Are Hispanics in America becoming “white,” as some commentators have claimed recently? If so, then perhaps the recent primary defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, which further dimmed the prospects for immigration reform this year, will not matter much politically, at least in the long run. After all, if Latinos are just white people in disguise, they should eventually warm to the GOP, the party most identified with white voters.

The argument for the whitening of Latinos is typically buttressed by data that show some overlap between the terms “white” and “Hispanic,” along with some vague allusions to how the Irish and Italians transitioned to white status over a period of time. The implication is that America will not become a majority-minority nation after all, but remain white, a boon to beleaguered conservatives. Democratic and progressive hopes of electoral domination, based on demographic change, will be dashed.

The latest edition of this meme was provided by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, based on a recent Pew Research Center article which was, in turn, based on the some unpublished research recently presented at the Population Association of America's annual meeting in early May. This research found that, between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses, 2.5 million Hispanics changed their racial designation from “some other race” to white, while 1.3 million Hispanics switched in the opposite direction, for a net 1.2 million Hispanics moving from some other race to white. (Race and Hispanic ethnicity are separate questions on the Census.)

There are two problems with using these data to infer a meaningful trend toward “whiteness” among Latinos. The first is that, as USC sociology professor Manuel Pastor points out, the Census Bureau changed its race question between 2000 and 2010: In 2010, but not in 2000, the race question included the boldface admonition, “For this Census, Hispanic origins are not races.” Since the Census provides a box to write in your “other race” and these write-ins are overwhelmingly Latino designations—Mexican, Hispanic, Latin American or Puerto Rican—it seems quite plausible that much of the observed switch from some other race to white among Latinos was attributable to following this admonition. In fact, Pastor notes that between 2007 and 2008, the Census's American Community Survey changed their wording on their race question in exactly the same manner. The result: an eight-point increase in the share of Latinos selecting "white" on the race question.

The second problem is that the overlap between Hispanic ethnicity and selecting white on a racial ID question is less meaningful than many commentators suppose. There have been separate questions on race and ethnicity for quite some time, which has always led to confusion. As demographer William Frey points out, the Census Bureau has recently been experimenting with a question where respondents can select Hispanic status or a standard race group as a single identifier and has found that the number of whites yielded by such a question closely tracks the number of whites we currently get by defining whites as non-Hispanic whites. So the whiteness of Hispanics as revealed by the two separate questions today may simply reflect the fact we currently ask two questions rather than one.