If young Mexicans, who have the city’s highest dropout rates, are not kept in school, they are likely to join the Central American gangs spreading in the city, the consul general of Mexico in New York, Arturo Sarukhan, warned a group of city educators.

“This stops being an issue of education and starts being an issue of social assimilation and of crime,” Mr. Sarukhan said Friday at a symposium on Mexican students hosted by New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education.

Unlike more established communities, such as those in California or the Southwest, New York’s Mexicans are almost all recent arrivals. They are the city’s fastest-growing immigrant group.

The majority immigrated in the past decade and a half, and the deluge shows no sign of abating. Currently the city’s third-largest Latino community after Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, the Mexican population now numbers about 125,000, according to city statistics. Community organizers say the number is more than twice that.

Most of New York’s Mexicans are in the country illegally and they are the least likely to speak English and the poorest of the city’s major immigrant groups. The rapid growth of the Mexican community is creating alarming trends that often go unnoticed because of a lack of communal infrastructure.

“One of the greatest challenges we have as a new community is there are very few means of political and social empowerment,” Mr. Sarukhan said. “You don’t have the depth here you have in other migrant communities – this is basically a first-generation community.”

For thousands of the youth who have joined the growing pipeline to New York and crossed the border illegally, school only comes second, after work. For those who do enroll, it is often only a short stint. “There are Mexican children coming here and never going into a school,” Francisco Gaytan, a specialist in immigrant education, told a roomful of schoolteachers at the symposium. “Roughly half of Mexican migrants 16 to 19 never step foot in an institute of higher education.”

According to city statistics presented at the symposium, there are 11,026 Mexican-born students in city public schools. Overall, the dropout rate is more than 35%, compared with a city average of about 16% for 2004.The earlier they arrive, the more likely they will stay in school: Of those who arrive before the ninth grade, 30% graduate; of those who arrive after ninth grade, only 17% graduate.

Still, a director of the recently formed Immigration Studies at NYU, Carola Suarez-Orozco, said recent Mexican immigrants, who often cross the border illegally when they are barely teenagers, are generally too preoccupied with work to get into trouble. It is the second generation, she said, that is more likely to join gangs in a search for identity. They follow a well-established pattern seen with the Polish, Irish, and Italian immigrants who formed earlier gangs, she said.

“If we don’t find ways to embrace their energies and talent, they’ll become disenfranchised and we’ll pay for it later when they are unemployed or enter the penal system,” Ms. Suarez-Orozco said.

That is the case with one of the gangs that Mr. Sarukahn warned is increasingly attracting Mexican youth. Refugees from El Salvador’s civil war formed the Mara Salvatruchas, an extraordinarily vicious gang, in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, the gang was created to fight back against Mexican gangs in the city. Since then, the Maras has risen to international infamy and is known for vicious actions such as decapitating its enemies. “If this was back in the ’70s, I’d still be worried, but I wouldn’t be as worried as I am today because of the growth of the Maras coming into New York,” Mr. Sarukhan said.

One way the consulate is working to prevent future problems is through programs launched last month with City University of New York and the American Jewish Committee, which will provide scholarships and leadership training to Mexican youth.

At the symposium, in which more than 100 New York City public school educators and academics participated, other issues particular to the city’s Mexican students were addressed, such as the prevalence of indigenous languages and the high percentage of illegal students. The director of English Language Learners for the Department of Education, Jesus Fraga, spoke to the audience in Spanish about the city’s commitment to ensuring successful integration of Latino communities and Mexican students in particular.