Barb,
Not to discount Fr. Angel's post, but here's the view from the other side California Central Valley. Victor Davis Hanson is a university professor with adult children married to Latinos and wildly crazy about his grandchildren.
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...Yet, aside from the always-sound advice to be civil, show empathy for the less well off, and avoid callous rhetoric, almost all such thinking is oversimplistic, if not flawed altogether.
In the first place, why do Republicans think their conservative message is a natural one for the majority of contemporary Latinos/Hispanics...?
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Had Republicans come out in favor of open borders and blanket amnesty, I doubt that they would have won the Latino vote ...Pundits can rail about supposedly naïve, out-of-touch Republicans who talked of self-deportation and thereby lost the Latino vote; but one just as easily might have castigated them for decrying out-of-control entitlements and food stamps, predicating legal immigration on education and skills, or criticizing unworkable and discriminatory affirmative-action policies, since these positions are also politicized as anti-Latino dog whistles.
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...But why do Republicans think Latinos are in any significant way opposed to continuing illegal immigration?
For the last 40 years, the influx of millions of illegal aliens leaving the impoverishment of Mexico by simply crossing the border, without much worry about U.S. law, has been a win/win situation for those already here. An expectation of cyclical amnesty or a general unwillingness of Americans to enforce their own laws is a magnet for millions in Latin America.
In the surreal world of American liberal orthodoxy, the nanosecond a young Mexican national crosses the border, he becomes immediately eligible for affirmative action — despite having little history of victimization by the United States or claim of contemporary bias.
In some 21 years of teaching at CSU Fresno I weekly mentored young illegal immigrants who were on federal and state scholarships, were recipients of the in-state tuition discount, and were courted by professional schools by virtue of being minority members with supposed historical claims against the majority.
Given the disparity between life in Mexico and life in the United States, why would a voting bloc give up such advantages — especially given that the larger the pool of unassimilated illegal immigrants, the greater the avenue for second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans to offer them collective representation and advance their own careers in government, media, and academia on the basis of collective ethnic grievances?
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For all the talk of family values and natural conservatism, there is not much evidence that rates of illegitimacy, crime, or divorce are much lower among Latinos than among the general population... Issues like abortion, gay marriage, and environmentalism have been successfully welded by the Latino leadership into a liberal package — at best, the price that Latino elites pay to white liberal counterparts for their support of amnesty and generous entitlements; at worst, because they believe these issues are a thorn in the side of the status quo establishment.
Read more
HERE.And note the solutions Prof. Hanson proposes after the model of Italian-Americans: "invest in the formidable powers of American assimilation, integration, and intermarriage." I think that includes knowledge of the English language. What do you think?
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