The Latino-ization of the American Southwest

RG writes:

My wife and I just returned from six days out west in Arizona and Nevada. We go to the Southwest USA almost annually and have so for about ten years now; we love the weather, the geology, the recreation.

However, I thought you’d find interesting some of our reflections. To start, I am 100 percent in agreement with your many thoughts on the continued mass immigration into our country, I’m particularly interested in it since I live in Dearborn, Michigan and have seen first hand the explosion of non-assimilating, fundamentalist Muslim immigrants and their affect of American society. That said, the “Latino-ization” of the US Southwest is stunning in its breadth and depth.

By simple observation, it looks like Latinos hold most, repeat, most jobs.

• Signs in Spanish are everywhere.

• Most young people (white or black Americans in their twenties) work as waiters or waitresses, sometimes holding two server jobs. Why? Our manufacturing/industrial fields are all but gone.

• Television and radio stations in Spanish are numerous—and some of these Spanish networks are powerful in their influence. Spanish ads are seeping into mainstream English commercials on television and radio. A hybrid of Spanish and English, sometimes called “Spanglish” can be heard.

• Lawyers advertising their services on the sides of buses or on billboards do so in Spanish.

• Watching and listening (but not understanding) Spanish news, one can still make out a few words like “immigration”, “ICE”, “migrants”, etc. Hispanic news channels are obsessed with immigration (if one calls what’s happening that).

The Latinos generally express confidence; I suspect they feel they are in the ascendancy. Their numbers are stunningly large and growing larger still. The Houston Chronicle reported on a study the other day that estimated the number of illegals in the US at 38 million—not the 20 million many of us have thought or the ridiculously low figure our government cites.

It’s a mindset. Latinos do not think they are breaking our laws or showing disrespect to our nation by not learning English and accepting American cultural customs. Mexico is wholly corrupt and inept and tens of millions of its peasants are either here or coming here. A 2005 Gallop poll showed forty-eight percent of Mexicans want to “migrate” to our country. They are coming unless something drastic is done by us to stop it. I rather doubt we will.

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Richard B. writes:

Three of Arizona’s counties now have white minorities Santa Cruz being 80 percent Hispanic ).

30 years ago jobs openings said “Spanish speaking preferred.” Now it’s”Spanish speaking,” therefore Latinos have the upper hand, and sometimes they don’t even need to speak English!

I’ve heard young white mothers say “Don’t bother to go to the State help agency. It’s run by Hispanics and they won’t help you if your white.” There’s a real good chance that the person you complain to is himself Hispanic, or a liberal Hispanic sympathizer.

Karen W. writes from England:

Interesting article from RG. It sounds as though the Southwest USA is almost conquered by Mexico already. Do the whites in America have the collective will to oppose and resist this?

Mark Jaws writes:

I speak and read Spanish so I make it a point to look at the editorial sections of DC’s El Tiempo Latino (The Latino Times) and The Washington Hispanic. First, we Gringos must understand that the vast majority of Latinos are very ethnocentric (like whites used to be in the good old days) and are very unlikely to look at an issue from the non-Latino point of view. Thus the Latino papers write only about the positive aspects of Latino-ization and never mention the high rates of high school dropouts, welfare usage, crime, and illegitimacy which characterize the Hispanic population in general. Furthermore, they write as if Latino-ization is a done deal, and they dream of America one day being a majority Latino country—as if that is going to be a good thing. But let us remember, we are dealing with a demographic with an average IQ somewhere around 90.

Walt replies to Karen W.:

Whites in California don’t seem to be consciously racially aware. What I mean is, though they tend to congregate together socially and domestically, they would dismiss the idea of a white ethnocentrism in response to Mexicanization as simply “racist,” regardless of how the Mexicans think. I’ve brought up the idea of a European-American organization to friends only to get nervous looks and averted glances. So the answer to your question at the present time would have to be “no.”

However, along the lines of what Mark Jaws is saying, Mexicans suffer from certain social pathologies that make them a self-limiting problem in the long run: they are averse to education, they have high illegitimacy rates, high crime rates, and are generally bad at organization. For now, they rely on demogogues to do the thinking for them, but absent these they are very collectivistic. As whites begin to leave the American Southwest, capital will leave with them rendering the original state of Mexican-Americans little better than than when they left Mexico. For now, they thrive on wealth redistribution from whites and northeast Asians to subsidize their malfeasance.

Welfare collapses without substantial social capital in the form of ethnic cohesion. This has all but run out.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 10, 2007 03:01 PM | Send