The Conservative Revolution 317Of partic ular concern to an older generation was the fact that the
family in which children were raised by two parents of the opposite
sex, one of whom (usually the male) worked and the other (usually the
female) stayed home and raised the children, was disintegrating at an
alarming rate. Marriage was often put off until the male had reached
his mid-thirties and the female her late twenties. Worse, divorce be-
came commonplace. Every other marriage seemed to end in divorce,
which was easier to obtain than had been the case a generation earlier.
More and more children were born to single mothers. Indeed, every
fourth child arrived in a home in which the father was missing. Too
often such a family lived at or near the poverty level. The resulting
emotional and psychological scars resulting from this situation were
and remain incalculable. Crime rates among the young increased sub-
stantially, most especially in urban areas.
Another concern was the growing number of Latinos coming into
this country. Thousands illegally crossed the Mexican border into the
United States, where they accepted low-paying farmwork. Not all
were Mexicans. Many came from other Latin American countries and
poured across the Mexican–U.S. border in their search for a better
life. They settled, for the most part, in the Southwest, from Texas to
California. By the beginning of the twenty-first century Latinos con-
stituted over a third of the populations in California, Arizona, and
Texas, and nearly half the population in New Mexico. In the East
there was a steady stream of Puerto Ricans into the continental United
States, and Cuban refugees settled in Miami and surrounding com-
munities, making English a second language in this area. As a matter
of fact, many cities to the north followed a general trend in making
signs, directions, and information available in both English and Span-
ish. A great deal of anti-immigration sentiment was generated, espe-
cially since so many of these immigrants were in the United States
illegally. Congress attempted to deal with the problem by passing the
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 , which penalized em-
ployers of illegal immigrants and granted amnesty to those immi-
grants who had already arrived. But the problem kept getting worse
because the border with Mexico was not adequately policed. Building
fences was impractical along a 1 , 000 -mile line (to say nothing of the
cost), and as one Mexican consul in Chicago stated, “For every foot of