So the Arizona immigration-enforcement law, SB 1070, may be working: “A new study suggests there may be 100,000 fewer Hispanics in Arizona than there were before the debate over the state’s tough new immigration law earlier this year.”
“BBVA Bancomer Research, which did the study, worked with figures from the U.S. Current Population Survey. The study says the decline could be due to the law known as SB1070, which partly entered into effect in July, or to Arizona’s difficult economic situation.” [TIME]
The bigger issue is one I reminded readers of in “Mass Immigration ‘End Of Days’ Scenario” still looms. Mark Krikorian does the dues too:
“[C]ontinued mass immigration guarantees the doom of conservatism (as I spell out in detail in my Encounter Broadside on the subject). The cause of limited government cannot succeed in the long term, even if the GOP does somewhat better among Hispanic voters, so long as the federal immigration program continues to admit a million-plus newcomers a year. And the overwhelming Hispanic preference for Democrats is not something that can be addressed with tweaks to immigration policy — even if such tweaks would do any good, which evidence suggests they wouldn’t.”
The fact is that mass immigration is inevitably made up of the relatively poor, who in a modern society will make disproportionate use of taxpayer-funded services (the majority of families headed by a Mexican immigrant, for instance, use at least one welfare program, even though the overwhelming majority have at least one worker in them). Therefore, the conservative message of smaller government is simply not going to resonate with a large share of immigrant voters, and may, in fact, repel them. What’s more, the huge majority of immigrants, not just Hispanics, are eligible for affirmative-action quotas as soon as they set foot in the United States, making it harder for them to embrace the party opposed to such benefits. On top of that, Hispanic immigrants, and even more their children, are more likely to have children out of wedlock than native-born Americans, another factor drawing them away from the Right and toward the Left.”