Federal Judge Upholds Alabama Anti-Immigrant Law--Hispanic Students Disappear

The extremely harsh law passed earlier this year in Alabama that targets undocumented immigrants has been upheld by a Federal judge, and the Associated Press reports that in its wake schools have witnessed the disappearance of Hispanic students.

Education officials say scores of immigrant families have withdrawn their children from classes or kept them home this week, afraid that sending the kids to school would draw attention from authorities.
There are no precise statewide numbers. But several districts with large immigrant enrollments — from small towns to large urban districts — reported a sudden exodus of children of Hispanic parents, some of whom told officials they planned to leave the state to avoid trouble with the law, which requires schools to check students' immigration status.

The Obama administration has filed suit to overturn that court ruling, but in the meantime it is likely that many Latinos will leave Alabama--exactly what the law was intended to accomplish. But there is a certain hypocrisy in the Obama administration's actions, as Greg Weeks noted today: 

The only reason the Obama administration is suing left and right is that it has utterly failed to pass any meaningful immigration legislation.  These lawsuits only seek to re-establish the status quo ante, which was already broken.  They don't do anything to advance federal reform.

Diversity is Getting More Diverse in the US

The US Census Bureau just released a new set of data from the 2010 census showing the detailed breakdown of the population by racial and ethnic categories based on data from the 100 percent short form. In this census, as in the several most recent ones, the Census asked two questions to elicit race/ethnicity. The first question asked "Is this person of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?" and right after that was the question "What is this person's race?" Over time, people's perceptions of their own identity tend to change, and the statistics have to keep up with those changes. For a great example of this, by the way, you should read the article by Mara Loveman and Jeronimo O. Muniz, "How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Inter-Census Racial Reclassification" American Sociological Review 72 [6] (2007): 915-939. Anyway, it turns out that over time Hispanics in the US have been increasingly checking the "white" box on the census form rather than the "some other race" box.

The share of Hispanics identifying themselves as white increased over the past decade from 48 percent to 53 percent, while the proportion of those who marked "some other race" dropped from 42 percent to 37 percent. Many Hispanics previously preferred to check the "some other race" category to express their nationalities — such as Mexican or Cuban.
The Census Bureau has been examining different ways to count the nation's demographic groups. One experiment is a possible change to the questionnaire that would effectively treat Hispanics as a mutually exclusive group. It would allow people to check off just one of five race or ethnic categories — white, black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander or American Indian/Alaska Native — rather than asking people who identify themselves as Hispanic to also check what race they are.

Of course, the Census Bureau publishes, and encourages us to use, the so-called Hispanic-exclusive categories, in which Hispanic origin and Race are cross-tabulated, thus producing the non-Hispanic White category. Still, these census data show us that things are evolving.

"There is no question that racial lines are blurring in the United States, especially among `new' minorities — Hispanics, Asians and growing mixed race generations. Yet it's particularly significant that we are seeing breakdowns in white-black separation," said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. "Strong gains in interracial marriages and higher mixed-race identification among youth suggest that past racial categories will need to be radically changed or even dispensed with in the next two or three decades."

The Associated Press also came up with this nugget of information:

In the 2010 census, President Barack Obama was among those who identified himself only as African-American, even though his mother was white.

Keep in mind that this information had to have come from the President himself, since the census data are confidential for 72 years, and any Census Bureau employee who released such information would be in big trouble.

Families and Households Continue to Diversify in the US

The US Census Bureau has just released data from the 100 percent short form for the 2010 census showing that the percent of households that are gay couples, indeed married gay couples, has been increasing in the United States. The census form (Figure 4.2 in my 11th edition) asks that the first person to be listed is one who owns or rents the house (or, it could be anyone). Then everyone else's relationship to that person is requested, including the category of "husband or wife." 

Some 131,729 same-sex couples checked "husband" or "wife" boxes on their decennial census forms, the first time people could do so, after gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts starting in 2004.
That 2010 tally of married gay couples is higher than the actual number of legal marriages, civil unions and domestic partnerships in the U.S. Even after New York legalized gay marriage in June, a Census Bureau consultant, Gary Gates of UCLA, put the actual number of legally recognized gay partnerships at 100,000.
"There's no dispute the same-sex population increases from 2000 and 2010," said Martin O'Connell, chief of the fertility and family statistics branch at the Census Bureau. In cases of couples who reported they were living in a marriage relationship, "they basically responded that way because that is truly how they felt they were living."
The total of 646,464 gay couples in the U.S. was a downward revision of the Census Bureau's count of 901,997 released last month. The bureau said Tuesday it had to make the adjustment after determining that coding errors resulted in an exaggerated count for the initial number.

There were also some fairly predictable regional variations in the results:

The highest share of households with reported same-sex couples — both married and unmarried — was in Washington, D.C., at nearly 2 percent. Washington was followed by Vermont, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Delaware, New Mexico and Washington state. On the other end of the scale, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming had the smallest shares, each with less than one-third of 1 percent.

OK--You Can Vote In 4 Years, But Don't Try to Drive

Only two days after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia announced that women would be allowed to vote (and run for office) in municipal elections in 2015, a women was sentenced to a penalty of ten lashes by a whip for driving herself in the city of Jeddah.

Normally, police just stop female drivers, question them and let them go after they sign a pledge not to drive again. But dozens of women have continued to take to the roads since June in a campaign to break the taboo.

Note that this taboo on women driving has nothing to do with Islam per se:

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bans women — both Saudi and foreign — from driving. The prohibition forces families to hire live-in drivers, and those who cannot afford the $300 to $400 a month for a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor.

There are no written laws that restrict women from driving. Rather, the ban is rooted in conservative traditions and religious views that hold giving freedom of movement to women would make them vulnerable to sins.
Activists say the religious justification is irrelevant.
"How come women get flogged for driving while the maximum penalty for a traffic violation is a fine, not lashes?" Zein el-Abydeen said. "Even the Prophet (Muhammad's) wives were riding camels and horses because these were the only means of transportation."
Since June, dozens of women have led a campaign to try to break the taboo and impose a new status quo. The campaign's founder, Manal al-Sherif, who posted a video of herself driving on Facebook, was detained for more than 10 days. She was released after signing a pledge not to drive or speak to media.
Since then, women have been appearing in the streets driving their cars once or twice a week.
Until Tuesday, none had been sentenced by the courts. But recently, several women have been summoned for questioning by the prosecutor general and referred to trial.

This is definitely a case of steps forward and backward--hopefully there are more steps forward than backward...

Having a Child May be Good for the Health of Men

Getting pregnant is one of the most dangerous things for her health that a woman can do in life. For men, however, parenthood may be good for health, according to a study just published in the journal Human Reproduction and reported by the Associated Press. 

New research suggests that dads are a little less likely to die of heart-related problems than childless men are.
The study — by the AARP, the government and several universities — is the largest ever on male fertility and mortality, involving nearly 138,000 men. Although a study like this can't prove that fatherhood and mortality are related, there are plenty of reasons to think they might be, several heart disease experts said.
Marriage, having lots of friends and even having a dog can lower the chance of heart problems and cardiac-related deaths, previous research suggests. Similarly, kids might help take care of you or give you a reason to take better care of yourself.
Also, it takes reasonably good genes to father a child. An inability to do so might mean a genetic weakness that can spell heart trouble down the road.

Keep in mind that differences are not dramatic, so the search for better health is probably not a good reason in and of itself for a man to father a child. However, this research does come on the heals of a study published last week suggesting that testosterone, the main male hormone, drops when a man becomes a father, so these two studies together suggest some intriguing biological linkages to male reproduction.