Immigrants Are Voting Like Americans

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Research by Alex Nowrasteh suggests that immigrant voters are voting like the rest of America on most issues, except immigration. He writes at the Cato Institute:

My research on immigrant policy opinions showed that their positions were similar to those of native-born Americans on most issues except for immigration, where immigrants supported liberalization. The policy and institutional effects of immigration were positive or neutral from a conservative perspective. However, immigrants and Hispanics still tended to vote Democratic and severely limited the reach of this research. After all, a self-interested politician would reasonably only look at voting patterns. Another problem was that everybody overlearned lessons from 1990s California. Yes, the GOP committed suicide there by embracing nativism—but the lesson did not translate to other states. The effect was not generalizable, as a social scientist would say.

Here’s how I ended my recent updated piece on Proposition 187 and immigration politics in California:

The California Republican Party’s decision to represent the anti-immigration wing of the American electorate in the early 1990s destroyed that state’s GOP for at least a generation in exchange for winning one election in 1994 and a symbolic victory on Proposition 187 that didn’t actually change policy. That was a bad deal. What happened in California at that time appears to be a perfect storm of events that undermined the GOP in that state, but state Republican Parties in other states that passed harsher immigration laws like Arizona, Texas, and Florida don’t seem to have suffered the same fate and neither has the national GOP.

The oft-repeated phrase “as California goes, so goes the nation” should be replaced with “as California goes, so goes California” in at least this one case. Anti-immigration politics can likely explain California’s dramatic shift leftward, but that effect is confined to the Golden State.

Immigrants and their descendants are assimilating well into American society and politics. The GOP didn’t need to moderate its immigration position, and maybe demographic voting patterns would have converged sooner with more of a GOP emphasis on law and order or other appeals than nativism, but that’s a counterfactual we can’t test and will never be able to. In all, I’m happier for the future of the United States that immigrants and their descendants are assimilating well than I would be if immigration were a political wedge issue like I thought it was a decade ago. This week’s election returns are dramatic evidence that immigrants and their children are assimilating to American political norms, that they are voting Republican in huge numbers, and that Donald Trump defeated the best politically self-interested argument for Republicans to oppose increased legal immigration.

Read more here.