If Republicans are looking for a good reason to stem the out-of-control migrant tide now illustrated by the caravan heading for the southern U.S. border, last week’s midterm election results in Texas ought to provide one.
The Dallas Morning News reported that the “Latino surge” at the polls is one reason liberal Democrats did so well, and the growth of that population might well do for Texas what it did for California: make electing a Republican virtually impossible.
Hispanics, the conventional wisdom is, vote for Democrats. Of course, it does not have to be that way, but there is no question that as a whole new arrivals vote more liberal than native-born Americans and that newly arrived immigrants are not assimilating to the degree that past immigration waves have.
Grim News for the GOP
The news from Texas ought to be a wake-up call for the GOP: demography, as even the neocons now admit, is destiny.
Reported the Dallas Morning News:
The blue wave lapped at the shores of Texas this year — and it was powered by Latino voters.”
Though Republicans held on against the current in statewide races, Latinos helped send El Paso’s Veronica Escobar and Houston’s Sylvia Garcia of Houston to Washington, D.C. They’ll be the state’s first two Latinas in Congress.
Democrats won 12 Texas House seats, including five in Dallas, and unseated two North Texas Republican state senators.
The surge in Latino votes, the newspaper reported, also helped Beto O’Rourke in his race against incumbent Senator Ted Cruz, and so “political experts confident that enthusiasm around the 2018 race, paired with natural population growth, is likely to make Texas a truly competitive state by 2020 and maybe even a shade of blue.”
National polling group Latino Decisions, the newspaper reported, found a significant increase in Hispanic turnout from 2014 to 2018. In Dallas County, it was 86 percent. But other counties saw turnout more than double: Hilado, 105 percent; Cameron, 115 percent; and El Paso, 168 percent.
And 70 percent of the voters cast a ballot for Democrats, the group reported. An exit poll from the Associated Press found the same level of support for Democrats. In Texas, AP found, 69 percent of Hispanics went for O’Rourke, and just 30 percent for Cruz.
Meanwhile, Pew Research Center reported that 12.7 million Hispanics voted in 2016 versus 9.7 million in 2008, the newspaper observed.
Republicans Still Don’t Get It
As usual, the GOP still doesn’t get it. If the GOP did get it, it would focus on creating better understanding among existing voters, including Hispanic voters, as opposed to worrying about its immigration position. As the Dallas Morning News reported:
Nancy Richer, the Dallas County GOP’s Hispanic engagement director, said she was happy to see many new Latino voters make their voices heard at the polls, though she feels Republicans may have fumbled the conversation around immigration, leading many Latinos to support Democrats.
“This was a concern for us,” Richer said. “Many Latinos may have felt discouraged from voting Republican. Many Latinos put immigration above everything else.”
Though the newspaper reported that younger Hispanics cite immigration as a concern, it’s actually not their main concern, and never has been.
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has been writing for years about what she calls the GOP’s “Hispanic Delusion.”
As she explained in 2012, changing its position on immigration won’t help the GOP win Hispanics votes, for the simple reason that much more than just immigration separates most Hispanic voters from the Republicans’ professed beliefs. “If Republicans want to change their stance on immigration, they should do so on the merits, not out of a belief that only immigration policy stands between them and a Republican Hispanic majority,” Mac Donald said. “It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation.”
GOP economic policies, she reported in National Review, citing a recent poll, “were a stronger turn-off for Hispanic voters in California than Republican positions on illegal immigration. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanic voters were suspicious of the Republican Party on class-warfare grounds — ‘it favors only the rich’; ‘Republicans are selfish and out for themselves’; ‘Republicans don’t represent the average person’ — compared with 7 percent who objected to Republican immigration stances.”
Another myth is that most Hispanics share the GOP’s professed undersanding of “family values.” “What Republicans mean by ‘family values’ and what Hispanics mean are two completely different things,” a top Hispanic marketing expert told Mac Donald. “We are a very compassionate people, we care about other people and understand that government has a role to play in helping people.”
And why is that? Mac Donald explained that “U.S.-born Hispanic households in California use welfare programs at twice the rate of native-born non-Hispanic households.”
The data are similar in Texas.
Migrant Voters
Right now, a train of 4,000 to 6,000 migrants, all of them jobless and likely illiterate, are heading for the border. And the Border Patrol collared 60,000 illegal aliens in October, and more than 500,000 in fiscal 2018.
Eventually, many of those permitted to stay will likely become voters — or their children will under the current anchor-baby policy wherein those born here automatically become citizens. And until such time as the intergrity of the ballot is secured, many likely will not wait until they become citizens but will vote illegally.
Yet many Hispanic U.S. citizens in the United States do not toe the liberal-Democrat line, and are themselves opposed to open borders or out-of-control immigration. One of them is Christian Gomez, research project manager for The John Birch Society, the parent organization for The New American. “Illegal migration is an affront to those who have come here legally in the past and the decedents thereof,” Gomez said. “Anyone seeking entry into the country that is unwilling to abide by our Republic’s laws, especially its immigration laws, is not an ideal candidate for citizenship. Furthermore, a large influx of migrants, regardless of their origin, will change any given society, in turn changing the politics and government of that society. Hence why immigration should be limited and controlled to ensure proper assimilation rooted in a proper understanding of our Constitution, republican government, and the virtues of freedom, in order for such new citizens to cast an informed vote.”
Regarding the liberal bent of most Hispanic voters in the United States, Gomez explained:
Unbeknownst to most Hispanics is how they are being used as pawns by the Deep State and the Democratic Party in order to build their power base and perpetuate their anti-American globalist agenda.
The problem with many in the Hispanic community is a lack of education, in which the ideals and principles of liberty, conservatism, and the Constitution are articulated in Spanish. Instead, most Spanish speakers get their news largely from either Univision or Telemundo (which is owned by Comcast through NBC Universal); both Univision and Telemundo are extremely liberal in their news and political coverage and are propagators of noticias falsas (Spanish for “fake news”).
He concluded: “An informed electorate remains the key for all Americans, including Hispanics.” But this education process, so vitally needed, can be effectively negated by flooding the country with overwhelming numbers of legal and illegal immigrants.
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