VDARE doesn’t endorse candidates, but we have no problems giving a summary of where they stand on immigration.

A few weeks I expressed disappointment in Bob Barr’s near complete 180 from immigration reform patriot to open borders libertarian in VDARE. While I thought that his new found stance on immigration would hurt him in the general election, I acknowledged, that “I would be lying if I said that picking back up the standard of patriotic immigration reform would help Barr win the Libertarian Party nomination—anymore than it would it help him become president of La Raza.”

This was an understatement. Even Barr’s extremely watered down position on immigration still upsets many libertarians. For example, Susan Hogwarth of the Party’s Radical Caucus sent a widely circulated open letter to Barr, expressing concern that he proposed to “secure our borders from criminals, terrorists and those seeking to take advantage of the American taxpayer.”

Well it seems that my piece may have actually helped Barr. I attended an event last week where I learned that a number of pro-Barr libertarians circulated my article to prove that he wasn’t a restrictionist. Two people there told me that they voted for him after reading my piece.

The U.S. unemployment rate jumped by a half percentage point to 5.5% in May on the biggest increase in seasonally adjusted unemployment in 33 years. (See the Labor Department report here.) The prospect of a short and shallow recession appears far less likely in light of the disappointing news.

But May’s malaise was not distributed evenly: Unemployment rates for adult men (4.9%), adult women (4.8%), teenagers (18.7%), whites (4.9%), and blacks (9.7%) rose in May. The jobless rate for Hispanics (6.9%) was unchanged.

The disparity between Hispanic and non-Hispanic employment trends was even more startling. Here are the Household survey figures for May:

• Total Employment fell 285,000 (-0.19%)
• Non-Hispanic employment fell 454,000 (-0.36%)
• Hispanic employment rose 169,000 (+0.83%)

The Labor Department does not break out foreign born workers separately. But unpublished BLS statistics show that nearly 60 percent of Hispanic workers are foreign-born. For whites the foreign born share is only 4 percent, for blacks only 11 percent. (Immigrant shares are still lower for non-Hispanic whites and blacks.)

Implication: the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job creation is a good measure of the displacement of native workers by immigrants.

VDARE.com’s American Worker Displacement Index (VDAWDI), calculated as the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth indexes during the Bush years, skyrocketed to 123.8 in May – up 1.2 percent from April. Not since August 2007 has VDAWDI grown at a faster pace:

The blue line tracks Hispanic employment growth; pink is non-Hispanic growth, and yellow the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth. Each starts at the same level – 100.0 – in January 2001. The subsequent differences reflect the two-tier economy of the Bush years.

Since the start of the Bush administration (January 2001) Hispanic employment has risen by 4.46 million, or 27.6 percent. Non-Hispanic employment has risen by 3.82 million, or by 3.14 percent.

This is particularly shocking when you consider that Hispanics are only 15.5 percent of the labor force. Yet they got 54 percent of jobs created.

The Karl Rove strategy of Republicans winning the “pivotal” Hispanic vote by pushing for illegal immigrant amnesty, whose truest true believers are George W. Bush and John McCain (Ted Kennedy’s partner in pushing amnesty), continues to work as well as ever.

From the LA Times:

Obama leads in battle for Latino vote

The latest polls show he has a surprising advantage over McCain and is favored by up to 62% of voters.

By Peter Wallsten, June 6, 2008

A new Gallup Poll summary of surveys taken in May shows Obama winning 62% of Latino registered voters nationwide, compared with just 29% for McCain. Others have found a wide gap as well. The pro-Democratic group Democracy Corps compiled surveys from March through May that showed Obama with a 19-point lead among Latinos. And a Times poll published last month showed Obama leading McCain among California Latinos by 14 points.

Republicans say McCain’s numbers among Latinos at the moment are disappointing — far below the goals set by a campaign that has long believed McCain could challenge the traditional Democratic dominance of the Latino electorate.

The numbers suggest that McCain’s image has suffered after a competitive GOP primary in which he renounced some of the moderate views on immigration popular among many Latinos. For example, McCain, who was a chief sponsor of legislation creating a path to citizenship for most of the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, now says he believes the government must focus first on securing the U.S.-Mexico border before dealing with illegal workers.

The new position helped mollify some conservatives who viewed McCain as soft on illegal immigration. But it now leaves the senator forced to come from behind in an area that was supposed to be a strength. And McCain must weigh two competing needs: attracting Latinos in the Southwest and Florida turned off by the GOP’s hard-line opposition to his legislation and mobilizing conservative whites who could prove crucial in Ohio and other battlegrounds.

The “competitive GOP primary” was basically over on February 5, four months ago. Since then, McCain has been paddling back toward amnesty.

Look, the simplest explanation for why Hispanics prefer the Democrat over the Republican is because he’s the Democrat. They’ve voted for every Democratic Presidential candidate since JFK. They like the tax-and-spend Democratic Party more than the [whatever the hell Republicans are these days] GOP because, on average, Hispanics pay less in taxes and get more in government spending. That’s because, on the whole, they are poorer. (For an explanation of why poorer people would vote to have the government take money away from richer people and give it to them, see the recent insights of that cutting edge political analyst, Aristotle.)

One reason that the media is constantly surprised by the facts about Latinos is because the facts tend to be dull. As I wrote in Is Brown the New Black? in the March 10, 2008 American Conservative:

“Although the media constantly tries to drum up interest in Hispanics by extolling them as ’swing voters’ living in ‘vibrant neighborhoods’ and so forth, the tedious reality is that the word that best sums up Latino America is inertia. Things just sort of keep on keeping on in the general direction that they were already moving.”

The LA Times article rolls on with this insightful quote:

“If the McCain people don’t realize they need to beef up that operation, then clearly he’s not going to be president,” said Robert de Posada, a Republican consultant on Latino politics.

Because it always comes as a complete surprise when a man who makes his living as a “consultant on Latino politics” says we need more Latinos in America. Perhaps the McCain people could “beef up that operation” by hiring another “Republican consultant on Latino politics,” such as, to pick a random example, Robert de Posada.

Meanwhile, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who was raised in Mexico City, is helping Obama rally the Hispanic troops:

“With Latinos, you stress that Obama’s a minority like us,” Richardson said.

Well, that’s reassuring.