October 4, 2002
THE CONSERVATIVES THE CONSERVATIVES DON'T WANT:
Hispanic Voters Hard to Profile, Poll Finds (LIZETTE ALVAREZ, October 4, 2002, NY Times)On social issues, Latino Democrats expressed more conservative values than their non-Latino white counterparts. Thirty-four percent of Hispanic Democrats said they believed that divorce was unacceptable, compared with 13 percent for non-Hispanic white Democrats. Twelve percent of Latino Democrats said they thought abortion should be legal in all cases, compared with 26 percent of non-Latino white Democrats who expressed the same belief."Latinos born outside the United States, as a group, have particularly more intense and socially conservative views than those born within the country," said Mollyann Brodie, vice president and director of public opinion and media research for the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The poll of 1,329 registered Hispanic voters, 838 non-Hispanic whites and 136 non-Hispanic African-Americans was conducted by telephone from April to June and has a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points. It is part of a broader survey of Latinos in the United States that will be released in December. [...]
Immigration was also an important topic. About half of the Hispanics surveyed said they thought too many immigrants were living in the United States. But about three-fourths said the United States should continue allowing the same number of Latin Americans into the country as it has been, or should allow more.
Here we see the odd nature of the immigration issue in a nutshell. Hispanics are a natural conservative voting bloc, if only we woo them. Yet even they oppose immigration, though they're okay with it if we're talking about their own ethnic group. How hope to get the GOP's wahoo wing to accept the need for immigration when the immigrants themselves are ambivalent about the topic? Posted by Orrin Judd at October 4, 2002 9:22 AM
The first thing people want to do when they get in a lifeboat is help their family in. The second is pull up the ladder and get away from the sinking ship as quickly as possible. Who knows better than immigrants that the US is civilization's lifeboat and the ship is sinking fast?
"13 percent [of] non-Hispanic white Democrats" believe that "divorce [is] unacceptable." Isn't this like Nazi's rejecting racial epithets or Cuban Communists objecting to long speeches? How do you swallow the donkey of unlimited abortion while straining at the gnat of civil divorce?
My guess would be that the 13 percent here aren't part of the 26 percent who support unlimited abortion.
Posted by: JW at October 4, 2002 11:30 AMOne of my former trainees is of Korean ancestory (came to the U.S., with his family, at age 2). He was a vociferious supporter of Pat Buchanan. When I asked him how he could do that, given Mr. Buchanan's clear views on limiting immigration, my fellow smiled and said, "now that my family is here, they can roll up the sidewalks!"
Posted by: Steve White at October 4, 2002 3:56 PMWe have to be able to recognize the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Part of the reason why recent immigrants are hostile toward illegal
immigration is because many of them just spent the last five or six years wading through a nearly intolerable muddle of bureaucratic taddle to secure legal citizenship, only to have a great host of politicians pandering to those who deliberately flaunted the oppressive law which they duly honored.
The Wall Street Journal
's position on immigration is characterized by the same truculence and stupidity as Buchanan's position on trade and Israel. In discussions of immigration, the Journal
totally abandons its respect for the economic principle of supply and demand as regards labor. It says fatuous things like, "illegal immigrants take the jobs that no one else will do" without even speculating that perhaps the illegal labor has driven wages down so low that no one else can afford
to do the jobs, which of course hurts the immigrants as well.
Paul:
Our county has 2% unemployment and jobs going begging. You get $9 to work at K-Mart as a stockboy. We've no shortage of entry level jobs in the economy and a couple who each worked such a job and had two kids would be above the poverty line.
When immigrants flood the labor market, wages drop, and politicians counter with a variety of artificial, damaging methods like minimum wage laws. Simultaneously, property values in old, traditional, desireable urban neighborhoods skyrocket.
These pressures on those families who would like to earn their living through a blue-collar working father (the traditional American method) are intense, and to survive organized labor must ultimately prostrate itself before the state and become very nearly an arm of the welfare sector. Of course, these families are a natural constituency for the GOP: they abhor the frenzied innovation of the Left, utterly disdain multiculturalism, and are rooted in tradition, faith, and family life. Yet the paradox is that they owe their economic wellbeing to the unions, and thus, to the Democrats. (Bush made a rather ham-handed attempt to mitigate this dyanmic with his tariff decision.)
Now of course the Dems care nothing for these people other than as accessible votes; indeed, the media (and Democratic) elite positively despises their cultural conservatism. That elite consists largely of assorted malcontents and decadents, who would love to effect the utter emasculation of the traditional 1950s American family and community. And their
livelihood, which depends on strong and supple minds not strong and skilled bodies, is not threatened in the least by immigration --
That is, until immigrants began flying planes into skyscapers, and producing mass graves in great cities. America has no immigration policy -- or at best one in a state of total decrepitude. Some people have begun to wake up to this fact (including myself, I might add) in light of the costs of that decrepitude one sunny day in September. A good example is Mort Zuckerman's recent US News
column
.
Here is another plain signal
of a renewed skepticism of mass immigration.