Frank X. Moraga
By Frank X. Moraga / Amigos805
It has been a very strange time since the Nov. 6 elections. All of a sudden, many of the die-hard NO DREAM Act, NO Comprehensive Immigration Reform, NO Amnesty folks in D.C. are singing a different canción.
Huff Post Latino Politics reports that House Speaker John Boehner now believes that an immigration overhaul can happen, with U.S. Sen Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) now working with U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on a bipartisan bill.
Even Fox News host Sean Hannity has dropped his “scathing criticism of amnesty, and is now telling his fans he supports reform,” Huff Post Latino Politics reported.
Hannity told his listeners that he has “evolved” on immigration policy and now supports a “pathway to citizenship,” according to quotes posted on thinkprogress.org.
That collective thump you heard recently was Latinos and other supporters of immigration reform falling off their chairs in disbelief.
Amazing how people react when all the election numbers come in and they find that yes, indeed, America is becoming more diverse, more multicultural and that it’s time to address the challenge of immigration reform in a more adult way.
A new report by the Pew Hispanic Center only drives home the point.
In the report “An Awakened Giant: The Hispanic Electorate is Likely to Double by 2030,” the record number of Latinos who cast ballots for president this year are the leading edge of an ascendant ethnic voting bloc that is likely to double in size within a generation, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis based on U.S. Census Bureau data, Election Day exit polls and a new nationwide survey of Hispanic immigrants.
The nation’s 53 million Hispanics comprise 17% of the total U.S. population but just 10% of all voters this year, according to the national exit poll. To borrow a boxing metaphor, they still “punch below their weight.”
However, their share of the electorate will rise quickly for several reasons, the center reported. The most important is that Hispanics are by far the nation’s youngest ethnic group. Their median age is 27 years—and just 18 years among native-born Hispanics—compared with 42 years for that of white non-Hispanics. In the coming decades, their share of the age-eligible electorate will rise markedly through generational replacement alone.
This report was written by Director Paul Taylor, Research Associate Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Senior Demographer Jeffrey S. Passel and Associate Director Mark Hugo Lopez. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera took the lead in developing the survey questionnaire’s naturalization section.
The Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center, is a nonpartisan, non-advocacy research organization based in Washington, D.C. and is Funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
According to Pew Hispanic Center projections, Hispanics will account for 40% of the growth in the eligible electorate in the U.S. between now and 2030, at which time 40 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote, up from 23.7 million now.
Moreover, if Hispanics’ relatively low voter participation rates and naturalization rates were to increase to the levels of other groups, the number of votes that Hispanics actually cast in future elections could double within two decades.
If the national exit poll’s estimate proves correct that 10% of all voters this year were Hispanic, it would mean that as many as 12.5 million Hispanics cast ballots. But perhaps a more illuminating way to analyze the distinctive characteristics of the Hispanic electorate—current and future—is to parse the more than 40 million Hispanics in the United States who did not vote or were not eligible to vote in 2012. That universe can be broken down as follows:
- 11.2 million are adults who were eligible to vote but chose not to. The estimated 44% to 53% turnout rate of eligible Hispanic voters in 2012 is in the same range as the 50% who turned out in 2008. But it still likely lags well below the turnout rate of whites and blacks this year.
- 5.4 million are adult legal permanent residents (LPRs) who could not vote because they have not yet become naturalized U.S. citizens. The naturalization rate among legal immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean trails that of other legal immigrants by a sizable margin—49% versus 72%, according to a Pew Hispanic analysis of the 2011 March Current Population Survey (CPS). The new Pew Hispanic survey finds that a major reason Hispanic immigrants naturalize is to gain civil and legal rights, including the right to vote. The flexing of electoral muscle by Hispanic voters this year conceivably could encourage more legal immigrants to become naturalized citizens.
- 7.1 million are adult unauthorized immigrants and would become eligible to vote only if Congress were to pass a law creating a pathway to citizenship for them. Judging by the immediate post-election comments of leading Democratic and Republican lawmakers, the long-dormant prospects for passage of such legislation appear to have been revived by Latinos’ strong showing at the polls.
- 17.6 million are under the age of 18 and thus too young to vote—for now. That vast majority (93%) of Latino youths are U.S-born citizens and thus will automatically become eligible to vote once they turn 18. Today, some 800,000 Latinos turn 18 each year; by 2030, this number could grow to 1 million per year, adding a potential electorate of more than 16 million new Latino voters to the rolls by 2030.
Generational replacement alone will push the age- and citizen-eligible Latino electorate to about 40 million within two decades. If the turnout rate of this electorate over time converges with that of whites and blacks in recent elections (66% and 65%, respectively, in 2008), that would mean twice as many Latino voters could be casting ballots in 2032 as did in 2012.
As a result, serious leaders in the Republican Party are seeing the handwriting on the wall, realizing that appealing to a small minority base of anti immigration reform activists will not win them any elections in the next few years. With even Texas expected to become a blue state in the next few years because of changing demographics, the time has come for some reality to set in.
Let’s hope that this will lead to a more mature dialog so we can resolve immigration reform once and for all and then move on to other equally important issues facing the nation.
— Frank X. Moraga is editor/publisher of Amigos805. He has served as business editor, director of diversity and general manager of a bilingual publication at the Ventura County Star, and as a reporter in the community editions of the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Daily News.