14 DAY TRIAL // A recent research revealed that higher immigration during the '90s was the main factor in a great drop in interracial marriages in the US.
"The decline reflects the growth in the immigrant population during the 90s - more native-born Asian Americans and Hispanics are marrying their foreign-born counterparts," said Zhenchao Qian, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
The research team used U.S. census data from 1990 and 2000, investigating married couples aged 20 to 34 who identified themselves as whites, African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Hispanics or some combination.
"Interracial and inter-ethnic marriages began to increase in the 1970s and continued to grow through the 1980s," Qian said.
The majority of the interracial marriages are between whites and minorities and only few marriages occur between minority groups.
The level of intermarriages started decreasing in the '90s, especially those couples formed by whites and Asian Americans or Hispanics.
Some blame it on the rise of cohabitation.
"However, this study found that is not the case. Our results showed that recent increases in cohabitation have gone hand-in-hand with increasing shares of interracial marriages," said Quian.
In the case of African American men forming a couple with a white woman, intermarriages rose by about three-quarters (from 8.3 percent to 14.9 %) during the 1990s, while interracial cohabitation levels increased by about one half (from 14.7 to 21.9 %).
"Interracial couples choosing to cohabit have not siphoned off couples who would have otherwise married," Qian said.
"If you look at changes in the 1990s, the bigger picture is really immigration, especially for Asian Americans and Hispanics. Those are the groups that had the largest influx of immigrants during the 90s."
As a result, more native-born racial minorities choose marriage partners from among the new immigrants and the percentage of native-born Hispanic men marrying white women decreased by nearly 4 % from 1990 to 2000 (35.3 % to 31.9 %) while in the case of native-born Asian American males, the number dropped from 50.2 to 45.8 %.
Higher education favored interracial marriages in the case of Hispanic and Asian Americans, but proved irrelevant for African Americans.
Native-born Hispanic women with a college education had a three times higher probability to marry white men compared to their counterparts lacking high school education.
New arrived Hispanic and Asian immigrants, who generally possess lower levels of education, are more prone to marry their native-born counterparts with a similar education level.
"It is clear that education is an important part of the assimilation process for Hispanics and Asian American," Qian said.
"The melting pot is clearly bubbling, but mostly along class lines, with the highly educated most likely to cross racial and ethnic lines to marry. While education has been a way to bring many ethnic and racial groups together, that hasn't played a role with African Americans", said Qian.
The historical discrimination against African Americans may be still impeding the crossing of racial boundaries for marriage, while Hispanics and Asian Americans do not experience segregation by schools and neighborhoods, so they are more exposed to regular contact with other races.
"Interracial marriages between African Americans and whites will continue to increase, but it will take a lot for blacks to get near the levels of intermarriages seen by other minority groups," he said.
In the 1990 census, the subjects could regard themselves as one race while in the 2000 census, they could choose more than one racial category.
"Understanding marital assimilation has been made more difficult by the multiple-race classification in the 2000 census," Qian explained.
The research showed that the bi-racial American Indian-white or Asian American-white individuals were more likely to marry whites rather than American Indians or Asian Americans.
The opposite happened with mulattoes (individuals of mixed white-black race) who were more likely to marry African Americans, as they regard themselves as black, even when reporting themselves the biracial roots.
"It is unclear whether the 1990s represents a short-term pause in the decades-long upward trend in marital assimilation, or whether it is the beginning of a new racial divide," he said.
"It is possible that the continuing influx of immigrants from Asia and Latin America may continue to slow intermarriage, especially if new groups are segregated from the majority white population and native-born minorities."