But Why Do Immigrants Vote Democratic?

7/24/2018—Democrats and independents don’t understand all the talk about illegal voting. Because there really isn’t any illegal voting. Various studies have shown this.

But that understanding is not what is actually being talked about. In an April 5, 2018 article in the New York Review, Adam Hochschild reported on the following exchange he had at a California gun show.

“At one table a man is selling black T-shirts that show a map of California in red, with a gold star and hammer and sickle. Which means? ‘This state’s gone Communist. And I hate to say it, but it was Reagan that gave it to them. The 1986 amnesty program [which granted legal status to some 2.7 million undocumented immigrants].’”

This means that 2.7 million votes in California, and now the children of those admittees, are not legitimate votes. Multiply that by the vote in other States and you get an idea of what Republicans are thinking about when they say Trump really won the national vote—-the vote of the people who ought to have been allowed to vote in the first place because they did not come here illegally.

This is not pure racism—-it actually has nothing to do with African-Americans, for example. It is nativism.

The conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote today in the PG that the whole reason that Democrats favor immigration is that they want these votes.

Aside from the fact that all of this is deplorable anti-democratic thinking, it does raise the question Republicans don’t want to ask—-why do immigrants vote Democratic? A few years ago, President George W. Bush appeared to be ready to take that question on and contest that political narrative.

For all the talk about crime, immigrants, documented and otherwise, are more law abiding than are Americans who have been here longer. As Bush realized, but Republicans now don’t want to think about, they are a natural Republican Party constituency. They work hard. Many own small businesses. They are religious. In fact, undoubtedly, they are more likely to be pro-life than are native born Americans. They didn’t come here for the privilege of paying high taxes.

There are precedents. Cuban immigrants voted Republican for years.

The main reason that immigrants vote Democratic seems to me to be that Republicans obviously don’t like immigrants. That seems pretty stupid on the part of Republicans. As a Democrat, I’m glad they are not waking up. But as an American it would be better if they would.