RSS Feed MenuFor years, Republican leaders have been assuring anxious followers that the post-1970 wave of very low-skilled Hispanic migrants from Mexico and Central America are guided by conservative values. They came from Catholic countries after all – they worked hard – and they sometimes told pollsters they opposed abortion. They omitted to note that the children of these immigrants would follow a very different path. The Washington Post this morning offers a very different glimpse of the future American electorate.
When the Marquez sisters set out to get pregnant, Edelmira was 14 and Angela was 15. … As many as one in four Hispanics born in the United States to immigrant parents gives birth to a child before her 20th birthday, according to a statistical analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center. Only Hispanics who come to the United States as immigrants have a higher teen birth rate.
One of the fathers of the girls’ children is an illegal Salvadoran immigrant now serving time in prison for burglary. The other father is working, but is also present illegally. One mother has dropped out of high school already, the other soon will. Neither is working.
The Post’s sidebars note an interesting culture gap: while Hispanic teens born outside the U.S. are less sexually active than either white or black teens, U.S.-born Hispanic teens are more sexually active than whites (although still less than blacks). Both U.S.-born and foreign-born Hispanic teens are much more likely to give birth before age 20 – and they are much more likely to have become pregnant intentionally.
Are these the makings of another underclass? Very possibly – but one thing it’s not is the social basis for cultural conservatism.
ottovbvs // Dec 11, 2009 at 7:01 pm
franco 2 // Dec 11, 2009 at 6:50 pm
” And otto, CAN be? You CAN BE an idiot whenever you wish, and you take the opportunity often……….They are actually more of a threat to African Americans ”
……Don’t like it when I point out you can’t even understand definitions you yourself post?……sorry………and funny I don’t see the NAACP in the forefront of attempts to stifle immigration reform or maybe Tancredo’s a secret member……you really are pitiful
aDude // Dec 11, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Reason – you are exactly correct. The current limits to the number of immigrants we will allow to enter legally is the problem, just like the 55 mph speed limit made criminals out of otherwise good drivers.
As for the cultural aspects of immigrant Hispanic life, I would love to see any statistics normalized for economic status. That is, I suspect you will see that the economic strata in which any teenager lives is a more accurate indicator than their ethnic group/cultural group/race/tribe/whatever.
As recently as 2004 Republican Bush was pulling 40% of the Hispanic vote. Then the cultural purist crowd decided to get noisy “I’m not racist, but we can’t let all those Mexicans take over…”
In the end, Obama carried North Carolina and Indiana on the strength of the Hispanic vote (if they had voted for McCain in the same percentage that they had voted for Bush, Obama would not have carried those states).
By 2020, the groups that the Republican Party is viewed as being hostile to will be African American (14%), Hispanic (20%), and non-Christian (17%). It’s tough to see how an anti-Hispanic policy (and, let’s face it, screaming about “illegal immigrants!” is perceived as being anti-Hispanic, since there aren’t any ICE sweeps against illegal Canadians) can ever lead to a Republican majority.
franco 2 // Dec 11, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Otto, now you are really displaying your ignorance. I love it!
Chekote // Dec 11, 2009 at 7:42 pm
both overall life expectancy and infant mortality numbers are better in Britain and when was the last time anyone went bankrupt because he couldn’t pay for cancer surgery…..
That’s because the US has higher rates of death from accidents which lower the life expectancy of compared to other countries. We have the best survival rates when it comes to cancer. We have are the innovators that have brought the drugs and medical procedures that other countries benefit from. So please. I couldn’t care less what the Brits do. BTW, did you ever take a close look to their teeth?
About hispanics, study, latinos, survey | Find me About // Dec 12, 2009 at 4:17 am
[...] For years, Republican leaders have been assuring anxious followers that the post-1970 wave of very low-skilled Hispanic migrants from Mexico and Central America are guided by conservative values. They came from Catholic countries after all – they …Read Original Story: "Natural Republican Voters" – FrumForum [...]
ottovbvs // Dec 12, 2009 at 9:43 am
Chekote // Dec 11, 2009 at 7:42 pm
“That’s because the US has higher rates of death from accidents which lower the life expectancy of compared to other countries.”
…….not to mention that the a third of this country is obese……finding obscure reasons for differences doesn’t alter the fact we have lower life expectancy
“We have the best survival rates when it comes to cancer. We have are the innovators that have brought the drugs and medical procedures that other countries benefit from.”
……You might want to take a look at the list of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world……the majority are European including two from Britain……
“o please. I couldn’t care less what the Brits do. BTW, did you ever take a close look to their teeth?”
…..Their teeth?………I’m sure you couldn’t care less what anyone else does since you’re obviously an “informed consumer” who thinks it makes entire sense to pay twice as much for the same product
sinz54 // Dec 12, 2009 at 10:09 am
franco 2: Any member of a group that over-identifies as a tribe at the expense of individualism will by nature vote for Democrats. ”
The most recent Pew Survey on ethnicity in America that I’ve seen was a few years old. And yet even it showed that even back when Bush was President, married white Protestants (from which the GOP’s main base is subsetted) were down to only 51% of the electorate–and that number was dropping steadily each year.
America is becoming a nation of minorities more than ever. White Protestants are becoming a minority too. By your logic, that means that the GOP will never win another election again.
Why? Because you’ve assumed that all minorities just vote on the basis of tribe, and hence you have to write them all off: “We can’t reach out to Jews, blacks or Hispanics because Sarah Palin isn’t Jewish, or black, or Hispanic–and so they won’t vote for her on that basis.”
Do you see how self-defeating that strategy is? Do you now see why Karl Rove and George W. Bush tried extra hard to appeal to the Hispanic voters?
sinz54 // Dec 12, 2009 at 10:12 am
ottovbs: You might want to take a look at the list of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world……the majority are European including two from Britain……
You might want to take a look at the list of the Nobel Prizes in medicine: The U.S. has won more Nobel Prizes in Medicine than any other nation by far.
ottovbvs // Dec 12, 2009 at 11:33 am
sinz54 // Dec 12, 2009 at 10:12 am
“You might want to take a look at the list of the Nobel Prizes in medicine: The U.S. has won more Nobel Prizes in Medicine than any other nation by far.”
……Considering this is the richest country in the world and spend more on pure scientific research than anyone else is this surprising?……….It hardly invalidates the role of European pharmaceutical companies in the development and industrialization of various medicines does it?……the point being “we” are not the only contributors and in fact there’s a case to be made that probably a majority of the original scientific discoveries that underpin the entire body of modern medicine from evolution and anti biotics to mapping the human genome were made in the UK……Crick and Watson probably had bad teeth into the bargain!
jakester // Dec 13, 2009 at 2:48 am
Didn’t the same geniuses in the GOP say that the Muslims were natural Republican voters cause of their “deep family and religious” values before 9/11? I guess since the illegals are mostly Catholics, they have to be good conservatives according to talk radio logic
jakester // Dec 13, 2009 at 2:50 am
yeah sinz54
they tried so hard by letting illegals over run us and look how that paid out for them
jakester // Dec 13, 2009 at 2:58 am
CO Independent
for all your talk about being a real American as opposed to those “out of touch east coast elites”, you sound just as condenscending, small minded and smug as they come. Yeah, it’s all the culture’s fault, How do you plan on changing the culture? You just threw the usual populist conservative tropes out there without offering one concrete suggestion or approach besides “You should get down in the trenches like I (almost am).” Do you seriously think promoting backwards rural Mexican cultural identity is one that is going to help the nation as a whole or even them in the long run?
CO Independent // Dec 14, 2009 at 11:42 am
Jakester,
I think you are misconstruing my post. The point of the post, which was clearly articulated multiple times, is that the sexual promiscuity identified in the article is not inherent in Hispanic culture. It IS inherent in American culture, at least in lower socioeconomic spheres. Further, at no point does the post advocate “promoting backwards rural Mexican cultural identity” as you suggest.
As to concrete, conservative ideas regarding how to reform American culture to reduce teenage promiscuity in the Hispanic community, how about the following for starters:
1. A concerted media campaign to inform teenagers of the downsides of sexual promiscuity.
2. A significant reduction in welfare benefits available to unwed mothers.
3. A concerted media campaign directed to Hispanic boys and men about fatherhood
4. A concerted effort to enforce age of consent and statutory rape laws in the Hispanic community.
None of these options will be tried because they are not in the interest of our welfare state organizations, which require a continued cycle of poverty and dysfunction to guarantee their workflow.
sinz54 // Dec 14, 2009 at 12:10 pm
ottovbs: a majority of the original scientific discoveries that underpin the entire body of modern medicine from evolution and anti biotics to mapping the human genome were made in the UK
No.
If you want to go back to the origins of modern medicine, they would be in France (Pasteur’s work on bacteriology and the germ theory of disease) and in Germany (Ehrlich’s first antibiotic for syphilis). Ehrlich coined the term “chemotherapy” for the idea of curing disease with artificial chemicals.
But in the 20th century, the leader in medicine was unquestionably going to be the United States. And the world knows it. When someone anywhere in the world is desperately ill but has the wealth to pay for the best treatment, they come to the U.S. That’s why Massachusetts General Hospital (where I’m getting my kidney transplant) offers an International Patient Center with interpreters for just about any foreign language:
http://www2.massgeneral.org/interpreters/