While I am sure that many Hispanic voters are concerned that their illegal family and friends may be deported, and might therefore wish for a general amnesty, I’d bet against the potential ability of a pro-amnesty GOP to persuade Hispanic voters to vote for the small government party any time soon. The salient variable, in my perhaps monomaniacal view, is that the current out of wedlock childbearing rate among Hispanic women in the U.S. is 52.5% That is well past the tipping point in a culture.
For three decades I have listened to Republicans tout the social conservatism of Hispanics, with increasing dismay at the obvious wishful thinking involved. Yeah, sure, on balance they may believe in tight families, and hold Roman Catholic views on marriage, abortion and taking care of granny. But in the real world, behavior is what you want to look at. When you have a 52% out of wedlock childbearing rate, you can bet that subsidized contraception, and abortion on demand are important to the targeted population. This is why the astonishingly crude Sandra Fluking of the Democratic party was so successful. More dangerously, in a country where single motherhood is a ticket to poverty, or a very hard row to hoe at the least, we should expect most of those non-wealthy single mothers to vote for the party associated with greater welfare benefits. Hispanic parents and boyfriends also have great financial incentives to support the party of the more generous welfare state, to offset costs to themselves.
It is genuinely hard to raise a child alone while working, and financially impossible to do so while not working — but for the myriad income supports ranging from food stamps, to summer programs, cash benefits, housing subsidies, etc,. Since the current administration has entirely succeeded in de-stigmatizing the benefits (which are not entitlements per se) formerly known as “welfare,” they are a legitimate, explicit voting rationale.
Finally, now that ‘Obamacare’ is the ‘law of the land,’ please consider just how genuinely irrational it would be for any non-wealthy single mother to vote for a party which threatens to undermine it. The percentage of never married single mothers who can afford decent private medical insurance for their children, or who have jobs which provide it, is low and getting lower. This is a problem across ethnic groups in a society where the current out of wedlock birth rate is 40%. Among black women (72.3%) it is a lost cause. Among white women it is currently 28%; and the GOP no longer counts on the votes of a majority of white women.
Non-citizens are still not eligible for welfare benefits. A general amnesty gives us more And we seem to have lost the ability to distinguish between immigrants who will be self-sufficient, and those who will be net tax consumers (welfare dependents) from day one, it is unclear how a general amnesty helps the GOP amass more