How Republicans can win Hispanics back

Republicans are throwing away a great opportunity at a peril to the American dream by not actively recruiting this group of people and using them against the Marxist, Muslim-loving left.

At last, some common sense. Thank you.

You left off the barf tag.

You write blather, sir. I live in Phoenix. I went to school with many Mexican Americans whose parents were American citizens. My friends were American citizens. Many of my friends stand against illegal immigration--they are embarrassed by it.

I'm not certain whether you write from misinformation or from bigotry, but you are wrong in your thinking.

And by the way, virtually all family-oriented Mexican Americans are conservative, church-going folks who have sent their sons and daughters to fight in our wars, and are American patriots

The Mexican Americans that we need to eradicate are the ones who have bought into the drug cartels. We need to find these guys--some of them executioners--and prosecute and execute the ones who de4serve it.

The GOP is ignoring reality. Minorities and immigrants vote Dem. The out of wedlock birthrate for Hispanics is 50%, topped only by the black rate of 71%. Hispanics have a 50% school drop out rate. This is the social pathology for failure in this society and greater dependence on Big Government.

Immigration, Political Realignment, and the Demise of Republican Political Prospects

Latino Voting in 2010 Partisanship, Immigration Policy, and the Tea Party

Hispanics are for the most part, hard-working, Christian and legal. They embrace and appreciate free enterprise at a greater rate than many native born Americans whose children are content to play their computer gamers, watch reality shows and slide through school without really learning anything. There are FAR more legal Hispanics than illegals here. And they are gowing in numbers and they are American.

Can you define Hispanic?

I hate to introduce some facts into this discussion, but here is the reality:

Hispanic Family Values?--Runaway illegitimacy is creating a new U.S. underclass.

Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future.

But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.

Latino Voting in 2010

The national results have already been digested in previous papers and studies (Lopez 2010). In summary, exit polls indicated that Latinos cast 38 percent of their votes for Republicans in U.S. House races, compared with 60 percent for white non-Latinos. For the individual U.S. Senate races, Latino Republican support ranged as high as 55 percent for Marco Rubio in Florida, to the high-teens in the two New York contests. In California, Carly Fiorina won an estimated 29 percent of the Latino vote, and John McCain won 40 percent in Arizona. Even Sharon Angle, the Tea Party candidate who narrowly lost to Harry Reid, won 30 percent of the Hispanic vote in Nevada.

The 2010 elections were an electoral earthquake, overwhelmingly favorable to the Republican Party. Yet in spite of the most dramatic Republican victory since 1994, we observe no surge for Republicans among Latino voters. Even in the locations where the Republicans recruited strong, credible, winning Latino candidates, there was no tidal wave of Latino voters rushing to the Republican side. Comparisons across offices and campaigns show that the Sandoval and Martinez candidacies were good for only a few percentage points. Marco Rubio did better, but not vastly better by recent historical standards within Florida.

Where does this place the determined Republican efforts to make in-roads among Latino voters? It is not hopeless, but it will take time. The recruitment of high-quality Latino candidates is a promising start, and probably the best route. Changing policy positions on immigration doesn’t hold much promise, though, because it’s political party loyalty that needs to be changed, and that is not easily accomplished. It will be through the upward economic mobility of the Hispanic population across several decades and generations that will yield more Latino Republicans. That gradual pattern of movement is also consistent with longstanding patterns of ethnic and immigrant political life in American history.

Republicans should reengage on this issue and reframe it. Start by recognizing that new Americans strengthen our economy. We need more people to come to this country, ready to work and to contribute their creativity to our economy. U.S. immigration policies should reflect that principle. Just as Republicans believe in free trade of goods, we should support the freer flow of human talent.

The latest data show 22.1 million immigrants holding jobs in the U.S. with an estimated 8 million being illegal aliens. By increasing the supply of labor between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700 or roughly 4 percent. Among natives without a high school education, who roughly correspond to the poorest tenth of the workforce, the estimated impact was even larger, reducing their wages by 7.4 percent. The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary. It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status.

The Bureau of Labor statistics for December 2011 show a national unemployment rate of 8.5 percent, including 15.8 percent for blacks and 11 percent for Hispanics. 22 million Americans are seeking full-time employment. Despite the economic downturn, the U.S. continues to bring in 125,000 new, legal foreign workers a month. This includes new permanent residents (Green Cards) and long-term temporary visas and others who are authorized to take a job. This makes no sense.

The U.S. adds one international migrant (net) every 36 seconds. Immigrants account for one in 8 U.S. residents, the highest level in more than 80 years. In 1970 it was one in 21; in 1980 it was one in 16; and in 1990 it was one in 13. In a decade, it will be one in 7, the highest level in our history. And by 2050, one in 5 residents of the U.S. will be foreign-born.

Currently, 1.6 million legal and illegal immigrants settle in the country each year; 350,000 immigrants leave each year, resulting in net immigration of 1.25 million. Since 1970, the U.S. population has increased from 203 million to 310 million, i.e., over 100 million. In the next 40 years, the population will increase by 130 million. Three-quarters of the increase in our population since 1970 and the projected increase will be the result of immigration. The U.S., the world’s third most populous nation, has the highest annual rate of population growth of any major developed country in the world, i.e., 0.963% (2011 estimate), principally due to immigration.

We are importing hundreds of thousands of high school dropouts annually through our immigration policies. 25% of the adult immigrants who enter each year lack even a high school degree. Do we really need to import more high school dropouts?

57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children. The poverty rate for immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) is 17 percent, nearly 50 percent higher than the rate for natives and their children. While government works to reduce the number of poor persons, massive low-skill immigration pushes the poverty numbers up. In addition, low-skill immigration siphons off government anti-poverty funding and makes government efforts to shrink poverty less effective. Milton Friedman said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” We have both.

SueRae:

Good for you! Stick to your guns. History is on your side.

Without a policy to actively seek the support of Hispanics who have emigrated here, we and this republic are finished. It also would not be a bad idea to start to break the Democrat solidarity of the black vote. Plenty of blacks, whatever whites may imagine, are hard-working and are social conservatives and deeply religious. Abortion has ravaged the black community. Blacks are 12.5% of Americans and have suffered 40% of the abortions. Martin Luther King's nieces are stumping the country before audiences white and black to attack abortion and urge an end to it. They, as was MLK, are Baptist ministers. The extraordinary abortion rate among blacks was one of the express goals of Margaret Sanger, who was the foundress of Planned Barrenhood. Blacks are also no fans of homosexuality and other sexual perversions and when that question is shorn of partisan identification, have cast the decisive votes in Ohio and California in favor of marriage as understood in western Civilization. We need, as a movement, to develop more effective outreach to blacks around the question: "For 50 to 80 years, Democrats have said: Vote for me and I will make you free! Have your lives improved as promised? Is it time to try something new and very different? Are you sick yet of being lied to and used?"

Blacks and Hispanics already make up 25% of the population. In about 40 years, given the stubborn general refusal of the Caucasian American community to resist the siren call of sharply limiting the number of children (if any) per family and the determination of blacks (declining somewhat lately) and Hispanics to welcome large numbers of children to their families, Caucasians will be verging on minority status. The hurtful attitudes displayed today against the Hispanic immigrants (with or without papers) will not likely be forgotten in the polling places of 2050.

To those who somehow think we can maintain a generally lily white political movement because we are more socially comfortable with it, I would ask to what country do you expect your children and grandchildren to flee when they are in the minority and you have aligned blacks and Hispanics in near unanimity against conservatism?

I suffer from Bush exhaustion as many folks here do but this is Jeb's strongest suit and always has been. He married a Hispanic woman and converted to Catholicism which has to be unique in his family. He was actually able to deliver the Miami area Cubans to his thoroughly clueless father against Reagan in 1980. Anyone doesn't think that was an amazing result doesn't know Cubans who tend to be more conservative than most of us. They knew and liked Jeb. He understands their culture and their politics and also the culture and politics of Mexicans and Central Americans and has repeatedly proved it.

Milton Friedman was certainly a conservative. He once observed that capitalism is a wonderful belief and that no dollar he ever earned as concerned about the fact that he was a Jew. Capitalism appeals to individualists everywhere including the Hispanic community. The Mexicans here in Northern Illinois are noted for the fact that they arrive, they are married or soon marry, have numerous kids, work two or more jobs, earn and save, start their own modest businesses (lawn care, building trades, food shops, etc.) and move up. What's not to like? Whatever we Anglos may wish to think, they want their kids to be as fluent in English as anyone else and to succeed. They are a model of upward mobility in a time when many born here have given up hope in our own system.

But, but, but.....what part of "illegal" don't I understand???? I understand "illegal" (having practiced criminal law for 25 years before retiring) and I am ashamed of the fact that this nation feels it somehow necessary to establish quotas for immigration by nationality alone. I could understand resistance to Muslims under current circumstances and for as long as Wahhabi and Shiite Islam and their respective radical anti-Americanism exist. Exclusion of Hispanics or many others smacks of the late 19th century hysteria over the "yellow peril" posed by Asian immigration to the prejudices of the hysterics, or the hysteria that we were being invaded by probably Bolshevik Eastern European Jews after the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, or the absolute conviction that every Italian American was a secret servant of the Black hand and then of the Mafia or that my Irish ancestors and all Irish were worthless drunks, brawlers and hopelessly Democrat. OK, I will grant that at least Clan Kennedy deserved it but not the rest of us.

I am actually proud that to the best of my ability to determine, each and every immigrant ancestor of mine arrived "without papers." One German ancestor (who died a millionaire beer brewer and whiskey distiller and restauranteur) arrived as a 16-year old stowaway on a boat from Europe and was punished by being abandoned on the docks at Baltimore as a 16-year old. He went west and was rich and in business at 20. America used to be a great country! Another ancestor of Scots-Irish Presbyterian ancestry merely walked across the border in about 1900 from his native Canada when he was about 17 years old. He witnessed the assassination of McKinley as he stood in line to shake McKinley's hand. Within a few years he was a shirt company executive in Cincinnati without benefit of more than a high school education, if that. No "papers." My Irish Catholic grandmother arrived from Cork on the docks of Southie in Boston in 1895 without papers and was greeted as a 12-year old with signs saying: Jobs available, No Irish Need Apply." She was conservative in many ways but knew those were Republicans who posted those signs. She did not cast a single Republican vote until she voted for Nixon in 1968 when she was 85. LBJ's Great Society was the last straw for her.

We ought not set ourselves up to alienate Hispanics for as long as my grandmother was alienated.

Hispanics are natural social conservatives and should, on that basis alone, be fully available as Republican voters and conservative Republican voters at that. They did not come here to see to it that their daughters would be "free" to abort their grandchildren or to facilitate son Pedro "marrying" Bruce. Likewise they believe in small business capitalism and in participating fully in our economy.

I suspect that you fully understand the foregoing and I admire the fact that you have had the courage to post as you have. Expect an anti-immigration mob to gather and attack. Hopefully, my post will draw the heat to me and away from you.

God bless you and yours and those with the courage and fortitude to come to our country seeking a better life and to renew the American Dream and the American Republic. We need them. They are our allies to be if we have the foresight to figure that out soon enough to restore our relationship with them as aspiring Americans.

Our weapons ARE our ideas, the articulation of same and a willingness to re-frame the argument.

Those who disagree are free to flame away.

FUJB

Thanks to each of you for your posts.

Republicans should reengage on this issue and reframe it. Start by recognizing that new Americans strengthen our economy.

WHICH "new Americans"? Illegal aliens are not Americans. Jeb is using Martin O'Malley/Rahm Emanuel language here. Most illegal aliens take jobs AWAY from Americans, commit the vast majority of identity theft, and undermine wages across the land. In addition, a far greater percentage of illegal entrants are criminals than in the general population, with an increasing majority of which part of violent gangs such as MS-13. Only 3% of illegals work in agriculture, so the "fruit picking" argument is a red herring. Republican elites simply do not understand how illegal labor is hurting American workers.

We need more people to come to this country, ready to work and to contribute their creativity to our economy. U.S. immigration policies should reflect that principle. Just as Republicans believe in free trade of goods, we should support the freer flow of human talent.

We need MORE people to come in? 1 MILLION per year is not enough? Before the disastrous 1965 immigration act it was 1/5th that amount. And we have chronically-high unemployment - in no small part BECAUSE of illegal migrations. Groups like NumbersUSA and FAIR are calling for a reduction of the immigration number until our unemployment subsides. In any case it is really a matter of how many, or who? Ted Kennedy's 1965 Act re-balanced the source of immigrants from Europe to the Third World. America needs SKILLED immigrants. Computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians - not illiterate laborers from Ivory Coast and Ecuador. They do NOT "contribute" any "creativity" to our economy, nor start businesses.

We need to connect immigration to other pro-growth policies, so that new Americans can apply their talents here and succeed. The United States needs an economy that is vibrant and dynamic, open to the contributions of new entrants. We have to reduce regulations across our economy, whenever they impede economic dynamism and flexibility in the labor market. We need secure energy supplies, radical tax reform and a reduced footprint of power of the state.

Again, what "contributions" do itinerant laborers who don't speak English make to our economy? Elites like Bush and Bloomberg typically speak of H1-B visas and illegals in the same breath. But Google co-founder Sergei Brin and SpaceX and PayPal creator Elon Musk were not illiterate migrants. They were educated Russian Jews who fled the oppressive corruptocracy of the former USSR for free enterprise here. THOSE are the TRUE "immigrants" we need. STOP conflating them with illegal aliens. They are NOT the same. And Hispanics do NOT support amnesty. Marco Rubio and Susana Martinez both oppose the DREAM Act and both got large percentages of the Hispanic vote. Most CA Hispanics supported Prop 187 to restrict welfare to illegals (until blocked by a court). 65% of Arizona Hispanics backed Prop 200 to do the same. Stop pandering, and support the rule of law.

Once you start appealing to groups based upon their ethnic heritage you've already lost the battle.

But go ahead, try to win a majority of any ethnic group by appealing to their sense of industry and ethics. The democrats will promise them goodies and will hand you your head, politically speaking.

We can never EVER win this way.

You make excellent and articulate points. What I am agreeing with in the Jeb Bush article is that we cannot paint immigrants with a broad brush as people to be feared and those here legally should not be discriminated against. Look no further than the likes of Marco Rubio and thousands of naturalized citizens here legitimitely. And if we go back far enough, we all have an immigrant past.

I guess we don’t know the same people. I am not saying they are all illegal. You obviously don’t live in Houston, TEXAS.

Didn’t they were all illegal. You obviously don’t live in TEXAS.

Didn’t say they were all illegal and what is the fight about. Some imaginary illegals. Get real. You obviously don’t live in TEXAS or you are blind.

Get your gender straight fool. Didn’t say they were all illegal. Why are we fighting about illegals? You obviously don’t live in TEXAS.

Texas or California.

In fact, California is the perfect example of where the rest of the country will end up under brother Jeb's philosophy.

I don’t want “Hispanics”, I want Americans.

Are “Hispanics” truly a one issue people? All they want is for people to flood over the border like a horde of locusts? Somehow I doubt it.

And by the way, virtually all family-oriented Mexican Americans are conservative, church-going folks who have sent their sons and daughters to fight in our wars, and are American patriots

I don't know who told you that nonsense, they are a 70% pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, pro-drug, left-wing democrat, voting block.

Conservatives vote Republican.

>Didn’t they were all illegal. You obviously don’t live in TEXAS.

Nope, I don’t live in Tx.