Kevin McCarthy Repesents Big Ag. Interests

What John Boehner’s Surprise Resignation Means For Immigration Reform

by Esther Yu-Hsi Leehttp://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/...rd_blue_16.png Sep 28, 2015 2:23pm




House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is the favorite to succeed John Boehner (R-OH) after his surprise resignation as the House Speaker last week. The appointment of McCarthy, who represents a heavily Latino district, to preside over a more radically conservative Republican caucus could have implications for immigration reform.
McCarthy’s district encompasses the agriculture powerhouses of Kern and Tulare counties, which produced $3 billion annually in crops like “cotton, citrus, grapes, stone fruits, pistachios, wine grapes, almonds, olives, tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, alfalfa, cattle and sheep,” according to his website. His district is also about 35 percent Latino, and employs a massive number of farmworkers. Grower and labor union statistics suggest it’s possible that upwards of 70 percent of all farmworkers in the country are undocumented.
Yet McCarthy has so far maintained a strict opposition to immigration reform. As the highest-ranking House member, McCarthy’s immigration-restrictionist stance could hurt the Republican Party, especially as Latinos amass more voting power and the demographics of this country shift towards a majority-minority nation.
On his website, McCarthy takes a hard-line approach, stating that he would not support so-called “amnesty,” that the government should focus on securing the border first, and that “illegal immigrants are not receiving any of the benefits that are reserved for American Citizens.” He supported legal status for some undocumented immigrants last year, but refused to take up comprehensive immigration reform on a House floor vote as recently as March 2015.
But the political climate might force a change. Numerous polls indicate that immigration is a very important topic for at least 63 percent of Latino voters because they personally know an undocumented immigrant.
Without movement on federal immigration reform, Latino voters will instead vote for candidates who aren’t actively campaigning on a mass deportation platform. Latino votes will likely play a crucial role in the 2016 presidential race: roughly 66,000 eligible Latino voters turn 18 years old every month, or one every 30 seconds. About 11.2 million Latino voters turned out for the 2012 general election, but it’s expected that more Latinos will vote in 2016, particularly spurred on by the anti-immigrant rhetoric espoused by some Republican candidates. A Latino Decisions report found that the GOP would need the votes of anywhere between 42 percent and 52 percent of the Latino vote to win a majority of the general election.
In order to find common ground with future eligible voters, as the GOP has said it needs to do, McCarthy will need to bring a House floor vote on issues that reflect an increasingly majority-minority country, meaning that population growth comes mainly from immigration and that there have been fewer births and more deaths among whites.
McCarthy’s own state is perhaps a good model for how Republican voters have adapted to their majority-minority population. About 61 percent of Californian Republicans favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a route that would include paying penalties, learning English, and undergoing a criminal background check. Decades after the passage of the anti-immigration law known as Proposition 187, the state passed bills that would make life easier for undocumented immigrants, including allowing some to have in-state tuition, receive driver’s licenses, and get limited healthcare access.
At least three other congressional Republicans representing similar, immigrant-heavy districts rooted in the agricultural industry, David Valadao, Jeff Denham, and Devin Nunes, embrace broad immigration changes.

McCarthy is not the guy, kick him to the curb.

I am afraid we are stuck with McCarthy. I am also afraid that he can make us wish for Boehner. May I be wrong in both cases, please.

I think you are right. It is one thing to object to flaws in someone; it is another to actually oversee the replacement into success. I think we need to get after true immigration enforcement members in the US House ( and maybe the Senate, too) and tell him to toe the line, or else. I think that can be done.

Kevin McCarthy certainly represents the interests of illegal aliens and those that hire them more than the American citizens he is sworn to serve.

W

No, McCarthy isn't a given. But if it turns out that he becomes Speaker, then you know we've lost our Congress.

Quote:

---

In order to find common ground with future eligible voters, as the GOP has said it needs to do, McCarthy will need to bring a House floor vote on issues that reflect an increasingly majority-minority country, meaning that population growth comes mainly from immigration and that there have been fewer births and more deaths among whites.

---

Think Progress is really pushing racism.

So is Al Jazeera. Anyone that doesn't see the writing on this wall is, I fear, blind. Unfortunately for Al Jazeera, Steve King only stated a fact. Many of the "migrants" pay the cartel by smuggling drugs as they cross the border. - It is a documented fact.


Why Latinos won’t become white


Assuming Latinos will join the white majority ignores the stark divisions in a racially diverse group

October 22, 2014 11:30AM ET
by Gabriel Arana @gabrielarana

In the lead-up to the midterms, President Barack Obama has been parroting the conventional wisdom about the GOP’s future: Republicans are doomed if they keep up their opposition to immigration reform and continue the inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric. “It’s anybody’s guess how Republicans are thinking about this,” he saidduring a town hall event in Santa Monica, California. “If they were thinking long term politically, it is suicide for them not to do this.”

Latinos make up 14 percent of the population, and their share is projected to grow to 29 percent by 2050. This demographic traditionally identifies with the Democratic Party; the toxic immigration debate in Washington, fueled by xenophobes in the GOP, will only increase that tendency. In 2006, 49 percent of Latino eligible voters identified as or leaned Democratic. By 2011, that number jumped to 67 percent. With the United States projected to become a majority-minority country by 2043, Republicans’ chances of winning the White House on the backs of white voters will grow ever slimmer.

But a counternarrative, one that would put Latino votes back in contention for the GOP, has begun to emerge. In the coming decades, Latinos could become “white” — a process in which cultural assimilation would presumably be followed by political realignment — opening them up to affiliation with the Republican Party. It’s a theory espoused most prominently by Slate political writer Jamelle Bouie, who argues in the winter issue of Democracy that “the future won’t be majority-minority; it will be a white majority, where Spanish last names are common.” But this vision of complete assimilation ignores the stark racial divisions in Latin American societies, in which socioeconomic status and skin color, as in the U.S., tend to fall along parallel lines.

Ethnic attrition


The idea of Latinos becoming white in the American sense — a vision of racial and cultural assimilation independent of self-identified race — isn’t a new one. Economists Brian Duncan at the University of Colorado and Stephen Trejo at the University of Texas at Austin call it ethnic attrition. As Latinos intermarry and climb the socioeconomic ladder, the theory goes, they are less likely to self-identify as Hispanic. Duncan and Trejo’s research shows (PDF) that while virtually all first- and second-generation Hispanic immigrants identify as Hispanic, in the third generation, those of mixed heritage start to self-select out of this group. Among third-generation immigrants with only two Hispanic grandparents, 79 percent identify as Hispanic. Among those with only one Hispanic grandparent, the number falls to 58 percent. Think of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, whose father is Cuban and whose mother is white, or comedian Louis C.K., whose grandmother is Mexican and whose other grandparents are Irish and Hungarian.
Racial self-identification tends to be reflected in one’s politics. A recent analysis of election-survey data by Spencer Piston, a political scientist at Syracuse University, shows that lighter-skinned Latinos, who are more likely to identify as white, vote Republican at higher rates than those with darker skin. Bouie’s prediction is that in the future, more and more Latinos will identify as white and that a substantial number of them will also identify as Republicans. Democrats’ dreams of a solid future majority could thus be imperiled.

History shows just how fluid such self-identification is. As historian Noel Ignatiev argues in his landmark work, “How the Irish Became White,” when Irish immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1800s, they faced significant discrimination at the hands of the Anglo-American ruling class. Irish-Americans were for generations a reliable Democratic voting bloc, but intermarriage and the Democratic Party’s embrace of African-American rights led to a political realignment. Irish-Americans came to view themselves — and be viewed — as part of the white mainstream. While these voters continued to lean Democratic, by the 1980s they joined the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency.

Overlooked in discussions about Latino racial identity is the persistence of discrimination, which tends to strengthen existing racial categories.

Will Latinos follow the patterns of Irish immigrants before them? To an extent, certainly. One of the strongest pieces of evidence for this — and the reason Latinos are the group commentators most frequently talk about becoming “white” — is that interracial marriage rates are highest between whites and Hispanics. A full 80 percent of third-generation Mexican-Americans are the product of intermarriage. Another finding that has fueled much of the recent discussion about Latino self-identification is a study from the Pew Research Center earlier this year showing that 2.5 million Americans changed their self-identified race and ethnicity from “Hispanic and some other race” in the 2000 census to “Hispanic white” in the 2010 census.

But as Julio Varela at the blog Latino Rebels suggests, the 2.5 million Latinos who switched their identity from just “Hispanic” to “Hispanic white” most likely reflects confusion or ambivalence about how to label oneself rather than a realignment of racial identity. Case in point: The same study of census data showed that 1.3 million Latinos made the switch in the opposite direction.

Diverse identities


By assuming uniform motivations, the “today’s Latinos, tomorrow’s whites” framework also flattens a racially diverse group — one that includes light-skinned people whose ancestors hail from Spain; indigenous South Americans; blacks in the Caribbean, Brazil and Colombia with roots in Africa; Asian immigrants to Latin America; and those with mixed European and indigenous heritage.
Immigrants hailing from the 20 countries south of the U.S. border, tend to share certain characteristics. Reflecting a history of colonization, they tend to speak Spanish or Portuguese and practice Catholicism; their families tend to be bigger; Latin American cultures tend to be more collectivist. In the U.S., attacks on immigrants have increasingly made those with roots in Mexico and Central and South America see their political fates as intertwined. But if asked, most Latinos in the U.S. refer to themselves by their national-origin group — Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban. And while it doesn’t look like immigration reform is passing any time soon, if it does, Latinos may be even less likely to use the pan-ethnic Latino label.
This isn’t to say that light-skinned Latinos of European descent won’t increasingly assimilate into the white mainstream as Irish (and Italian) immigrants did. That’s already happening, to an extent. But whether this will be the case with other subgroups is an open question, in part because there isn’t much data on it. Because of the persistence of the United States’ limited black/white/Asian/Latino classification system, we don’t know the intermarriage rates between black Hispanics and whites or whites and Hispanics of indigenous descent. Nor do we know the racial composition of Hispanics who checked — or did not check — the “white” box in the 2010 census.
Finally, a simple but important factor that often gets overlooked in discussions about Latino racial identity is the persistence of discrimination, which tends to strengthen existing racial categories. (Remember that even highly successful mixed blacks such as the president continue to face discrimination, and while Obama jokes about standing out as white among blacks, most of the American public considers him black.) To ask whether Latinos will see themselves as Latino or white in the future is also to ask how long the GOP will continue to be dominated by the likes of Iowa Rep. Steve King, who said that for every undocumented minor who becomes a valedictorian, “there’s another hundred out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinion...nicitygop.html

This is just a thought, I have no proof. Probably thanks to the feds I have no proof.

Oh, the thought. It is remarked many times about where do all those aliens get enough money to pay coyotes up to seven thousand dollars for guiding and driving aliens to the border. What if those aliens are not Mexicans, Salvadorans, or Guatemalans? What if even 10 to 20 percent of them are middle easterners with ISIS sympathies? Pray that there is no basis for my thought! If there is any substance to the thought, we are losing a war fast!

Now Russia is pushing us out of the fight, even bombing our allies? How much can we defeat?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by kevinssdad

This is just a thought, I have no proof. Probably thanks to the feds I have no proof.

Oh, the thought. It is remarked many times about where do all those aliens get enough money to pay coyotes up to seven thousand dollars for guiding and driving aliens to the border. What if those aliens are not Mexicans, Salvadorans, or Guatemalans? What if even 10 to 20 percent of them are middle easterners with ISIS sympathies? Pray that there is no basis for my thought! If there is any substance to the thought, we are losing a war fast!

Now Russia is pushing us out of the fight, even bombing our allies? How much can we defeat?

---

They get their money from the drug cartels mostly, but also from other illegal enterprises including terrorism businesses.