The Political Orientations and Behaviors of Latino Immigrant Youth.

The current body of scholarship on the political incorporation of Latinos in the United States overlooks a key cohort: young immigrants. This paper seeks to address this gap by systematically analyzing, through multivariate analyses, the political orientations and behaviors of Latino immigrant youth, including a comparative examination of the three most studied Hispanic subpopulations: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. While many policy makers have voiced concerns about the political incorporation of Latin American immigrants, our results suggest that most first- and second-generation Latino immigrant youth report few suspicions of government institutions and processes, high levels of support for economic individualism, and significant levels of engagement in electoral processes. Taken together, the study points a high degree of political incorporation among young Latino immigrants with only modest and inconsistent differences among the major national subgroups. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]