Why a Democratic Majority Is Not Demographic Inevitability (Part Two : The Politics of Immigration Reform) | The Nation
▻http://www.thenation.com/blog/173444/why-democratic-majority-not-demographic-inevitability-part-two-politics-i
Le nombre croissant d’Hispaniques aux Etats-Unis ne garantit pas forcement des lendemains qui chantent pour le parti Démocrate, dit Rick Perlstein.
...taking the long view (...) it has to be acknowledged: party identities aren’t passed on through the genes. Blocs of “natural Democrats” have become natural Republicans before. Indeed, in at least one instance, it happened with shocking rapidity. As I noted last time, in the 1960s, droves of white Democrat ethnics—Italians, Eastern Europeans, the Irish—started voting Republican in a backlash against the Democrats’ continued embrace of civil rights in the wake of a failed open housing bill and the urban riots. Only an eye-blink earlier, they had been considered the soul of the New Deal coalition.
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Hispanics are more liberal than voters in general on all sorts of issues—for instance, 75 percent of Hispanics prefer “a bigger government providing more services” rather than “a smaller government providing fewer services,” compared to 41 percent for the general population. But what if they start becoming “Italian”? That is to say, what if Hispanics, less hobbled by official discrimination, follow the pattern of other immigrant groups before them, become increasingly upwardly mobile—and become increasingly identified, by themselves and others, as “white.” Is it not reasonable to assume that they might become more Republican? That would certainly be the historical precedent: more and more immigrant groups (excluding, of course, African-Americans), becoming “white.”