In the LA Times' effort to look objective, they published an essay by Steven Malange that states there really isn't a Latino voting bloc - and that Latinos will find in time that enforcement actually helps their quality of life. Steven Malange is wrong. He underestimates the new generation of Latinos who are attending college and are organizing as I write this. Voter registration is their motto.
Perhaps the essay was published because just yesterday Democratic Senators hosted the first ever -
Senate Democratic Latino Youth Summit
Perhaps someone wants to negate that these 150 "cream of the crop" young people could be the leaders in a driving force to represent the Latino vote in upcoming elections. Their influence will spread beyond their ethnic group because as they live their lives as most Americans do, they have non-Latino friends and colleagues, or they may have non-Latino spouses (there is a 50% intermarriage rate with anglos), which would mean they have non-Latino in-laws.
Influence spreads, especially when there is enthusiasm. Those 150 will get the Latino vote going --of course our current anti-immigration moves will help it along.
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Immigration Prof Blog
Latino Youth Summit
Washington, D.C. – Senate Democrats today highlighted the importance of civic engagement among young Hispanics as part of the First Senate Democratic Latino Youth Summit. The event gave close to 150 young Latinos from across the country the opportunity to interact with senators and discuss issues of importance, such as: immigration, civil rights, and education. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Ken Salazar (D-CO), and Robert Menéndez (D-NJ), addressed the young Hispanic leaders and commended their involvement and impact on public policy and society.
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The myth of the Latino voting bloc
The GOP has less to fear from a backlash than many claim.
Los Angeles Times
By Steven Malanga
October 18, 2007
When President Bush's immigration reform bill collapsed this summer, largely because of objections from his own party, open-borders advocates warned that the GOP would pay a harsh political price for killing the bill. Latino support had been crucial in electing Bush, the argument went, and Latino voters represented a rising electoral tide that Republicans were ignoring at their peril.
But such commentary is based on an inaccurate picture of the Latino voting public that emerged after the 2004 election and persists today. Just days after the election, for instance, Dick Morris, a former pollster and advisor to President Clinton, declared that Latinos had elected Bush; they represented 12% of the electorate, Morris reasoned, and 45% of them had pulled the levers for the president, enough to be decisive.
The Latino vote for Bush was far from decisive, however, and it may be years before it plays a pivotal role in a national election. Latinos may represent about 14% of the U.S. population, but they constituted just 6% of the 2004 electorate -- 7.5 million voters out of 125 million. According to Census Bureau data, only 34% of the nation's adult Latino population registered to vote in 2004, and 28% voted. By contrast, 67% of the country's adult white, non-Latino population and 56% of its adult black population voted in 2004. Black voters outnumbered Latino voters nearly 2 to 1 in 2004.
Exit polls taken during 2004 also indicate Latino support for Bush may have been exaggerated. In different polls, Bush's share of the Latino vote ranged from a high of 44% to a low of 33%. Yet subsequent academic studies have estimated Bush's actual level of Latino support at the lower end, somewhere between 35% and 37%. Seen in this context, the "swing" of voters from Bob Dole, who garnered 21% of the Latino vote in 1996, to George W. Bush was hardly historic. In 1984, Ronald Reagan captured 37% of the Latino vote -- a performance at least equal to Bush's.
This suggests that the key to winning Latino votes may be running good candidates, not pandering. Latino voters themselves seem to agree. A 2004 Washington Post poll found that immigration was the least important issue among Latino voters, with only 3.5% placing it at the top of their concerns.
The decline in Latino support was not a unique phenomenon for Republicans; from 2004 to 2006, the GOP lost support among virtually all constituencies, including union members (down 10 percentage points) and even white evangelicals (down 8 percentage points). In many places, the falloff was larger among core Republican voters than among Latinos. In California, for instance, 2006 GOP Senate candidate Richard Mountjoy's share of the Latino vote was 10 percentage points below Bush's 2004 share -- while his share of white male voters was a whopping 12 percentage points below Bush's comparable showing two years earlier.
...Given what the voting numbers show us, it's unlikely that Latinos will become an important voting bloc in most places as soon as many predict. And by the time that they do, Latino citizens might find that an immigration policy based on enforcing borders and increasing the number of better-skilled immigrants, which many Republicans advocate, actually benefits them. Recent economic studies show that the country's current levels of immigration are hurting immigrants who are already here -- and hurting native-born Latinos more than most U.S. residents. A saner immigration flow is likely to boost the average wages of our current Latino population and free up resources, like housing, in Latino communities...
for link to complete article on the Latin Youth Summit: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2007/10/senate-democrat.html
for link to entire LA Times article, click title of this post
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