The Associated Press ran a story on October 21st entitled “Hispanic Protestants Swinging Back to Democrats” ]Eric Gorski, Oct. 21st, 2008].

The article describes “a Hispanic Protestant defection to Democrat Barack Obama, a shift that could prove key in battleground states with large Hispanic populations such as Colorado, Nevada, Florida and New Mexico.” In states like that, every vote counts.

In 2004, Hispanic Protestants comprised about one-third of all Hispanic voters, and in that year Hispanic Evangelical and Pentecostal voters voted for George W. Bush.

But now, in 2008, the AP reports that

“A report in late July from the Pew Hispanic Center found Obama leading McCain two-to-one among non-Catholic Hispanics who affiliate with a religion - in other words, mostly evangelicals and Pentecostals.

Other numbers suggest a closer race. Gallup daily tracking polls from Sept. 1 through Friday show Obama leading McCain 47 percent to 43 percent among non-Catholic Hispanic Christians.”

Either way, it doesn’t appear advantageous for McCain.

“In 2004, exit polls showed 63 percent of Hispanic Protestants supported Bush. In 2000, that demographic group supported Democrat Al Gore by a similar margin. Hispanic Catholics have largely remained loyal to the Democratic Party, so evangelicals and Pentecostals are swinging the Hispanic vote.”

According to Samuel Rodriguez , president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference:(about whom I’ve written before, here)

had this to say about it :

“I find it powerfully refreshing, enforcing the reality that we’re not going to be the white evangelical community. We’re not the Christian right.”

Why is Rodriguez so eager to distinguish himself from the white evangelical community ?

“We will not be the extension of one political party and we won’t be exploited and used for victory and then ignored.”

Too bad conservative Republicans didn’t think that way, rather than having given a blank check to Bush all these years!

And this is interesting :

Rodriguez and others said the immigration debate that hit a fever pitch in 2006 caused the shift back to the Democrats.

“We blamed the Republican Party for the immigration reform debacle, and we blamed them for xenophobic rhetoric,” said Rodriguez, who added that he will probably vote for McCain anyway because Obama is too liberal on abortion and marriage. “That pushed Hispanic evangelicals to look at ourselves.”

The McCain campaign has a “national Hispanic advisory council for Hispanic evangelicals, “  headed up by Mark Gonzalez, who says

“The [Republican] party has a major job to do in terms of repairing the damage with the Latino community . Hispanics are very loyal. It’s a legacy, being Democratic in the Hispanic community. There is still a learning curve.”

It looks like Hispanic Protestants is another demographic the GOP is losing. Time for a new strategy?

VDARE’s Allan Wall has written recently about the very different presidential campaigns being experienced currently by us monolingual English-speakers versus by those, such as Allan, who understand Spanish. His article is a follow-up to–and reinforces–what he wrote on a similar theme six years ago.

Here’s a key observation from his recent piece:

[The broadcast] ads in Spanish are not necessarily even saying the same things as they are in English. But the mainstream white majority of our country is blissfully unaware of most of this. [emphasis added]

I wrote about this in 2002, ["Nuestra Gente" and the National Question in Texas] referring to the 2002 Texas gubernatorial election in which Democratic candidate Tony Sanchez was portrayed as a conservative in English ads and as a Mexican-American leader in the Spanish ads.

But don’t politicians always appeal to different constituencies with different emphases? Yes, of course. But at least if they are talking the same language, the electorate has a better chance to keep up with it.

It’s preferable to have politicians lying in one language [rather] than in two languages.

So Allan is concerned about a campaign in which an important part of the discussion is happening, in effect, behind most of the electorate’s back, because our naturalization requirements are now mostly honored in the breach and because our goofy myriad-lingual ballot law makes it practical for the nominally-naturalized to vote.

Another aspect of the ballot law’s nation-wrecking idiocy is the sheer technical difficulty — and legal hazard! — involved in carrying it out. This is exemplified by a brief article (“Sticky Rice” versus “Oh Bus Horse” in ‘08? [left column, scroll down]) last year in the Advocate newsletter published by ProEnglish:

The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of bilingual ballot laws was on display in Boston, Massachusetts recently where controversy erupted over how to write candidates’ names in Chinese. The problem began when Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin challenged a U.S. Department of Justice court motion to require the state to list the names of candidates on ballots in Chinese characters instead of the Roman alphabet.

The problem with using Chinese characters to reproduce the same sounds contained in a candidate’s name, called transliteration, is that the characters themselves have distinct and sometimes awkward meanings that could influence Chinese speaking voters. Compounding the problem is that Chinese characters can mean different things depending on whether it is Mandarin, Cantonese, or other Chinese dialects.

Thus Mitt Romney’s name in Chinese characters would be translated as “Sticky or Uncooked Rice.” Barrack Obama’s name would be “Oh Bus Horse” in Cantonese, while in Mandarin it might be interpreted as “Europe Pulling a Horse.”

Galvin said that in addition to costing Massachusetts thousands of dollars, transliterating candidates’ names into Chinese characters increased the risk of lawsuits from candidates and partisan challenges of election results.

In a rare outbreak of sanity a U.S. District Court ruled in favor of Galvin saying that candidates’ names did not have to be transliterated. But the ruling appeared to leave Boston’s policy of listing candidates’ names in Chinese characters up in the air. So if frontrunner Hilary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination she still could appear on the ballot as “Upset Stomach” in Boston and several other cities.

The bilingual ballot provisions of the Voting Rights Act, adopted as a “temporary” measure in 1975 to remedy a lack [of] educational access among certain linguistic groups, were renewed for another twenty-five years in 2006 after the Bush Administration threw its support behind their renewal to overcome stiff opposition in Congress.

(Presumably that should actually be “multilingual ballot provisions.”)

Congressman Steve King (R-IA) emphasized such technical problems in a “Dear Colleague” letter he circulated when the Voting Rights Act’s reauthorization was being discussed:

Multilingual ballots increase the risk of election errors and fraud. For example, in 2000, six voting sites in Flushing, N.Y., printed ballots in Chinese with the names of the political parties reversed. Several thousand voters cast their votes using these erroneous ballots. You can imagine the disastrous potential of these errors.

As Winston Churchill said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Imagine his added delight over electorates voting using materials mis-translated into their various, disparate languages!

Way back in August, I described Joe Biden as “kind of a bozo.” But then the whole world decided that they either hated or loved Sarah Palin, and everybody decided that therefore, through some sort of reverse osmosis process, Biden must be a Steady Hand on the Tiller etc etc.

Nah, he’s a garrulous old hack, which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s the wrong thing in a Vice President. The VP is supposed to be the next best thing to the President, which means people (especially foreigners, who don’t know any better) listen to him, which means he isn’t supposed to talk too much. He’s supposed to just stand there looking sad while they lower the dictator of Bebukustan into the ground. Al Gore was good at that.

Biden’s not. Every so often, he just can’t control himself, and then you get incidents like “I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.”

In my piece on Sarah Palin’s immigration policy I made the points that she hasn’t thought and/or doesn’t care that much about the issue; and if she happens to have good instincts, they aren’t going to come out as McCain’s running mate or vice president.

Both of these assertions came to fruition in a recent interview with Univision. When asked how many “undocmented immigrants” were in her state, she replied “I don’t know, I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

As for amnesty, she says she’s against it; but qualifies that she’s only against “total amnesty.” One thing she is against without qualifications is deportations,

There is no way that in the US we would roundup every illegal immigrant -there are about 12 million of the illegal immigrants- not only economically is that just an impossibility but that’s not a humane way anyway to deal with the issue that we face with illegal immigration.

So what’s her alternative between “total amnesty” and deportations. If you guessed, “attrition through enforcement,” you’re wrong. Instead when she is asked “so you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?” She responded,

I do because I understand why people would want to be in America. To seek the safety and prosperity, the opportunities, the health that is here. It is so important that yes, people follow the rules so that people can be treated equally and fairly in this country.

In my article, I got a bit of grief about calling Palin “a pig in a poke—despite the lipstick.” Well, the gender sensitive conservatives can be happy to know that there is no pig in the poke. Her amnesty cat is out of the bag.

Forbes magazine published one of the worst op-ed editorials I have seen in at least a month or two; maybe all year! There are too many things wrong with this editorial to discuss in one newsletter so I have chosen two of the worst ones to debunk.

It almost seems that the author did nothing more than copy and paste random talking points from a Compete America position paper, but she goes a step further by stating that the current housing crisis could be mitigated by letting more H-1Bs into the U.S.:

America’s financial markets and economy won’t fully recover until the slide in the housing market is stopped. Selling homes to skilled immigrants would not solve all our housing woes, but it would be a step in the right direction–without an additional penny needed from Uncle Sam.[Houses For Sale--To Immigrants Diana Furchtgott-Roth 10.20.08]

In case you are wondering what kind of bonehead would make such an absurd statement; it was written by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, [Send her mail]]who in the past did stints as Chief of Staff of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. If that isn’t enough to explain her faux pas here is one more: she is listed in a book called 101 People Who Are Really Screwing America&
, by Jack Huberman.

Replacing American workers with H-1Bs accomplishes nothing more than evicting an American family out of a house so that a new foreign worker can buy a cheap foreclosure. Destroying jobs and wrecking our skilled domestic labor force exacerbates the housing and banking crisis instead of making the situation better. Following Furchtgott-Roth’s logic, we could solve the entire housing crisis by allowing unlimited numbers of skilled foreign workers into the U.S.

Even considering Furchtgott-Roth’s dubious titles as economist and analyst there is no excuse for this fallacy of logic:

This figure [number of H-1Bs in the U.S.] represents a minuscule portion of the American labor force of 155 million. Even if green card and H-1B quotas were raised to 750,000, that would be only less than half of 1% of the labor force. A higher quota would still block admission to the majority of applicants, who are discouraged from applying due to the small likelihood of success.

Furchtgott-Roth seems to be using the BLS statistic of 155 million to estimate the total American labor force. It’s a suspicious number to use for her calculations because the entire population of the United States is about 305 million. Does anybody seriously think that one out of every two Americans is participating in the labor market, and that each of them is potentially affected by the H-1B visa program?

She minimizes the effect of H-1B by comparing the total number of H-1Bs with the entire U.S. labor force of 155 million workers. That’s a red herring because H-1B doesn’t impact the entire American workforce in proportion to its deleterious affects on workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEMS). It’s unclear whether she is advocating a cap of 750,000 for both H-1B visas and green cards combined, or separately, but the affect is hardly miniscule. Half of 1% is a gross underestimate–the correct percentage would be more like 15% to 30%.

FACT CHECK: H-1B visa holders already hold about 16% to 32% of the total number of STEM jobs and that doesn’t include the large number of employment based (EB) green cards. If Furchtgott-Roth got her way those percentages would go way up. Estimates of the number of STEMs vary — the NSF says there are about 5 million but it varies depending on the definition of STEM worker. There are about 800,000 H-1B visa holders currently employed in the U.S. although some estimates are as low as 330,000.

Important Links

To read more about the effects of H-1B on the STEM labor force, go to page 71 of  On The Need For Reform Of The H-1B Non-Immigrant Work Visa In Computer-Related Occupations, by Norm Matloff. [PDF]

For more statistics on the number of STEMs, read “U.S. S&E Labor Force Profile“, by the NSF.

For statistics on the number of H-1Bs, read H-1B Temporary Workers: Estimating the Population by B. Lindsay Lowell [PDF]

For labor force numbers read, “Employment Situation Summary“, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

You can also click the links on the left part of this page:jobdestruction.info/ShameH1B:

• “9 out of every 10 new job openings for computer/IT were taken by H-1Bs“
• “Negative job growth in Computer/IT for U.S. citizens“
• “If it wasn’t for H-1B the unemployment rate for Computer/IT workers would be 0%“

Via Craptocracy, we learn that three days before endorsing Barack Obama, Colin Powell warmed up by, well ….

From the Guardian:

Colin Powell celebrated his 71st birthday this year but he’s clearly not too old to pull some cheeky Afro-hip-hop moves. His take on Olu Maintain’s song Yahooze at the Africa Rising event at the Royal Albert Hall worked a lot better than his former boss George Bush’s embarrassing inaugural shape-throwing alongside Ricky Martin. Although he kept his jacket buttoned, almost everyone deemed his dancing spot-on.

But it doesn’t look as if the former US secretary of state paid too much attention to the lyrics, or he might have discovered that the Nigerian hit is a celebration of that country’s most infamous export, advance-fee email fraud (sometimes called 419 fraud, after the relevant section of the Nigerian penal code). The perpetrators are known as “Yahoo boys” after their email service-provider of choice.

He told the crowd:

“I stand before you tonight as an African-American,” The Times quoted Powell as telling the audience. “Many people say to me, ‘You became secretary of state of the USA., is it really necessary to say you are an African-American, or that you are black?’ And I say, ‘Yes,’ so that we can remind our children. It took a lot of people struggling to bring me to this point in history. I didn’t just drop out of the sky. People came from my continent in chains. There’s no reason a new Africa can’t be created right here and now.”

Of course, it’s purely racist for anybody to suggest that race had any influence on Powell’s endorsement of Obama, even when Powell admits it was a factor.