America’s Transformed Electorate

Twenty Years of Liberal Dominated Immigration Policy

In August 2001, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a study by James G Gimpel and Karen Kaufmann of the University of Maryland that concluded:

“Current immigration policy is slowly but steadily sifting the nation’s electorate toward the Democratic Party.”

On November 13, ten days after the 2020 election, CIS published a study confirming that immigration over the last 20 years has had a dramatic effect on American politics and favored progressive Democrat politicians and policies. The study was based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey from 2000 to 2020 and found that the U.S. electorate had grown 15 percent, but the number of voting age immigrants and their children had increased by 71 percent. As a share of total eligible voters, immigrants and their children increased from 14 percent to 20 percent. The most dramatic increases were predominantly in the South. North Carolina went from 4 to 12 percent, Georgia from 4 to 13 percent, Virginia from 7 to 16 percent, Texas from 14 to 25 percent, and Maryland from 12 to 23 percent.

Outside the South, California went from 33 to 43 percent, and New Jersey went from 23 to 36 percent. The percentage of foreign-born is the most reliable predictor of Democrat Party dominance.  

Florida went from 22 to 29 percent, but the Florida immigrant vote is still dominated by more conservative Cuban and Venezuelan anti-socialist refugees. By the same definition, the South Carolina immigrant population remains at only 5 percent but is growing fast. The 2020 figure for other Southern and Southern Culture border states are as follows: Oklahoma, 7 percent; Tennessee, 6 percent; Arkansas, 5 percent; Kentucky, 5 percent;  Louisiana, 5 percent; Missouri, 5 percent; Alabama, 3 percent; Mississippi, 3 percent; and West Virginia, 3 percent. Many are low but growing fast.

It should be noted that there were also dramatic increases in the immigrant vote in Arizona, going from 9 to 24 percent, Nevada going from 11 to 23 percent, and even Utah going from 4 to 12 percent. Colorado has now become a more secure Democrat state, going from 6 to 15 percent.

In other states of recent interest in the 2020 election, the immigrant vote in Michigan is 12 percent, while Pennsylvania and Minnesota are both at 11 percent. Wisconsin is lower at 7 percent. Recent immigration was considered a key factor in seven critical swing states in the 2020 election—Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida—but others including Texas could be added in the future. Again, the most dramatic rates of growth were in the South.

The 2001 CIS Gimpel and Kaufmann study and other studies over the previous two decades showed that the 1965 immigration law and the 1986 amnesty were largely responsible for the original trend.  George W. Bush improved his own support by Latino voters but did not break the trend.  The Bush immigration policy was based on anecdotal myths rather than statistical reality, and his negligible internal and workforce enforcement gained him disappointing levels of Hispanic respect and resulted in a doubling of illegal immigration.   

A February 2013 CIS study based on the 2006 Congressional elections by George Hawley at the University of Houston indicated that Republicans who favor soft immigration policies or amnesty receive negligible increased support from Latino voters.  Education, jobs, the economy and healthcare are much more important to Latinos than immigration. According to a 2011 Pew Research study, 75 percent of Latinos favor big government and more services compared to 41 percent for the general U.S. population. In 2012, 69 percent of Hispanics favored Obamacare, and 71 percent voted for Obama.  Many Latinos oppose amnesties because cheap labor threatens their economic well-being.  About 20 percent of Latinos are consistently conservative and strongly opposed to amnesty.  Hispanic conservatism is particularly strong among Cuban-Americans and the growing number of Hispanic evangelical Christians. 

Hawley’s study also revealed a sobering statistic for immigration-liberal Republicans. Republicans with liberal immigration records lost nearly 10 percent of their non-Hispanic white vote.  Attention: Liberal Republicans get negligible Latino support for favoring soft immigration policies and lose 10 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote. Hawley believes the loss of white votes would be much higher if voters paid more attention to voting records. This sobering statistic has been largely ignored by establishment Republicans. However, it does gain them favor in the mainstream media and with cheap-labor financial donors.

Chain migration of families and birthright citizenship for the children of unlawful immigrants have helped explode the immigrant population in the U.S. 

President Trump and his extraordinary economic success, which delivered record prosperity in jobs and incomes to Hispanics and Blacks, considerably eroded the heavy immigrant and Black bias against populist Republicans. According to a BBC News article on November 22, 2020, Trump got a record 19 percent of the votes of Black men and also 10 percent of the Black women’s vote. His Hispanic vote was up 4 percent from 2016 to 36 percent. About 30 percent of Hispanic women voted for him, up 5 percent. His Asian vote was up 7 percent to 38 percent. Trump was up 3 percent to 55 percent for non-Hispanic white women. He got 61 percent of the white male non-Hispanic vote, which was off from 62 percent in 2016.

Trump would have won the election handily, if it were not for last minute voting rule changes in five of the seven key swing states. He took Florida easily and North Carolina, where the Democrat Governor and Democrat majority State Board of Elections tried to make some of the same changes without permission of the North Carolina General Assembly, but were stopped by a very displeased Federal Judge.  There were many irregularities in the 2020 election, and it is unlikely Americans can have fair elections unless they are corrected.

You can see by the data presented in this article that the Republicans have an uphill battle for survival. The Democrats are also planning to lock in their dominance by a huge amnesty, open border policies, creating other states, and stacking the Supreme Court.

Nearly 20 years ago in August 2001, I wrote two articles on LewRockwell.com. The first was entitled Bush Amnesty Plan Will Bury Republicans Forever: The Outcome of the Immigration Issue will decide all other issues. The second was entitled: Like the RMS Titanic the GOP is Headed for Disaster: Yet Her Officers Refuse to Heed the Warnings. The second article included this paragraph that still stands true:

“Unless Republican leaders wake up and very soon, their extraordinarily misguided policies on immigration will sink the GOP and with it every noble principle of government once held dear by the friends and defenders of liberty. The damage will be permanent and progressive. This unwelcome demise will affect the outcome of every issue: taxes, abortion, gun control, government spending and regulation, Supreme Court appointments, education, the protections of constitutional government, racial preferences and quotas, labor, the moral foundations of our society, national defense, everything.”

It is high time we think through the consequences of cheap labor, stacking the demographic cards for increasing faithful welfare state voters, and the “feel-good” virtue-signaling policies that actually harm most American workers and their families. We must also deal frankly with immigration policies that endanger national security, public safety, and public health.    

In 2016, however, Donald Trump gave us hope that we might save our country and its noble traditions and Make America Great Again. We must not give up that hope or the Trump agenda.

The reality is that American patriots are now in a tight spot with ambitious Cultural Marxist and Corporatist media, technology, and political forces in power and set to hammer flat even freedom of speech and thought and personal, political, and religious liberties. Yet Republicans are only one Senate seat and five or six House seats from stopping the radical Democrat economic and social agendas. With strong Trump agenda leadership, we can still restore sanity to our nation. Liberty is the fruit of wisdom and courage.

However, there are many dangerous Democrat agendas that we must stop before the 2022 and 2024 elections. It is urgent that we stop the nation-destroying Biden-Obama amnesty and open borders plan.  This foolish, appalling, and extremely partisan plan would not only lock in permanent Democrat Party power forever, it would have staggering economic consequences. One CIS estimate is that it would cost over $93,000 in life-time social security benefits for each illegal immigrant amnesty. Multiply that by 22 to 30 million probable amnesties and you will have only a portion of the astronomical nation-destroying costs. There will also be huge Medicare and Medicaid costs, and these Federal costs are only a fraction of the total. Local and state governments bear most immigration and amnesty costs.  More data on the economic and fiscal costs will be available soon. This includes the danger of hyper-inflation.  

 “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;”—Hosea 4:6