Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [59]
LATINO SWINGERS
Michael Sokolove, writing in The New York Times, once noted that “the electoral math for Democrats begins with an assumption of capturing something like 90 percent of the African-American vote.” And they usually come pretty close. Some 85 percent of blacks self-identify as Democrats, while fewer than 10 percent align with Republicans. Bill Clinton won more than 80 percent of the black vote in 1992 and 1996. Al Gore won 90 percent in 2000, and John Kerry won 88 percent in 2004. Black fealty to the political left is such that Democrats don’t really have to battle the GOP for the black vote, so much as they have to battle apathy. Today’s black electorate has made it clear that they will vote Democrat or stay home.
The left has no such claims on today’s Latino vote, as even the more partisan Democrats acknowledge. “The great majority of Hispanics arrived in America in this half century and they are clearly in the process of forming party attachments,” writes Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and advisor to Clinton and Gore. Greenberg found that Latinos are four times as likely as Anglos to give a “don’t know” answer when asked which party they support, and that Mexicans in particular “are as likely as Anglos to say they are independents (33 percent) and to shift marginally their party allegiance toward Republicans with rising income and education.”
Despite this political reality, however, many Republicans are happy to concede the Latino vote to Democrats rather than work for it. They continue to behave as if black and Latino voters are joined at the hip. Not only does the attitude that Hispanics are lost to the GOP betray a shocking lack of confidence in the appeal of Republicanism, but it also betrays an ignorance of U.S. political history.
“Starting with the civil rights movement, and with racial preferences and quotas being extended to Latinos, there was an assumption on the part of liberals that they were just like blacks,” said Michael Barone in an interview. “But there are lots of differences.” Barone, a political historian, said that the black political experience in the United States more closely resembles the Irish, while Latinos seem to be following the route taken by Italian immigrants.
Blacks in the rural South headed north in the great migration that began during World War II. Like the Irish immigrants who came a century earlier, they were fleeing societies in which they were second-caste citizens. With some exceptions, both groups generally lacked much entrepreneurial experience. They had been slaves and sharecroppers, peasants and serfs, with no opportunity to become Homo economicus. They looked to government as a means to change their caste status. They tended to gravitate toward the kinds of public sector jobs that the Democrats specialized in creating.
“The Irish loved those government patronage jobs sought through politics and run hierarchically like the Roman Catholic Church, a comparison that Pat Moynihan makes in Beyond the Melting Pot,” said Barone. “Blacks are a little different in that black churches are more entrepreneurial and less hierarchical, but you still have political leaders like [former Washington, D.C., mayor] Marion Barry putting 55,000 people on the payroll of a city with 550,000 people.”
Italians and Latinos, by contrast, come from societies with low levels of trust in public institutions, according to Barone. You trust your family and you work hard. You don’t attract attention. This mind-set doesn’t automatically turn you into a Republican, but it does mean that the Dems don’t have a lock on your vote. So while the Irish for many decades voted uniformly Democratic nearly everywhere