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In the analysis and anticipation of the primary votes leading up to Super Tuesday on February 5, one sees consistent references to the "Latino vote." Today's news reports credit Latinos and women with putting Hillary Clinton over the top in Nevada, for example.
Read those reports with a gimlet eye. Experts say that while Latino voters might be critical constituencies in several major primary states, a monolithic bloc of voters of Hispanic descent doesn't exist. In addition, certain storylines -- such as whether Latinos will vote for a black candidate -- ignore the diversity among Hispanic peoples.
Maynard Institute columnist Bobbi Bowman explained it this way in 2006:
"[L]et’s banish two major misconceptions about the so-called Latino vote and the spurious stories that so often spring from them.
"These two myths are that the growing Latino population means an equally growing Latino electorate, and that Latinos vote as a bloc.
"There is not doubt that the Hispanic population is booming. Hispanics are the country’s largest minority, comprising an estimated 14.5 percent of the 288 million folks living in the U.S. Latinos are fueling U.S. population growth. But a growing population has little to do with voting strength."
Bowman goes on to explain why that's so: according to Census data, more than half of the people identified as Latino in the United States are ineligible to vote, because they are children or immigrants. The Pew Hispanic Center projects that based on past voting patterns, about 6.5 percent of the voters in the next presidential election will be Latinos.
However, the same December, 2007 Pew Hispanic Center study found that much of the Latino population is concentrated in states that are expected to be hotly contested in November: Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado. In 2004, Pres. Bush won those states by five points or fewer. That's why California human rights activist Amanda Navarro was quoted as saying, "We believe the Latino voters can be the swing voters in the 2008 Presidential election."
In 2004, the Republican Party courted Hispanic voters with socially conservative positions on same-sex marriage and abortion. In 2008, immigration is the wedge issue. Another Pew national survey of Latinos released last month found that more than half of the respondents said that they knew someone who had been targeted by aggressive immigration law enforcement tactics. By large margins, they also said they opposed many of these tactics, including workplace raids, the identification of undocumented immigrants by local police and checking immigration status before issuing a drivers' license.
However, these gross figures miss some nuances in the data, such as:
"For example, on questions about enforcement policies, native-born Hispanics take positions that are closer to those of the rest of the U.S. population than do foreign-born Hispanics. Also, the native born are less likely than the foreign born to report a negative personal impact from the heightened attention to immigration issues.
"Likewise, Hispanics who are not citizens feel much more vulnerable in the current environment than do Hispanics who are citizens. They are about twice as likely as Hispanic citizens to worry about deportation and to feel a specific negative personal impact from the heightened attention to illegal immigration. (Non-citizens account for 44% of the total adult Hispanic population."
On the subject of immigration (and noting that not all immigrants are Hispanic), Bowman has a few more misconceptions to correct. First, regardless of their immigration status, most immigrants pay taxes. Second, whether we realize it or not, the next generation of seniors are increasingly dependent on the Social Security taxes paid by today's more diverse, largely immigrant workforce. That's one aspect of the debate over investments in education for immigrants that is too frequently ignored.
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez argues that the press also neglects to realize that Latinos are racially diverse. In particular, she singled out the New York Times for reporting that Latinos might be reluctant to vote for Barack Obama because he is black. So are many Latinos, she points out:
"The New York Times not only ignores completely the African history of Latin America by positioning "blacks" against "Latinos" as if none of us were both. To do so is enormously irresponsible because it dissolves from public consciousness the fact that African slavery was a crime committed all across this hemisphere, by colonial Europeans who spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The story also erroneously portrays Latinos as a race unto themselves - an error egregious enough to be stated in our own census
