ENGLISH FAVORED BY KIDS; IMMIGRANTS' YOUNG BLEND IN.

Byline: Celia W. Dugger The New York Times

A multiyear survey that is the largest ever of the children of immigrants - who now account for almost one in five American children - found that they overwhelmingly prefer English to their parents' native tongues and have higher grades and steeply lower school dropout rates than other American children.

While a majority of those surveyed, who were predominantly Latino, Asian-American and African-American children, said they had personally experienced discrimination, an even larger majority of them said they still believed that the United States is the best country in the world to live in. The youths were adolescent.

The lead researchers on the study describe these findings as reassuring indications that the children of immigrants are unlikely to form a new multiethnic underclass, as some experts fear, cut off from the mainstream by academic failure and an inability to speak English.

But the researchers also say it is still an open question how well these young people will do in college and the job market, a caution shared by other experts.

The researchers said that the survey brought into sharp relief the extraordinary diversity of the children of immigrants, not only by national origin, but by social class. It reaches from the young of Chinese and Indian couples from highly educated, upper-middle-class backgrounds to Mexicans and Dominicans from the humblest origins.

``What can certainly be predicted now is that the destinies of these youths will diverge,'' said professor Ruben Rumbaut, a sociologist at Michigan State University. ``Some will go up, and some will go down.''

Outperforming their peers

The survey, which shows that the children of immigrants outperform their American peers and that those from more advantaged backgrounds do better than poorer children, will inevitably become fodder for the larger debate about the United States' immigration policy.

Supporters of the current high levels of immigration will cite the achievements of these young people, while critics may find reinforcement for their view that national policy should be tilted to favor more highly skilled and educated immigrants.

California kids

The research team, led by Rumbaut and professor Alejandro Portes, a sociologist at Princeton University, first interviewed 5,200 youngsters in Southern California and South Florida in 1992, when the youths were in the eighth or ninth grades, and then tracked down 82 percent of them for a second interview in 1995 and 1996, when most of them were high school seniors.

This fall, another team of sociologists will begin a large-scale survey of the grown children of immigrants in New York City and its suburbs, focusing on adults 18 to 32 years old, rather than adolescents.

The number of children who are either immigrants or the American-born offspring of immigrants grew to 13.7 million last year, from 8 million in 1990, making them the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population under the age of 18, according to a new analysis of census data by Rumbaut.

The $1 million survey of the children of immigrants was financed by the Russell Sage, Andrew W. Mellon, Spencer and National Science foundations. The researchers provided their findings to The New York Times.

The language issue

Among the most striking findings of the bicoastal survey of children from San Diego and Dade (Miami) and Broward (Fort Lauderdale) counties in South Florida have to do with the contentious issue of language. While nine out of 10 of the youths surveyed spoke a language other than English at home, almost exactly the same proportion, 88 percent, preferred English by the end of high school.

Rumbaut wrote, ``The findings suggest that the linguistic outcomes for the third generation - the grandchildren of the current wave of immigrants - will be no different than what has been the age-old pattern in American history: The grandchildren may learn a few foreign words and phrases as a quaint vestige of their ancestry, but they will most likely grow up speaking English only.''

And the professor also pointed to the ascendancy of English as evidence of the irrelevance of a California ballot initiative that could end bilingual education, which has been depicted as an impediment to the acquisition of English. ``English is triumphing with breathtaking rapidity,'' he said.

Upbeat portrayal

The study presents a generally upbeat portrayal of the children of immigrants as ambitious, hopeful and resilient in the face of discrimination.

In San Diego, the children of immigrants had better grades than their American peers in every grade. The gap narrowed over time, largely because the poorly performing children of immigrants were more likely to stay in school than their peers who were not the children of immigrants, the researchers say. In South Florida, the school districts were unable to provide the researchers with grade-point averages for the district as a whole.

But when the researchers analyzed how the children of immigrants were faring by national origin, they found that levels of scholastic success diverged sharply. Generally, the children whose immigrant parents had better educations and jobs and who came from stable, two-parent families were predictably more successful, with a few startling exceptions.

The children of Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Korean parents had the highest grade-point averages, A's and B's. English-speaking West Indians had lower grades, C's and C-pluses. Latin American and Haitian youths performed most poorly, with averages that were slightly higher or lower than a C.

Defying expectations

But a few groups defied what would have been expected based on their socioeconomic status. The children of Southeast Asian refugees, who came from the most impoverished backgrounds and whose parents were among the least educated, were also among the least likely to drop out of school and had above-average grades. They did it by studying for longer hours and watching less television than many of the other children of immigrants, the study found.

And the children of Cuban immigrants, who were from average to above-average socioeconomic backgrounds, had the highest dropout rates and among the lowest grades (an average of C or C-plus), the survey reported. The Cuban children, who belonged to the dominant group in metropolitan Miami faced less discrimination than any other group in the survey, the researchers said.

The children of Cubans did worse academically than the children of Mexicans, who are one of the poorest and by far the largest immigrant group in the United States.

The findings about Cubans were among the survey's most startling to Rumbaut and Portes and their colleague, Lisandro Perez, director of the Cuban Research Center at Florida International University, who are all Cuban immigrants themselves.

Portes had earlier hypothesized that Cuban youths would use their economically powerful ethnic enclave as a springboard to higher education and the middle class, much as Eastern European Jews did in an earlier wave of immigration.

``As it turns out, the enclave may not be a springboard,'' Perez said, ``but a cushy net that means you don't have to depend exclusively on education for a job. It may be that Cubans are right, and will do better going to work at an uncle's factory in Hialeah. We're not certain how it will translate economically.''

Self-image

The survey also found some intriguing changes in the way the children of immigrants identified themselves, possibly reflecting their altered relationship to the rest of American society or perhaps just adolescent rebelliousness.

When the youths were first interviewed, more than half labeled themselves as hyphenated Americans or as plain Americans. That sounded like old-fashioned assimilation and it might have been expected that, three years later, even more of the youths would have chosen an American identity.

But the results of the second interview, conducted in the months after California's passage of Proposition 187, the initiative that called for restricting social and educational benefits to illegal immigrants, turned those expectations on their head.

Prop. 187 effect

Only a third of the youths in Southern California picked an American identity the second time around, while almost half identified themselves by their national identity, especially youths of Mexican and Filipino descent, who belong to the two largest immigrant groups in the United States.

The researchers interpreted the change as part of a backlash among these youths against what they perceived as immigrant bashing that surfaced in the campaign for Proposition 187.

In South Florida the pattern was different but equally striking. The proportion identifying themselves by some kind of American label dropped to about one-third, while those who chose ethnic identities such as ``Hispanic'' or ``black'' doubled to 38 percent, mainly among Latin Americans and Jamaicans.

The more militant, nationalistic identities assumed by Mexicans and Filipinos in California, and the minority-group identities chosen in Florida reflected the youths' rising awareness ``of the ethnic and racial categories in which they were persistently classified by mainstream society,'' Rumbaut wrote.

In one of the more troubling findings of the study, the young people who identified themselves by ethnic identities like ``Chicano'' or ``Latino'' in junior high had lower grades and somewhat higher dropout rates than the other children studied. This finding lends support to analysts who have suggested that children of immigrants who come to identify with American minorities may take on oppositional identities and see doing well in school as ``acting white.''