Facts about Hispanic immigration to America are often obscured by statics about “immigrants”. Such numbers are misleading, as not all American immigrants are Hispanic. To remedy this problem, the current post will look at various aspects of the Hispanic American population which are cause for concern.

As will be seen, Hispanic Americans are, in many measurable respect, more problematic than White non-Hispanic Americans. Because of this, increasing the proportion of our population which is Hispanic via immigration will damage America in many predictable ways.

Moreover, contrary to common mythology, a multitude of studies have shown that Hispanics do not assimilate to American culture by the 3rd generation.

A nation’s government should only allow in immigrants if doing so is in the best interest of said nation’s citizens. After all, these citizens are the people who pay for the government, and their ancestors were the people who created it, not to mention the national culture.

The only serious benefit ever offered by immigration enthusiasts is that immigration helps the economy. However, as reviewed below, the economic benefits of Hispanic immigration to natives don’t even come close to making up for the relevant costs. Given this, it is in the national interest to stop the current wave of Hispanic immigration into the United States.

1. Welfare use

Hispanics use welfare more than Whites do. This is true when comparing immigrant Hispanics to immigrant Whites and Native Hispanics to Native Whites. Below, you can see the result of an analysis carried out by the Center For Immigration Studies which looked at welfare use by immigration status and ethnicity for the years 2009-2012. In every year, Hispanics had a higher welfare use rate than Whites.

It is also note worthy that poor Hispanics use welfare more often than poor White do.

Camarota (2015)

A similar result was found by the New Century Foundation when looking at data from 2004-2005:

New Century Foundation (2011)

Some critics of the above studies argue that Hispanics have larger households on average than Whites do. Given this, it may be misleading to compare welfare usage by household.

I don’t think it is obvious which measure is better. Sure, Hispanics have larger families, but it is still likely that everyone in a household often benefits when one person in the family goes on welfare.

That being said, even if you look at individuals Hispanics still use welfare more often than Whites:

Pew (2013)

Pew (2016)

2. Crime

Normally, the first place to look for crime rates broken down by ethnicity is the FBI’s uniform crime report. However, their racial categories only include Blacks, Whites, and Asians. For the most part, Hispanics will be lumped in with Whites and to a lesser extent with Blacks. The UCR also includes a Hispanics vs Non-Hispanic category scheme, but in that case Whites are lumped in with Blacks. Given this, the UCR is not very useful for comparing the arrest rates of Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites.

Luckily, many large cities, such as New York and Chicago, and some states, such as California, do record arrest rates in a way that differentiates non Hispanic Whites from Hispanics. The relevant data was compiled in a recent report published by the New Century Foundation. The results, as can be seen below, show that Hispanics have a much higher crime rate than non-Hispanic Whites.

Rubenstein (2016)

Happily, the US incarceration data is better than its arrest data. The DOJ does a good job differentiating Whites and Hispanics in its prisoner population reports. As can be seen below, said report not only show that Hispanics have a higher crime rate than Whites, but show that this remains true even when only comparing young males of each ethnicity, thus falsifying the myth that Hispanic crime rates are caused by ethnic differences in median age and/or sex ratio.

Beck (2001)

Carson and Golinelli (2013)

Carson (2014)

Carson (2015)

3. Health

In some ways, Hispanics are actually healthier than Whites. Unfortunately, they are less healthy in the ways that impact others: STDs and obesity rates.

New Century Foundation (2011)

Gallup (2012)

New Century Foundation (2011)

According to the CDC:

“In 2010, the gonorrhea rate among Hispanics was 49.9 cases per 100,000 population, which was 2.2 times the rate among whites.”

“In 2010, the chlamydia rate among Hispanics was 369.6 cases per 100,000 population… nearly three times the rate among whites.”

“The 2010 rate of P&S syphilis for Hispanics was 2.2 times the rate for whites.”

4. Education

Relative to non-Hispanic Whites, Hispanics don’t do very well in school. Moreover, this has been true for decades, and the gap, which is present from an early age, is, at best, closing at a snail’s pace.

Aud, Fox, and KewalRamani (2010)

New Century Foundation (2011)

Hemphill, Canneman, and Rahman (2011)

5. Sexual Behavior

Hispanics are also more likely than Whites to engage in degenerate sexual behavior. This can be seen by looking at divorce rates, abortion rates, non-marital birth rates, and teen pregnancy rates.

New Century Foundation (2011)

Fears (2014)

Aud, Fox, and KewalRamani (2010)

Contrary to the assimilation myth, the proportion of Hispanic children being raised by a single parent is actually higher among native born Hispanics than it is among 1st generation immigrants:

Landale Oropesa, and Bradatan (2006)

6. Socio-Economic Status

Speaking of the assimilation myth, below we can see that even 3rd generation Hispanics have higher than average rates of poverty and welfare use and lower than average levels of educational attainment, home ownership, income, and insurance coverage.

Camarota (2012)

7. Politics

Hispanics also differ markedly from White Americans in their voting patterns. Specifically, as reviewed in this article, Hispanics vote democrat in every presidential election whereas Whites vote republican.

And no, Hispanics are not “natural conservatives”. As is covered in more depth here, Hispanics hold liberal views on a wide variety of issues.

And no, Hispanics do not assimilate into White culture and become as conservative as Whites, or even the mean American, with time. On economic issues, some assimilation takes place, but there is no data to suggest that it they totally assimilate.

Pew (2012)

On social issues, if anything, Hispanics get more liberal as the longer they’ve been in the US.

“In evaluating their social values, first-generation Latinos are more likely to express views generally considered more conservative than second-generation Latinos. When asked whether they thought divorce was unacceptable, nearly half (46%) of first-generation Latinos reported they believe it is unacceptable, compared to three in ten (30%) second-generation Latinos. When asked about abortion, more than eight in ten (83%) first-generation Latinos said it is unacceptable, compared to about two-thirds (64%) of second-generation Latinos.” – Pew (2004)

In fact, according to a 2014 study by Pew, 62% of foreign born Hispanics and 63% of native born Hispanics identity as democrat or lean democrat.

Some people think that the GOP can convert Hispanics into Republican voters by adopting the leftist worldview on immigration. Given what we have already seen, it should be obvious that this is false. After all, Hispanics disagree with Republicans on far more than just immigration, and even republican presidents who granted mass amnesty, such as Reagan, still lost the Hispanic vote.

Even stronger evidence was provided by an analysis carried out by the Center for Immigration Studies. This report looked at whether more pro-immigration Republican members of congress, as measured by their NumbersUSA grade, received a greater share of the Hispanic vote than anti-immigration republicans.

As can be seen, being pro immigration (as signified by a low grade) did not induce more Hispanics to vote Republican. It was, however, associated with a fall in the proportion of non-Hispanic White votes the Republican received.

Hawley (2013)

To put this into more concrete terms, consider another study done by the Center for Immigration Studies which combined data on the US’s 100 largest counties from 9 elections and found that, even after controlling for median income and the percent of the county that was black, a 1 point increase in the proportion of a county that was immigrant was associated with, on average, a .59 point drop in the proportion of that county that voted republican in the presidential election.

The implications of this data could not be clearer: Hispanic immigration means the end of American conservatism.

In fact, this has already happened to a degree. Consider this: if the Hispanic proportion of the electorate had not grown since 1980 Mitt Romney would have won the 2012 election even if there wasn’t a single non white person that voted for him. Romney won 59% of the white vote and if Hispanics were still 2% of the electorate, as they were in 1980, whites would be 85% of the electorate which means the white vote alone would have given Romney 50.15% of the vote. If we add on Romney’s share of the Hispanic and Black vote that number rises to 51.08% of the vote. On the other hand, if we project our current racial demographics back onto past elections we find, based on NewYork Times exit poll data, that the Republicans would have only won one presidential election in the last 27 years.

8. Hispanic Identity

Another interesting feature of Hispanic Americans is that they are more likely to think of themselves as Hispanic (or Mexican) than they are to think of themselves as Americans. A pew study carried out in 2002 found that this was even true of 41% of 3rd generation Hispanic Americans.

Pew (2002)

More recent Pew Polling finds that this is true of the plurality (49%) of 3rd generation Hispanic Americans!

Pew (2012)

Many Hispanics also don’t identify as a typical American:

Pew (2012)

Thus, not only are Hispanics different from Americans in a wide variety of ways, Hispanics don’t even identify as normal Americans either.

Combine this with the data reviewed in this article showing that ethnic diversity tends to make people get along less well, and it should be obvious that Hispanic immigration will increase American’s levels of alienation and social strife.

9. The Economic “Benefits”

At this point we’ve seen most of the costs of Hispanic immigration. In response to this, liberals will often say that Hispanics improve the economy by doing crappy jobs for little money and thus lowering the price of goods and so increasing the amount of stuff Americans can buy. Thus, immigrants grow the economy.

According to the Harvard labor economist Geroge Borjas, immigrants (we are talking about immigrants now instead of Hispanics because I couldn’t find good data on Hispanic immigrants alone) add 1.6 trillion dollars to the US economy each year. Of this, 98.7% is consumed by said immigrants. 2.2%, or $35,200,000,000, goes to natives. Dividing this by the roughly 300 million “native Americans” in the US and you get $117 per person.

As can be seen below, there are about 16 million immigrant households in the US. This implies that each household increases the incomes of natives by $35.2 billion divided by 16,211,763 immigrant households = $2,171.

This number can be contrasted with the impact on the public deficit that an immigrant has each year compared to a non-immigrant. This is equal to the amount they pay in taxes minus the amount they consume in government services.

An analysis of this was carried out by the Heritage Foundation. It found that the average household added $310 to the deficit each year compared to $4,344 for legal immigrants and $14,387 for illegal immigrants.

In other words, immigrants add thousands of dollars to the deficit each year relative to what non-immigrant Americans do, and this completely dawrfs any plausible increase in the real income of non-immigrant Americans thanks to immigrants.

Rector and Richwine (2013)

10. Conclusion

In conclusion, the supposed economic benefits of Hispanic immigration are illusory. By contrast, the economic, political, and social, costs are very real. America is harmed by Hispanic immigration, not helped, and for any government that puts America’s interest first there is only one way to deal with Hispanic immigration: reverse it.

Pew (2015)