Pub­lished by Cam­pus Progress

The last few weeks have seen plenty of debate about the poten­tial influ­ence of the Latino vote, as well as the pur­ported dis­af­fec­tion of numer­ous “vot­ing blocs”— women, youth, and espe­cially Lati­nos. (Evi­dently minor­ity inclu­sion pos­i­tively cor­re­lates with elec­toral apathy.)

Now a new report by the Immi­gra­tion Pol­icy Insti­tute has some inter­est­ing (albeit obvi­ous) data to con­tribute: New Amer­i­cans account for a rapidly grow­ing pro­por­tion of the elec­torate. The report pro­poses that New Amer­i­cans, newly nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zens and the U.S.-born chil­dren of recent immi­grants, made up 15 mil­lion (10 per­cent) of reg­is­tered vot­ers in 2008. The vast major­ity of these—11.6 million—were Latino vot­ers. Asians, the sec­ond largest group, accounted for 4 mil­lion of all reg­is­tered voters.

It’s not news that Lati­nos make up a siz­able pro­por­tion of vot­ers and have the poten­tial to shift the out­come of elec­tions. They were, after all, a piv­otal demo­graphic in last two elec­tions, when they helped usher in a num­ber of Democ­rats into pub­lic office.

This year, some run­ning for office want to con­tinue the trend and are both bank­ing on Latino votes and tak­ing them as a given. Oth­ers, mean­while, feel threat­ened by the power of the Latino elec­torate that they are covertly fund­ing Spanish-language tele­vi­sion ads urg­ing Lati­nos not to vote. Lati­nos def­i­nitely boast some elec­toral brawn and, with regard to that, the report only con­firms the obvious.

But less appar­ent, the report posits, is the stag­ger­ing rate at which the so-called New Amer­i­can “vot­ing bloc” has grown in recent years—an increase of 101 per­cent between 1996 and 2008. The Immi­gra­tion Pol­icy Insti­tute argues that this expo­nen­tial growth is notable in that it is “con­sis­tently over­looked” and “polit­i­cally underestimated.”

It’s an inter­est­ing propo­si­tion. I’ll con­cede that main­stream media—and even some candidates—tend to over­look the grow­ing saliency of immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties of color, I have to con­tend that the anti-immigrant move­ment in the United States does not.

Nativists—anti-immigrant extrem­ists who dom­i­nate media dis­course on immigration—don’t, after all, sim­ply fear mass unau­tho­rized immi­gra­tion. Rather, they acutely fear mass legalimmi­gra­tion: Large influxes of non-white immi­grants with strong ties to their coun­tries of ori­gin who at the same time wield the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic power bequeathed to Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. Unau­tho­rized immi­gra­tion isn’t mis­per­ceived as a threat merely because unau­tho­rized immi­grants are mis­per­ceived as crim­i­nals, but because the more eco­nom­i­cally and cul­tur­ally embed­ded undoc­u­mented immi­grants become, the greater the social incen­tive to “legal­ize” them.

Undoubt­edly, the main­stream tends to over­look the rate of growth among new citizens—in part, because it seems irrel­e­vant to most of us —but Nativists have never over­looked nor under­es­ti­mated it. Most of the time, in fact, they’re blow­ing it totally out of proportion.

Fed­er­a­tion for Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Reform (FAIR) founder John Stan­ton, whom the South­ern Poverty Law Cen­ter calls “the racist archi­tect of the anti-immigrant move­ment” epit­o­mizes this, hav­ing once said:

To gov­ern is to populate…Will the present major­ity peace­ably hand over its polit­i­cal power to a group that is sim­ply more fer­tile? As whites see their power and con­trol over their lives declin­ing, will they sim­ply go qui­etly into the night? [H/T Rachel Mad­dow]

In Ari­zona, for exam­ple, anti-immigrant sen­ti­ment is dri­ven not merely by fear of crim­i­nal “aliens” but rather by a fear of the grow­ing power of immigrants—both autho­rized and not. To many mem­bers of the con­ser­v­a­tive, white elite that fear is palpable.

For all of the talk of behead­ings in the Ari­zona desert, the truth as Ari­zona state leg­is­la­tors know it is that, both in num­ber and eco­nomic power, Arizona’s immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties have been grow­ing steadily larger—and there­fore more polit­i­cally threatening—over the years.

Thirty-eight per­cent of the state’s med­ical sci­en­tists are immi­grants, as are 36 per­cent of its sci­en­tists and physi­cists and 15 per­cent of econ­o­mists, accord­ing to the Udall Cen­ter for Stud­ies in Pub­lic Pol­icy [PDF]. The num­ber of chil­dren born to immi­grants in Ari­zona has increased 205 per­cent since the 1990s, result­ing in a grow­ing num­ber of first gen­er­a­tion U.S. cit­i­zens whose Amer­i­can priv­i­lege is accented by strong ties to immi­grant and for­eign com­mu­ni­ties. It’s worth­while to note that many of the loud­est voices still protest­ing SB 1070 belong to young Lati­nos who were either born in the U.S. or immi­grated at a young age. The nine youth who were arrested last spring after chain­ing them­selves to the Capi­tol build­ing were all col­lege students—educated and com­ing of age in a state largely igno­rant of their edu­ca­tional and eco­nomic aspi­ra­tions and progress.

All of this speaks to a sin­gle community’s poten­tial long-term impact on a state that has, for the last 100 years, been steered and shaped by a much more afflu­ent class of whites. It’s not the first time that a rul­ing class felt desta­bi­lized by the slow-but-surely grow­ing power of an increas­ingly agi­tated pop­u­la­tion, and it won’t be the last. This is what the anti-immigrant move­ment is orga­niz­ing against—a grow­ing minor­ity threat­en­ing to become an encroach­ing majority.

The power of immi­grants has never been under­es­ti­mated by Nativists—politically or otherwise—and the rest of us should seri­ously take note of that.

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