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Democrats in the US have for years championed mass illegal immigration from south of the border. Of course, that’s meant conveniently pretending that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden never championed building a border wall. Nor that Obama deported record numbers of illegal immigrants back across the Rio Grande.
But the Democrats’ recent enthusiasm for shipping millions of Hispanic immigrants into the US is not merely a matter of hypocrisy. Rank political calculus is in fact the main driver. If you don’t vote Democrat, you ain’t brown, they might say. Historically, it might have been true that immigrants tended to vote blue, but more and more, brown is turning red.
Biden’s approval rating has declined with just about every demographic. But no racial or ethnic group has soured on the president more than Hispanics, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregation of all available polls […]
What makes this trend so menacing for Democrats is that it threatens to block the party’s most plausible path to retaining federal power even if white working-class unionist Democrats in the Rust Belt go extinct. Hispanics are already the largest category of non-whites in the United States, comprising 19 percent of the U.S. population. Between 2008 and 2020, the Hispanic share of the electorate increased by about 30 percent. And the group is poised to grow considerably in the years to come.
Democrat strategists have bet on the assumption that the traditional 70% of the Hispanic vote would be theirs forever. It ain’t necessarily so.
On the other hand, if Hispanic voters are in the process of emulating the political trajectory of the so-called “white ethnics” — which is to say, growing more conservative as a portion of the population assimilates into whiteness and moves up the socioeconomic ladder — then Democrats would be in profound trouble. Already, due to the party’s scant support in overrepresented rural areas, Democrats need to win large popular majorities in order to compete for federal power. If Hispanic voters become an evenly divided voting bloc, the GOP could lay claim to a coalition that isn’t merely more geographically efficient than the Democrats, but larger to boot. In which case, Republicans would be in position to dominate American politics for the foreseeable future.
Intelligencer
A survey of college students by the Hispanic Heritage Foundation found that a majority were Republican — a clear turnaround on their Millennial predecessors. Even more ominously for the Democrats, Trump is increasingly winning over new and female Hispanic voters.
So, why are Hispanic voters walking off the Democrat plantation?
Because, while hardcore racial identitarians might see nothing but brown skins swarming over the southern border, the fact is that Hispanics have a lot more in common with traditional American values than not. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be the pin-up girl of the bourgeois white left, but she is a privileged trust-fund kid, vastly out of step with most Hispanic immigrants. Most have a hard-working ethos, are religious, ideologically conservative — and, from bitter experience — vigorously anti-socialist. Having fled socialist regimes, they’re not about to embrace the Democrats’ swing to the far-left.
The most commonly-cited concern among Hispanic voters was fear of socialism and that “people will become lazy/dependent on government”. And far from diminishing amongst younger Hispanics with less direct experience of socialist regimes, fourth-generation Hispanics are even more concerned about socialism than recent arrivals.
Ethnic solidarity also diminishes the longer an immigrant group is in the United States. So socially conservative Hispanics are more, not less, likely to vote Republican as time passes.
Hispanics aren’t buying the Democrats’ Critical Race Theory bullshit, either.
By overwhelming margins, they believe that Black people should overcome prejudice by “working their way up … without special favours” as other minority groups did; that people mainly get ahead through hard work rather than luck; and that “God will grant good health and relief from sickness to believers who have enough faith.”
As independent journalist Tim Poole argues, conservatives should be less worried about large-scale immigration from south of the border than anywhere else. Skin colour doesn’t concern me, he says: values do. The values of Hispanic immigrants are far more in alignment with middle America than identitarian obsessives realise.
And the Democrats’ racial gambit may well be about to blow up in their faces.
