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 Institutes 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: Its 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.
Psh. I've got some swamp land in FL I'd be glad to sell you.
RACISM!!!!!!! You can't say that! You'll drive voters away. Don't you want to be inclusive?!!! YOu hater you!! All cultures are the same! YOu must stop saying these things!!
A Democrat MIGHT tell them what they WANT to hear and then what? (eyes rolling)
And who was that candidate?
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.
Ah. It's all the fault of the Dems. No personal responsibility of those actually engaging in high-risk behaviors.
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've gotten disgusted with some of the La Raza rhetoric, myself. But I don't use that as a brush to pain all Hispanics, whereas you seem to be trying to paint the entire anti-illegal movement as bigots.
The Democrats do a good job of dividing people along racial and ethnic lines, and convincing them to vote as a bloc. Politicians like the one you refer to play right into their hands, they are playing the Democrats game. They are terribly destructive, suicidal even on more than one level.
We should always keep our focus on our unifying principles, we should never engage in ethnic politics, both because it violates our core principles and because you can never out-Democrat a Democrat.
Classic liberalism, American style conservatism, the philosophical underpinnings of the Republican party are ideas that have to be transmitted from person to person, from generation to generation. We've already handicapped ourselves, all of the organs that transmit ideas into the culture are in our enemies' hands, the schools, the news media, Hollywood, and while we worry about "barbarians" swarming across the border, we graduate hordes of barbarians every year who have been educated by our enemies.
And we wonder why we can barely manage 50% at the polls.
The Democrats use ethnicity to shut down debate. If we play their game we lose. We have to keep our focus on principle, we have to learn how to communicate those ideas to people who have never heard them, not only because they are new to the country but to people who have been educated by our opponents, which is to say, 99% of everyone graduated from public schools. If we can't explain ourselves to hispanics, to blacks, to public school graduates, we've won our last election.
When Democrats look at America, they see an ethnic patch-work quilt that can be manipulated according to race. When Republicans look at America, they just see two colors, red and blue, the people who "get it" and the people who don't. We should insist as we always have on color-blind politics, color-blind citizenship, keep the focus on principle, because thats who we are, because if we play ethnic politics we'll lose to the people who are masters at it, and because if we go down that road we've lost our souls.
If we want to preserve our country we have several things we have to do post-haste. We have to secure the borders. We have to get control of the schools. We have to build alternatives to the corrupted information media. But we have to keep our focus on principle, and leave ethnic pandering to our enemies. If we do that, we won't get every hispanic, or black, or white to vote for us. We'll get the ones who "get it", though, and those are the ones we want.
Now, I wonder what the Latina abortion rate is, compared to the other groups? If it's lower, then such could explain some of these numbers.
LOL...Good point.
Some of it doesn't just sound anti-Hispanic. It is virulently anti-Hispanic. Read a few immigration threads, and it's right there, in many posts.
ping
I didn't get that impression at all. But some of the rhetoric amongst the "true conservatives" on the anti-illegal threads here verges on the bigoted.
Revisionism.
40+% of Hispanic voters voted for Prop. 187.
It was the media onslaught, and the lack of any kind of GOP response, after 187 passed that was damaging.
Who are the Bushbots who thought that?
I sincerely doubt, on balance, President Bush believes that himself.
You wouldn't, sink.
But some of the rhetoric amongst the "true conservatives" on the anti-illegal threads here verges on the bigoted.
As opposed to the many attempts to play the race card on opponents of illegal immigration, sink? That kind of crap flows both ways and obscures the factual aspect of the debate.
I won't try any more. It's too frustrating.
I get grouchy when folks are continually playing the race card. And distorting the positions of anti-illegal conservatives.
No, you are wrong. The widespread use of pot and now of meth is having devastating consequences. Ditto coke and heroin.
Doped up people do not make ethical choices.
Sounds as if the Pence plan will form the basis for any conference negotiations.
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