Swordsmyth
08-20-2018, 10:00 PM
Writing in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald explained (https://www.city-journal.org/html/republicans’-hispanic-delusion-10256.html) years ago that Hispanics don’t particularly care about immigration policy, and to the degree they do, it doesn’t affect their vote. So a GOP amnesty or shift toward open borders won’t help shift the Hispanic vote.
A Hispanic backlash in California after Proposition 187 (the 1994 voter initiative that denied illegal aliens many publicly funded services) turned the state from red to blue, they claim; a similar rout awaits the party if it does not embrace liberal immigration policies.
But that probably isn’t all she wrote. President Reagan’s amnesty in 1986 “did not trigger a Latino surge into the Republican Party.”
California’s Hispanics leaned as strongly Democratic before Prop. 187 as after it. Hispanic voting patterns in California have held steady since 1988 — they vote approximately two-to-one for Democratic presidential candidates. California’s shift from red to blue would have happened with or without Prop. 187, as defense-industry whites left the state, replaced by liberal high-tech professionals, and as the Hispanic portion of the electorate tripled from 7 percent to 21 percent.
Socially conservative Hispanics are not “Republicans waiting to emerge” who “just need to be invited into the party by an amnesty and not scared off by immigration enforcement,” as Scott and his strategists would claim.
The majority of Hispanics vote their perceived economic interests, rather than their social values (evangelical Hispanics may be an exception to this rule). Blacks are equally conservative on gay rights and other favorite liberal crusades, and that doesn’t affect their allegiance to the Democratic party.
Even Republican Hispanics, she explained, favor higher taxes and a bigger welfare state, while “the majority of Latinos — poor and poorly-educated — the more government services, the better.... Welfare use actually increases between the second and third generation of Mexican-Americans — to 31 percent of all third-generation Mexican-American households.
In 2001, the Center for Immigration Studies explained likewise (https://cis.org/Report/Republican-Efforts-Attract-Latino-Voters): “There is no indication that the Republican or Democratic positions on immigration policy explain the orientation of Latino voters. Rather, it seems that the core positions of the Republican Party are simply not as attractive to Latino voters as are those of the Democratic Party.”
More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/29832-florida-s-scott-pandering-to-hispanics
A Hispanic backlash in California after Proposition 187 (the 1994 voter initiative that denied illegal aliens many publicly funded services) turned the state from red to blue, they claim; a similar rout awaits the party if it does not embrace liberal immigration policies.
But that probably isn’t all she wrote. President Reagan’s amnesty in 1986 “did not trigger a Latino surge into the Republican Party.”
California’s Hispanics leaned as strongly Democratic before Prop. 187 as after it. Hispanic voting patterns in California have held steady since 1988 — they vote approximately two-to-one for Democratic presidential candidates. California’s shift from red to blue would have happened with or without Prop. 187, as defense-industry whites left the state, replaced by liberal high-tech professionals, and as the Hispanic portion of the electorate tripled from 7 percent to 21 percent.
Socially conservative Hispanics are not “Republicans waiting to emerge” who “just need to be invited into the party by an amnesty and not scared off by immigration enforcement,” as Scott and his strategists would claim.
The majority of Hispanics vote their perceived economic interests, rather than their social values (evangelical Hispanics may be an exception to this rule). Blacks are equally conservative on gay rights and other favorite liberal crusades, and that doesn’t affect their allegiance to the Democratic party.
Even Republican Hispanics, she explained, favor higher taxes and a bigger welfare state, while “the majority of Latinos — poor and poorly-educated — the more government services, the better.... Welfare use actually increases between the second and third generation of Mexican-Americans — to 31 percent of all third-generation Mexican-American households.
In 2001, the Center for Immigration Studies explained likewise (https://cis.org/Report/Republican-Efforts-Attract-Latino-Voters): “There is no indication that the Republican or Democratic positions on immigration policy explain the orientation of Latino voters. Rather, it seems that the core positions of the Republican Party are simply not as attractive to Latino voters as are those of the Democratic Party.”
More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/29832-florida-s-scott-pandering-to-hispanics