Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Myth Debunked: Latin Conservative Tidal Wave Is Not Coming
National Review Online ^ | July 24, 2006 | Heather MacDonald

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.


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: 1ignorantrant; 3rdworld; aliens; atzlan; hispanics; illegalimmigration; immigrantlist; immigration; knownothingism; latinovote; reconquista; thirdworld; valuesvote
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-80 ... 141-157 next last
To: Porterville
Catholics do not have abortions.

Psh. I've got some swamp land in FL I'd be glad to sell you.

41 posted on 07/24/2006 9:48:55 AM PDT by subterfuge (Call me a Jingoist, I don't care...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]

To: doc; livius
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.

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)

42 posted on 07/24/2006 9:53:28 AM PDT by subterfuge (Call me a Jingoist, I don't care...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies]

To: sine_nomine
Once both groups adopted free love, it was all over.

The decline of American culture has nothing to do with sex, drugs or religion. It is caused by economics. Both spouses must work to support a family. This has broken the traditional family structure. Everything else is BS.
.
43 posted on 07/24/2006 9:57:55 AM PDT by mugs99 (Don't take life too seriously, you won't get out alive.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies]

To: mugs99
Both spouses must work to support a family pay taxes.
44 posted on 07/24/2006 9:59:44 AM PDT by hispanarepublicana (Don't fall for the soft bigotry of assuming all Hispanics are pro-amnesty. www.dontspeakforme.org)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 43 | View Replies]

To: livius
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.

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.

45 posted on 07/24/2006 10:01:33 AM PDT by dirtboy (Glad to see the ink was still working in Bush's veto pen, now that he wisely used it on this bill)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

To: livius; Tancred; mugs99; hispanarepublicana

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.


46 posted on 07/24/2006 10:02:18 AM PDT by marron
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

To: Tancred
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.

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.

47 posted on 07/24/2006 10:03:05 AM PDT by dirtboy (Glad to see the ink was still working in Bush's veto pen, now that he wisely used it on this bill)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: hispanarepublicana

LOL...Good point.


48 posted on 07/24/2006 10:06:25 AM PDT by mugs99 (Don't take life too seriously, you won't get out alive.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies]

To: aft_lizard
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?

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.

49 posted on 07/24/2006 10:06:50 AM PDT by sinkspur (Today, we settled all family business.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: 1_Inch_Group; 2sheep; 2Trievers; 3AngelaD; 3pools; 3rdcanyon; 4Freedom; 4ourprogeny; 7.62 x 51mm; ..

ping


50 posted on 07/24/2006 10:08:57 AM PDT by gubamyster
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: dirtboy; livius
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.

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.

51 posted on 07/24/2006 10:10:05 AM PDT by sinkspur (Today, we settled all family business.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 45 | View Replies]

To: The Old Hoosier
Well, in California, we helped the Dems with Prop 187.

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.

52 posted on 07/24/2006 10:14:10 AM PDT by B Knotts (Newt '08!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 34 | View Replies]

To: pbrown

Who are the Bushbots who thought that?

I sincerely doubt, on balance, President Bush believes that himself.


53 posted on 07/24/2006 10:14:17 AM PDT by mjolnir ("All great change in America begins at the dinner table.")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: sinkspur
I didn't get that impression at all.

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.

54 posted on 07/24/2006 10:15:35 AM PDT by dirtboy (Glad to see the ink was still working in Bush's veto pen, now that he wisely used it on this bill)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 51 | View Replies]

To: dirtboy
It has become virtually impossible to have any kind of discussion with you of late. You seem to be continually angry.

I won't try any more. It's too frustrating.

55 posted on 07/24/2006 10:20:43 AM PDT by sinkspur (Today, we settled all family business.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 54 | View Replies]

To: dirtboy
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.

The simple explanation for the numbers in the article is method. This is a statistical sample from NYC. Who compiled these numbers? How were these numbers compiled? Does this represent all of NYC or a particular area of NYC? Is the NY Times telling the truth?
.
56 posted on 07/24/2006 10:20:49 AM PDT by mugs99 (Don't take life too seriously, you won't get out alive.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 47 | View Replies]

To: sinkspur
It has become virtually impossible to have any kind of discussion with you of late. You seem to be continually angry.

I get grouchy when folks are continually playing the race card. And distorting the positions of anti-illegal conservatives.

57 posted on 07/24/2006 10:23:50 AM PDT by dirtboy (Glad to see the ink was still working in Bush's veto pen, now that he wisely used it on this bill)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 55 | View Replies]

To: mugs99

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.


58 posted on 07/24/2006 10:24:54 AM PDT by sine_nomine (Confidential to Bush: protect the borders. It's in the Constitution.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 43 | View Replies]

To: marron
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

A simple truth that every Republican needs to be reminded of!
.
59 posted on 07/24/2006 10:26:04 AM PDT by mugs99 (Don't take life too seriously, you won't get out alive.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 46 | View Replies]

To: dirtboy
I'm sure you were really grouchy yesterday, given that Hastert said that he would bring any bill to the floor that stressed border enforcement first, and that the Senate may take up the Pence bill on its own after the August recess.

Sounds as if the Pence plan will form the basis for any conference negotiations.

60 posted on 07/24/2006 10:28:34 AM PDT by sinkspur (Today, we settled all family business.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 57 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-80 ... 141-157 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson