The New Latino Politics Will Be A Shell Game

The fact that the Mexican immigration spigot has gone almost dry is a game changer. It’ll have consequences in the U.S., but we have no idea how it’s going to play out.

If I owned a bag of tea-leaves and knew how to read them I’d venture a guess. But we didn’t know the effects of the immigration surge when it was happening, so how can we foretell things now that it’s dwindled?

We know the facts:

• Immigration from Mexico is at the lowest point since the 1950’s. And we know this because the census in Mexico counted 4 million more people than expected. The head scratching among the head counters led to the discovery that more Mexicans opted to stay put because Mexico now has more jobs offer and better opportunities for education.
• We also know that immigrants from other Latin American countries continue to make the trek to the U.S. (yes, even in this recession, there are jobs here that immigrants easily find because the conditions and the pay are better than what they find back home).
• And the immigrants who are already here are not going back – it’s too risky and too expensive.

Every time we talk about the growth of the Latino population we like to project the swell into the future, and every time we do that we assume that immigration rates will hold over the years.

This changes that calculus.

I’m certain that the Latino population will continue to grow; because Latinos will continue to make babies (two-point-whatever the number per family is these days) – we’re pretty consistent on that front. But Mexican immigration is the variable.

The slow-down will affect politics, education and the economy.

It will affect the way we draw political districts and jurisdictions, and the way we bicker to defend voting rights; it will affect the influx of immigrant labor that falsely bolsters the service economy, and that will affect tax and social security revenues; it will change the way demographers run their numbers and the conclusions they report.

We’ve already seen how the largest chunk of the Latino growth came from birthrates, not immigration. The differences are that birth rates produce a future workforce whereas immigration produces workers now, but birthrates also produce future voters (if they vote when they get the chance) and immigration doesn’t.

It’ll be sleight of hand politics.

Business interests are already calling for an expansion of worker visas; they understand the implications for their bottom line. Soon their calls will turn into strong political pressure and politicians will turn that into policy as soon as it hits their political bottom line.

If I read tea leaves I’d say that, because of business pressure, the political action needed to provide immigrant workers will move faster than comprehensive immigration reform because it’s easier to relax visa restrictions – it’s not a hot button political wedge. Think of it as a shell game; immigrants are the ball and politics are the shells. The trick will be for politicians to make it seem as if the immigrants aren’t where they are. I imagine them making aggressive stump speeches at the border, distracting their base, while the workers come in the back door.

I’m not sure how, yet, but I know that we’ll be talking about immigration differently than the way we talk about it now.

Conservatives would like the country to be the way it was in the 1950’s, and it looks like they’ll get their wish on the immigration numbers. But there are a lot more Latinos in the U.S. then there were 60 years ago and immigration or not, there will soon be more.

Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda

[Photo by wnstn]