The once red state of Virginia — which voted to re-elected Richard Nixon by 67 percent in 1972 — has “gone the way of California” due to decades of mass immigration, New York Times best-selling author and populist conservative columnist Ann Coulter says.
On Tuesday night, Democrats took the majority in Virginia’s House of Delegates and the State Senate — the first time since 1993 that this has occurred. Already, Democrats hold power in the governor’s mansion with Gov. Ralph Northam’s (D-VA) victory in 2017, as well as with the lieutenant governor and attorney general.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Coulter said Virginia’s turn towards being a blue state – that voted to elect Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama twice – is the result of mass immigration for decades.
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“Virginia is 100 percent [the result of] immigration,” Coulter said. “Virginia has gone the way of California, it is gone, gone, gone. So get used to it, Republicans, because you’re going to have a lot of sad nights like this because of the effects of immigrants being moved into red states as has happened in Virginia.”
Since 1990, Virginia’s electorate has changed dramatically, mostly because of the nation’s legal immigration policy that brings about 1.2 million legal immigrants to the U.S. every year. Breitbart News has chronicled the state’s rapid shift since 2015.
For example, in 1990, Virginia’s foreign-born population stood at only five percent. Fast forward to 2017, and Virginia’s foreign-born population now makes up 12.5 percent of the state’s total population — a near tripling of immigrant residents in less than three decades.
To put that data into numbers, in 1990 there were less than 312,000 foreign-born residents living in Virginia. Today, there are close to 1.1 million, almost four times what the population was three decades before.
About 23 percent of Virginia’s foreign-born population arrived from Central America, the largest share of migration from any one specific region to the state. More than 11 percent of those Central Americans arrived from El Salvador.
Like Virginia, similar regions that were once solidly Republican have been handed over to Democrats due the annual importation of more than a million legal immigrants. Orange County, California, for instance, is now dominated by Democrats, following what the New York Times has described as a “40-year” flood of immigration to the area.
Republicans’ electoral prospects, though, are only expected to get worse because of historically high legal immigration levels, research by Axios, The Atlantic, and the New York Times has found.
Ronald Brownstein, senior editor for The Atlantic, noted this year that nearly 90 percent of House congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average were won by Democrats. This means that every congressional district with a foreign-born population exceeding roughly 14 percent had a 90 percent chance of being controlled by Democrats and only a ten percent chance of electing a Republican.
The New York Times and Axios admit that legal immigration at its current rate will continue shifting the American electorate more towards Democrat control, as discovered in the 2016 presidential election between then-candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Among native-born Americans, Trump won 49 percent to Clinton’s 45 percent, according to exit polling data. Among foreign-born residents, Clinton dominated against Trump, garnering 64 percent of the immigrant population’s vote compared to Trump’s mere 31 percent.