Court Asian and Eastern European immigrants, not Latinos

I invite you to consider the following image: a fat, white good ole boy (a real Pappy O'Daniel type), putting his arm around the shoulder of a young Latino and saying: "Hey there, Pancho, why don't you consider voting for the Republican candidate." Doesn't work does it.

Ever since the days of Cesar Chavez and Bobby Kennedy, Latinos have been the natural constituents of the Democratic Party. Given this situation, if a general amnesty were granted to all Latino illegal aliens currently in the US and they all became US citizens, this would simply create more votes for the Democratic Party. Why, for heaven's sake, would Republicans ever want to bring this about?

Now consider the characteristics of the Latinos for whom this amnesty is being proposed: they are, for the most part, very hard working, but poorly educated and with little earning power. They are often gardeners, housekeepers, unskilled construction workers (drive by Home Depot any morning), restaurant busboys, or women providing in-home care for elderly family members. They are often paid in cash, and therefore do not pay payroll or income taxes. A recent article published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis characterizes this population and their disproportionate need for public assistance (in this case, for food stamps) as follows:

The Hispanic population is growing rapidly in the U.S. generally and in the southern states particularly. This rapidly growing population is characterized by high poverty rates among children and the elderly compared to other races. The Hispanic population is also less educated, characterized by low income, lacks English language proficiency, and has a need for public assistance. Hispanic total and household participation in the FSP [Food Stamp Program] increased rapidly, especially in metro counties. The increase in participation is about three times that of the total population. Participation of Hispanic children in the program was also much higher than for adults. The growing Hispanic population with special needs and requirements and rising participation in the FSP will pose new challenges to food assistance administration to serve this group.

Finally, consider the question of whether a general amnesty would even staunch the flow of Latino illegal immigration. Would not a general amnesty rather simply encourage even more illegal immigrants to come north? The message an amnesty would send would be: Just make it to the US and survive long enough; eventually, you, too, will be granted citizenship. Thus, illegal immigration might actually increase after a general amnesty. Of the amnesty legislation for illegal immigrants of 1986, the NYT writes:

President Ronald Reagan signed that bill into law with great fanfare amid promises that it would grant legal status to illegal immigrants, crack down on employers who hired illegal workers and secure the border once and for all. Instead, fraudulent applications tainted the process, many employers continued their illicit hiring practices, and illegal immigration surged.

So, even if the Republican Party could win additional Latino votes by agreeing to a general amnesty (which, obviously, it cannot), it is not at all clear that an amnesty would be beneficial to society as a whole. It is questionable whether the contribution of a wave of poorly educated, low-income Latino citizens to society would be greater than their burden on it. What's more, it's not at all clear that a general amnesty would even put a halt to Latino illegal immigration.

Instead of courting the Hispanic vote with the promise of a general amnesty, then, I recommend that the Republican Party take a different approach (at least here in Silicon Valley): encourage more legal immigration from Asia and Eastern Europe (from India, China, and Russia, for example) and court these new immigrants as potential Republican voters. For simplicity, I will refer to this group of potential US citizens as non-Latino immigrants.

If the US applied the correct filters, non-Latino immigration would result in an enormous new influx of ambitious, high-tech workers into California. Everywhere you look in Silicon Valley, you see non-Latino immigrants already helping to build the high-tech economy. The education level, technical and engineering skills, and earning power of this population is significantly higher than what is found in the Latino population. Since these immigrants work in high-tech companies with well-defined HR procedures, they are not paid in cash under the table, like many Latino workers are, and therefore actually pay taxes. My guess is that they also make much less use of social services than the Latino population does. As a group, they generally place a very high value on education, so that the school districts where non-Latino immigrant families preponderate often have outstanding public schools, with little gang activity (think of the Mission attendance area in Fremont, where property values are sky high because of the schools). All the software companies I have ever worked for in Silicon Valley have always drawn and continue to draw extensively on this pool of non-Latino immigrants. In fact, these immigrants often form the backbone of software development teams (as they do in the software company I work in) throughout the Valley.

In my opinion, non-Latino immigrants are natural constituents of the Republican Party. My experience is that they have conservative family values. They believe that one should get ahead through hard work, not government handouts. They understand the financial mess the US finds itself in and find it repugnant. Their value system is decidedly entrepreneurial and meritocratic. Statements like President Obama's "You didn't build that" are counterintuitive to them. Try telling the Indian and Chinese high-tech entrepreneurs of software companies like Tibco and Informatica that they didn't build those companies.

In sum, the Republican Party should forget about pandering to Latinos and blacks and instead promote real, global diversity by advocating for more non-Latino, non-black immigration into Northern California. Once these new immigrants from Asia and Europe are absorbed into the American melting pot, they will be far more likely to support the many strands of conservative thought that find their natural home in the Republican Party.