Let me start by reminding you that Drudge, like his talk radio fellow travelers, is a fear monger who maintains his white, angry, scared audience by telling them that the gays, the browns, the blacks, the atheists, the Muslims, and the feminists are quickly securing the country and will soon be coming for them. But it's all garbage. So what about his headline: “Hispanics to be majority within 25 years”? is Drudge right? Well, no. If you followed the link on this headline, you would not have found an article discussing demographic trends. You would not have found an article from the Census or some new study. What you would have found is an article about a GOP candidate who claims that Hispanics will be the majority ethnicity in Texas in 25 years. In making that claim, he cites to a Gallop poll, which doesn’t say anything of the sort. It says instead that Hispanics favor Democrats. That's it.
So you tell me: was Drudge's use of the headline fair? Well get to the other one in a moment.
The idea of an Hispanic takeover of the US has been popular among racially-conscious talk radio and their opposite numbers in the Democratic Party for some time. The problem is that reality doesn’t cooperate with their thinking. Here’s the problem. They have taken a couple data points at their most extreme and then extrapolated that as a permanent thing. It’s like realizing that I gave you a dollar at noon, two dollars an hour later and four dollars an hour after that and then extrapolating that to tell the world that I will be giving you $256 in ten hours and millions by morning. Good luck with that.
What has happened is this. Hispanics have been the fastest growing group in the US because of two factors: immigration combined with a higher birth rate than everyone else. Taking this higher growth percentage than everyone else and projecting it into the future unchanged eventually leads to Hispanics becoming the majority.
But that’s not how humanity works. It also ignores the inputs, as I’ve written about before. Indeed, I’ve mentioned twice that the first big problem with this is that the majority of the growth rate for Hispanics has been immigration from Mexico, and that is coming to an end. Mexico’s economy is recovering and their birthrate has plunged well below ours. The end result is that there just aren’t enough Mexicans to go around anymore and they are choosing to stay home rather than come here. Because of this, Mexican immigration peaked in the 1990s and has been falling since. The last several years have actually shown a net ZERO in terms of Hispanic immigration. In other words, for every Mexican who came here, one left... yet Drudge says “Illegals pour into US!”
The result of this is that the same doomsday demographers who were sure we would become the Unidos Estados are now putting off that day. But never fear, they say, it’s still coming because those dirty browns breed like cockroaches!!
Only, they aren’t doing that in Mexico anymore. In fact, the birthrate in Mexico crashed from 6.7 in 1970 to 2.2 in 2012 and is approaching the same level as white European or even northern-Asian levels. Similar declines are taking place in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador – the biggest contributors to Hispanic immigration to the US.
What’s more, the Hispanic birthrate in the US has been plunging. In the 1990s, when Mexican immigrants first began to arrive in record numbers, the Hispanic birthrate in the US was about 3.0. At the same time, the black birth rate was 2.1 and the white birthrate ranged from 1.7 to 1.9 depending on the year. But these numbers don’t remain constant. By 2008, the Hispanic birthrate had fallen to 2.7. Then in 2008, something dramatic began. The Hispanic birthrate began to crash. By 2012, it fell to 2.19... just above the replacement rate of 2.1. Birth rates for Hispanics stayed the same in 2013, while whites and blacks both showed a slight increase, while Asian births fell by 2%.
In other words, these el cucarachas that were going to breed us out of existence suddenly were only turning out just enough kids to keep their population level. Moreover, Hispanic immigration had gone to net zero. That means no growth.
Hispanics are currently about 15% of the population. Based on everything we know, they are likely to top out at 17% of the population. And as we’ve pointed out before, they tend to meld into the white population fairly easily.
So much for Democratic dreams and talk radio fears.
16 comments:
Well researched and delivered! This also puts to rest the majority-minority dreams the Democrats have--as if their rainbow coalition wouldn't fracture once whitey got put in his place. In fact, I'd venture that a fair number have woken up to this reality as the number of "white males are dangerous" articles is on the rise. That's the closest thing to an admission we'll see.
As I've noted before, Hispanic isn't a race and it is a mistake to view them as either a single race of a single culture.
They tend to use the term 'white' more liberally than we do (ran across a lot of people in Latin America who classified themselves as white though to American eyes they looked Hispanic) and those who consider themselves white tend to marry whites (the whiter the better).
Dark skin is associated with the indigenous (think Native Americans) who are looked down. Blacks are probably lower on the scale but at least in the circles I worked in they were functionally outside it (I can count on the thumbs of one hand the number of native blacks I ran into among the local elite).
Both blacks and the indigenous tend to classify themselves as mixed and there are a lot of interracial relationships so that is probably true to an extent (I am roughly the shade of Wesley Snipes but two sets of my great-grandparents are white). Its worth keeping in mind that in America our now informal 1/16th rule tends to make things less complex than they are.
And of course they have the standard national fault lines. Given how different the cultures of Guatemala and Colombia are I'd be deeply shocked if their nationals had the exact same political preferences. Of course, pollsters tend to lump everyone that isn't Cuban together so its just a pet theory I have no way of proving.
Anyway, great analysis of the population growth rate. I completely agree.
tryanmax, Thanks! Amazingly, all this information is out there and very easy to find, but apparently neither side wants to see it.
I've noticed that too. There are an amazing number of "white males are dangerous" articles suddenly. It's definitely become a talking point on the left. It's a stupid one. It's a desperate one. It's most likely to backfire. But I guess they need something because their demographic dreams aren't happening.
Thanks Anthony!
I find it fascinating that all this information is out there to be found (and so obvious) and yet so many on the left and the right intentionally ignore it so they can sell this idea of "the end of America." I think that's really telling of their mindsets.
Nice additions to the debate, by the way. It is just as ridiculous to assume that all Hispanics are identical. I've dealt with a number of Brazilians, Argentinians and Mexicans over the years and I agree completely with your take on things. Most of the ones I've met consider themselves "white" and even draw their ancestry back to Europe, and they are often not kind about the indigenous people. They fit in well in the US, they hold professional jobs here, and no one thinks about them when they talk about deporting people. Yet, they would be included in these numbers that are being tossed around to freak people out.
Another group has been here long enough that, like any other group of children of immigrants, they have all but completely been Americanized. Yet, they are included in these numbers too. Again, that's silly.
Unfortunately, as long as our side stays in freak out mode, the Democrats will have an advantage in winning Hispanics at the voting booth. And even though 17% is small, it's still significant, especially when combined with women, blacks, Asians, Muslims, the young, etc.
These moral panics dont' help the conservative side one bit. And yes, the "freak out mode" stuff not only helps democrats win Hispanics but also whites who identify themselves as the moral guardians of diversity and left of centre issues. You know, the people who are outraged on behalf of minorities all the time.
AM, True. And those people are truly annoying. They are finding offense where none has been taken just to keep people upset and looking for offense. They are what drives the PC machine and keeps it oiled... they are about spreading division. Moreover, they've anointed themselves the arbiters of right and wrong and that is not something we can allow.
On not helping our side one bit, that's exactly the problem. For one thing, it plays into the idea that our side hates these people, which makes it easy for the left to keep them from voting for us. But even to a lessor degree, you have the problem that when you make complaints that are overly broad and unreasonable, no one listens when you make legitimate complaints. And there are many legitimate complaints here:
1. Countries need to be able to control their borders.
2. We need to weed out the criminals and send them back.
3. The "all or nothing" approach keeps getting us nothing, even when both sides agree on many things that could be done to fix parts of the system at least.
4. We should prevent immigrants from being illegible for benefits for some lengthy period of time.
Unfortunately, we can't get any of this done because of all the screaming.
How do I know you're on the nose with this, AP? Same as I do when you tweak the left. Posted this in the (allegedly) apolitical Rage Against the Media Facebook group, and the only retort so far has been, "BS."
In short: Great job! (as usual)
Thanks Eric! I'm not surprised. Some people just don't want to believe the truth on this.
All of this information is actually pretty easy to find from any number of sources. Unfortunately, people like Drudge or the MSM don't highlight it because it undermines the "end of America" trip they are selling, and both left and right have an incentive keeping people believing this even though it's demonstrably not true. So they put on their blinders and refuse to accept the truth.
Very good points. I try to explain macro-demographics to folks every once in a while,,but they aren't listening.
Thanks Critch!
I find it really frustrating because this mistake comes up over and over and over in so many contexts, and people never get it. Someone finds two data points and draws a straight line between them and then projects that out into the future. Soon everyone either has stars in their eyes or they're freaking out -- demographics, pollution, warming/cooling trends, economic growth, disease spreading, speed of technology, etc. But the universe doesn't work that way, and demographics certainly don't. Demographic trends in particular burn out fast because of demographic changes bring behavioral changes -- that's why world population growth is screeching to a halt when 20 years ago people thought there would be hundreds of billions of us by 2050.
But as you note, people don't want to listen. They like projecting this stuff out into the future and then freaking out over it.
Speaking of straight line graphs. When I was a stockbroker in the early 80s the State of Washington floated billions of dollars of municipal bonds to build something like 10 power plants...guess what, the population did not grow anywhere near as fast as they hoped for..I think they only built 3 plants. The bonds were floated by the Washington Public Power Systems (WPPS), they became known as Whoops, and were the first large muni bonds to default. Straight line graphs are a trap.
"Whoops!" LOL! Nice! :D
Sadly, this straight line thinking seems to be the most common mistake humans make, and they keep making it over and over. Even people who should know better, like people trained in finance, will make this obvious mistake.
For some reason, even though algebra and accounting drove me nuts in college, I loved statistics....crunching those numbers was satisfying and prepared me for commodities trading.
Statistics seems to be the hardest form of math for most people to grasp. I don't know if they just don't teach it clearly or if there is something within it that runs contrary to common sense, but as soon as you find yourself talking statistics, you can expect that few people will have a clue what you're talking about.
I've never tried commodity trading. I do play with options, but that's about it... play being the operative word.
Eric Cantor lost his Virginia primary...he's out. WTF???
Bev, I saw that. I'm writing about it right now for tonight.
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