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Ponzi Party : Immigration and an old con - Republican Party supports immigration increase
National Review, August 30, 1999 by John O'Sullivan
1. National figures show that support for the GOP fluctuates between one quarter and one third of the total Hispanic vote-rising or falling in line with the electorate as a whole. Regional, state, and national variations there are, of course. Broadly speaking, Cuban-Americans are more Republican, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans more Democratic. But no statistics show that a majority of Hispanic voters either supports or identifies with the Republicans. Cuban-Americans are shrinking as a proportion of the Hispanic total. And even Republicans who make a special pitch for the Hispanic vote rarely rise above 50 percent. Despite all the hoopla, for instance, George W. Bush gained just over 40 percent of Hispanics in his second Texas gubernatorial election. That's a landslide-but in reverse.
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2. Immigration further strengthens this strong Democratic tendency of Hispanic voters. To be sure, individual Hispanics are likely to move rightwards politically the longer they remain in the U.S. as they become more prosperous and assimilate to the American majority. But this effect is canceled out, and even reversed, mathematically by the arrival of new immigrants who are poor, culturally unassimilated, and on both grounds amenable to Democratic appeals. Hence the proportion of Hispanics who vote Democratic, instead of falling gradually, has risen slightly but erratically.
3. Finally, immigration also swells Democratic voting blocs as a percentage of the total electorate. The Census Bureau projects, for instance, that the Hispanic share of the population will rise from about 11 percent today to over 20 percent by 2050. Edwin Rubenstein and Peter Brimelow pointed out in these pages what these changing demographics would mean electorally-namely the disappearance of a natural Republican majority by about 2008. America will then tip permanently, if gradually, into the Democrat column as California has probably done already.
In short, winning elections by importing voters via immigration policy is perhaps the only workable application of Ponzi's logic-but it works for Democrats, not Republicans. The Democrats plainly know this since they have been standing at docksides and airports with citizenship applications, voter registration forms, and warm smiles. Republicans will gain very little by smiling warmly too. As long as present immigration levels stay in place, they will always be running up the down escalator.
Of course, in the end Ponzi's inexorable logic will come to their aid and the Democrats will run out of immigrant voters. That should be-oh, see the calculation on Social Security above-in about a.d. 2159.
Or, as George W. would probably put it, "manana."
COPYRIGHT 1999 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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