And spank me hard, please.
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.
More like, cannot collect welfare on a dead fetus. Applies to whites, blacks and Hispanics.
Wake up and smell the coffee! It is illegal immigration that we are against. The importation of this third world invasion is only going to hurt this country. Many of the Latino immigrants do not want to assimilate into our culture. They refuse to speak our language, bleed our social system, committ an enormous amount of crime, etc... We have a mayor in LA, who is a former gang member and member of MECHA, who claims that Latinos are in a civil war to recapture the southwest.
All we have to do is look at the southwest to see that this article is correct. California was once a GOP leaning state. From the end of the New Deal to 1988, it voted Republican in every presidential race except the 1964 Johnson landslide. It elected a good number of Republican Senators and Governors, including Ronald Reagan. But look at the state now. A GOP presidential contender couldn't carry it to save his life. The Democrats run the place and there's no prospect for changing that. Arnold is governor, that's true, but he's a mushy "moderate" Republican and got a lot of votes for being a movie star, hardly something that can be repeated very often.
Look at Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado. Democrats once wrote these states off in presidential elections. They usually got slaughtered there, but now they're competitive, and with another decade or so of immigration, those states will be Democrat-leaning. Other than the Cubans who flooded into Florida after Castro took over, can anyone identify anyplace where a rising hispanic population has helped the Republicans? The Cubans were a unique circumstance. When communists seize power in a country, it's the educated and productive class that flees. That's the class of voters we got from Cuba. But from elsewhere in Latin America we get mostly the uneducated, unskilled, welfare class voters. They vote mostly Democrat.
What about Texas, some people might ask? Hasn't it grown more Republican? Yes, but it hasn't grown more conservative. Like all southern states, Texas was once solidly Democrat, but most of those Democrats were conservatives. They switched over to the GOP after the radical left took over the Democrat Party in the sixties. That accounts for the state becoming more Republican, and it's helped cancel out the addition of more immigrants to the state. But now virtually all those old conservative Democrats have converted, so where is future GOP growth going to come from?
Look at county-by-county election map of Texas (red vs. blue counties). The blue counties are heavily concentrated along the border with Mexico, where the immigrant wave had its first effects. Each election cycle, that blue strip of counties edges north, taking out a red county or two. And so Texas will slowly become Democrat.
It isn't that there aren't millions and millions of people in Latin America who might be supportive of GOP ideals. It's just that (with the exception of Cuba) they have no particular reason to come to the United States. They're educated, have jobs, and are doing fine in their own countries. Maybe if Chavez cracks down even more we'll get a wave of Republican Venezuelans, but otherwise we get mostly loyal Democrats from south of the border.
How is it possible that anyone ever believed that these peasant hordes could become GOP voters?
Now that we have stopped the bleeding, we cut off the social net, return to the Constitutional limits. Simply put, we either do so, or we die as a nation.
So, after Bush gets his way and legalizes all these tens of millions of illegal aliens, what's to prevent the left from co-opting the hispanics throughout the rest of the country as you say they've done in California?
In the face of yet another column (and they happen on both sides of the issue) shallowly lumping the ENTIRE hispanic voting population into one group, here's a re-post of something I've said before.
The issue is that studies that look at ethnic voting patterns, especially among hispanics, are flawed to begin with. To "pool" hispanics in a voting bloc for the purpose of analysis or strategy is like pooling apples, oranges and grapes in a voting bloc. And even if you get all the fruit classified as grapes isolated in a voting bloc, you'll have to seperate out the "raisins", so to speak. When I say grapes vs. raisins, I mean that there can be (and generally is) a world of difference in the voting patterns, philosophies, tastes, etc., between a hispanic of Mexican ancestry who's been here for 6 generations versus one who's been here for 2. And then among the 6th-generation ones, there's likely to be some vegetarians, some hunters, some treehuggers, some chemical salesmen, etc. It would be like trying to analyze the voting patterns and preferences and therefore form a strategy for guys with size 9 shoes. Too much diversity in that population to make it worthwhile.
Thank you for using the term "bushbot" in your post. It allows me to give any comment you may post the attention and respect it deserves. Please continue to do so.
Your truly - Bushbot
I see more hispanics with "W '04" bumper stickers here than I do white folk (the ones that don't drive huge ranch trucks, that is). And this is Southern NM.
I heard about trucks with "Kerry Es Pendejo" bumper stickers down around the Permian Basin oilfields in '04.
And spank me hard, please.
Well, in California, we helped the Dems with Prop 187. But hispanics aren't easily led sheep who will just do whatever leftists tell them. They may, on the other hand, be susceptible to that kind of leftism if we insult them, the way people seem to every day on FR.
In TX and NM, Hispanics are almost voting like whites. In FL, they vote more conservative than whites. Check out the exit polls for 2004, state by state, you'll be surprised.
The truth is we might not see another republican president for a generation. We can easilly lose the whole southwest and Florida and if we lose just one of these states, the whole country goes blue and by the time conservatives get power back we might as well be living in Europe.
Thank you George Bush.
"W" isn't running again.
The problem with promiscuity is multi-racial, thanks to sex education and Planned Parenthood's abortion business.
The article says that Mexican Americans have worse statistics. I am not the expert.
My experience with Mexican Americans has been 99.999% positive.
What tipped me about societal degeneration was the behavior of seniors (whites) and those with all the privileges and education. Once both groups adopted free love, it was all over.
Supposedly Reagan did not press family issues because conservative Republicans wanted drugs and free love, but lower taxes and a strong defense.
That could be. I know affluent white Americans want those spare grandchildren aborted. It looks better for the seniors.
Who said Bush was a conservative? He is another RINO president.
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