ABSTRACT
Latin American immigrants began coming to the United States in great numbers in the mid-1950s. Today, immigrants from Latin America comprise the largest percentage of the United States' foreign born population. Of the more than 21 million known immigrants living in the United States today, 47 percent are Latino and 43 percent are from Latin America (Portes & Zhou, 1993; Waters & Eschbach, 1995). However, there is considerable variation between migrants from the many Latin American countries, and these variations determine both the composition and destination of the immigration streams. Both factors are important, because they effect the economic adaptation of these immigrants, as the results presented here have shown.
