El Sueño Americano? The Generational Progress of Mexican Americans Prior to World War II
研究了1880至1940年间第一代墨西哥移民及其后裔的经济表现，发现三代内经济差距未缩小，但到现代差距已大幅减小。
We present new estimates of the outcomes of first-generation Mexicans and their descendants between 1880 and 1940. We find zero convergence of the economic gap between Mexicans and non-Mexican whites across three generations. The great-grandchildren of immigrants also had fewer years of education. Slow convergence is not simply due to an inheritance of poverty; rather, Mexican Americans had worse outcomes conditional on the father’s economic status. However, the gap between third-generation Mexican Americans and non-Mexican whites is about half the size today as it was in 1940, suggesting that barriers to Mexican American progress have significantly decreased over time.