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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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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.

The math is much more generous for swing states. A few ten thousand votes in the right swing states and you have a new electoral coalition. The Biden administration is bringing in millions.

Are you conflating encounters and admissions?

Regardless, I don’t think the average illegal alien is voting. They don’t appear to have done so in the last election, at least.

All those anchor babies grow up with citizenship. Give it time

Unless you have some wildly compelling evidence otherwise, most of what I've seen indicates that those born in the US, raised in the US, even to immigrant parents tend to vote at least in broad strokes similar to their peers, and don't follow their parent's preferences to any abnormal degree. Certainly it's hard to imagine an 18-year-old voting Democrat for the sole reason they are eternally and perpetually grateful for their parents being allowed into the country by Democrats 18+ years earlier... that's just not how people vote.

Who are their peers?