Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue
2016-12-01 · Guest: Alex Nowrasteh (Cato Institute) · 46:55
History and Economic Reality of US Immigration Policy
Bob Zadek and Alex Nowrasteh discuss the history and economic reality of US immigration policy. They debunk common myths regarding immigrant criminality and welfare usage while exploring the political consequences of anti-immigrant legislation, specifically focusing on how California’s Proposition 187 permanently shifted the state’s political landscape.
Topics: Immigration Policy, US History, Economics, Labor Markets, Welfare, Criminality, Proposition 187, Donald Trump, Cato Institute
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Alex Nowrasteh: Immigration Policy Specialist at the Cato Institute
Introduction to Immigration Rhetoric [00:19]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Thanks so very much for listening. I am your host, Bob Zadek. 424-BOB-SHOW is the way to call to join my conversation at any time.
Donald Trump is the first president to be elected in my memory where immigration was a major part of his campaign rhetoric. And it’s not because immigration has become within this country a major problem all of a sudden. It is more his selecting immigration was more, I think, opportunistic than speaking to a problem that reared up all of a sudden in the 2016 election.
And immigration has an interesting, immigration policy, interesting and dare I say, fairly ugly history in the United States. And what’s so interesting to me when I speak about with my friends about the subject of, and it’s always phrased as “illegal immigrants”—how do you feel about illegal immigrants? And everybody is, of course, opposed to quote “illegal immigrants.”
The interesting follow-up question—try it if you wish with your friends—the interesting follow-up question is, well, if you’re opposed to illegal immigration, which part of that are you opposed to? The illegal part or the immigrant part? That is to say, if the United States suddenly passed a law that basically put us back to the 1880s, which means let them all in, which means there is no such thing as an illegal immigrant—all immigrants are per se legal—so now there is no illegal immigrant. Would you then, those who oppose illegal immigration, would you then be done with the issue because there are no more illegal immigrants? And of course, the answer is invariably, well, not quite.
So it seems to be that the opposition to illegal immigration is far more on the immigrant part and far less on the illegal part. This is an issue that everybody has an opinion and the opinion is often strongly felt. There is much smoke out there and much misunderstanding. In order to help us sort these issues out, I’ve called upon once again my good friend and colleague, Alex Nowrasteh. Alex is an immigration policy specialist with the Cato Institute. Alex was one of my very first guests, perhaps nine years ago on my show, and has been a frequent commentator on my show since then. Alex, thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Alex Nowrasteh: Thanks, Bob. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
A Brief History of US Immigration Law [03:15]
Bob Zadek: Now Alex, a brief history of immigration law in this country. People either don’t know or tend to have forgotten that for maybe the first hundred or so years when we enjoyed profound economic growth in this country, there were virtually no immigration restrictions whatsoever. It was truly the Bob Zadek rule of quote “let them all in.” And the first immigration laws were enacted for fairly unpleasant, ugly reasons, clearly steeped in racism. So tell us the brief history of immigration regulation in this country and what drove the policy.
Alex Nowrasteh: Sure. The first laws that were passed on the topic were in 1790, and it was essentially just an open borders law that allowed, that just regulated who could become a citizen. Some nasty rules in there, but it said that anybody could come—there were no restrictions on anybody coming here on any kind of race or any kind of country of origin. And that was in 1790.
Fast forward to 1875 and Congress passed a law that basically banned criminals, banned people who were insane, and tried to target prostitutes. The intent of that law was to try to exclude Chinese women who were coming over to meet male Chinese immigrants who had come over to work in the gold rush or in other industries in California.
In 1882 is when it started to get really ugly where Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. That law did exactly what it sounds like it did; it banned Chinese immigrants into coming into the United States. And then beginning in the late 1880s, you have laws passed against the importation of workers who could break up labor unions. You had a Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the United States that would stop Japanese immigration to the United States.
In 1917, you had a law that banned illiterate immigrants and almost all immigrants from Africa and the rest of Asia coming to the United States. And then finally, you had a law in 1921 called the Emergency Quota Act. It was passed after World War I, and the idea was to put for the first time numerical quotas on immigrants from Europe, with the effect being, the intent and the effect being to discriminate against Eastern and Southern European immigrants in favor of Northern and Western European immigrants.
That law was solidified and made more exclusive by banning many categories of Southern and Eastern European immigrants in 1924. Herbert Hoover created an executive action in 1929 which basically banned almost all immigrants from Europe for the rest of the Great Depression. And then after World War II, you had sort of a gradual expansion, a gradual liberalization of immigration occurring. So in 1942, they created a guest worker visa program to help during the war to bring Mexican farmworkers up north. That was expanded in the early 1950s. You had the Immigration Act of 1952, which removed a lot of the race-based and discriminatory features of the 1924 Act.
And then you had the pretty big liberalization in 1965. It removed all of the—treated every immigrant from every country essentially the same. And then you had an Immigration Act in 1990 that basically opened the door much wider for high-skilled immigrants from overseas, especially Asians. In the mid-time, sorry I skipped 1986, you had a Reagan amnesty for some number of about three million or so Mexican illegal immigrants who were here in the United States. And since 1990, we have seen just a more of a crackdown, more spending on immigration enforcement at the border and the interior of the United States, but we haven’t seen any further liberalizations or increases in legal immigration.
Bob Zadek: As we can see, the laws that were enacted, which started to restrict immigration starting from the end of the 19th century, were for the most part driven by xenophobia, racism, just “exclude the foreigners, we don’t like them.” They weren’t driven by any findings that our self-interest as a country were furthered by immigration restrictions. And similarly, then we had liberalization again, just getting back to zero.
Alex Nowrasteh: If I could add one thing about that, Bob, too. From 1880 to about 1930 is the real sort of xenophobic, the most xenophobic period of American immigration law. But it wasn’t just racist; it was also an unholy alliance between them, labor unions, and progressives were supporting immigration bans for their own reasons as well. So it’s an unholy alliance between racists and the early 20th century, late 19th century progressives.
Bob Zadek: Bootlegger and Baptist again, huh?
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, but I’m not sure who the Baptist is here.
Bob Zadek: I guess, yeah, it’s just bootleggers and more bootleggers. No bootleggers and Baptists.
Debunking Economic Myths: Jobs and Welfare [05:00]
Bob Zadek: Now Alex, the anti-immigrant movement, if I can call it that, is allegedly driven by the fact that immigrants quote “take our jobs”—oh, how I hate that phrase because it is nobody’s job to keep, it is only your job to retain if you are the best person to do it, but that’s for another show. So we have immigrants taking quote “our jobs,” and we have immigrants coming to this country to get welfare, and why should we pay for their welfare payments? Let them stay where they were and stop taking our welfare dollars. So in other words, the argument is couched in economic terms that allowing unfettered immigration is economically bad for us. How accurate is that belief?
Alex Nowrasteh: It’s completely wrong. I mean, even if you take a look at the most anti-immigrant legitimate research done in peer-reviewed academic journals on this topic, you will find that immigration increases the size of the economy and increases the wages for all Americans far more than you see a downside in it.
And one of the main reasons is that immigrants are different than Americans in terms of their skills, in terms of their experience. So if you’re going to have your wage cut or you’re going to compete for labor with immigrants, they’ve got to be very similar to you. They’ve got to be similar level of education, language ability, experience. And most immigrants have very different levels of experience, different levels of language ability, etc. So there’s just not that much competition to begin with.
What’s remarkable, though, is that even if you look at these areas of the labor market where you would expect to see a lot of competition between Americans and immigrants, you don’t see job losses for Americans at all. You see job increases. And the evidence on wages is mixed, but all of the estimates come in with a net effect of somewhere around very, very small positive, around 1% or less in terms of a positive impact.
And the obvious reason is, when everyone talks about immigration, they assume that a big increase in the supply of workers would diminish wages. And if that was the only thing that happened, then that would be true. But immigrants are also people; they buy things and they increase demand, which also increases the demand for jobs and demand and higher wages. So you have both a supply and demand effect that pushes up wages for most Americans, at least most Americans due to immigration.
Now the welfare angle is something I’ve spent a lot of time doing research on. And what you find is, well, first off, if you’re a legal immigrant to the US on a green card, you don’t have access to almost any means-tested welfare benefits for the first five years that you’re here. If you’re an illegal immigrant, you have zero access to them. If you’re on a guest worker visa like an H-1B or you’re here as a student or anything like that, you have zero access to these benefits. So there are already pretty good laws in place to prevent that from going on.
So when you even take a look at immigrants who are eligible to receive welfare in the United States and compare them to Americans who are eligible to receive the same benefits, immigrants are much less likely to use these programs. And when they do use them, the dollar value of the benefits consumed is much less than it is for native-born Americans. So just to give you one quick number on that: if native-born Americans used Medicaid at the same rate as immigrants do, and when they do use it, they use the same amount, that program by itself would be 42% smaller.
Bob Zadek: Oh my goodness.
Alex Nowrasteh: So it’s a tremendous—they are as a group much less likely to use these benefits than similar native-born Americans, even when they’re eligible, and most of them aren’t.
Bob Zadek: And so there is no argument to be made on the merits—on the merits being the key—that immigration—I’m not going to use the phrase illegal immigration, of course, I’ve discussed that already—but immigration, there’s no argument to be made that’s data-driven that immigration as an economic activity has a negative impact on our country. And of course, it has a profoundly positive impact, especially in those areas of our economy that are dependent upon immigrant low-wage and immigrant workers, such as agriculture in the Northwest and in the South and of course in California, and in other areas which you can explain to us where without the immigrant, there is simply nobody to do the work. Now what are the areas where immigrants supply a labor need that would otherwise simply be unmet?
Alex Nowrasteh: So there are lots of jobs that I think Americans would do if the wages were much higher. But the point is that if the wages were much higher, these jobs just wouldn’t exist. So in agriculture, for instance, is one of the great industry examples that even a lot of anti-immigrant people admit is an industry that would largely die without immigration.
And what we see is, it’s true, the economy would adjust if the market got rid of all the immigrants and the farms went out of business and the wages went really high, but it would adjust in such a way that the economy would shrink. It would be smaller. In the same way that the economy would adjust if we got rid of other people or other sort of inventions that help increase production. I mean, if we got rid of electricity, we would all adjust. The economy would adjust by shrinking, though, and that’s how we would adjust by getting rid of a lot of foreigners.
Another industry that really relies on a lot of foreigners is the high-tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area. Large numbers of skilled workers, whether they be computer engineers, IT specialists, etc., work in these industries that are internationally competitive industries. And to maintain their international competitiveness, they need to have access to a liberal international labor market. Otherwise, because they have to sell their products on the international market, they need to be able to compete on the international market in terms of labor as well. So without these types of liberal immigration policies for these industries, they would have a much harder time competing internationally and indeed growing and providing jobs for Americans also.
Immigrants and Criminality [12:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, I am loath to even raise the subject because it has zero merit, but I just want to raise it only to dispose of it. There is—and Donald Trump’s first comment, we’re going to discuss Trump’s policies after we come back from break—but Donald Trump’s first pro-running for president speech was about famously about immigrant rapists and robbers, i.e., criminals, undesirables coming into this country, and they are increasing the amount of crime being perpetrated on American citizens. Help us understand what the data is on criminality within the immigrant population versus the population as a whole.
Alex Nowrasteh: So immigrants are far less likely to be convicted and incarcerated for violent and property crimes than virtually any other group of Americans. So they’re about one-fourth as likely to be incarcerated for those crimes as other Americans. And it’s important to note that if you’re arrested and convicted as an immigrant of a crime in the US, you serve your sentence before you are deported. So we’re not getting into any kind of tricky numbers here; this is a straight-up comparison.
What’s remarkable, though, is that even when you take a look at the incarceration rates for illegal immigrants—and you have to try to estimate those because it’s not reported directly in the census data—even when you take a look at those, illegal immigrants by themselves are much less likely than natives to be incarcerated for these types of offenses. A lot of them are in federal prison temporarily before being deported just for immigration offenses, not for other real crimes that you and I are concerned about. So this is one of the biggest myths out there today is that immigrants commit crimes disproportionately compared to Americans, and it’s simply not true. It’s the opposite.
Bob Zadek: And also, I believe it’s the case that culturally, especially within the Hispanic and I think Asian population, in both populations, as a matter of culture, they have strong family values. So they as a group—and I really hate to use the word “they” because it lumps too many people into a generalization—but they are simply less prone to commit crime, and they’re not coming here for the purpose of committing crime. They value their presence in the United States too much to jeopardize it with a crime, plus it’s just not their nature.
Trump’s Proposed Immigration Policies [15:30]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek and I’m speaking with Alex Nowrasteh. We are discussing immigration in America, specifically Donald Trump and what it portends for the future. After he gets his arms around the powers of government, as best you can tell, if you take President-elect Trump at his word, what will immigration policy look like in America?
Alex Nowrasteh: So based on his position paper that he published last year, there are a bunch of issues that he’s very specific on. One is a huge increase in border enforcement, including the border wall, which was the number one chant at his rallies was “build the wall.” So he wants to build a wall out to about 1,000 miles along the border with Mexico to try to stop unlawful immigration that way.
In terms of interior immigration enforcement, he wants to triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who run the deportation programs currently. So he wants to increase that by about threefold. He also wants to institute a program called E-Verify nationally. He wants to make it so that every time—and E-Verify is a program, every time you’re hired as an employee, what it does is that the employer has to then run your name and information through a government database to make sure that you’re legally eligible to work in the United States. So what he wants to do is make it so that every time a private employer hires somebody, they must use that E-Verify system to try to cut those people out.
He wants to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Obama put in place through executive action in 2012 that deferred the deportation of some illegal immigrants who were brought here as children who have met certain categories who aren’t violent criminals or things like that and gave them a temporary work permit. He wants to get rid of that.
He wants to have mandatory detention for all illegal immigrants who are apprehended in the United States, making sure that they spend time in a detention facility. And most worrying—all those things are worrying to me, but the two most worrying things is: one, he wants to decrease the amount of legal immigration into the United States. He says he wants to cut the number of green cards for workers down to about zero until the economy fully recovers and the unemployment rate is zero. And he also wants to end the entire refugee program, either entirely or just for Muslims who are making it into the US through the refugee program.
Sanctuary Cities and the 10th Amendment [19:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, assuming all of that is accomplished, first of all, there are so many questions. The first question is, how much of that in your opinion—and it’s all very vague, it’s all mostly talking points right now—but how much of that would require legislation, which means he has to get in effect 60 votes in the Senate as well as he’s going to have the House? How much of it can be done by executive order? Obama has refined the art of the executive order, although President Bush apparently issued more executive orders in number, but Obama’s were far more far-reaching. But how much can Trump do with his quote “pen and his phone” versus how much requires legislation?
Alex Nowrasteh: So he can end the DACA program immediately because that was an executive action. He can either revoke it for all the current young adults and kids who have it, or he can just make it so that they can’t reapply, so it will run out in about two years for all those people. So he could do that on his own.
He could also kill the refugee program entirely on his own because in law, the president has a lot of authority and discretion in accepting refugees and putting in place a lot of the vetting procedures, and they could make that so burdensome that they could cut out virtually anybody from there.
Now in terms of decreasing worker immigration, that’s more tricky. He couldn’t change the numbers in terms of the law that are allowed to come in legally, but what he could do is get his regulatory agencies to craft new rules and regulations based on older interpretations of existing law to put in place more burdens, making it more difficult for these people to come in. So he could shrink that entirely or kill it almost all by itself.
In terms of the immigration enforcement, he can’t really expand the size of the immigration enforcement agencies, but what they can do is they can force or try to force a lot of local communities and local police departments and state police departments, state police agencies to cooperate with the federal government more.
Bob Zadek: Now, by the way, let me just interrupt. That’s a very interesting issue because that triggers interesting constitutional questions such as anti-commandeering. A little-known but important part of constitutional law is that the federal government is not permitted to command, to compel local law enforcement to enforce federal law. They simply cannot do it. They might be able to do it coercively by somehow denying other federal benefits to states and localities, but even that, the Supreme Court is sensitive to the issue. So the issue of getting assistance—think sanctuary cities—getting assistant of local law enforcement is somewhat constitutionally tricky, isn’t it?
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, it is constitutionally tricky. The Obama administration did it from 2009 to 2011 and it triggered a pretty big backlash that they backed down on when it comes to immigration enforcement. And what’s interesting is the Obamacare decision—the NFIB v. Sebelius decision—actually limits the ability of the federal government to use funds to coerce states into adopting certain activities. So even more so than during the first term of the Obama administration, the federal government is limited in how it can use funds to coerce states into going along with its territory, with its opinion. And if they do, it has to be very clearly and explicitly spelled out in the law why these funds are being denied or attached to certain cities like sanctuary cities, for instance, in order to deny them those benefits. And that’s not currently in the law, so you’d have to get Congress to pass a law too.
Bob Zadek: What’s so interesting is the sanctuary city movement—San Francisco, New York, other major urban centers—are on the right side of the Constitution in their refusal to assist the feds in enforcing federal law. Little-known fact, but it’s a very interesting aspect of the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
The Unseen Economic Costs of Deportation [22:30]
Bob Zadek: Alex, assuming Trump had his way and enacted most of his policies, what would be the social and perhaps more important economic impact on the United States if Trump simply gets his way? Will we be better off, worse off, and how will we feel the pain?
Alex Nowrasteh: Well, let’s take the extreme example and start there. A lot of Trump’s statements during the campaign were he was going to deport all of the illegal immigrants. And if you did that, not taking into account any government costs associated with it, that would shrink the size of the US economy by about 5% initially and make it more difficult to grow after that.
If you decrease the supply on the high end of a lot of these high-skilled workers coming into the United States, that would also reduce growth in a lot of these high-skilled industries. And both of these contrast quite a bit with his stated goal of wanting to increase US economic growth to 4% per year. In fact, it’s probably—it’s virtually impossible, very difficult probably to get up to a 4% economic growth in the United States without a rapidly growing population of people who are workers and consumers. And the best way to do that is to actually increase immigration, not to decrease it.
Now that’s just like the simple economics of it. All these enforcement procedures are going to cost a lot of money, tax dollars, that are going to either have to come from other programs or have to come from increased taxation or increased debt on that end of things. So that will also be a drag on economic growth.
And that doesn’t assume at all that he’s successful in blocking off international trade or punishing companies that outsource or anything like that. So that’s just the economics of it. In terms of the social impact, it will have a very devastating effect on millions of Americans who have immigrant families in the United States. So to give you an example right now, there are about four and a half million American citizen children in the United States whose one or more parents are illegal immigrants currently. So it would have a devastating impact on four and a half million of them. So that’s a huge impact on people who are mostly younger in the US whose parents are here illegally if they were somehow removed or had to live deeper in the shadows in the black market. That doesn’t count the illegal immigrants or other immigrant communities in the US in major cities that would be more reluctant to cooperate with police if they knew that the police were a deportation force everywhere. And so the social and economic costs will be pretty high.
Bob Zadek: Are there any, any beneficiaries of Trump’s program? Certainly there are some segment you can identify, some segment of the population, and I want—I’m trying to learn how large or small that segment is because they ought to be the only supporters of this program. So who are they? Who would be, if anybody, the beneficiaries of Trump’s success?
Alex Nowrasteh: So there are two main groups that would be the beneficiaries, one guaranteed and one speculative. The guaranteed beneficiaries would be the employees of the government who carry out these orders and the government unions that represent these folks. They would win tremendously. Perhaps private prison corporations or other corporations that do government contracting and provide these services would also be the beneficiaries of this.
Another group that might be a beneficiary, if we’re taking a look at just one portion of the academic literature, is some Americans who have less than a high school degree who are working in the—who are 25 years or older and working in the United States. Some of them might see moderate nominal wage increases. Now the prices for everything they buy will go up, but the dollar amount on their paycheck might go up by about 3% to 8% depending on the estimates. That size of the population, however, is 8% to 9% of the entire US population. But every other group of workers in the United States—high school graduates only, people with some college and college or above—would all lose. And those losers are about 91% to 92% of the population, while the potential beneficiaries are only about 8% to 9%.
Bob Zadek: What is interesting is that triggers the quite well-known concept of the “unseen.” Frédéric Bastiat, an economic philosopher in the middle of the 19th century, observed that often the benefit, the small benefits are seen and visible, and the profound detriments are dispersed and invisible. So when you go to the supermarket and the produce you buy is a bit more expensive, you’re not going to say, “Darn immigration policy, now my apples are four cents more.” No one’s going to know that; it’s invisible. But the overall effect on the economy is enormous. Whereas the very small segment of the population who gets a raise or gets a job, they will feel it. And they will be aware, they will say, “Thank goodness for Trump, I’m now making $35 a week more” or some such numbers that. But the overwhelming majority of the population who is paying through higher taxes and higher cost of goods will not know it’s a result of the policy. It’s a dynamic that is an economic dynamic that is very important and that really has a profound effect upon how people feel about a policy.
Alex Nowrasteh: And that’s exactly right. And one of the other big unseen effects is a lot of businesses are going to see a lot of their customer bases deported. So if you can—and then they’re not going to be able to hire Americans, they’re not going to be able to buy the capital goods that stock their businesses, they’re not going to be able to sell the products that they produce and plan. So as a result, they’re going to have to let other people go and fire people in their who are currently in their business. So I don’t see—there is no path to prosperity by decreasing the supply of people in the country. It diminishes both the supply and demand sides of the economy and it makes all of us just a—it makes almost all of us just a little bit poorer, and in the long run, it makes all of us poorer.
Bob Zadek: And it’s the economic history of our country shows without exception that during periods of liberal immigration policy, economic life accelerates. It gets better and better and better. And during periods of constricted immigration policy, we are either flatlined or worse off. So the evidence is overwhelming and it’s a question of all of these emotional feelings crowding out all of the data. The data never gets to the surface and never gets to be part of the debate. It’s a data-less debate for the most part.
Alex Nowrasteh: It is. And I find in my experience, the issues that are most emotional are the ones where foreigners are involved in some way or another. So foreign policy, trade policy, immigration—we have a portion of our brain that is very, as humans we all do, a portion of our brain that is very loath to admit or it’s difficult to comprehend that having more people here from other places helps us increase the size of the economy and increases our standard of living and allows more opportunities for trade and business. And it’s true in immigration, it’s true in trade, but it’s very hard to get those types of ideas across. We’ve been trying since Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations in 1776, and I think we’ve made a little bit of headway since then, but not nearly enough.
Prop 187 and the Political Shift of California [26:00]
Bob Zadek: Alex, I want you to tell us the fascinating and perhaps forgotten story of—it can be subtitled “When California sneezes, the country gets a cold,” or at least the GOP gets a cold. I want you to discuss Prop 187 because that may have been the start of it all. Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant, mean-spirited bill in California in 1994 and how it profoundly affected who votes Republican and who does not. It’s a fascinating story which portends for the future.
Alex Nowrasteh: So the story begins in 1990. Pete Wilson, the Republican, was elected as Governor of California. In that year, he split the Hispanic vote about evenly with the Democrats. But shortly after that, California was hit by a recession, the end of the Cold War and the decrease in funding for defense industries really hurt California and for some other reasons. And Pete Wilson and the GOP at that time in the early 1990s decided that they were going to blame immigration and illegal immigration specifically for all of the problems in the state that the state was facing.
So what happened was in 1994, Governor Wilson had a tough re-election campaign.
Bob Zadek: Now it’s important, Alex, just to interrupt. This was a political decision, not a data-driven decision. This was a “Hey, I have an idea, let’s blame Hispanics.”
Alex Nowrasteh: Exactly. Yeah, it was a—it was an entirely politically driven decision. At the same time, a group of conservative Californians supported, they put on the ballot, they got enough signatures for something called the Save Our State initiative or Proposition 187. It would have cut off social benefits for illegal immigrants, which I do support, but the second portion of it that was terrible was it would have made every single California state employee an immigration agent. They would have had to report to the INS at the time all illegal immigrants or suspected illegal immigrants that they came in contact with.
Now the effect of this proposition was that it galvanized Hispanic support against the Republicans in a way that we had never seen before. So that although Pete Wilson won re-election in 1994, his Hispanic vote totals dropped to 25% from about 50% in 1990. So they went from 1990, 50% to about 25% in 1994, and they continued to fall after that for all other Republican gubernatorial candidates at the exact same time that the Hispanic population in the state was increasing.
You also see this trend in terms of partisanship, in terms of registration for political parties. Hispanics were increasingly registering as Republicans from 1980 to about 1991. There was a 20-point shift toward Republicans amongst Hispanics in California. Beginning in the early 90s when Pete Wilson started this, you saw from 1991 to 2000 a 30-point swing against the Republicans in registration in California when their numbers were much greater. And you see a huge surge in naturalizations, that is legal Hispanic immigrants in the state of California becoming citizens so that they could vote. And they voted overwhelmingly against the Republicans and for the Democrats.
And you have to contrast this at the same time to the state of Texas, which under Republican leadership, they did the exact opposite. They reached out to Hispanics, said we need immigration reform, and the GOP by the end of this period was getting half of the Hispanic vote in the state of Texas, while in California it was getting about 20%. And they both have the same percentage of the population that is Hispanic. One is an overwhelmingly Republican state, one is an overwhelmingly Democratic state. For me, the lesson is clear: the GOP needs to be nicer and to reach out to immigrants and not blame them for problems.
Bob Zadek: Amen. Thank you so very much, Alex. Regretfully, we’re running out of time. Alex, thank you so so much for giving us an hour of your time and your wisdom. This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now. I’ll be back next Sunday with another hour of libertarian thought and opinion. Thanks so much for listening and have a nice Sunday.