What the Surging Hispanic Population Portends

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One of the ironies that strikes me when I hear white - usually Christofascist - rant about Hispanics not being "real Americans" is the idiocy of those attacking Hispanics.  If anyone is not a "true American" it is the white conservative bigots many of whom come from families that have been in the Americas for a fraction of the time period that Hispanics have been in the Americas - especially Hispanics with significant Native American ancestry be it Mayan, Aztec, or other groups that were in the Americas for thousands of years before the coming of European explorers and adventurers.  A piece in The Economist looks at (i) the reality of who are "real Americans," (ii) how the surging Hispanic population in the United States will change America, and (iii) how wrongheaded GOP policies are harming America's future prospects.  Here are highlights:

IN THREE TERMS representing Colorado in Congress, John Salazar got used to angry voters calling him a Mexican and not a proper American. During fights over the Obamacare health-insurance law, a constituent told him to “go back where you came from”. The attacks were misplaced. Mr Salazar is proud of his Hispanic heritage, but he comes from a place with deeper American roots than the United States. One of his ancestors, Juan de Oñate y Salazar, co-founded the city of Santa Fe in New Mexico. That was in 1598, some 250 years before it became American territory (and the best part of a decade before English merchant-adventurers splashed ashore at Jamestown, Virginia). A laconic man in denims and cowboy hat, Mr Salazar is a fifth-generation Colorado rancher, farming the same corner of the San Luis valley that his great-grandfather settled 150 years ago, just when Mexico ceded the territory to America. As families like the Salazars put it, they never crossed the border, the border crossed them.

But their high desert valley is home to many Spanish-speaking newcomers too. A demographic revolution is under way. In 1953, when Mr Salazar was born, America’s Hispanic population numbered perhaps 3m. It surged after changes in immigration law under President Lyndon Johnson, nearing 9m by 1970. Today it stands at 57m, out of around 321m Americans, and is on course to double by mid-century, when it is projected to be 106m out of 398m. In the past two decades Hispanic migrants have spread from a few states and cities to places that had not seen big foreign inflows since the days of steam trains and telegraphs. The biggest group, with 34m, is Mexican-Americans.

Hispanics are transforming the definition of what it means to be a mainstream American. During the roughly 200 years from the presidency of George Washington to that of Ronald Reagan, whites of European descent consistently made up 80-90% of America’s population. By the time of the 2010 census, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites (for simplicity’s sake called whites hereafter) was down to 64%. Some time around 2044 it is projected to fall to less than half.

[I]t is white decline that makes today’s demographic revolution so remarkable. America has twice before witnessed European migration waves that were proportionately even larger when measured against the population at the time: once in the 19th century and again at the start of the 20th century. Those new Americans came to be seen as respectable, over time, as they assimilated towards a majority culture rooted in what were explicitly called Anglo-Protestant ideals: self-reliance, rugged individualism, thrift and hard work. Yet now that white majority is on course to become a minority.

Every year around 900,000 Hispanics born in America reach voting age. Neither party should imagine it will own their votes in perpetuity, but Republicans have the most work to do. In the 2012 presidential election Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, got nine in ten of his votes from whites, whereas Mr Obama won eight in ten of the votes cast by minorities. If the Republicans want to catch up, party hardliners will have to stop taking extreme positions on immigration. Hispanics are unlikely to listen to messages about jobs or health care from candidates who are also proposing to deport their mothers.

Business is waking up to the rise of Hispanics.  . . . . if Hispanic-Americans were a country they would rank 16th in the world. A giant reason to be optimistic about the rise of Hispanics is that they are making America much younger. The median age of whites is 42; of blacks 32; and of Hispanics 28. Among American-born Hispanics, the median age is a stunning 18. As other parts of the rich world face a future of aging, shrinking populations, Hispanics are keeping American schoolyards full of children and replenishing the supply of future workers. 

Take away Hispanics and other fast-growing minorities, and America’s numbers look like those for Italy, a country full of pensioners with a shrinking labour force. As things stand, however, America’s working-age population is expected to grow at a healthy clip.

Many more Hispanics are enrolling in college—and still more would seek degrees if conservative politicians looked to the long term and changed state laws that make the children of unlawful migrants pay much more than their American classmates for a public college education. When one in four children in public schools is Hispanic, economic self-interest alone should prod states to get them ready for the 21st century.

This report will show how some Republicans in Tennessee, a conservative state, are debating pragmatic changes. Alas, in other states, Tea Party zealots are leading a charge in the wrong direction. Texas used to stand out among conservative states for a businesslike approach to immigration. But in 2014 a dismaying number of Texas Republicans ran for election vowing to repeal a far-sighted 2001 law granting subsidised college tuition fees to students resident in the state, regardless of their legal status.

Nativist panic-mongering about a Hispanic “invasion” has helped to skew public perceptions. Many Americans vastly overestimate the incidence of illegal immigration. A survey in 2012 by Latino Decisions, a pollster, asked non-Hispanics to guess the percentage of undocumented Spanish-speaking immigrants. The average guess was one in three. The real figure is one in six. And fresh immigration as a cause of Hispanic population growth was overtaken in 2000 by Hispanic births in America. Of the 17m Hispanic children in the country, some 93% are native-born citizens.

Calm logic should prod older Americans to welcome well-educated young taxpayers of any colour. But in politics culture matters just as much as logic. Even different generations of Hispanics can clash, as John Salazar has witnessed in Colorado. During an attempt to pass a comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, he was berated by Mexican-American constituents whose families had been in his valley “for ever”. They asked him why he was trying to help the mojados (wetbacks)—a pejorative for Mexicans supposed to have swum across the Rio Grande.