The London Daily Telegraph's Ed West [Twitter] is suspiciously knowledgeable about American immigration issues. Suspicious in the sense that I suspect him of having read Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer, and for all I know, possibly even me, and acquiring in the process knowledge that American pundits know is not to be presented to the public. He is not, like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire, a British immigrant, doing the immigration restrictionist writing Americans won't do—he's still in London, where he belongs.
But he knows a surprising amount:
Pundits tell the Republican party: 'The only way you can win is by importing more Democrat voters'By Ed West Last updated: November 8th, 2012
Congratulations to Ted Kennedy on his historic election victory. The Lion of the Senate may no longer be with us, but there is little doubt that he secured Barack Obama’s win – for as every media outlet has pointed out, Romney simply "ran out of white guys". If America had the demographic profile of 1992, the Republicans would have secured victory; had the country its 1980 electorate, the GOP would have won in 2008 too. Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which he said would lead to at most 50,000 people a year arriving (slightly below the actual figure of one million) swung it.
The consensus among the commentariat, therefore, is that the Republicans and by implication the Conservatives need to do more to attract non-white voters by cutting down on their objections to immigration and multiculturalism. In order to win, the Republicans must encourage the importation of millions of Democrat voters – an almost flawless plan.
This rests upon a couple of false ideas. Firstly, that there is a straight comparison between Latin American immigration today and that of eastern and southern European Catholics and Jews from the 1880s to 1920s. Sure, some of the complaints sound similar, but there are major differences, and the main one is that it took the 1924 law restricting immigration to facilitate the integration of white ethnic minorities.
Integration has many forms, among them the adoption of English, intermarriage, relative equality of outcomes and voting patterns; minorities with strong identities tend to vote along ethnic lines, while integrated majorities split fairly evenly, as one would expect in a healthy democracy. Hispanics continue to have different levels of income and education to non-Hispanic whites well into the second and third generations, and beyond.
As long as that continues it is unlikely they will turn Republican en masse. Even the pro-immigration Hispanophile George W Bush, whose dynasty is partly Hispanic, only won 40 per cent of the Hispanic vote at the height of the sub-prime mortgage boom. Better than Romney, but in a two-party system not exactly reason to pop open the champagne.
Secondly, there’s not much evidence that Hispanics actually care about immigration controls. If I were a poor Mexican-American farm worker I think it’d be in my interest to seal the border; the only beneficiaries of open borders are big business, self-appointed community leaders and the Democrats. Many white ethnics favoured shutting the door in the 1920s, including Samuel Gompers.[More]
Read the whole thing.
