Mark Krikorian writes: Conservative luminaries have been warning that Donald Trump poses a threat to the Republican party and to the political future of conservativism. Charles Krauthammer has called him “political poison.” Fred Barnes says Trump has “made the GOP’s future dicey.” George Will thunders characteristically that “every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency.”
All this may be true. Trump is indeed a braggart who goes out of his way to antagonize people — not a winning approach in electoral politics. And he’s shown little real commitment to conservative principles — or principles of any other kind, for that matter.
But Trump is not the long-term problem faced by the Right. Ramesh Ponnuru’s assurance regarding Trump that “this too shall pass” may be underestimating Trump’s staying power, but at some point he will pass.
But if mass legal immigration is permitted to continue, the Right is finished regardless of what Trump does or says.
If the federal immigration program continues to operate at its current pace — about 1 million green cards issued per year — it will create nearly 15 million potential new voters over the next two decades, disproportionately liberal, as I will explain below. If Senator Rubio and the rest of the Republican establishment had gotten its way and the House had passed Chuck Schumer’s bill, the number of these potential new voters minted by mass immigration by 2036 would have been more than double that, over 32 million.
What are the likely political leanings of these millions of voters imported by Congress and the president? Conservative immigration romantics imagine them to be natural Republicans, having a right-winger inside just waiting to burst out, if only they’re welcomed with open arms.
Unfortunately, a mountain of survey research gives us no reason to believe that to be the case. Put simply, immigrants and their adult children are disproportionately big-government liberals who vote heavily Democrat because that party’s policies accord with their own views and interests.
This conclusion isn’t based on tendentious survey questions or a one-off poll that doesn’t reflect true views. Rather, survey after survey after survey after survey hammers the point home: Immigration increases the electoral power of the Left.
Immigrants are disproportionately big-government liberals who vote heavily Democrat because that party’s policies accord with their own views and interests.
Let’s look at just a sprinkling of the findings (examine them in more detail in a comprehensive review of immigrant policy preferences published by Eagle Forum). The 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey found that 62 percent of immigrants supported government health insurance, as opposed to 45 percent of the native-born. The 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study found 58 percent of immigrants supported affirmative action, versus 35 percent of natives.
The Pew Research Center found in 2011 that Hispanics (mainly immigrants or the children of immigrants) had the most negative view of capitalism of any group polled — more negative even than self-identified supporters of Occupy Wall Street.
Pew also found that 75 percent of Hispanics preferred a larger government providing more services to a small one providing fewer; the figure for the public at large was just 41 percent. It’s true that support for bigger government is lower among the adult grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants, at “only” 58 percent. But not only is even this figure disturbingly high, it’s not clear that it tells us anything about the grandchildren of today’s immigrants — their grandparents arrived at least half a century ago in a very different America.
