The point, knucklehead, is that in the 1920s (and thereabouts) they weren't "quaint neighborhoods", they were large areas of the city. Assimilation has reduced them in size.
Since you're apparently suffering from some cognitive disorder, let me spell it out slowly in steps:
Italians, Irish, Poles, Other Slavs, etc immigrated to the United States where they were met with open hostility.
Said groups formed their own ethnic enclaves where they spoke their native languages, kept their native customs and, most importantly, kept among themselves.
Said groups eventually assimilated into mainstream American culture over the course of
generations to the point where Chicago still has enclaves but they are greatly diminished from the Polish-only, Serbian-only or Lithuanian-only sprawls of yore. However, the fact that these enclaves do still exist is testament to the fact that these things take time.
Currently, Mexicans are immigrating in large numbers to open hostility both from the public and from a government attempting to restrict them via strict quotas, much as they did with the afore mentioned immigrants.
Said Mexicans are forming (well, have formed) ethnic enclaves
The children of said immigrants are assimilating into American culture, perhaps even quicker than previous immigrant waves did. I quote an article below but I've read more studies showing that Latinos are often learning English faster, inter-marrying more and adopting American norms for naming their children than previous immigrant waves. But it takes time. It takes
generations.
Finally, and I think this is where we find common ground, I propose that the quickest way to facilitate assimilation is by normalizing the status of the immigrants who are here.
Don't make children choose between loyalty to their family or to a nation which is hostile to their family.
Don't encourage remaining within enclaves by making it dangerous to leave to find work, housing, education, etc and risk deportation.
Transgenerational assimilation
will happen. No matter how easy we make things for first generation immigrants, their children will attend English speaking schools, make English speaking friends, adopt their customs, listen to their music, prefer NBC over Telemundo, wish to attend universites, get jobs with English speaking businesses, etc. The problem is that we've gotten ourselves so worked up over the right now that we've forgotten the lessons of past immigration waves and demand an immediate solution.
U.S. News & World Report in April 2007 wrote:
In 2003, Rand economist James P. Smith's research suggested that Hispanics had historically made educational and economic progress similar to that of previous European immigrant waves. While Hispanic immigrants had only about 70 percent the lifetime earnings of native-born whites, the most recent data showed the second generation cutting that gap nearly in half.
Perhaps the best sign of this growing assimilation is the high rate of Hispanics marrying outside of their ethnic group. Few foreign-born Hispanics marry non-Hispanics, partly because many arrive married. But studies show only 68 percent of their children, and 43 percent of their grandchildren, marry fellow Latinos.
Definitions. Far from the separate cultures Huntington envisions, some experts contend that the Hispanic population's growth will bring it increasing irrelevance as a designation. "Hispanic" has always been a more amorphous characterization than other definitions of origin; the Census Bureau does not define it as a race. Research from the Pew Hispanic Center shows that Hispanics in later generations increasingly identify as "white." And America's definition of the majority group has historically proved elastic, expanding to include previous waves of Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants.
Educational and economic disparities may narrow but will most likely persist long into the future. However, the most readily voiced fear-that the Spanish language will displace English-seems the least grounded. Last year, research on Spanish retention in heavily Mexican Southern California found that Mexicans in the region retain proficiency in their native tongue longer than other immigrant groups, but English quickly dominates. Fewer than 30 percent of the children of Mexican immigrants reported preferring to speak Spanish at home. By generation three, only 17 percent of the Mexican-Americans spoke fluent Spanish.
"If there's not retention of the Spanish language in Southern California, it's not going to be retained anywhere," says Princeton Prof. Douglas Massey, one of the study's authors.
Italians, Irish, Poles, Other Slavs, etc immigrated to the United States where they were met with open hostility. 