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So I am seeing people like Elon Musk repeat stuff (tweet here) about Democrats deliberately offering some sort of citizenship-for-votes scheme. Laying aside that there are other reasons besides nefarious ones to want to give legal status at least (not even necessarily citizenship) to people who have lived here in some cases for decades, he had a pretty specific claim, that the 1986 amnesty law flipped California blue effectively forever.
But I don't think the math works out? Anyone want to check this?
~2.7 mil made legal from 1986 law seems to be the common estimate. Here claims 1.6 million applied in California. This report says that 90% were approved. But critically, just because you're made legal doesn't mean you can vote! The same report said that as of 2001, only a third had naturalized. Generally speaking, only half of immigrants ever fully naturalize. That means in the 15 years after the amnesty, only in the ballpark of 500-700k voters were likely added to California rolls. Here we can see that Latinos in general do skew Democratic, but the gap varies by year, anywhere from an 9 to 52% gap. Is that enough to make a difference? In 1996, with that biggest gap, that would be 250k-350k (very ballpark) swing votes, but the margin of victory was at the lowest around 350k in 1988 (about 250k at most according to the gap that year, but I think this was far too soon for the naturalization numbers to swell even that large, since the process takes a few years even for legal residents). Every other election had a gap of well over a million votes! So if you go on and match up the years and the Hispanic vote gap, the effect is even less, often dramatically less: 2004 we see 9% or about 60 thousand votes of delta, versus a margin of victory of around 1.25 million votes, so a very small fraction.
So even the poster child of amnesty doesn't seem to fit with the narrative. Okay, sure, fine, when you drill down to more local elections, not just presidential ones, it can make a difference. But overall, California's blue-ness seems to only be very slightly due to the amnesty bill. If I were a fact-checker, I think I'd say "mostly false" -- the math VERY plainly does NOT work, and doesn't fit with history, but there might be some nugget of plausibility buried. I think you can still, despite these clear factual falsehoods, in good faith make an argument that granting citizenship is a bald-faced political power grab, but I think there are other, stronger explanations. In this sense, the general ideas behind "great replacement theory" might hold some water on the cultural side, but in terms of the actual mechanisms of governance, consider me quite underwhelmed.
Note that the same could not be said for DC statehood -- that's something that in my opinion couldn't possibly be less nakedly partisan and also wildly unconstitutional. I bring it up here as a sort of rough proxy or prior for the general claim about power grabs being real/something to be worried about. When it came up in 2021, 37 senators co-sponsored the legislation. Allowing for some good faith there too (no taxation without representation?), I'd say you can conclude that maybe half of all politicians are willing to make such a power grab? But there's a reason 37 senators is not enough to pass a bill. Once you reach the neighborhood of 45, the difficulty goes up exponentially, so beware accidentally "intuitively" weighting support by the simple number of cosponsors. So again, this seems to suggest that there's a lot more going on than vote-buying.
So the whole idea is far from wild fancy, but the way it's being made, and the framing seems plain partisan warfare. And remember, demographics is NOT destiny! Hispanic voters aren't even necessarily permanent, locked-in Democratic voters, only a few tweaks to the Republican party (which almost happened in 2004ish) would make the platform appeal to plenty of them. For all the noise about how you can "buy votes" via specific, targeted policies, I don't see much anecdotal evidence of that being the case. For example, would-be student loan aid recipients I know don't seem to weight it all that heavily in their decision of who and how to vote -- other things overshadow it by a lot. Polling data suggests the same is broadly true of Hispanics, even if they were to receive generous amnesty. See for example one reason why no one talks about Puerto Rico being admitted as a state: besides the fact that Puerto Ricans somewhat don't want it, neither big party is actually convinced they would in fact be the ones to get the votes. It's a wild-card they don't want to deal with.
Is this one of those things where the statistic is wrong as bait to get people complaining about real numbers? Cause I do not want to go through that again. Goalpost movement is not admirable.
Anyway. I generally agree that no single policy works as a vote purchase. That includes helicopter money. People don’t generally want a handout; they want a system which subsidizes whatever they were already doing, but makes it socially acceptable. Unfortunately, everything that resembles such a system is laundered through the lawmaking process and then tossed in the tumble dryer that is our economy. If the cycle lines up and we get a Good Economy, the program was a success and will never be removed. If it runs into a Bad Economy, it was obviously the only cause; anyone involved ought to be run out of town on a rail.
On the other hand, there are lots of ways to buy your opponent votes. Class warfare. Scandals and/or witch hunts. Doing anything that can be remotely tied to a Bad Economy.
These are powerful incentives for incrementalism. Any bold plan is a point of failure. I suspect this is why none of the Presidential candidates since Obama have pitched a signature policy. The closest we got was Trump’s wall, which appears to have been overcome by events. As with the ACA, the popular underlying concept has given way to a series of last-minute compromises tolerated by both parties.
When minorities vote Democrat at rates of 60% (Hispanic and Asian) or 90+% (black), you don't need to buy anything, you just need to have them there, and registered. They will take care of the rest with or without your handouts.
Why do you think this is the case, then?
Probably because those minorities and foreigners are exhibiting the failure mode of all democracies, especially when they are multi-racial. They know voting is a racial head-count, and if they want to be counted, they need to vote D.
The Democrats are the party of minorities and foreigners. They've chosen to be so rather than moderate their policies to appeal to the native American population. This is a reversion to form, as Democrats have been shot through with international communists and Soviet sympathizers since FDR was first elected.
This is why you see internal migration going from blue states to red states. Democrats have shit policies which drive people out. This should cause Democrats to slowly lose relevance, or force them to pivot to more reasonable policies. Instead, they import foreigners, make them citizens, and rely on those votes (and the census representation that goes with the warm bodies) to maintain relevance.
The problem with this is that it means Democrats are trying to replace their opponents, breed them out, and kill them through neglect and indifference, in order to turn the country into a one-party government. When California becomes a one-party state, people leave for Texas and Idaho. When all of the US becomes Soviet, there's nowhere left to move.
I'm interested in "failure mode of all democracies" -- do you really think this, and what evidence are you using? Because sure, I can think of a fair few countries where democracy went poorly, but I'm not sure I'd jump to "democracy always fails in this manner" or similar argument "all democratic failures happen in this manner" or even "all countries that get too multiethnic and are democracies fail this way" and the similar prediction that "all democracies are doomed to eventual failure". Not quite sure which angle exactly you're describing.
If anything, I think that the two-party system, for all its incredible and well-documented failings, actually serves as a pretty good insulation from what I think you're talking about. Since both parties have an incentive to change their policies (often incrementally, but the base pressures are there) in order to win, or regain an edge, this means that a multi-ethnic state cannot rely on simple alliances between ethnic groups, but must in some sense compete for them, and trade groups once in a while too. Don't think we'd get very far broaching replacement theory per se in this context, but more wondering about the proposed mechanism and evidence side of things. Even assuming deliberate importation of votes is happening and intentional (which I obviously above dispute), for the sake of argument here, you can't do so indefinitely. I just don't think it usually makes sense numerically, without being washed out by backlash. For example, we can plainly see that even Kamala has had to harden her border policies. That's in direct response to discontent. Might she be lying? Sure. But the discontent is real and might even cost her an election, which I count as evidence for my above contention.
Greece and Rome, mostly, as well as the American Founders reflecting on Greece and Rome. This is ancient, and has been known for millennia. This is nothing new, and it is nothing I came up with on my own.
Read Aristotle and Socrates and Plato. Read Thucydides. Read history.
If you're looking for a peer-reviewed study in Nature or Science, you've come to the wrong place.
You are incorrect, it's obviously happening, and it's happening at an unprecedented pace during this administration.
Another, longer article arguing the same.
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Even in a high-immigration scenario, US population will peak around 2080 and red tribe white TFR is the highest stable one. Just make it that far and the country gets reconquêred.
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