Mike Gonzalez - A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans

Copyright 2014 by Mike Gonzalez and the Heritage Foundation

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

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CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-8041-3765-2

eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3766-9

Jacket design by Andrew S. Janik

v3.1

To Siobhan

B Y THE TIME THIS BOOK IS PRINTED, HISPANICS MAY HAVE BECOME the largest population group in California. When that line is crossed, surely by the 2016 presidential election, Hispanics will have a plurality in the Golden State, followed by non-Hispanic whites, with Asians coming in third at roughly twice the number of African-Americans, who will be a distant fourth. No one group will account for more than 40 percent of the population. Every group enumerated as a distinct ethnic identity by the US Census will be a minority in California.

California, in so many ways emblematic of America, symbolizes the profound demographic change the nation has undergone in the last few decades.

Hispanics have been the majority in Los Angeles County for several years. With 9 million residents, LA County has a population greater than that of Michigan or forty other states. But unlike Michigan, which brings up Rust Belt images of failed industries and decrepit cities, LA County is the home of the beautiful people. Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades, and Rodeo Drive are the perfect sun-soaked backdrops. Los Angeles houses the one industry in which we are indisputably the leader: Hollywood, the Dream Factory. The people who tell our tales and present our image back to ourselves and to the world live in LA County.

California: the land that for many in my generation symbolized the American Dream: the Beach Boys, the Brady Bunch, Disneyland, Annette Funicello. It is now more the Mexican-American Dream and, to a lesser extent, the Salvadoran-American Dream and the Guatemalan-American dream.

By 2013, Hispanics accounted for 38 percent of the population, and non-Hispanic whites for 39 percent. The population statistics for those two groups have been going in the opposite direction of each other for years. Not only are Hispanic birthrates going up, but whites are also having fewer babies. Whites also are fleeing California in the thousands every year for Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas. From 2000 to 2010, California lost 1.5 million more people to other states than it gained from them, reversing an inflow trend that had held for decades during the heyday of California Dreamin.

For the vast majority of non-Hispanic white Californians, the purpose of the flight isnt to escape minority status. Its to leave behind the crushing taxes and the asphyxiating regulation that is making all these Atlases shrug and refuse to keep carrying the burden.

When they escape to Texas, refugees from Californias welfare state find a low-tax, low-regulation booming economy in which Hispanics, again mostly of Mexican origin, are also fast approaching the tipping point of parity with non-Hispanic whites. They now constitute 38 percent of the states population, compared with 45 percent for whites, and are growing at a much faster rate. According to the 2010 Census, the Hispanic population rose by a staggering 42 percent in the first decade of this century, accounting for two-thirds of the states population growth.

Texass mostly Mexican-American Hispanics have a lower unemployment rate than Californias, are more entrepreneurial, own their own homes at a higher rate, go to church more often, have stronger family units, and have children who perform better academically. They also vote Republican at a higher rate than Californias Mexican-American Hispanics. Unsurprisingly, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration would like to make Texass Hispanics more like Californias. They are concentrating resources in the Lone Star State for a big voter push and have set as their target the states Mexican-Americans. If the Democratic Party succeeds at turning Texas blue, it could win every presidential election as far as the eye can see.

The nationwide demographic change also has been eye-popping. Some 50.5 million US residents checked the box for Hispanic or Latino in the 2010 Census, accounting for 16.3 percent of a total population of 308.7 million and making the United States the second largest Hispanic country in the world after Mexico. Only ten years earlier, the Hispanic population of the United States had stood at a mere 35.3 million. In fact, our Hispanic-origin population is 20 percent larger than Spains. Hispanics are now the second largest group in the United States, easily edging out African-Americans, who currently account for 12.6 percent of the nations population.

Hispanics lopsidedly voted 7129 for Barack Obama in 2012 and played a pivotal role in such battleground states as Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Florida. After November 2012, the conservative movement to which I belong finally began to pay attention to the demographic question in earnest. Did this result mean that Hispanics had gone permanently to the liberal side? A debate quickly ensued among conservatives about what to do as liberals rubbed their hands at the prospect of having a lock on the Hispanic vote. Demography is destiny became their battle cry.

But is any of that true? More important, how did America get here? How did demography, so important in a democracy, change so massively and so rapidly? What does a future in which one-third of America is Hispanic hold?

HOW WE GOT HERE

This book will try to shine a light on facets of the Hispanic presence in this country that receive little attention elsewhere. It is a book about who Hispanics are, how they got here, and whats happened to them since their arrival. It also will focus on what Americas profound changes in the last half centurythe War on Poverty programs, the civil rights era, and the sexual revolution, among themhave meant for them. It is an in-depth look at how liberals have achieved dominance over Hispanic voters and offers proposals for how conservatives can turn things around over the long term. Finally, I care about Hispanics having the opportunities they need to better themselves, to become upwardly mobile and make this land even better than it was when they arrivedin other words, to take up the path every other immigrant group has followed. The choices Hispanics make politically will affect how successful they are.

Hispanics, of course, have been a permanent presence in this land since Admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles landed in Florida and claimed it for Spain in 1565. Most Americans dont know this history, but they ought to. Three decades after Menendez, his compatriot Don Juan de Oate arrived in the Rio Grande Valley, and the two poles of Hispanicism in North AmericaFlorida and the Great Southwestwere established. It all happened decades before Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.

The great population bulge that is having such a deep impact on our demography and our democracy has little to do, however, with Menendez and Oate, as important as they may be.

The rapid rise in Hispanic numbers in the last half century was not the result of the natural growth of the Hispanic population that was in this country by the mid-twentieth century but mostly the consequence of government fiat. It was Congress that altered Americas demography by taking sweeping, consequential actions while blithely ignoring underlying economic forces. Congressional legislation also created a problem we now regularly tear ourselves apart trying to solve and one indelibly associated with Hispanics in the public mind: illegal immigration.