HispanicTrending

October 30, 2014
By John Johnson

This is one of the more tangible signs of the growing importance of the Hispanic vote in American politics: Two congressional candidates in Colorado will have a Spanish-only debate tonight, believed to be the nation's first, reports NBC News. No translators will be allowed as Republican incumbent Mike Coffman tries to fend off Democratic challenger Andrew Romanoff in the 6th District.

Neither is of Hispanic descent, but Romanoff speaks fluent Spanish after teaching in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Coffman has been playing catch-up ever since redistricting added more Hispanics into his district. He works with a tutor and watches Spanish-language news, and the Denver Post notes that he also has softened his immigration stance. He now supports a path toward legal status, but not full citizenship.

Source: Newser

October 31, 2014
By Jay Cost

Since Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, immigration reform has been at the top of the national agenda. Of course, very little has come of it—apart from some legally dubious executive actions, as well as a lot of blather from pundits, left and right, who seem to have no understanding of the Hispanic community. All we ever get are variations on the same theme: Unless they accept a terrible immigration bill, loaded up with payoffs to special interests, conservatives will be doomed to a permanent minority status. Meanwhile, conservatives are too often caught flat-footed. Apart from a handful of opponents, such as Senator Jeff Sessions, who has brilliantly recast the debate along class, rather than racial, terms, they have very little of value to offer.

But this intellectual drought is finally at an end, thanks to Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. A Race For the Future is a smart, informed take on what the right should do for, and with, Hispanic voters.

This is a book full of provocations, but the most daring move by Gonzalez is to ignore altogether the debate on immigration reform. He views it as “a proxy war for feelings and attitudes that lie beneath the surface and that are linked to an evident lack of mobility among many Hispanics.” The immigration debate between left and right is a fight over whether America should add another massive lump of unassimilated immigrants into the national mix. Conservatives—largely the white, married middle class whose descendants assimilated generations ago—oppose this. Business interests, racial polarizers, and Democratic pols—who are interested in cheap labor and/or votes—simply do not care about assimilation. In fact, many oppose it, some even outright.

Gonzalez wants to transcend this debate altogether, to render it moot by way of a policy that assimilates Hispanic Americans into the great American nation. He casts a gaze across history and sees how the Scots-Irish, Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews all went from being separate from the mainstream to being inextricably a part of it. And then he asks: Why not Hispanics? His book is about adapting public policy to make this happen for America’s newest arrivals.

This is no small task. In Gonzalez’s telling, the surge of Hispanic immigration began right around the time that the institutions immigrants would need to succeed began to crumble. Just as Hispanics started arriving en masse, the sexual revolution and the Great Society displaced the preeminence of the traditional, two-parent family. This has hurt demographic groups across the board, but it leaves new arrivals particularly vulnerable, because they do not have shared memories of the way things used to be.

Hispanics, moreover, began arriving in large numbers around the time that the civil rights movement was reaching its zenith, inducing a profound shift in government policy. Looking to protect as many minorities as possible, the Johnson administration went so far as to create a term out of whole cloth, “Hispanic” (which Gonzalez grudgingly uses for lack of a better word), to catch a wide variety of peoples—from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, etc.—who often have no real connection to one another. In this way, the federal government impeded the process of assimilation by treating them as a disadvantaged minority, like African Americans, when in fact they were simply new immigrants, as the Irish and Italians once were.

Finally, the traditional role of public schools as the transmitter of shared social values began to degrade: “Gone are the texts,” says Gonzalez, “that once taught all Americans, native or immigrant, how to be an upstanding citizen with the civic knowledge needed to help the republic survive.” White natives can more easily suffer this shift because cultural and social norms are still embedded in their families. But what of Hispanics? They are new to the country, and much more dependent on the school system to learn what it means to be American. In this way, our educational establishment has utterly failed them.

Sitting in the background is the idea that, in important respects, Hispanics have had it worse than previous immigrant groups. The first couple of generations of Irish and Italians certainly faced more hardship and isolation when they arrived, but during this period, they were laying the groundwork for future success. Hispanics came during an era of relative material comfort in America and have been protected by a seemingly beneficent federal government. Those protections, however, have inhibited the development of the social capital necessary to rise into the middle class.

This points to Gonzalez’s mandate for the conservative movement. All too often, he writes, conservatives “have failed to pull up the welcome wagon” for Hispanic immigrants, yielding a monopoly on their political support to the progressive left. The right must respond to this by helping Hispanics develop the capital (financial, human, and social) to rise to the middle class. For Gonzalez, that means encouraging savings and business development, promoting stable families, and, of course, education.

This is an enormously important book. For too long, conservatives have had the terms of the immigration debate dictated to them: Provide an amnesty that lowers wages, raises unemployment, and welcomes more immigrants who need assimilation—or lose the Hispanic vote forever. This is a policy choice that has been set up by the left, on the left’s terms, and for the left’s benefit. It is a debate that conservatives can never win.

The only alternative is to change the terms of the debate. To do that, conservatives need to have a firm grasp of the Hispanic condition and offer serious proposals on how to improve it. Mike Gonzalez offers both.

Source: The Weekly Standard

October 30, 2014
By Francisco Alvarado

Fueled by the growth of Latino voters across the United States, small, minority-owned public opinion firms are in high demand this election season.

Candidates, political organizations and media companies are relying more and more on companies like Latino Decisions in Seattle, Washington, and Bendixen & Amandi in Miami, Florida, to track Latino voting trends and behavior.

“We’re getting new inquiries every day from groups trying to understand what Latinos are thinking,” said Latino Decisions co-founder Matt Barreto. “Across the board, candidates realize they need to engage Latinos in a more authentic way.”

In 2007, Barreto and his business partner, Gary Segura, founded Latino Decisions because they believed established national polling firms were not producing accurate information about Latino voters and the issues most important to them.

“We have dedicated a good amount of our adult lives studying the Latino perspective in a scientific way,” Segura said. “We have been doing research since the 1990s. The data we use is drawn from the entire United States.”

The firm started gaining traction in 2009, when Latino Decisions began a weekly tracking poll of Latino voters in the run-up to the 2010 mid-term election. Back then, Barreto and Segura only had one other analyst keeping tabs on Latino voting predictions. Their work eventually got picked up by mainstream media outlets. By 2012, Latino Decisions had carved its niche in the polling industry and now has seven analysts sifting through data.

The firm gained credibility with mentions in Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight blog when it was being published by the New York Times.

Silver noted Latino Decisions’ practice of using bilingual interviewers to talk to Latino voters provided the firm with more accurate answers about projected Latino voting patterns that favored President Barack Obama. “Polling firms such as Latino Decisions that have conducted interviews in Spanish have shown Mr. Obama with a larger advantage among Hispanic voters than those which interview in English only,” Silver wrote.

Bendixen & Amandi, whose Peruvian-born principal Sergio Bendixen has been analyzing Latino voter trends since the 1980s, also uses similar methods with success, according to Keith Donner, a Miami-based political consultant. “They do a very good job,” Donner said.

Today, Latino Decisions conducts polling for a plethora of clients that includes the immigration reform organization America’s Voices, Latino advancement group the National Council of La Raza and the American Jewish Committee, which hired the firm in 2012 to conduct a survey that found that only 18 percent of Latinos in the U.S. were highly familiar with Jews and the Jewish religion.

Dina Seigel Vann, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Belfer Institute for Latino and Latin American Affairs, said the survey’s purpose was to figure out what opinions and attitudes Latinos had about the Jewish community. “Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States,” she said. “Our focus is building a bridge with Latinos in the United States, as well as in Latin America.”

Siegel Vann said the institute selected Latino Decisions based on their research methodology. “They are really forward-looking,” she said.

More recently, Latino Decisions has conducted polls in North Carolina and Colorado for the National Council for La Raza. Both surveys showed Latino voters overwhelmingly support the Democratic candidates running for U.S. Senate and could tip the balance in those close races. In a poll for America’s Voices, a sample of 600 Latino voters across the country found that 46 percent of them are voting in the midterm election to support the Latino community and not because of party affiliation.

“I can also tell you that Latinos could shift the outcome of elections in Georgia and Kansas,” Segura said. “Ten years ago, no one would have said that.”

While his firm and Bendixen & Amandi are the most well-known Latino polling firms nationally, Segura said the market is big enough for more players to enter the arena.

“Latinos are the fastest-growing segment in everything,” he said. “Ten years from now, Latinos will easily represent more than a quarter of the U.S. population. There is definitely a growing market for what we do.”

Source: Fox News Latino