Thread: Immigration, Realignment, Demise of Republican Political

Several tables within the text and citatiions within the End Notes may make this report more easily read in the original, available by clicking on the source link at the end. Opinions expressed are those of the author.

Immigration, Political Realignment, and the Demise of Republican Political Prospects

By James G. Gimpel
February 2010
Backgrounders and Reports

Download a pdf of this Backgrounder
http://www.cis.org/articles/2010/republican-demise.pdf

James G. Gimpel is a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park. He can be reached at jgimpel@gvpt.umd.edu.

This Backgrounder examines the political implications of large-scale immigration. Between 1980 and 2008, 25.2 million people were granted permanent residency (green cards) by the United States. A comparison of voting patterns in presidential elections across counties over the last three decades shows that large-scale immigration has caused a steady drop in presidential Republican vote shares throughout the country. Once politically marginal counties are now safely Democratic due to the propensity of immigrants, especially Latinos, to identify and vote Democratic. The partisan impact of immigration is relatively uniform throughout the country, even though local Republican parties have taken different positions on illegal immigration. Although high immigration may work against Democratic policy goals, such as raising wages for the poor and protecting the environment, it does improve Democratic electoral prospects. In contrast, immigration may help Republican business interests hold down wages, but it also undermines the party’s political fortunes. Future levels of immigration are likely to be a key determinant of Republicans’ political prospects moving forward.

The electoral impact of immigration has been greatest in counties with large populations, where most immigrants settle. In these locations, Republicans have lost 0.58 percentage points in presidential elections for every one percentage-point increase in the size of the local immigrant population. On average the immigrant share has increased 9.5 percent in these counties.

In counties of at least 50,000, where the immigrant share increased by at least two percentage points from 1980 to 2008, 62 percent saw a decline in the Republican percentage. In counties with at least a four percentage-point increase, 74 percent saw a decline in the GOP vote. In counties with at least a six percentage-point gain in the immigrant share, 83 percent saw a decline in the GOP vote share.

Republicans have remained competitive in presidential elections because losses in high-immigration counties have been offset by steady gains in low-immigration counties.

Even in Texas and Florida, often thought to be an exception, the rising immigrant population across counties is associated with sharply diminished support for Republican candidates.

In Texas, for example, the estimate shows that for every one percentage-point increase in the immigrant population in a county, the Republican vote share dropped by 0.67 percentage points, which is more than the decline nationally association with immigration.

The decline does not seem to be associated with the local Republican Party’s position on illegal immigration.
Introduction

How has the growth of the immigrant population changed the political partisan leanings of the places where immigrants have settled? The answer to this question is of considerable interest to academic specialists, journalists, interest groups, and political parties engaged in the immigration policy debate. If the impact of mass immigration is politically neutral, there is no reason to be concerned that constituencies will change appreciably by the settlement and naturalization of new arrivals. In that case, immigration might have economic and cultural impacts that should be anticipated, but no one need be concerned about political shifts.

On the other hand, if immigration does change the politics of locales, districts, and even entire states, then what might those changes entail? Certainly one important implication will be a resultant public shift toward favoring governmental activism — a belief that government should do more, rather than less. Latino voters, for instance, are presently among the demographic groups that are most strongly behind an activist government. This is undoubtedly because they have, on balance, lower incomes, and concentrate in areas monopolized by Democratic Party politics into which they are easily socialized.

Observers have witnessed the concurrent surge in California’s immigrant population, fueled mostly by the relocation of less-educated Mexicans, along with its rising Democratic Party majority, especially in presidential elections.1 Recent studies of Latino party identification have shown that those of Mexican origin, and occupying the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, are especially likely to identify with the Democratic Party (Alvarez and Garcia-Bedolla 2003, 40). Remarkably, Latinos in California appear to vote overwhelming Democratic even when Republican Latino candidates are on the ballot opposing Anglo Democrats (Michelson 2005).

It is not surprising, then, that the nation’s sustained flow of lower-skilled immigrants, largely from Latin America, has given rise to predictions of an emerging Democratic Party majority by a variety of studious onlookers (Judis and Texiera 2002; Campbell 2008; Arnoldy 2008; Lopez and Taylor 2009). After all, the propensity for immigrants, and especially Latinos, to be swing voters has been wildly exaggerated by wishful-thinking Republican politicians and business-seeking pollsters who refuse to acknowledge the durability of individual party identification (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002). Nevertheless, the rise in Democratic Party prospects in California and elsewhere has more than a single source, and it is always questionable just how much this partisan realignment can be attributed to immigration.

Naturalization, Voting, and Political Influence

In most locations in the United States, the most direct instrument for the political influence of immigrants is the naturalization process, by which immigrants become citizens and can then vote. It is well known that not all immigrants naturalize as soon as they are eligible.2 The longer an immigrant resides in the United States, however, the more likely he or she is to naturalize. Moreover, according to recent reports the share of eligible immigrants choosing to naturalize reached a 25-year peak of 59 percent in 2005, up from just 48 percent in 1995 (Passel 2007). Estimates of annual naturalizations were running about 650,000 per year as of mid-decade, with about 35 percent of the present foreign-born population now naturalized and eligible to vote. The rate of naturalization for Mexicans, by far the single largest immigrant nationality group, has also increased, though it is still lower than other immigrant groups, at around 35 percent of the eligible Mexican immigrant population (Passel 2007).

Origins matter, as the naturalization rate from Latin America is lower than from other regions of the world. About 4.4 million immigrants from Latin America are naturalized (46 percent of those eligible), compared with four million from Asian nations (71 percent), 2.8 million from Europe and Canada (69 percent), and 444,000 from Africa and the rest of the world (59 percent) (Passel 2007).3 Although Latino immigrants have the lowest naturalization rate, their sheer numbers make them a potentially influential population, casting about 7.4 percent of all votes in national elections (Lopez and Taylor 2009; Lopez 200. Notably, more recent immigrant entry cohorts also show themselves to be naturalizing faster than did previous cohorts (Passel 2007, 16). Related research has shown increasing levels of political mobilization among naturalized immigrants, at least in some key states (Barreto 2005).

With rising immigration, and faster naturalization rates, the potential for immigrants to exert direct political influence is higher than it has been in the past. But for this influence to register, immigrants must have decidedly different political viewpoints and preferences than the native-born. If immigrants possess or come to acquire the same partisan predispositions as natives and divide their votes in the same way, there is not likely to be much political change resulting from their emergence into the electorate.

But recent studies have indicated that the foreign-born, and particularly the large Latino immigrant populations, do not mimic the attitudinal and behavioral tendencies of natives. They have slightly lower participation rates, and they are far more Democratic in their party identification and vote preference. Throughout the last decade, for instance, surveys large enough to represent the foreign-born population eligible to vote all showed a lopsided preference for the Democratic Party. The 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, conducted by YouGov/Polimetrix, gauged the partisan preferences of over 1,700 naturalized immigrants and found 55 percent to be Democratic identifiers, 31 percent Republican, and 14 percent independent (see Table 1).4 The 2004 National Annenberg Election Study found a similar percentage of naturalized citizens to be allied with the Democratic Party: 49 percent, compared to just 32 percent for Republicans and 19 percent for independents (n=4,13.



In non-presidential years, the Democratic bias appears to drop due to the considerably smaller electorate casting ballots in mid-term contests. The YouGov/Polimetrix survey in 2006 exhibited less Democratic bias among immigrants eligible to vote, at 51 percent, compared with 36 percent Republican identifiers and 13 percent independent (Table 1). In both the 2006 and 2008 surveys, however, the independents actually leaned lopsidedly Democratic, and voted that way in the November general election. Democratic senators, for instance, captured 64 percent of the immigrant vote actually cast in 2006, compared with just 34 percent won by the GOP candidates. This favoritism of the Democrats in mid-term contests is especially pronounced in closely competitive elections, as previous research on the Latino electorate has shown (Gimpel 2007; Gimpel 2003). Republicans do well in mid-term contests among immigrants only in cases where immigrant turnout drops and/or the GOP candidate is an overwhelming favorite, bringing only the most Republican-identifying immigrant voters to the polls.

More importantly, among immigrants who are not yet citizens, these same surveys show an even greater preference for the Democratic Party (Table 1). With the Democratic bias in immigrant political preference so decisive and so predictable, it is no surprise that the rise in immigrant populations should directly lead to ever-growing Democratic majorities in the places where immigrants settle, and declining electoral prospects for Republicans. The instrument of this partisan realignment is the directly observable behavior of the immigrants themselves.

Immigration and Displacement

Even when immigrants are slow to naturalize and vote, however, the instrument of political realignment at the local level can lie in the indirect force of population displacement. If particular populations are pushed out of areas as a consequence of large-scale immigrant flows, this could have the impact of altering the political complexion of districts, states, and regions.

A number of labor economists, economic historians, and demographers have documented the prodigious outflow of natives associated with immigrant influx (Frey 1996; Frey and Liaw 1998; Frey, Liaw, Xie, and Carlson 1996; Borjas 1999, Chap 4; Hatton and Williamson 2006, Chap. 14). The exodus is a consequence of downward pressure on wages coupled with rising housing prices, costs that natives would rather avoid by moving elsewhere. These “crowding outâ€

Thanks, T2s. Now I am really depressed.
Just think about how many future Democrat voters were born today, especially to illegal parents. Probably one out of 350 will be a future Republican.