Democrats began talking about the promise of demographic change decades before the Buffalo shooting set off a debate about ‘great replacement theory.’
To lawmakers, the illegal immigrants pouring across the Southern border in the late 1970s were a political headache. To labor leaders, they were competition for struggling American workers.
But to Al Perez, these immigrants from Mexico represented something else: the future.
Headlines in U.S. News and World Report warned of “Border Chaos” and a “Time Bomb in Mexico: Why There’ll Be No End to the Invasion by ‘Illegals.’” Labor leaders complained that these new immigrants were undercutting their workers, and “eating our lunch.”
In the summer of 1977, then-president Jimmy Carter called for a legislative solution that would combine amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the country with sanctions on employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers.
Perez, the Washington counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, had no interest in employer sanctions that threatened work opportunities for immigrants. More importantly, he had no interest in policies that would slow the arrival of immigrants from Mexico.
“More Mexican-Americans mean more political power for us,” Perez told the Atlantic Monthly in 1978. “Time is on our side. Yes, we fear the backlash which may come as a result of illegal immigration, but we believe that on balance the migration is in our interest.”
At the time, this accumulation of ethnic and demographic power wasn’t explicitly partisan — Democrats in the ’70s often led the way on efforts to curb illegal immigration out of concerns about the impact on labor and wages, said Jerry Kammer, a senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies who wrote about Perez’s efforts in his book, Losing Control: How a Left-Right Coalition Blocked Immigration Reform and Provoked the Backlash that Elected Trump. But over the last four decades — particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s — the impact of immigration and demographic change has increasingly become a partisan concern.
Democrats, progressives, and their friends in the mainstream media have often seemed to be cheerleaders for what they’ve seen as a “rising American electorate,” a more diverse country that would inevitably propel them to political dominance. On the right, this same line of thinking has long been seen as a threat, not only to the nation’s cultural fabric, but to the electoral prospects of Republicans.
In 2009, Eliseo Medina with the Service Employees International Union, called for expanding the electorate to further the progressive cause. Immigration reform, Medina told the America’s Future Now! conference, would put 12 million eventual voters on the pathway to citizenship, and if progressives could capture two out of three, “we will create a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.”
A 2013 Politico headline proclaimed that “Immigration reform could be bonanza for Dems.” Then-vice president Joe Biden in 2015 called the declining percentage of Americans of European decent — “folks like me,” he said — “not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.” Last August, after the U.S Census Bureau released data that showed the first-ever decline in the number of non-Hispanic white Americans, the progressive filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted it was “In other words, best day ever in U.S. history”:
From today’s news (8/12/2021):
“The Census data collected from the 2020 Census was released today — and it revealed that the number of White people in the U.S. has fallen for first time since the first Census was taken in 1790.”
In other words, best day ever in U.S. history.
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) August 13, 2021
The election of Donald Trump in 2016, and the gains he made with minorities in 2020 have started to change the calculous about future Republican chances with black, Asian, and Hispanic voters. But concerns on the right about progressives weaponizing demographic changes for political ends remain.
On Fox News, Tucker Carlson has repeatedly alleged that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with more obedient voters from Third World countries. He and others on Fox have received renewed scrutiny for promoting “replacement” rhetoric after a white gunman killed ten black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket on May 14. According to a rambling 180-page document the shooter left behind, he was an adherent of the so-called “great replacement theory,” a conspiracy that holds that Jews or other elites are orchestrating an effort to disempower whites by importing new voters.
Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London, and author of the book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, said the term “replacement” has long been used by demographers to describe the physical displacement of groups by other groups. He doesn’t believe the evidence supports an orchestrated effort to replace whites in the U.S. Rather, he said, as whites have become a smaller share of the American electorate, a lot of people on the Left are simply “celebrating it as it happens.”
In 2002, Ruy Teixeira co-authored the book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which posited that the changing electoral landscape — the changing voting behavior of women, professionals, and younger people, along with racial and ethnic demographic patterns — was poised to benefit Democrats. Teixeira told National Review that he and his co-author, John Judis, were merely pointing out clear demographic trends. “That’s different from arguing that Democrats should consciously engineer and accelerate this shift,” he said. “We said not one word about that.”
Bipartisan Concerns about Illegal Immigration
Concerns about the impact of illegal immigration from Central and South America stretch back generations. In the 1950s, President Harry Truman worried that “thousands of our own citizens, particularly those of Latin descent, are displaced from employment or forced to work under substandard conditions, because of the competition of these illegal immigrants,” according to Kammer’s book, Losing Control.
Kaufmann traces the roots of the current debate over American demographic upheaval to the Hart-Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended immigration quotas by country, a system devised in the 1920s to prioritize new arrivals from Northern and Western Europe. The 1965 act prioritized family connections over national origins. Backers in Congress believed the new system would perpetuate the European-dominated status quo. It didn’t.
“What you get in ’65 is a move to a kind of colorblind, universalist system where in fact national origins is abolished as a criteria, quotas are abolished,” Kaufman said. “It then opens up non-European immigration, and very quickly the non-European share of migration, which was essentially almost nothing, very quickly, by the ’80s it’s maybe three-quarters of the inflow.”
By the 1970s, immigration from Mexico — legal and illegal — was soaring. Republicans and Democrats were both concerned about the impact of illegal immigration. In 1970, Democrat Walter Mondale complained in the Senate that “we have a massive poverty population coming into the country virtually every day from Mexico,” according to Losing Control.
Kammer said Democrats aligned with the labor movement often led the fight against illegal immigration, including with proposals to sanction employers who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants.
By the early ’80s, the Hispanic political power that Al Perez had championed was becoming increasingly evident. In January 1984, a Miami Herald headline declared that the Hispanic vote was a “sleeping giant awakening.” According to the article, “Hispanic voters, 3.5 million strong and growing, are being hailed as the new power group in U.S. politics.”
The article noted that Mexican-Americans, the largest block of Hispanic voters, were “mostly Democrats,” and William Velazquez, then-executive director of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, said Hispanics had “natural bonds” with Democrats.
Kammer said that by the late 1980s, after President Ronald Reagan signed the bipartisan Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, an explicit divide began to emerge between the two parties on their views about immigration. “Republicans gradually became more prominent in advocating for restrictions, and Democrats even then were tending more toward immigration as a civil rights, as a social justice issue, and not as a labor issue,” said Kammer, whose book explored the history of the 1986 legislation and its consequences.
Loss of a White Empire
By the early 1990s, reports of whites becoming a demographic minority were becoming common in American newspapers and magazines. On April 9, 1990, the cover of Time magazine featured a crudely drawn American flag, with the white stripes colored black, brown, and yellow — “America’s Changing Colors,” the magazine declared.
“What will the U.S. be like when whites are no longer the majority?” the cover asked, leading to a story that said the “browning of America” will affect every aspect of society. The story did not delve into the weeds of partisan politics. But concerns on the right were growing.
In 1992, Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan was calling the “invasion” of illegal immigrants across the Southern border “a national disgrace.” He proposed tightening the border and doubling the size of the Border Patrol. By the late ’90s, Buchanan was warning that unchecked immigration would be a “demographic death sentence” for Republicans.
“If the Republican Party doesn’t deal with immigration, in eight to ten years the Republican Party at the national level may be a permanent minority party,” Buchanan said, according to a 1998 report by the Newhouse News Service.
Kammer points to the 1994 debate over Proposition 187 in California as another touchpoint that moved Hispanic voters more firmly into the Democratic camp. The proposal, championed by California’s Republican governor Pete Wilson, was designed to curb illegal immigration in the state by denying state services to illegal immigrants. A Los Angeles Times survey before the vote found that 52 percent of Hispanic voters supported the measure, according to Kammer’s book. Prop 187 ended up passing with 59 percent support overall, but it was deemed unconstitutional in court.
Kammer said Wilson’s heavy-handed TV ads that portrayed Mexican immigrants in a sinister light ended up provoking a “very, very visceral reaction among lots of Mexican-Americans.”
“That really offended lots of sensibilities,” Kammer said. “And I think it was unfortunate, because many, many Mexican-Americans wanted to stop illegal immigration. But more than that, they wanted to protect themselves. This became an us-against-them situation.”
In 1995, while speaking at the University of California-Riverside, Arthur Torres, a former California state senator who would later be the longtime chairman of the California Democratic Party, called Prop 187 “the last gasp of white America in California.”
Mario Obledo, the co-founder of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, later said that California was becoming “an Hispanic state,” and anyone who didn’t like it should leave. “They ought to go back to Europe,” the Texas-born Obledo said.
In 1996, two years after the Prop 187 vote, journalist Dale Maharidge published The Coming White Minority, which focused on California’s demographic shifts to explore the nation’s predicted minority-majority status. Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, Maharidge said “whites who have always accepted the idea that the U.S. is a white country are going to have to accept the fact that this will no longer be so, and that once it changes it is never going to be so again. This will not be something whites will grasp very easily. It’s destined to feel like a loss of empire.”
The Driver’s Seat of the Anti-Immigrant Bandwagon
While Republicans like Buchanan warned that immigration and demographic changes spelled electoral doom for Republicans, President Bill Clinton was having his own troubles with Hispanic voters in the mid 1990s. In the view of some activists, Clinton in campaign mode was too aggressive with his talk about border security. During his 1995 State of the Union speech, Clinton said Americans “are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country,” and he pledged to “better identify illegal aliens in the workplace.”
In a 1996 column, Carlos Munoz Jr., a University of California–Berkeley ethnic studies professor, activist, and author, wrote that Clinton “has jumped into the driver’s seat of the anti-immigrant bandwagon.”
Republican political consultant Karl Rove, who worked on numerous campaigns in the 1990s, including George W. Bush’s two gubernatorial campaigns, told National Review he didn’t see evidence at the time that Democratic strategists were expecting to ride the country’s changing demographics to decades of electoral power. Exit polls showed that Bush won about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote during his 1998 reelection campaign in Texas, and his brother, Jeb, won 61 percent of Florida’s Hispanic vote in his own campaign for governor that year.
The idea that an immigrant group or ethnic group’s voting patterns can be predicted accurately decades into the future just isn’t realistic, Rove said.
“Periodically as a country, we go through deep concerns about the level of illegal immigration. We went through this in the 1880s and 1890s. We went through it in the 1920s,” Rove said. “But the idea that somehow or another somebody can posit that future generations of a certain immigrant class are going to be voting here or voting there, is just simply impossible.”
Rove said he doesn’t believe there is a conspiracy to bring immigrants into the country as part of a “deliberate effort to change the nature of the American experience.”
“I just don’t see that as the case,” he said. “If it were such, then one of the members of the conspiracy would have to be Ronald Reagan, who signed an immigration reform bill in the 1980s that granted ultimate citizenship to millions of immigrants.”
The Dawn of a New Progressive Era?
It was in the late ’90s and early 2000s that Democrats really started to promote the idea that more immigrants, a declining white population, and a more diverse electorate could rocket them to political dominance.
Teixeira and Judis’s aforementioned 2002 book on the subject used “hard data — demographic, geographic, economic, and political — to forecast the dawn of a new progressive era,” according to a description of the publication. They were not alone in their optimism.
Liberal activists began talking openly of the “rising American electorate.” In 2009, after Barack Obama was elected president, Democratic strategist James Carville published 40 More Years: How Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, which predicted that young people would power a Democratic majority “that will last not four but forty years.” In May of that year, a Time magazine cover declared Republicans an “Endangered Species.” In 2011, California academics Shaun Bowler and Gary Segura published The Future is Ours: Minority Politics, Political Behavior, and the Multiracial Era of American Politics, predicting that “demography will, in fact, be destiny,” according to a description of the book.
In 2013, the left-wing Center for American Progress issued a report that concluded that, “Supporting real immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future.”
In the first decade of the 2000s, mainstream Democrats still sometimes talked tough about illegal immigration. In 2007, Senator Chuck Schumer declared that “Democrats should become the party that aggressively stanches the flow of illegal immigrants.” By 2020, that tough talk had given way to Democrats like Stacey Abrams saying the “blue wave” she expected that November was comprised of the “documented and undocumented.”
Teixeira said he doesn’t believe it’s fair to say that Democrats are intentionally engineering demographic changes to their political benefit. He called the great replacement theory “a pretty far right-wing constellation of ideas coming out of Europe.” But he said left-wing cheerleading of white decline has “certainly gone too far.”
Teixeira said that in their book, he and Judis were always talking about the “potential” for a Democratic majority. “I emphasize potential,” he said, “because we talked in the book about how it was necessary for these opportunities to be handled intelligently, for the Democrats to adopt a variety of what we called progressive centrism. And above all else, and we talked about this and everyone immediately forgot it, that you need to have a certain share of more conservative, white working-class voters still on board with your party, or the political arithmetic just doesn’t work.”
Teixeira has said a “dangerous misinterpretation” of his book helped elect Donald Trump.
Some conservatives have argued that Democratic crowing about declining white power and the weaponization of demographic change have alienated working-class whites. Teixeira said it also encouraged Democrats to act like they don’t need those voters.
“It encourages the lazy, counterproductive, and basically mathematically illiterate approach to the electorate where these idiots think that they can get by without paying attention to what more conservative or non-college white voters think,” Teixeira said.
Kaufmann, who is an advocate of acknowledging a self-interested white identity during this period of demographic change, said that in the coming decades, what it means to be white and what it means to be part of the ethnic majority will likely shift. Americans who are exclusively non-Hispanic whites are certainly declining and will likely be a minority of the population in the next 30 years. But looking forward, Kaufmann said, “you might imagine somebody who is of mixed non-Hispanic white and Hispanic background, or non-Hispanic white and Asian background could become considered and consider themselves white.”
In the meantime, minority voters have been drifting away from being Democratic partisans for over a decade now, in part because of the Left’s “almost fetishization of race,” Kaufmann said.
He said there is a double standard in the nation’s discussion of race and immigration, in that progressives have become emboldened to cheer for demographic trends that benefit them politically, but that it is somehow off limits for conservatives to push back.
“The reality is, both parties are motivated by self-interest,” Kaufmann said. “There’s a very, very big double standard in terms of when it’s permissible to defend your interests around immigration. The goal, I think, has to be to try to have that more open conversation, but it’s currently being shut down.”