Hispanics – praag.org

Ilana Mercer: The Hispandering Effect

From her bright eyes and big smile to her sun-kissed, luscious locks, Kathryn Steinle was the consummate California girl. The 32-year-old was shot dead by a proxy of the American Immigration-Industrial-Complex.

ICE, the federal wing of The Complex, was quick to blame its local branch: the City of San Francisco. San Francisco is the sanctuary city that unleashed confessed killer Francisco Sanchez. As a matter of policy, sanctuary cities commit to protecting their illegal population as they would their endangered species.

Yes, San Francisco provided sanctuary not for Kathryn Steinle, but for the likes of Francisco Sanchez. Alas, this criminal alien had accessories to the crime. The murder of Ms. Steinle was a murder-by-proxy. For regularly unleashing predators on people they swore to protect, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement is just as culpable as the sanctuary cities. Last year, reports CNSNews, ICE alone loosed approximately 30,000 convicted criminal aliens, “including those convicted of sex crimes, homicide, drunk driving, kidnapping and robbery.” Recidivism among them is proving rife.

Francisco Sanchez is the face of successive American administrations—lawmakers and enforcers; city, state and federal—who’ve refused to uphold negative rights; who’ve rejected a duty that falls perfectly within the purview of the “night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory.” And well within the ambit of the U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 4:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

Ms. Steinle joins a litany of lives lost. Criminal aliens commit crimes all the time. However, until the rise of The Donald and The Coulter duo, a few weeks back—those who determine the “conversation” du jour had been otherwise occupied in northern New York State. For three weeks, they followed a manhunt for local killers escaped.

Criminals of the Richard Matt and David Sweat caliber (or potential) cross the country’s Southwest, wide-open border almost daily. They go on to integrate into drug cartels (yes, I’m pro-legalization; always have been), as drunk drivers and as petty and not-so-petty criminals. Nobody stops them. No one is allowed to so much as ask about their pedigree.

The same sort of offenders sprang into action the day after Ms. Steinle’s murder. On that Thursday, by Ann Coulter’s telling, “two people, Traci Lynn Lemley and Jeremy Carrico,” were killed by “members of the Mexican mafia.” Another couple, “Michael Careccia and his wife, Tina, were dug out of the Arizona desert,” having been placed there, allegedly, by one Jose Valenzuela. There was a child rape, courtesy of a Haitian voodoo priest. In my sanctuary state of Washington a hit-and-run took place. In response, Washingtonians took to the streets of Seattle in solidarity with … victims of the shooting at the First AME Church in Charleston.

Remember the 2007, execution-style shooting of four young black college students in Newark? That was the doing of a gang of MS-13-tied illegal aliens.

Remember Josie Bluhm, age 4, killed in May of 2009? Behind the wheel on that fateful day was killer Eleazar Rangel-Ochoa.

Dearly departed is Arizona Rancher Robert Krentz. A pillar of the Cochise County community, Krentz had for decades raised cattle along the Arizona-Mexico border. The cruel marauder who shot Krentz and his canine companion on his land, in 2010, beat a retreat to Mexico.

In 2012, a man named Ramon Hernandez took the tiniest of victims. Dimitri Smith was killed in-utero by this recipient of the Drunk-Driver Immigration Visa. You can see the deceased preemie, as he is cradled by young mother Aileen Smith, before being laid to rest.

One of the stupidest men on TV, Geraldo Rivera, is fond of countering the carnage with this claim: The overall probability of being victimized by a Hispanic is negligibly low.

However low, that probability is still greater than the likelihood of one being killed by a soldier of ISIS. Yet some American crazies (like Chucky Krauthammer) are demanding that the U.S. occupy the Middle East so as to militate against those miniscule probabilities.

Besides, how would La Raza or Obama or Rivera know that Hispanic crime rates are likely comparable to white crime rates, given the obfuscating effects of the “Hispanic effect”? To wit, as criminologists have long complained, “FBI and Bureau of Justice crime statistics fail to distinguish between Hispanic and non-Hispanic white criminals.”

The upshot: White criminality is inflated; Latino lawlessness remains in the shadows.

More critically: What do Geraldo, La Raza and the rest of America’s Immigration-Industrial-Complex mean when they assert that the threat posed to natives by imported Latino criminals is significantly lower, or the same, as the danger to you and me from our own, local trailer trash?

Is the Latino Lobby implying that had they not been murdered by imported criminals—Steinle, Bluhm, baby Smith; Krentz, Jamiel Shaw, Jr., and Grant Ronnebeck would have, nevertheless, been killed by native criminals?

Ridiculous! I know not if this illogic—this inescapable deduction—is a case of a categorical confusion or a category mistake. All I know is that, logically, at least, propensities for crime are irrelevant in a discussion about the murder of Ms. Steinle and all other victims of criminals who should not be in the U.S.

For these deaths have nothing to do with aggregate crime rates; they’re about individuals who should be alive: a baby that should have been born, a girl who should be among the living, young men and women who should not be dead.

To justify the crime-probabilities line-of-inquiry in the context of Sanchez’ presence that day on the SF pier, you would need to show that had Sanchez been deported or jailed or turned back at the border—his victim, Ms. Steinle, would nevertheless have suffered the same fate at the hands of a native murderer. The same eventuality would need to be demonstrated with respect to each individual victim of a criminal alien. The implication is crushingly stupid, even by Geraldo Rivera’s standards.

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Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. Follow her on Twitter. “Friend” her on Facebook.

US whites a minority by 2050

A new baby boom of Hispanic, Asian and black children is coming to America – and it will make whites a minority by 2050.

The surge is not due to new immigrants coming to the United States – but instead stems from the immigrants who are already here having children, according to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.

His new book, Diversity Explosion, recounts how falling white birth rates and rising birth rates for minorities will change way the United States of America looks – and votes – forever.

There are already nearly as many non-white babies being born as white children, according to Census Bureau statistics. It’s only a matter of time before minorities children outnumber white ones.

The result, Frey tells the Atlantic, will be very similar to the Baby Boom after the Second World War – except this time it will be minority children being born.

‘Back in the 1950s, we had a lot of Americans across the board in their childbearing years – we had all these babies,’ he said.

‘Now, that’s really only the case for some of the newer minorities.’
And it’s not just cities that will be changing. The suburbs are already becoming more diverse and are likely to become progressively less white year after year.

Between 2000 and 2010, the population of Hispanics in suburbs grew by more than eight million. Major cities added just three million Hispanics.

Even among black Americans, the population of suburban dwellers is growing. In the last decade, the population of suburban blacks grew by three million and the population of urban blacks shrank by several hundred thousand.

Source: Daily Mail

Most Americans support affirmative action

PRINCETON, N.J. — Two-thirds of Americans think college applicants should be admitted based solely on merit, yet most approve of affirmative action, a Gallup poll indicates.

Twenty-eight percent of Americans think a college applicant’s race and ethnic background should be a factor when granting admission to promote diversity on college campuses.

Seventy-five percent of whites and 59 percent of Hispanics believe applicants should be evaluated based on merit alone, while black people are more evenly divided on the topic, the poll said.

In a separate question, Americans largely support the idea of affirmative action programs more generally. Fifty-eight percent of Americans support affirmative action, including 51 percent of whites, 76 percent of blacks and 69 percent of Hispanics.

Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to favor such programs, the poll found.

“Americans are not averse to having the government take steps to help improve the conditions of minority groups in the United States, and in a broad sense express support for affirmative action programs,” Gallup said. “One of the clearest examples of affirmative action in practice is colleges’ taking into account a person’s racial or ethnic background when deciding which applicants will be admitted.

“Americans seem reluctant to endorse such a practice, and even blacks, who have historically been helped by such programs, are divided on the matter.”

Gallup interviewed 4,373 adults by telephone for the survey between June 13 and July 5. There was a 2 percentage point margin of error. – UPI

Will the US Follow South Africa Down the Path of White Decline?

by Dan Roodt

In the aftermath of President Obama’s victory, the Wall Street Journal described the GOP as the WOP, the White Old Party. Indeed, the Republican Party finds itself in a demographic death spiral as youth, single women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

In fact, the Democratic Party could become the American version of South Africa’s ANC as immigration and high non-white birth rates ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters eager for “change” or even South African-style “transformation:” the ANC’s term for racial revolution and ever tighter anti-white measures.
The latest proposal is for all charities, such as orphanages or soup kitchens to lose their non-profit status if they serve any whites at all. It would mean that charitable organizations could serve only blacks and that whites would not be allowed to help each other in any organized way, even to alleviate poverty or care for orphaned white children.

In the United States, such extreme anti-white measures are probably unthinkable today, but as recently as the early 1980s the idea of a black president in South Africa was deemed equally unthinkable. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s spokesman Bernard Ingham said at the time: “Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land.”

In the 1960s, so-called apartheid South Africa was still considered such a desirable place to live that 500,000 Britons emigrated there, fleeing socialist Britain.

The question therefore arises: how could South Africa, once seen as a leading Western power more or less on par with Canada or Australia, collapse so quickly to become “just another African country?” And what lessons can white Americans draw from our tragic demise, as they ponder the outcome of a Presidential election in which the evidence of a demographic turn for the worse is clear for all to see?

Ilana Mercer’s book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa went some way towards portraying the horrors and mayhem of whites living under a hostile black government, but the underlying causes of South Africa’s spectacular collapse still need explanation.

A century ago, South African whites still enjoyed demographic parity with blacks and were a majority in most towns and cities. In 1950, demographers sympathetic to the National Party shocked everyone at a Stellenbosch University conference by stating that the black population could grow from 8 million to 20 million by 2000. This prediction seemed so outlandish no one believed it. The recent census confirmed that blacks now represent 40 million, far overshooting the “nightmare scenario” of 1950.

South African whites feared communism more than anything else, but American racial ideologies such as affirmative action and so-called BEE (“black economic empowerment—our version of minority procurement) are doing vastly more damage to them. At least under communism the Bolshoi ballet still functioned and the Soviet Union still had a space program. The pursuit of diversity and multiculturalism in South Africa has, however, led to across the board decline; some small towns regularly suffer water and electricity shortages.

In my opinion, America’s future will not resemble its past, but will look more like today’s South Africa. As the number of whites declines, loss of power will follow, leading to aggressive legislation pushing whites out of jobs and most positions of power.

Many whites will emigrate or move to the remaining red states, just as South Africa’s whites have emigrated since 1994. But ultimately there will be no place to go as the global demographic decline of whites means that even European countries suffer the same fate of dispossession.

Demography is destiny, as Auguste Comte said. There is a mysterious process whereby whites react to racial domination not by rioting or claiming special privileges as other races do, but by working harder, having even fewer children, and quarrelling among themselves. We see this happening in South Africa, in Western Europe and, of course, in America where white Republicans and Democrats are like two dogs fighting over a bone, while a third is about to run away with it and leave them with nothing.

The Republican Party is poised to adopt the attitude of South Africa’s liberal opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which has forsaken its core white support and practices affirmative action in its own ranks. There are three women on its election posters: one white, one colored or mixed-race, and one black, at once expressing the party’s diversity and its disdain for the white male.

Jared Taylor asks that the Republican Party be loyal to its electorate and become the unabashed champion of white interests. Again, the history of South Africa is instructive. British Prime Minister Harold McMillan made a famous speech in the South African parliament on February 3, 1960 in which he warned us that “the wind of change is blowing through the African continent” and that ultimately we would have to surrender power to the nonwhite majority. Our brilliant leader, Hendrik Verwoerd, promptly replied in an unprepared speech that “the tendency in Africa for nations to become independent, and at the same time to do justice to all, does not only mean being just to the black man of Africa, but also being just to the white man of Africa.”

Verwoerd’s slogan of “justice for the white man too” was rejected by most of the Western world. Lest we forget, the rank and file of the Republican Party rebelled against Ronald Reagan’s veto and passed sanctions against South Africa on Sept. 29, 1986.

Since that time, the U.S. has consistently pursued an anti-white foreign policy. In Southern Africa it supported black Marxist movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO). In Europe, it has called for a large Muslim state, Turkey, to be included in the European Union. Would the American elite ever adopt a pro-white policy domestically while pursuing the opposite of such a policy externally?

There are three forces that are likely to determine the Republican Party’s position on white interests. The first is the wishes of its own electorate; the second is the corporate sector that funds the party, and the third is the mainstream media. America’s large corporations support affirmative action and diversity, while the media support multiculturalism. The GOP will follow their bidding and betray its voters.

Like the whites of the former Rhodesia, South West Africa, and South Africa, Republicans will embark on a forlorn search for conservative allies “of color” whom non-white voters will reject as “traitors.” Even if a black woman such as Condoleezza Rice could be fielded as the next Republican presidential candidate, it is doubtful whether many blacks or Hispanics would vote for her.

Pat Buchanan and others have already chronicled “the death of the West,” but we need to understand the laws of this process, because it follows a pattern of false hopes, interspersed with successive betrayals by white leaders. The final days of the Roman Empire followed the same fatal chain of events.

The crisis is far deeper than most Americans realize. South Africa went from being a powerful, Western country to capitulation in just ten years: from 1980 to 1990. President Barack Obama has already started to fire some of his best generals, just like F.W. de Klerk purged his army of all pro-white generals prior to surrendering to the ANC.

I fear that white Americans take false comfort in “still being the majority.” They do not realize how quickly they will lose that status as global demographics change, and immigration to the US accelerates. South Africa is now being overrun by immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. But America too will become a haven for African immigrants as the population of our continent doubles from the current one billion to two billion within the next 30 or 40 years.

It could even be that Africa’s burgeoning population poses a far greater demographic risk to Americans than Mexicans. Unprecedented technological change, especially in communications, has put immigration information at the disposal of Africans in even the remotest villages.
American whites could become a minority much sooner than they think. That has been our experience in South Africa; people appreciate the enormity of the changes only after it is too late.

Some white Americans may clamor for self-determination, and the South may want to secede again. However, any breakaway group will find itself in the political wilderness, without media support and fighting the forces of demography and history.

We need to form a global network to keep America from falling into the hands of anti-white zealots. We should constantly compare notes on successes and failures, taking heart from every advance. The United States is such a military and economic power that the battle now taking shape within its borders could well determine the fate of the West. If the United States goes the way of South Africa, whites everywhere will be in danger.

When does affirmative action reach ‘critical mass’?

University of Texas Austin — The University of Texas at Austin

AUSTIN, Texas — Walking across the South Mall, or scanning the football stadium’s 100,000 seats on game day, University of Texas admissions Director Kedra Ishop sees how much has changed since the 1990s, when she was a black student at what was an inordinately white school.

This giant flagship campus — once so slow to integrate — is now awash in color, among the most diverse in the country. The student body, like Texas, is majority-minority.

At the dining hall, minority students no longer cluster together. Actually, it’s more a high-end food court now, and many tables are racial mosaics — white, black, Latino, Asian.

So is this the “critical mass” of minority students that the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly endorsed in 2003 as an educational goal important enough to allow colleges to factor the race of applicants into admissions decisions?

That question will be front and center Wednesday when a more conservative Supreme Court revisits affirmative action for the first time since that landmark case nine years ago involving the University of Michigan.

This time, it’s Texas defending the use of race in admissions, fighting a discrimination lawsuit from Abigail Fisher, a rejected white applicant. As it happens, the court’s decision will affect relatively few students at Texas, which admits most students through a system that doesn’t factor in race.

But a broad ruling rolling back affirmative action could be an earthquake at other campuses across the country that make more use of race, potentially changing the educational trajectories of millions of students.

For all the wrenching debates about opportunity and fairness the affirmative action debate evokes, the outcome will likely come down to how the current justices fill out the answer to questions they began to answer in 2003: What is critical mass, and how far can a university go to achieve it?

Generally, it’s the point where there’s enough diversity on campus to provide a rich educational environment. But beyond that, it’s a concept critics call maddeningly vague and supporters necessarily so. Is it enough for the student body to be diverse overall, or must all groups be well represented? What if there’s diversity in the student body, but not in most individual classrooms?

Texas will swallow its pride and argue that for all its progress, it’s still short of critical mass. Under state law, most UT students are admitted automatically based on their high school GPA, with race playing no role. But for the smaller remainder of its class where it enjoys more leeway, Texas argues it should be able to use race as a factor.

The reason: Some groups, especially blacks, remain underrepresented compared to Texas’ population. And minority students clump together academically, leaving most classes with no more than a single black or Latino voice.

But the university won’t give a target number, something the court would likely call an unconstitutional quota.

“There’s never been a discussion of ‘this is the target, this is what it looks like, this is where we’re trying to go,'” Ishop said. “We know what it doesn’t look like. And we know without the ability to examine students in their completeness that we can get back there very quickly.”

Such arguments sound mushy to UT’s opponents, who call the school’s goals for critical mass a quota in disguise. They say the university has gone too far using race in admissions, abusing the discretion the court granted colleges to define critical mass for themselves.

“It is a squishy concept that’s being manipulated,” said Terence Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, which argued against affirmative action in the Michigan case and has filed a brief against Texas in the current one. “It’s just sort of diversity for its own sake,” he added, “with no end and no limit.”

History’s role

History isn’t central to the legal issues in the affirmative action debate, but it’s an issue at UT-Austin. The football team didn’t integrate until 1970, and even as minority enrollment expanded, UT little resembled increasingly diverse Texas, leaving minority students feeling isolated.

“It was very seldom three or more were gathered,” said Machree Gibson, who arrived on campus in 1978, earned two degrees and later became the first black female president of the Texas Exes, the university’s powerful alumni group. “We used to joke, ‘Three in a room, we’re a gang.'”

Today, even a short drive through campus leaves Gibson amazed how things have changed.

But UT still doesn’t look like Texas. Of its 52,000 students, 5 percent are black (compared to 12 percent of the state population). Latinos make up 18 percent at UT (38 percent statewide) and Asians 15 percent (4 percent statewide).

Greek life and off-campus housing for upperclassmen remain mostly segregated — the West Campus neighborhood is mostly white, Riverside more black and Latino, and the Far West neighborhood Asian, limiting interactions. Academically, many departments have few non-white faces. Senior Kristin Thompson says she’s one of just two black female civil engineers in her class, despite aggressive recruiting. She’s found her community outside class, but her academic experience has been lonely.

“At UT we talk about what starts here changes the world, but I think we’re doing a disservice to students by not preparing them for a world that doesn’t have these demographics,” she said.

In the Michigan case nine years ago, psychologists, educators and, most influentially, the military flooded the court with briefs arguing a diverse learning environment helped prepare students —- whites and minorities —- for jobs and citizenship. Many also argued it takes a critical mass of minorities

How many? There was no magic number. But enough for minorities not to feel isolated in the classroom, and non-minorities to realize minorities’ views weren’t one-size-fits-all.

Those arguments persuaded Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the court’s key swing vote. In her majority opinion in the 5-4 case, she gave Michigan and other universities leeway to define critical mass in terms of their own educational goals, and to use race as a plus-factor in admissions to get there (O’Connor has since been replaced by Justice Samuel Alito, a strong affirmative action skeptic).

In Texas, a 1996 federal appeals court ruling had prohibited UT from using race in admissions, and black enrollment had plummeted. A year later, the Texas Legislature passed a “Top 10 percent” law, guaranteeing UT admission to any student at the top of his or her Texas high school.

The law was race-neutral, but it boosted the number of minorities — by some measures, close to current figures. To UT’s opponents, that proves UT can reach ample diversity — even “critical mass” — without resorting to racial preferences.

But UT says the diversity produced by the 10 percent law was stilted. Ninety percent of smaller classes had one or zero blacks, and 43 percent no more than one Latino. A student survey found minorities felt isolated, and a majority of all students felt there weren’t enough minorities for “the full benefits of diversity to occur.”

The university wanted leeway to recruit more minorities with different interests, to ensure fields such as geosciences, architecture and Thompson’s civil engineering had a critical mass, not just the campus overall.

So for the relatively small portion of its class — currently about one-quarter — not admitted automatically by their high school performance, UT designed a system to mimic what the court had allowed in the Michigan case. In that second system UT emphasizes race is a small factor, among many “special circumstances” that may be considered. It’s also not automatic, and could benefit any applicant, even a white one in some cases.

Both sides acknowledge the effect of race in UT’s system is modest (Fisher contends race is decisive for just 33 additional minority enrollees per year). To UT, that shows race is used along the limited lines the court has allowed. To Fisher, it shows that UT doesn’t need to use race at all.

On campus, critical mass evokes a range of responses. Jesse Hernandez, a senior who attended a virtually all-Latino high school in the Rio Grande Valley, says its benefits include generating a vibrant multicultural social life. Latino cultural groups, and fraternities and sororities, help minorities find a community at a huge school, but also benefit the broader student body by sharing their culture on campus.

Thompson, the civil engineering student, says she’ll recognize critical mass “when there are less racial incidents on campus, when students feel like they can go anywhere on campus and feel welcome, can go anywhere and speak their mind and not feel like they’re going to be chastised for it, ridiculed for it, looked at crazy,” she said. She loves UT, but says it’s not there yet.

“To me that’s the end goal: a welcoming campus, not a quantity of students.”

Senior Jordan Grenadier’s experience has been different.

“I don’t ever feel like I walk on campus or walk into a classroom and only see one particular type of people,” said Grenadier, who leads the campus chapter of the group Young Conservatives of Texas. On West Mall, where student groups set up tables, “it’s so diverse whenever you walk down there, it’s almost hard to imagine the university saying ‘that’s not good enough.'”

The question isn’t “whether or not (diversity) is important,” she said. “It’s, ‘Is it justified? Can someone who is qualified to attend the university not get accepted because someone who is maybe not as qualified gets in because of racial preferences?'”

UT-Austin’s president, Bill Powers, who agrees critical mass is the “central question” in the case, says UT isn’t just saying “we’ll know it when we see it.” He says “analytics,” such as classroom diversity surveys, will show UT if it’s successfully preparing students to live and work in a diverse world.

“Right now, African-Americans and Hispanics are underrepresented,” Powers said in an interview in his library-like office on campus. “We’ll reach a critical mass when you can (see it) both in the campus atmosphere and the milieu in individual classes. Not 100 percent, but where a sufficient number of individual classes bring this cross-cultural environment.”

“It really is going to hinge on what lens the court looks at the campus through,” said Gerald Torres, who says diversity is key to meaningful conversations about environmental justice in his law school courses. “Is it the lens of the classroom or is it the lens of the campus? If it’s the lens of the campus, then (the court) is likely to say the percentage increase of students of color under the 10 percent plan is sufficient. If they look at the classroom, I think they’ll say it’s not.”

Attorneys for Fisher, who sued Texas after she was denied admission to UT-Austin in 2008, contend that by even referencing the state’s demographics in its critical mass goals, UT is acknowledging a quota. They also argue the Supreme Court never intended to make diversity in every classroom the benchmark for critical mass.

“As long as you have a critical mass in the school as a whole, you’re going to bump into people in the dorms, in the all-night bull sessions,” Pell said. “That’s what’s going to give you the benefits of diversity. Now Texas says that’s not good enough, you have to have diversity in every corner of the university, in every classroom, every major.” – Associated Press

Could Romney’s older, white voters withstand Obama’s rising tide of black and Hispanic youths?

US_crowd — Typical Obama voters? Young and not so white?

By MICHAEL ORESKES
Associated Press

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — One way to think about this year’s election is as a contest between the impact of a sour economy (advantage Romney) and the power of the nation’s shifting demographics (advantage Obama).

Put simply, the groups that support President Barack Obama most strongly – blacks, Hispanics, young people, unmarried women – have been growing as a share of the electorate. Those who support Mitt Romney the most – white working men and older people – have not.

This demographic tide is so strong that some Democrats came away from their 2008 victory feeling that a political reordering was in the works that could be as important as the New Deal realignment that ushered in a generation of Democratic strength after the Great Depression.

The Great Recession put a deep dent in that hope of theirs, as it soured most other optimism around America.

But now both Republicans and Democrats see that the demographic tide is still running. But it is running into the effects of the bad economy.

As Republicans convened here this week, Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, issued a warning to his fellow Republicans. Perhaps the economic hard times would get them through this year. But soon they would have to face the longer-term implications of America’s population shifts.

“Our demographics are changing, and we have to change. Not necessarily our core beliefs, but the tone of our message and the message and the intensity of it for sure,” Bush said. “I don’t think that’s going to have an impact in this election though. . But long-term, conservative principles, if they’re to be successful and implemented, there has to be a concerted effort to reach out to a much broader audience than we do today.”

—

DEMOCRATS ARE hoping Bush is wrong about the impact this year. In fact, it could be said they are hoping the continuing demographic shifts will salvage Obama from the wreckage of the economy.

Charles Cook, one of the country’s foremost analysts of election trends, says that basic public opinion about the election has been so stable now for so many months “that the makeup of the electorate is one of the few critical questions.”

There are different ways to express the changes that electoral makeup is undergoing.

The percentage of the electorate that is white and not of Hispanic origin has been dropping steadily. It was about 90 percent of the vote in the 1970s. By 2008 it was 74 percent. The white vote has declined an average of 3 points each presidential election since 1992.

Will the trend continue into 2012?

Yes, concludes a study by a liberal think tank that looked at census data in battleground states. The researchers, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress, combined declines in the white electorate (3 percent) with growth among blacks and Hispanics (2 percent) as well as college-educated whites (1 percent), who are more sympathetic to Democrats than white voters in general. That produced a total swing of 6 percent toward voters more likely to favor Obama.

But demographics are not always destiny. Population trends don’t actually register voters or bring them to the polls. The drubbing Democrats took in 2010 was largely explained by the very low turnout among some of their normally loyalist voters. Young voters who helped elect Obama in 2008 stayed away in droves at the midterm. So did blacks and Hispanics

The same thing could happen this year. “Will Democratic apathy and Republican energy make the electorate much more conservative leaning than its underlying demographics would suggest?” Teixera and Halpin asked.

That question is driving both sides, and the effects can be seen everywhere in the presidential campaign.

Just Wednesday, Obama campaigned among University of Virginia students in Charlottesville, one of four college-town appearances he is making in a week to gin up enthusiasm among young voters.

“Go out there, register,” he implored the students, “Stand up. If you do, we will win Virginia and if we win Virginia we will win this election and we will finish what we started.”

Meantime, Ann Romney went to the Latino Coalition lunch here at the Republican convention, part of a concerted Republican effort to reduce Obama’s margins among Hispanics. “I admire your community so much because I know how much you value family and what sacrifices you make for your families,” she said.

She stressed the Republican theme that Obama was unsympathetic to small business. “The Latino community is the huge engine of small business,” she said, and “they are mistaken if they think they are going to be better off” if Obama is re-elected.

—

REVIVING THE economy is an appeal Republicans hope will be heard by all voters, including those who have leaned Democratic. The downturn hit everyone, after all. Pat Mullins, Republican chair in Virginia, said party polling had found that Hispanic voters were less worried about immigration policy than unemployment.

“They’re concerned about the same things we are – that their kids have the advantage to better themselves,” he said. “That’s what they moved here for.”

But around the convention there is a palpable subtext, exemplified by Jeb Bush, that just relying on the economic message was a recipe for trouble, certainly in the long term. “We need to start being certain these various communities have leadership roles,” Mullins said.

The question of roles sparked some blunt exchanges this week.

The chairman of next week’s Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, took a shot at the Republicans for lining up a string of minority speakers at the opening night of the convention. “You can’t just trot out a brown face or a Spanish surname and expect people are going to vote for your party or your candidate,” Villaraigosa said.

Indeed, the racial fault lines between the parties are creating conversations that are not always pretty.

A search for black faces at the Republican convention has become a kind of game on Twitter under the hashtag “negrospotting.” The pop singer Clay Aiken wrote that he and his brother had been watching and taking a drink each time they spotted a black face and were, as their hashtag put it, “soberasamormon.” This prompted the country star John Rich to tweet that Aiken “should be ashamed for racist comments like that.”

The Republican Party says delegates aren’t asked to identify their race, so they don’t know how many are black. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which has been counting just that since 1974, says there are 46 black delegates, or about 2 percent.

And when it comes to Hispanics, Romney hurt himself during the primaries, particularly when he refused to support Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s legislation to address the problem of young illegal aliens who were brought to the United States by their parents and have lived here for years, gone to school and built lives but remain illegal. Obama then outmaneuvered Romney by unilaterally suspending deportations of these residents.

To counter this, Romney took a step that reflects the very notion Jeb Bush raised – to look at the makeup of the electorate, shape the message and change its intensity. For his speech Thursday evening, the newly minted nominee has chosen someone to introduce him who reflects that changing demographic and can, not coincidentally, help to deliver it: Marco Rubio.

US census to change its racial classification system

WASHINGTON (AP) — To keep pace with rapidly changing notions of race, the Census Bureau wants to make broad changes to its surveys that would treat “Hispanic” as a distinct category regardless of race, end use of the term “Negro” and offer new ways to identify Middle Easterners.

The recommendations released Wednesday stem from new government research on the best ways to count the nation’s demographic groups. Still it could face stiff resistance from some racial and ethnic groups who worry that any kind of wording change in the high-stakes government count could yield a lower tally for them.

“This is a hot-button issue,” said Angelo Falcon, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy in New York City and a community adviser to the census. “The burden will be on the Census Bureau to come up with evidence that wording changes will not undermine the Latino numbers.”

Arab-Americans said they strongly support the Census Bureau’s efforts. “The Census Bureau’s current method for determining Arab ancestry yields a significant undercount of the actual size of the community, and we’re optimistic that the new form should be significantly better at capturing ancestry data,” the Arab American Institute said in a statement.

The research is based on an experiment conducted during the 2010 census in which nearly 500,000 households were given forms with the race and ethnicity questions worded differently. The findings show that many people who filled out the traditional form did not feel they fit within the five government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian, Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native; when questions were altered to address this concern, response rates and accuracy improved notably.

For instance, because Hispanic is currently defined as an ethnicity and not a race, some 18 million Latinos — or roughly 37 percent — used the “some other race” category on their census forms to establish a Hispanic racial identity. Under one proposed change to the census forms, a new question would simply ask a person’s race or origin, allowing them to check a single box next to choices including black, white, or Hispanic.

The other changes would drop use of “Negro,” leaving a choice of “black” or African-American, as well as add write-in categories that would allow Middle Easterners and Arabs to specifically identify themselves.

Census director Robert Groves, who leaves his position Friday to become provost at Georgetown University, described the research findings as an important first step toward making changes in future censuses.

“As new immigrant groups came to this country decade after decade, how we measure ethnicity changed to reflect the changing composition of the country,” Groves said. “Since that change is never ending and America gets more and more diverse, how we understand and tabulate the information has to be continually open to change.”

“It’s critical that race and ethnicity reflect how people identify themselves,” he said.

The issue isn’t just semantic. Some African-Americans in 2010, for instance, criticized a question asking if a person was “black, African- American or Negro,” saying the government’s continued use of the term “Negro” was demeaning and offensive.

“We believe the proposed changes are consistent with the way most people do choose to self-identify and will enable census to more accurately capture the growing racial/ethnic diversity in the U.S.,” the National Urban League said Wednesday in a statement.

The wording in census surveys can also be highly political: census data are used to distribute more than $400 billion in federal aid and draw political districts and thus can elicit concern if a change were to yield a lower response.

While individual Hispanics have expressed dissatisfaction with census forms that don’t count Latino as a race, Latino political groups have been reticent about pushing for a change. The main reason: Past research has sometimes shown that treating Latinos as a mutually exclusive group on survey forms leads to a lower Hispanic count.

“Why would Latinos want to give up their own question on the census form that specifically asks if they are of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin?” asks Falcon of the National Institute for Latino Policy. He notes that the current wording, which first asks people if they are of Latino origin and then prompts them to fill in their race, fostered a strong count in 2010 that yielded a new census milestone for Latinos of 50 million, or 1 in 6 Americans.

Nicholas Jones, chief of the racial statistics branch at the Census Bureau, said the government’s more recent research found that Latino response rates were similar under both the current and the new proposed format. Across all race and ethnic groups, the nonresponse rates dropped notably to 1 percent under the proposed change, compared with nonresponse rates of roughly 4 to 5 percent with the traditional form.

Jones said the research identified ways to improve responses that will be used to discuss any survey changes with members of the Latino, black, Asian and other communities leading up to the 2020 census.

The government definitions of race groups are set by the White House Office of Management and Budget. Currently, Hispanics are an ethnic group, which means although they share a common language, culture and heritage, they do not share a common race. They can be black, white, Asian, American Indian or descended from original peoples of a place colonized by Spain.

Changes to questions on census forms also must be approved by Congress.

Other research findings:

—Removing the term “Negro” from the census form did not hurt the response rates of African-Americans. While some people in 2000 indicated that the term still had relevance to them, this number has steadily declined since then.

—Under the proposed changes, the number of people who reported multiple races increased significantly. The multiracial population is currently one of the nation’s fastest growing demographic groups.

—When provided write-in lines, as much as 50 percent of people who checked their race as “white” wrote in an ethnicity such as Italian, Polish, Arab, Iranian or Middle Eastern. More than 76 percent of black respondents also wrote in an ethnicity, such as Jamaican, Haitian or Ethiopian.

—Based on focus groups, many people supported creating a separate racial category for those who identify as Middle Eastern or North African.

Many demographers predict a wider range of responses on census forms and blurring of racial categories over the next 50 years as the minority population grows and interracial marriage becomes more common. In the case of Hispanics, the nation’s largest minority group, the label as an ethnicity to date has created particular confusion.

For instance, the Census Bureau describes Asian-Americans as the nation’s fastest-growing race group from 2000 to 2010; their rate of growth is actually equal to that of Hispanics, an ethnic group. On the other hand, Hispanics are typically treated as a race for purposes of counting “interracial” marriages in the U.S.

Terry Minnis, director of census and voting programs at the Asian American Justice Center, said more tests are needed to ensure that Asian-Americans are fully counted under a new question format. Recent tests by the Census Bureau show some decreases in responses when there were fewer check boxes available for the various Asian-American groups, which include among others Asian Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Vietnamese.

“As the Census Bureau looks to develop new strategies that maximize measurement and reporting on race and ethnicity, it must ensure that nothing compromises the quality and detail of data on Asian Americans,” Minnis said.

Obesity affected by surrounding race groups

The racial and ethnic composition of a community is associated with the obesity risk of individuals living within the community, according to a study led by researchers at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings, published in the June 14 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, may help explain disparities in obesity rates among racial groups and point to some of the environmental factors that may contribute to obesity in the United States.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which represented a cross-section of the U.S. population. The data were matched with geographical information from the U.S. Census. Obesity was calculated based on each study participant’s body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight in relation to height.

Analysis of the data found that community ethnic composition might affect residents’ likelihood of being obese, and the effect varied by the residents’ own ethnicity, for example, living in a community with a Hispanic population of 25 percent or greater was associated with 21 percent higher odds for obesity for Hispanics in that community. Non-Hispanic whites had 23 percent higher odds for obesity living in the same community.

The opposite was true for communities with high concentrations of non-Hispanic Asians. In those communities, the odds for obesity were 28 percent lower for non-Hispanic whites in those communities. While non-Hispanic blacks have the highest rates of obesity in U.S., living in a community with a high concentration of non-Hispanic blacks did not raise the odds of obesity even among non-Hispanic blacks.

“Obesity is one of the nation’s most pressing health problems, and our findings suggest that community characteristics related to racial and ethnic composition may have an important effect on residents’ weight,” said James B. Kirby, PhD, of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, who was the lead author of the study. “This study will enhance understanding of the disparities in the U.S. obesity epidemic and how certain racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected.”

“Social and built environments play an important role in influencing individuals’ health outcomes including obesity. Future research needs to better understand the mechanisms, but clearly interventions are needed to reduce obesity disparities in the United States,” said Youfa Wang, MD, PhD, MS, coauthor of the study and director of the Johns Hopkins Global Center on Childhood Obesity and Associate Professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/1g8TE)