David Frum of the horribly right-wing National Review lamented this week about "kids" and the Republican Party. Apparently the right isn't doing so well with those of us who are under-30: Democrats have a full 19-percentage point lead among young voters, and this is even more sharply pronounced when broken down by race and ethnicity.

David Frum suggests that this explains the whole Democratic lead:

Maybe you've heard about the recent polls showing a huge Democratic advantage among young voters. The latest , conducted by Stanley Greenberg for the Democracy Project, shows (among other dismal tidings) a 19-point party identification lead for Democrats among voters younger than 30...

Read the report in full, however, and you come across an interesting nugget on page 6: White young people continue to favor Republicans by a thin but real margin of 2 points. The Democrats owe their advantage among youth to a huge lead among young African-Americans (78 points) - and a very large lead (43 points) among Hispanics.

It's when David Frum tries to bring in the historical analysis that this piece begins to take a turn for the worst:

In the past, Republicans could win elections despite their unpopularity among ethnic minorities. But with the huge surge of immigration since 1980 - and especially since 2000 - the voting map of the United States has been redrawn in ways inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP...

Like Prometheus6, I believe that that sentence begs us to ask the question: why is the "voting map"'s new "redrawing" so "inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP"?

Frum says explicitly, "[the] legacy that will damage [Bush's] party is the legacy of immigration non-enforcement." As Frum says, the growing Latino population is being enlarged by "[a] large new community of people who are both economically struggling...but who lack deep attachment to the American nation." (As Rick Perlstein notes, once upon a time, this exact same thing would have been said about Jews.)

Not to mention, as Digby's Hullabaloo points out, this was a partisan voter survey. Illegal immigrants can't vote and therefore were not surveyed. So the whole "immigration non-enforcement" line is really a moot point, this survey only surveyed people who could vote. However they got here, they're here legally now with voting rights (after a median wait of eight years from immigration to citizenship).

This is not about immigration or even psychographics per se. This is no more than yet another cloaking of the same old racism. Indeed, as Digby continues:

The sheer numbers of non-whites are changing things, and that has the rightwingers working themselves into a full blown panic. The Bushies were right on this one. They needed to cool the racist ardor of their base, but they couldn't get it done. And now you see neocons like Frum trying to join the wingnut populist bandwagon with thinly veiled racist appeals to solidarity...

(His conflation of "illegal immigrants" who allegedly have no stake in the country with the large numbers of young Hispanic Americans who were born here gives the game away.)

Digby quotes Harvard University Sociology Professor Nathan Glazer, who shows the racist undertones of the social welfare-based arguments in his paper, "Why Americans don’t care about income inequality" by contrasting America with Western Europe on key idealistic points:

AGS [Alesina, Glazear and Sacerdote] report, using the World Values Survey, that "opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. For example, according to the World Values Survey, whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view.... 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said ...poor people could work their way out of poverty."

Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons:
[1] because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities,
[2] because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and
[3] because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution.

Anti-illegal immigrant legislation is often derided as racist and divisive but when a poll of Hispanic-American voters (who were largely born here, and were all citizens) is said to be reflective of "immigration non-enforcement" this shows: already "Latino" and immigrant are beginning to be interchangeable in some neo-con minds, a fact that more people should take note of.