As Donald Trump continues to surge in the polls, he’s received increasing attacks from pro-amnesty rivals like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
In a Spanish-language address, Bush declared, “El hombre no es conservador,” which–in English–translates to, “The man [i.e. Trump] is not conservative.”
Trump replied by asserting that if Bush wants to be a leader, “he should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.”
Technically, becoming a U.S. citizen requires one to achieve English language proficiency. As such, when Bush delivers his attack message in Spanish, he is undermining one of the core tenets of American citizenship– albeit one that is already in tatters as one in five U.S. residents now speaks a language other than English while at home, according to a 2014 report.
Trump’s call for language patriotism, however, received a stinging rebuke from the ethnic advocacy group La Raza. “Every time Donald Trump opens his mouth he widens the gulf between the Republican Party and Latino voters. Today is no exception,” said La Raza spokesperson Lisa Navarrette.
La Raza–which endorsed Rubio’s signature legislation, the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill–has advocated for a trio of policies that includes permanent toleration for illegal immigration, citizenship for illegal immigrants already residing in country, as well as substantial increases to the annual levels of immigration established by the federal government through green card allotments.
While La Raza has advocated for these policies, the group has never explained why it believes it would be beneficial to America to admit large number of immigrants who have political, economic, and cultural traditions that are vastly different than those of Americans.
La Raza’s rebuke of Trump comes on the heels of a new census data report authored by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies. The report found that “immigrant households use welfare at significantly higher rates than native households,” with more than half of U.S. immigrants on welfare.
Many establishment Republicans who share La Raza’s lobbying goals for expanded immigration from predominantly poor countries, such as Linda Chavez of the Becoming American Institute, argue that concerns about welfare use amongst immigrants is irrelevant and “nativist”.
“These kids who get subsidized school lunches today will go on to graduate high school… will go on to college and move up to the middle class of America,” Chavez told USA Today. Every time we have a nativist backlash in our history, we forget that we see immigrants change very rapidly in the second generation.”
Unfortunately, the findings of the census data report do not support Chavez’s claim–and in fact, perhaps undermine Chavez’s and La Raza’s lobbying efforts. The report details how the disproportionate reliance on welfare continues amongst the American-born children of immigrants.
The report found that 90.8% of Hispanic immigrants use welfare. This high rate of welfare usage extends to second and third generations of immigrant families: 76.4% of native Hispanics report that they use welfare as opposed to 40.8% of native whites.
This report reinforces the previous findings of acclaimed Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald, who, a decade ago, observed that both foreign-born Hispanics and their American-born children use welfare at rates which vastly exceed those of native-born whites. “Native-born Hispanics collected welfare at over twice the rate as native-born whites,” Mac Donald writes.
Moreover, the Hispanic population similarly accounted for almost the entire increase in poverty from 1990 to 2004, as Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson has reported. “The number of Hispanics with incomes below the government’s poverty line [rose] 52 percent; that [represents] almost all (92 percent) of the increase in poor people,” Samuelson writes. “Among children, disparities are greater. Over the same period, Hispanic children in poverty [rose] 43 percent; meanwhile, the numbers of black and non-Hispanic white children in poverty declined 16.9 percent and 18.5 percent, respectively.”
Interestingly, ethnic advocacy groups like La Raza have formed an alliance with big business interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce and tech billionaires in Silicon Valley, who all stand to gain enormous financial profits and increased political power from the further opening of America’s borders.
Silicon Valley has donated heavily to Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Hillary Clinton–all three of whom have pushed for yet even easier access for foreign workers to come to the United States and take over jobs from American workers who would require higher salaries.
The number of immigrants in the U.S. is currently at a record high of 42.1 million.
In 1970, fewer than 1 in 21 Americans were foreign-born. Today, as a result of the federal government’s four-decade-long green card gusher, nearly 1 in 7 U.S. residents was born in a foreign country. According to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute, 1 in 4 Americans is either an immigrant or a child of an immigrant.
Mass immigration has transformed American communities–for instance, a new report shows that Des Moines public schools are, for the first time, now majority minority. And in 8 years time, according to Census Bureau reports, the foreign born share of the U.S. population will reach an all-time high.
Each year, as a consequence of the 1965 immigration law lobbied for by Ted Kennedy, the United States issues more than one million green cards to many of the poorest and least-developed nations in the world. In addition to these green cards are nearly one million handpicked foreign workers imported on work visas, dependents of foreign workers imported on work visas, and refugees, as well as half a million foreign youths sought by college administrators.
Empirical evidence suggests that the admission of a huge flow of newcomers on green cards would dramatically swell the ranks of Democratic voters while also increasing pressure for big government services.
Indeed, as Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee observed during the Democratic National Committee’s meeting last week: more immigrants means more Democratic voters.
“We [i.e. Democrats] are right on immigration, the fastest growing voting bloc in the country,” Chafee said, “Of course you want people to be treated with respect and to vote Democratic.”
Yet despite La Raza’s activism, Chafee’s pronouncements, and the empirical data, many Republicans support the effort to increase the admission of Democrat-leaning voters who turned the former reliably-Republican state of California into a progressive stronghold and who are rapidly repainting the political landscape of formerly-red Virginia to a permanent shade of blue.
For instance, Congressman Paul Ryan told radio host David Webb that “immigrants from the third world” make “some of the best Americans”–presumably more so than immigrants from Western countries.
When asked whether he thought “immigrants from the third world are more likely or less likely to support conservative policies,” Ryan declared:
Some of the best Americans are the newest Americans. People who left former Communist countries, people who left scandalous nations that are crony capitalism that deny them their rights. So people who come from those kinds of systems and those kinds of governments can make the best patriots because they finally see and taste what freedom is like, and they want to fight for it. So that kind of a person can make the best American. And the way I look at it, from our Party’s perspective, is we have to do a better job of going into these communities and exposing people to a different mindset– to these principles that they may not even have ever heard or seen before. This is a challenge that conservatives have to answer
Ryan would perhaps be glad to know that about 9 out of every 10 new immigrants brought into the country on green cards is from Latin America, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East.
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