l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Steyn：在加拿大和澳大利亚竞争高技能移民的时候，美国高速引入低技能福利移民；
加利福尼亚拉丁裔人口从1970年占人口10%暴增到2010年的40%，这不自然
To an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but documented up
to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of election-night
analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession. On Fox News, Democrat
Kirsten Powers argued that Republicans needed to deal with the reality that
America is becoming what she called a “brown country.” Her fellow Democrat
Bob Beckel observed on several occasions that if the share of the “white
vote” was held down below 73 percent Romney would lose. In the end, it was
72 percent and he did. Beckel’s assertion — that if you knew the ethnic
composition of the electorate you also knew the result — turned out to be
correct.
This is what less enlightened societies call tribalism: For example, in the
1980 election leading to Zimbabwe’s independence, Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU-PF
got the votes of the Ndebele people while Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF secured
those of the Shona — and, as there were more Shona than Ndebele, Mugabe won
. That same year America held an election, and Ronald Reagan won a landslide
victory. Nobody talked about tribal-vote shares back then, but had the
percentage of what Beckel calls the “white vote” been the same in 2012 as
it was in 1980 (88 percent), Mitt Romney would have won in an even bigger
landslide than Reagan. The “white vote” will be even lower in 2016, and so
, on the Beckel model, Republicans are set to lose all over again.
Hence the urge to get on the right side of America’s fastest-growing
demographic. Only 27 percent of Hispanics voted for Romney. But all that
could change if the GOP were to sign on to support some means of legalizing
the presence of the 12–20 million fine upstanding members of the
Undocumented-American community who are allegedly “social conservatives”
and thus natural Republican voters. Once we pass amnesty, argues Grover
Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, “future immigrants will be more open
to the Republican Party because, unlike many immigrants who are already here
, they won’t have been harmed or insulted by Republican politicians.”
So, if I follow correctly, instead of getting 27 percent of the 10 percent
Hispanic vote, Republicans will get, oh, 38 percent of the 25 percent
Hispanic vote, and sweep to victory.
Everyone talks about this demographic transformation as if it’s a natural
phenomenon, like Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, I notice that many of those
exulting in the inevitable eclipse of “white America” are the same people
who assure me that demographic arguments about the Islamization of Europe
are completely preposterous. But in neither the United States nor Europe is
it a natural phenomenon. Rather, it’s the fruit of conscious government
policy.
According to the Census, in 1970 the “Non-Hispanic White” population of
California was 78 percent. By the 2010 census, it was 40 percent. Over the
same period, the 10 percent Hispanic population quadrupled and caught up
with whites.
That doesn’t sound terribly “natural” does it? If one were informed that,
say, the population of Nigeria had gone from 80 percent black in 1970 to 40
percent black today, one would suspect something rather odd and unnatural
had been going on. Twenty years ago, Rwanda was about 14 percent Tutsi. Now
it’s just under 10 percent. So it takes a bunch of Hutu butchers getting
out their machetes and engaging in seven-figure genocide to lower the Tutsi
population by a third. But, when the white population of California falls by
half, that’s “natural,” just the way it is, one of those things, could
happen to anyone.
Every four years, the Republican party pines for another Reagan. But Ronald
Reagan, governor of California for eight years, couldn’t get elected in
today’s not-so-Golden State. Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam back in the
Seventies, now presides as Governor Twilight, lead vampire of a malign
alliance of unionized bureaucrats and a swollen dependency class that
maintains them in office at the expense of a remorselessly shrinking
productive class. As the nation’s demographic profile trends ever more
Californian, perhaps Norquist’s predictions of naturally conservative
Hispanics pining for a new Reagan will come to fruition. Or perhaps Bob
Beckel’s more crudely determinative analysis will prove correct — that, in
a multicultural society, jostling identity groups will stick with the party
of ethnocultural spoils.
Once upon a time, the Democrats thought differently. It was their first
progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, who imposed the concept of “self-
determination” on post–Great War Europe, insisting that the multicultural
empires of the Habsburgs and Romanovs be replaced by a patchwork of ethnic
statelets from the Balkans to the Baltics. He would be surprised to find his
own party presiding over a Habsburgian America of bilingual Balkanization
as a matter of electoral strategy.
The short history of the Western Hemisphere is as follows: North America was
colonized by Anglo-Celts, Central and South America by “Hispanics.” Up
north, two centuries of constitutional evolution and economic growth; down
south, coups, corruption, generalissimos, and presidents-for-life. None of
us can know the future. It may be that Charles Krauthammer is correct that
Hispanics are natural Republicans merely pining for amnesty, a Hallmark
Cinco de Mayo card, and a mariachi band at the inaugural ball. Or it may be
that, in defiance of Dr. Krauthammer, Grover Norquist, and Little Mary
Sunshine, demographics is destiny and, absent assimilationist incentives
this country no longer imposes, a Latin American population will wind up
living in a Latin American society. Don’t take it from a right-wing bigot
like me, take it from the New York Times. In 2009, Jason DeParle filed a
story about suburban Maryland, in which he helpfully explained the
municipality of Langley Park to Times readers:
Now nearly two-thirds Latino and foreign-born, it has the aesthetics of
suburban sprawl and the aura of Central America. Laundromats double as money
-transfer stores. Jobless men drink and sleep in the sun. There is no city
government, few community leaders, and little community.
Golly. You’d almost get the impression that Mr. DeParle thinks that
laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and
sleeping in the sun, and dysfunctional government are somehow characteristic
of Central America. That sounds awfully judgmental for a Times man, no?
Republicans think they’re importing hardworking immigrants who want a shot
at the American Dream; the Democrats think they’re importing clients for
Big Government. The Left is right: Just under 60 percent of immigrants
receive some form of welfare. I see the recent Republican proposals for some
form of amnesty contain all sorts of supposed safeguards against gaming the
system, including a $525 application fee for each stage of the legalization
process. On my own recent visit to a U.S. Immigration office, I was
interested to be told that, as a matter of policy, the Obama administration
is now rubberstamping all “fee waiver” requests for “exceptional hardship
” filed by members of approved identity groups. And so it will go for all
those GOP safeguards. While Canada and Australia compete for high-skilled
immigrants, America fast-tracks an unskilled welfare class of such economic
benefit to their new homeland they can’t even afford a couple of hundred
bucks for the necessary paperwork.
It’s hardly their fault. If you were told you could walk into a First World
nation and access free education, free health care, free services in your
own language, and have someone else pay your entrance fee, why wouldn’t you
? So, yes, Republicans should “moderate” their tone toward immigrants, and
de-moderate their attitude to the Dems who suckered the GOP all too
predictably. Decades of faintheartedness toward some of the most
destabilizing features of any society, including bilingualism (take it from
a semi-Belgian Canadian), have brought the party to its date with destiny.
Or as Peggy Lee sang long ago in a lost land, “Mañana is soon enough
for me.”
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America:
Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn |
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