One under the radar effect of the current avalanche of immigration pouring into the United States is how this mass of new voters will impact issues outside immigration.
A recent Washington Post op-ed speculates one area Americans are likely to lose their Constitutional rights is the 2nd Amendment.
“Support for, and opposition to, gun control is closely associated with several demographic characteristics, including race, level of education and whether one lives in a city. Nearly all are trending forcefully against the NRA,” author and UCLA professor Adam Winkler writes. “The core of the NRA’s support comes from white, rural and relatively less educated voters. This demographic is currently influential in politics but clearly on the wane. While the decline of white, rural, less educated Americans is generally well known, less often recognized is what this means for gun legislation.”
Here the author shows how the tide of immigrants will wash over and subsume Americans and easily vote away hard-fought Constitutional rights:
Polls show that whites tend to favor gun rights over gun control by a significant margin (57 percent to 40 percent). Yet whites, who comprise 63 percent of the population today, won’t be in the majority for long. Racial minorities are soon to be a majority, and they are the nation’s strongest supporters of strict gun laws.
The fastest-growing minority group in America is Latinos. Between 2000 and 2010, the nation’s Latino population grew by 43 percent. Hispanics, which make up 17 percent of the population today, are expected to grow to 30 percent of the population in the coming decades.
Gun control is extremely popular among Hispanics, with 75 percent favoring gun safety over gun rights.
Asian Americans also represent a growing anti-gun demographic. Although only about 5 percent of the population today, the Asian American population is predicted to triple over the next few decades. A recent poll of Asian American registered voters found that 80 percent supported stricter gun laws.
Undermining gun rights would be a major victory for the Left and they know it.
Phyllis Schlafly, warned in 2013 that while many whites grew up in relatively safe rural areas learning how to handle guns, immigrants come from chaotic countries where violence is the norm and authoritarian governments clamp down on ownership.
Nate Silver, formerly of the New York Times, pointed out shortly after the 2012 election that the 2008 presidential exit poll (the question was not asked in 2012) found that 47 percent of whites, 29 percent of Hispanics, 21 percent of blacks, and 15 percent of Asians owned a gun. Silver also observed, “Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of demographic characteristics.” [Emphasis added.]
One of the reasons whites have such a strong commitment to gun rights is the much larger share who own them. The reason for this is that a much larger share of whites live in rural America or have roots there and are thus familiar with firearms in a way that is less common among urbanites. Asians and Hispanics in contrast are settling in cities and the suburbs where hunting and gun ownership are much less widespread. And they are coming from countries where firearms ownership is highly restricted. It is unlikely in the extreme that Asians and Hispanics will ever have gun ownership rates approaching that of whites given where they are coming from and where they are settling. This fact means that immigration unavoidably increases the share of the electorate that has no experience with guns. As a result, immigrants and their children will tend to be much more supportive of efforts to limit or even ban gun ownership.
