Immigration and the Republican Party — Further Points

/in /by

Re the article by Prof. James G. Gimpel discussed in “What does becoming a minority mean for the social status of Whites?“, there are several other interesting findings:

    • Putting Republican Latinos on the ballot doesn’t make Latinos vote Republican. ” Remarkably, Latinos in California appear to vote overwhelming Democratic even when Republican Latino candidates are on the ballot opposing Anglo Democrats.”
    • “The propensity for immigrants, and especially Latinos, to be swing voters has been greatly exaggerated by wishful-thinking Republican politicians and business-seeking pollsters who refuse to acknowledge the stability of individual party identification (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002). Entrenched patterns of party loyalty change very slowly, over decades, and are not ordinarily subject to wild swings in response to campaign stimuli.” . …
    • “In extensive national surveys, major immigrant groups prove to be more liberal than the native-born on matters such as government spending and income redistribution, the government role in healthcare, and government efforts to stimulate the economy. Immigration is but one of a long list of issues on which the foreign-born population is out of sync with the Republican Party (Hawley 2013)” [and White America].
    • “On non-fiscal matters, recent surveys suggest that the picture is more mixed, but Hispanics and Asians certainly do not stand out as social conservatives. Hispanic policy views line up so congruently behind the Democrats that prominent Latino scholars say that it is mistaken to consider them swing voters — in fact their Democratic loyalty has been long-standing (De la Garza and Cortina 2007; Segura 2012).”
    • White displacement: “A number of labor economists, economic historians, and demographers have documented the prodigious outflow of natives associated with immigrant influx … . The exodus is a consequence of downward pressure on wages coupled with soaring housing prices, costs that natives would rather avoid by moving elsewhere….
    • “Across all U.S. counties, including the many smaller counties, the estimated effect of immigration is to drop Republican vote share about two percentage points. Even in seemingly remote locations with negligible immigrant populations, the effect is sufficient to move a 51 percent county to a 49 percent county. Aggregated over the large number of counties and viewed through the template of the Electoral College’s winner-take-all system of elections, the impact of immigration is easily sufficient, by itself, to decide upcoming presidential elections.”