Press Still Outraged Whites Can Vote Against Immigration
08/13/2014
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The Washington Post kvetches,
Writing in the Brookings Institution's FixGov blog last week, political scientist Christopher Parker pondered House Republicans' stubborn refusal to back immigration reform, despite support in the Senate and across wide swaths of the conservative commentariat. He surmises that House Republicans are balking because they "represent constituencies haunted by anxiety associated with the perception that they’re 'losing their country' to immigrants from south of the border."

Recent polling backs this up. Significant numbers of conservatives, and white Americans in general, admit to feeling discomfort at the prospect of a non-majority white America. These views are even stronger among Tea Party-aligned conservatives. According to Parker's polling, nearly two-thirds of Tea Party conservatives want to eliminate birthright citizenship, and 82 percent of Tea Partiers say they feel "anxious or fearful" about undocumented immigrants.

Another factor behind Republican recalcitrance on immigration and similar issues is the simple racial math underlying many House congressional districts. According to U.S. Census data, only 13 out of 234 Republican-held districts are majority-minority (that is, districts where white non-Hispanics make up less than 50 percent of the population). That's about 5 percent of all Republican districts. In contrast, fully 49 percent of Democrat-held districts are majority-minority.

[95% of Republican House districts are majority-white, by Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post, August 12, 2014]

Three points.
  • Whites are right to fear they are losing their country (without scare quotes.)  More importantly, there's no evidence to suggest that America is embracing the "post-racial" future that many hoped for with the election of Barack Obama.  Instead, as Lee Kwan Yew put it, "In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion."
  • Blacks and Hispanics get their own districts designed specifically to increase minority representation.  Of course, the price of this is that it weakens overall Democratic representation in the House.  If these districts were broken up, you might get more Democrats, but you also might get more moderate white Democrats.  The result is both white Republicans and minority Democrats benefit from the way things are.
  • Christopher Ingraham, naturally, is one those who piled on to Mo Brooks after he called out the War on Whites.
Just think how mad reporters will be once they figure out that 100% of those who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were white.  They'll be even more upset once they learn people used to refer to these evil whites as simply "Americans."

 

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