Posted on 07/24/2006 6:36:23 AM PDT by Tancred
The myth of the redemptive Hispanic is finally cracking. For years, conservative open-borders advocates have touted Hispanic “family values” as a prime reason to increase immigration. Hispanic immigrants, these conservatives say, will save America from itself. At a time when Anglo and black families are disintegrating, when society is becoming increasingly atomized and alienated, Hispanics will bring the traditional values that the country so desperately needs. In a classic iteration of the theme, Larry Kudlow wrote on NRO last May that Hispanic immigrants would “become a much-needed churchgoing blue-collar middle class . . . that is crucial to a healthy America.”
The truth is now supplanting the fiction. Last Friday, the New York Times ran an editorial, “Young Latinas and a Cry for Help,” that laid out the real state of the Hispanic family. A quarter of all Latinas are mothers by the age of 20, few of them married, reported the Times. This out-of-wedlock teen-birth rate is three times that of white teens, and significantly more than that of blacks as well. The Hispanic dropout rate is also the highest in the country — the Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene puts it at 47 percent.
There is simply no way to square the facts about Hispanic family breakdown with the myth of the redemptive Hispanic. Talk to any social worker and she will tell you that illegitimacy has become completely normalized among her Hispanic clients. And the usual explanation for this epidemic of illegitimacy — an unresolved culture clash between young people and their traditional parents — is equally bogus. The mothers of teen mothers are themselves completely on board with single parenting, say the social workers, having often been single parents themselves. And they have no qualms about hooking their daughter and grandchildren into the public-benefits apparatus: “It’s now culturally OK for that population to be served by the welfare system,” says a case manager in a Santa Ana, Calif., home for teen mothers.
Far from exercising a brake on the erosion of traditional values, as conservative immigration advocates claim, the growing Hispanic population will provide the impetus for more government alternatives to personal responsibility. Advocates for young unwed mommies in the South Bronx are agitating for more day-care centers in high schools to accommodate the students’ children, reports El Diario/LA PRENSA. Demand for the 18 day-care slots at Bronx Regional High School, for example, far outstrips the supply, an 18-year-old Hispanic mother who attends the school told the paper. A bill has been introduced in Congress, the Latina Adolescent Suicide Prevention Act, to channel $10 million in federal funds to “culturally competent” social agencies to improve the self-esteem of Latina girls and to provide “support services” to their families and friends if they contemplate suicide.
For the New York Times, of course, the inevitable expansion of the welfare state is the glowing silver lining to this cultural catastrophe. With the usual melodrama that accompanies the pitch for more government services, the Times designates young Latinas as “endangered” in the same breath that it discloses that they are one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. “The time to help is now,” says the Times — by which it means ratcheting up the taxpayer-subsidized social-work industry.
It strains credulity to think that conservatives will fend off this push to meet social dysfunction with bigger government. Since the open-borders advocates have yet to acknowledge the facts of Hispanic family breakdown, there is no way of knowing what their solution to it is. One in four women in the U.S. will be Hispanic by the middle of the century, reports the Times — in states like California, they will be the majority. Unless Hispanic illegitimacy is stemmed, it is hard to see how the American family will be in a stronger state in future decades than it is today.
Conservatives, including open-borders conservatives, market themselves as the party of realism and common sense. A recent manifesto for immigration amnesty and liberalized entry rules in the Wall Street Journal bragged: “Conservatives have always prided themselves on acknowledging, in the words of John Adams, that ‘Facts are stubborn things.’” More stubborn still, however, is the unwillingness of open borders proponents to acknowledge social facts that undercut their cause.
BFLR.
bump
(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em, Down Hezbullies.)
Mexican Americans say that their coming of age party for girls (where $10,000 may be spent) is supposed to be about virginity. Many of the girls are pregnant at their big event. Some go off on a "honeymoon" with their boyfriends right after. The age for the quinceañera is about 15.
Only Bushbots thought the wave of illegal aliens would vote conservative. You can't tell those people nothin'. Illegal aliens = dim votes.
It's a marxist/socialist website but check out the collection of people that proudly marched in Chicago a few days back.
http://www.themilitant.com/2006/7028/702805.html
Personally I've begun to think that many among the OBL are closet marxists. Why else would they so rabidly support packing the country with marxists?
I can see why. I just heard a campaign speech by a conservative candidate here where he practically foamed at the mouth with his hatred of Hispanics and Spanish culture. The man was ignorant and bigoted. Hispanics immigrants are under a lot of pressure from the left - the Ford Foundation puts millions of dollars into getting Latin Americans to accept abortion and homosexuality, for example - and we put no money or effort whatsoever into winning them to our side.
Like all immigrant groups, they are the prey of the Democratic party. Why? Because we have made little or no effort to convince them of our views, and because the Dems immediately start to drag them into the victim/entitlement mentality that the Dems have used so effectively to corral blacks.
Frankly, I have been disgusted with some of the vitriolic, ugly anti-Hispanic ravings I have heard from conservatives who supposedly want to bring everybody together into their vision of America. Well, obviously, not quite everybody.
I disagree that we havent courted them and our views, its just that we have equal or greater pressure from the right that 'sounds' anti-hispanic, after all, if you are correct and we havent made much effort, did we get such a large number in 2004 to vote for us?
Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.
If you don't count California, where the Left has co-opted Hispanics most effectively, the number is more like 50 percent.
I think a lot of Hispanic voters actually are more sympathetic to our position by nature, regardless of what Heather McDonald says. I know that the GOP did make outreach efforts in 2004, and I agree, that did help.
One of the problems with the illegal immigration dispute is that many people on the right tend to lump all Hispanics in with illegal immigrants, and since that whole dispute has heated up in the last couple of years (since 2004), some of the rhetoric has gone way over the top. I was really shocked to hear the candidate I mentioned (who I was supporting because he was very anti-abortion) launch into a tirade not only about illegal immigration but about what a lousy culture Hispanics had, how they were ruining the US, etc. One woman (probably Hispanic) left in tears, and you can bet she's not going to vote GOP again. Nor will her friends and relations and probably her entire church.
I agree, I think many of them want to vote GOP for a variety of reasons. W was very popular with them, and of course Jeb Bush (whose wife is Mexican) is extremely popular. I'm just hoping that some of the anti-Hispanic viciousness and bitterness I have seen lately doesn't drive them into the arms of the enemy.
Probably the "single motherhood" difference is that the Hispanics have fewer abortions.
Like the little fat white girls in the trailers pregnant before they can drive?
Be afraid, very afraid.. If you think they are not registered to vote NOW... You have no idea how the democrat party works.. While people are watching Isreal and Hizbollah on TV, the democrats are registering to vote.. everywhere not just in L.A.
Yes just like the "fat white girls", just three times as often. From the article:
A quarter of all Latinas are mothers by the age of 20, few of them married, reported the Times. This out-of-wedlock teen-birth rate is three times that of white teens, and significantly more than that of blacks as well.
Catholics don't have abortions... it is a moralistic thing.
The price of choosing political expediency over principle.
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