Miami presents a challenge for conservative assumptions about politics and culture. No American city is more emblematic of recent GOP gains with Hispanic voters: Donald Trump carried Miami–Dade County in 2024 by 11 points, a staggering swing from Hillary Clinton’s 30-point margin in 2016. But Miami’s apparent incorporation into the Republican coalition has not settled the deeper question of whether the city’s Hispanic majority has assimilated into the American mainstream, or is merely a parallel Spanish-speaking community that happens to vote Republican.
In recent articles for the Center for Immigration Studies, Jason Richwine argues that Miami should be considered a failure of the assimilation model. According to his analysis of Decennial Census and American Community Survey data, the share of Miami–Dade County residents who speak Spanish at home has leaped from 37 percent in 1980 to 67 percent in 2024. In that same period, the share of native-born residents aged 20 to 29 who speak Spanish at home has exploded from 11 percent to 49 percent.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Richwine concedes that most native-born speakers are also fluent in English. But cultural fragmentation is still a major issue, he maintains, because it creates a local society inaccessible to English speakers and drives out residents who feel culturally alienated. In his view, Miami should serve as a cautionary tale.
Richwine is right to raise concerns about Miami’s linguistic fragmentation, but the full picture is more complicated. On other indicators of assimilation, Miamians are better blended into the American mainstream. We shouldn’t be too quick to assume that assimilation of Hispanic immigrants elsewhere will unfold as it has in Miami.
That said, Richwine’s central finding—that Spanish language retention is abnormally high in Miami—is correct. My own analysis of IPUMS USA microdata found three additional reasons to be concerned about the dominance of Spanish in Miami.
The first is that multigenerational Spanish retention in Miami is virtually unparalleled. I measured the percentage of native-born Hispanic Americans aged 20 to 35 with two native-born parents who reported speaking Spanish at home across 11 major Hispanic metros from 2020 to 2024. While this method captures only the grandchildren (and later descendants) of immigrants still living at home, the cross-metro ranking it produces is robust and gives a reliable estimate of trends in language retention.
Nationally, the average rate of Spanish-speaking at home among third-generation-plus Hispanics has steadily declined from 55 percent in 1980 to 25 percent in 2024. In Miami, by contrast, Spanish language retention has risen, from 55 percent to 64 percent. Miami doesn’t rank the highest nationally in this regard—that would be McAllen, Texas—but every other metro shows either a declining trend or a low-to-moderate and flat trend. Miami is the only one with a high and flat trend.
The second cause for concern: Miami Hispanics retain Spanish across generations more than other immigrant groups nationwide. While 64 percent of third-generation-plus Miami Hispanics speak a foreign language at home, the rates are significantly lower among other third-generation-plus counterparts: 26 percent of Chinese-Americans; 8 percent of Filipino-Americans; and 2 percent of Japanese-Americans.
The third troubling sign is that for foreign-born Miami Hispanics, spending more time in the U.S. doesn’t translate into higher English-speaking rates at home. According to 2024 data, 95 percent of foreign-born Miami Hispanics spoke Spanish at home regardless of whether they had been in the U.S. for less than five or more than 21 years.
What people speak at home is not, in itself, the issue. The concern is what these patterns indicate about linguistic equilibrium. Spanish is sustained in Miami not just by recent arrivals but also by the grandchildren of arrivals, and ongoing immigration seems to replenish the Spanish-speaking population faster than generational shift can erode it. The result is a civic environment from which English-only residents may feel excluded.
However, while I concur with Richwine on his normative claim that the dominance of Spanish in Miami is a problem, I differ on whether it represents a clean “failure” of assimilation in Miami and portends changes in other Hispanic metros.
Richwine acknowledges English fluency in his arguments but doesn’t note that it has increased over time alongside higher rates of speaking Spanish at home. Among U.S.-born Hispanic adults aged 25 to 64 who speak Spanish at home, the share who report speaking English well or very well in Miami has risen from 78 percent in 1980 to 97 percent in 2024. The number should be 100 percent, but it nonetheless represents progress and suggests that assimilation among the children of immigrants in Miami isn’t a failure.
When we expand measures of assimilation to include metrics other than language retention, Miami performs well. In my research, I built a six-measure composite score for U.S.-born Hispanic adults across 19 major U.S. metros measuring college-degree rate, labor force participation, median wage, share employed in management or professional roles, homeownership, and naturalization rate among foreign-born Hispanics (excluding Cubans, who naturalize at near-universal rates under the Cuban Adjustment Act).
Across the 19-metro panel, Miami-Dade ranks second overall, behind Atlanta and ahead of Washington, D.C. Some of this lead is compositional: Miami’s Hispanics are roughly half Cuban, and Cuban Americans tend to have higher educational attainment than other Hispanic-origin groups.
Miami Hispanics are not just doing well compared with other Hispanics. Across most measured dimensions, Miami Hispanics have converged with, and in some cases overtaken, national non-Hispanic whites. The college-degree rate among Miami’s U.S.-born Hispanic adults aged 25 to 64 is now 43 percent, slightly above the national white rate (42 percent); labor force participation is 86 percent versus 81 percent; the share in managerial and professional jobs is 46 percent versus 45 percent; and the homeownership gap with national whites has shrunk from 13 percentage points in 1980 to under five today. One exception is mean wages: Miami Hispanic wages grew 33 percent in real terms over the period, slightly trailing the 39 percent growth among national whites, leaving the absolute gap modestly wider in 2024 than in 1980.
Some of these outcomes are the byproduct of comparing a city-dwelling population with a national one, but it shows that Miami’s lack of progress on language assimilation has not held it back on other metrics.
It’s also not clear that Miami’s language trajectory predicts that of other metros. What appears to set Miami apart is the unusual intensity of its ongoing replenishment of Spanish speakers via immigration. In 2024, among Miami’s Hispanic adults aged 18 and older, 24 percent were foreign-born and arrived in the U.S. within the last decade—the highest share in my panel, and roughly three times the average rate (8 percent) across the eight other non-border major Hispanic metros. The measure of recent in-migration intensity correlates strongly with third-generation-plus Spanish-at-home retention across the nine non-border metros.
Miami’s unusual language pattern is the product of conditions that are themselves unusual; for most American cities, those conditions cannot easily be reproduced. On net, the evidence suggests that Spanish is not uniquely resistant to decay and will recede over time, barring significant levels of foreign replenishment.
Miami is neither a failure of assimilation nor a reliable forecast of what awaits other American cities with growing Hispanic populations. Still, it would be a mistake to be complacent about the role Spanish has come to play in the city’s daily life. Young, second-generation Hispanics like me should feel an obligation to privilege English above Spanish in public settings and to encourage our first-generation parents and grandparents to become fluent in English—not from shame about our heritage but from pride in being American. We have a stake in building communities where our neighbors who don’t speak Spanish can feel at home and where English as a shared language remains an indispensable connective tissue of civic life.