Instapundit links a most eye-opening article by
Mark Steyn:
To an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but
documented up to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of
Election Night analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession. On Fox
News, Democrat Kirsten Powers argued that Republicans needed to deal
with the reality that America is becoming what she called a "brown
country." 
Her fellow Democrat Bob Beckel observed on several occasions
that if the share of the "white vote" was held down below 73 percent,
Mitt Romney would lose. In the end, it was 72 percent, and he did.
Beckel's assertion – that if you knew the ethnic composition of the
electorate you also knew the result – turned out to be correct.
This is what less-enlightened societies call tribalism: for example,
in the 1980 election leading to Zimbabwe's independence, Joshua Nkomo's
ZAPU-PF got the votes of the Ndebele people while Robert Mugabe's
ZANU-PF secured those of the Shona – and, as there were more Shona than
Ndebele, Mugabe won.
… Everyone talks about this demographic transformation as if it's a
natural phenomenon, like Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, I notice that many of
those exulting in the inevitable eclipse of "white America" are the same
people who assure me that demographic arguments about the Islamization
of Europe are completely preposterous. But in neither the United States
nor Europe is it a natural phenomenon. Rather, it's the fruit of
conscious government policy.
According to the Census, in 1970 the "Non-Hispanic White" population
of California was 78 percent. By the 2010 census, it was 40 percent.
Over the same period, the 10 percent Hispanic population quadrupled and
caught up with whites.
That doesn't sound terribly "natural" does it? If one were informed
that, say, the population of Nigeria had gone from 80 percent black in
1970 to 40 percent black today, one would suspect something rather odd
and unnatural had been going on. Twenty years ago, Rwanda was about 14
percent Tutsi. Now it's just under 10 percent. So it takes a bunch of
Hutu butchers getting out their machetes and engaging in seven-figure
genocide to lower the Tutsi population by a third. But, when the white
population of California falls by half, that's "natural," just the way
it is, one of those things, could happen to anyone.
… perhaps Bob Beckel's more crudely determinative analysis will prove
correct – that, in a multicultural society, jostling identity groups
will stick with the party of ethnocultural spoils.
Once upon a time, the Democrats thought differently. It was their
first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, who imposed the concept of
"self-determination" on post-Great War Europe, insisting that the
multicultural empires of the Habsburgs and Romanovs be replaced by a
patchwork of ethnic statelets from the Balkans to the Baltics. He would
be surprised to find his own party presiding over a Habsburgian America
of bilingual Balkanization as a matter of electoral strategy.
The short history of the Western Hemisphere is as follows: North
America was colonized by Anglo-Celts, Central and South America by
"Hispanics." Up north, two centuries of constitutional evolution and
economic growth; down south, coups, corruption, generalissimos and
presidents-for-life. None of us can know the future. It may be that
Charles Krauthammer is correct that Hispanics are natural Republicans
merely pining for amnesty, a Hallmark Cinco de Mayo card and a mariachi
band at the inaugural ball. Or it may be that, in defiance of Dr.
Krauthammer, Grover Norquist and Little Mary Sunshine, demographics is
destiny and, absent assimilationist incentives this country no longer
imposes, a Latin-American population will wind up living in a
Latin-American society.
… Republicans think they're importing hardworking immigrants who want a
shot at the American Dream; the Democrats think they're importing
clients for Big Government. The Left is right: Just under 60 percent of
immigrants receive some form of welfare. … While
Canada and Australia compete for high-skilled immigrants, America
fast-tracks an unskilled welfare class of such economic benefit to their
new homeland they can't even afford a couple of hundred bucks for the
necessary paperwork.
