Saturday, May 21, 2016

Silver Lining: Trump Nomination Leads to Huge Increases in Hispanic Naturalization and Voter Registration


The rate at which Hispanic immigrants are becoming naturalized citizens has picked up dramatically this year, doubling rates seen even last year.

And the rate of Hispanic registration to vote, both among recent and long-time citizens, is also way up, tripling in some places.

All of which is an unexpected benefit of Donald Trump's likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president.

There is almost always a silver lining, even in dark events.

1 comment:

Mac said...

Agreed, so long as they truly want to and actually do become Americans, honoring and living their oaths to renounce loyalty to their foreign countries of origin, adhering to the United States only, learning our National language, abandoning any flag other than the American flag, and becoming Americans in deed as well as in word.

The problem is that the change in which you rejoice is, for many of the people you champion, a fraud. They do not want to become Americans, they want to be hyphenated Americans, with divided loyalties, often cherishing the place which they abandoned rather than over the place to which they came. They demand special privileges: the right to force the American people to accept the language of their country of origin as acceptable in government and business and society. (Try that in France. Or Guatemala!) They fly foreign flags as an expression of their loyalty to foreign powers instead of the United States. They want to elect representatives who will turn their backs on this Nation and treat foreign nations and foreign goals as morally equivalent to the national interests of the American people.

And because they are frauds, many, many American people have found in Mr. Trump a representative of their concerns.

As Theodore Roosevelt wrote on 3 January 1919:
“Our principle … ought to be absolutely simple. In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed or birthplace or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile. We have room for but one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one sole loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people.”

(A copy of this letter can be obtained from the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.)