her bills and hasn't seen her 8-year-old son since she left El Salvador three years ago. Yet Lopez is happy with her job, hopeful about the future and confident her son will one day graduate from college in the United States. For the 33-year-old Lopez, as for many other Hispanic immigrants, optimism about life in the U.S. appears to be partly a product of what she sees in the rearview mirror.
An Associated Press-Univision poll of more than 1,500 Latinos finds that Hispanic immigrants, many of whom faced huge problems in their homelands, have more idealized views of the United States than Hispanics who were born in America do. It's an oft-told story in U.S. history, one of immigrants drawn to the land of opportunity and happy with the contrast to their old life. But it's also one of ethnic groups that settle in only to confront social and economic hurdles that persist from one generation to the next. For Lopez, life in the U.S. so far has met the expectations she's built up since she was a young girl in El Salvador. In one week of cleaning offices, she earns double or triple what she made in a month as a grocery store cashier back home. And she's working much shorter days now, as she prepares to bring her son and father to the U.S. "One hopes for the best and sometimes you don't get it, but I'm good where I am," Lopez, who lives in Columbia, Md., tells a reporter in Spanish.
The poll, also sponsored by The Nielsen Co. and Stanford University, turned up stark differences between the hopes of immigrant parents and U.S.-born Hispanics for their children: 77 percent of foreign-born Hispanic parents believe it will be easier for their children to find a good job, compared with 31 percent of U.S.-born Hispanics. Likewise, far more Hispanic immigrants believe it will be easier for their children to buy a house and for their children to raise a family than do Hispanics born in the U.S. Because the nation's 47 million Hispanics are the country's fastest-growing minority, questions such as where they will work, whether their children go to college and whom they will vote for are important to the country as a whole. READ FULL STORY
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