New Americans for the Next America : Once Again, Immigrants Change U.S. Political, Cultural Identity

From Cuban Miami to the Koreatown and Little Manila of Los Angeles, the Sun Belt of quintessentially Ronald Reagan repute is becoming America’s new Ellis Island--Asian- and Latin-tilted. U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics may never be the same.

The original Ellis Island of 80 years ago was part of a transatlantic-oriented America that looked back to Europe. Ethnic politicking and “Old Country” culture tilted accordingly. Even a decade ago, New York City office seekers prepared themselves with fact-finding missions to Ireland, Israel and Italy. But the emerging question of the late 1980s is: How soon will California politicos begin to find it important to junket to Mexico City, Manila, Tokyo and Seoul? And what will it mean?

Another milestone in the continuing reorientation of America, probably. The new immigration to the Sun Belt, despite its cultural controversies, amounts to a kind of demographic seal of recognition on the region’s emergence as this country’s new power center. It’s a further sign that the economic and political power in the United States is shifting away from an Eastern seaboard built around America’s past European orientation. By contrast, the emerging Florida-Texas-California Sun Belt, with its burgeoning Third World population, represents a power axis increasingly based on interaction with Latin America and the Pacific Rim.

It’s a two-way politics, of course--just as it was a century ago when Irish-Americans in New York or Boston kept a watchful eye on the restiveness back in Ireland. Repeating that pattern, some new Asian and Latin American immigrant communities here have assumed an increasing role in the elections, political movements or even revolutions back home. Although Cubans, Chinese and Vietnamese cannot, because their countries are in communist hands, the Guatemalan, Colombian and Costa Rican populations of Los Angeles and New York have played a substantial part in their native countries’ elections. National candidates from these countries visited both cities to raise campaign money, and sizeable emigre communities in the United States still cast votes south of the border. U.S.-based expatriates have also been a force in promoting liberalization by authoritarian regimes in countries like the Philippines and Korea. And since the Sandinistas took power in 1979, roughly 175,000 Nicaraguans have come to the United States--principally to Florida, with California second. Most are supporters of the insurgent contra forces.

The consequences for internal U.S. politics should be at least as significant. To begin with, there’s reason to question post-World War II precedents that new voters from below the Rio Grande and west of Hawaii favor liberal ideas and Democratic candidates.

To be sure, that has been the dominant tilt of the earlier Asian and Latin American immigrations--Mexicans, Japanese, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos (since 1965, they’ve ranked second only to Mexicans). Yet conservatives can cite substantial pro-Reagan voting in 1984, plus indications of rightward movement among these groups, particularly on the cultural front. As of 1986, largely Catholic Latinos display a conservative profile on issues like abortion, school prayer, busing, gay rights and aid to religious schools.

Asians, by contrast, are conservative on economic issues--opposing welfare outlays, favoring sanctions against employers for hiring illegal immigrants and exceeding other minority groups in support for defense spending. A late 1985 survey of ethnic Californians released by Caltech found Asians also had “a strong pro-business attitude.” As well they should, given the ratio of Asian shopkeepers and entrepreneurs. Cubans and Indochinese, meanwhile, lean rightward because the loss of their homelands to communism. Somewhat the same is true of Nicaraguans, although few have become U.S. citizens. Koreans and Taiwanese also share some “Old Country” anti-communism. Hardly any fit a liberal stereotype.

The result is that a number of these groups are becoming Republicans, not Democrats. Growing numbers of Cubans, for example, have become an important force in the GOP--not just in greater Miami, but even in New Jersey, where Cubans in Hudson County (Jersey City), long the seat of a stereotypical Irish Democratic machine, are now beginning to tip the area Republican. The Indochinese are voting Republican, too, and although they don’t constitute a large electorate, there has already been talk about a GOP Vietnamese congressional candidate in California. Even the Koreans and Taiwanese, albeit not as Republican as the Cubans and Indochinese, constitute a future electoral pool for the GOP at least as much as for Democrats.

We’re not talking about big numbers, to be sure. Moreover, Democrats continue to profit from the fact that the oldest “new immigration” groups--the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans--are also the most numerous, the most widely registered to vote and the most disproportionately Democratic. They’re probably 4-1 Democratic in registration and at least 2-1 or 3-1 Democratic in their voting. At least 10 million Mexicans and Puerto Ricans live in the United States versus about 2 million Cubans and Indochinese. Nonetheless, recent voting statistics suggest that the Democrats have been suffering erosion in the older groups, too. Yesteryear’s 75% to 85% majorities are breaking up. Latino and Asian Americans sense they are in a new era. Republican strategists are even nurturing ties to Mexico’s conservative party--the National Action Party--as part of their campaign to woo upper-bracket elements of the Mexican-American community.

But if the partisan implications remain murky, what is indisputable is that the new ethnic groups are changing the makeup of the region from Florida to California. Regional conservatism will have to change, too. Back in 1968, when I coined the term “Sun Belt” in my book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” the key to the region, it seemed, was as a place where five trends met: 1) growing affluence; 2) a heavy in-migration of conservative Northern retirees and opportunity-seekers; 3) a strong backstopping of conservative economic interests--oil, agriculture, tourism and defense installations; 4) mushrooming middle-class suburbs a world away from old Northern urban centers, and 5) a dominant Anglo culture opposed to the ethnic and racial politics so prevalent in the North. This conservatism has indeed turned out to be the dominant politics of the region--and the country--as 1968-84 voting patterns attest.

But now a new watershed is taking shape. Not only are two economic props of the old ascendancy in trouble--agriculture and energy--but the Anglo predominance is fading, too. California demographers keep producing studies projecting a Third World population majority in the state sometime in the early 21st Century. Texas could easily be one-third Latino if illegal immigration isn’t controlled. Greater Miami is becoming more and more Latino.

Predictably, many people worry that the change is coming too fast. Some nervous people talk about a reconquista --a Latino recapture of Southwestern territory that was Spanish and then Mexican until the 1840s. Candidates for major office in Texas have even talked about militarizing the Rio Grande to stem the tide of illegal aliens. Asians, too, are stirring increasing animosity--whether they be difficult-to-assimilate Hmong tribesmen from Laos or the young, bright Asian-Americans grabbing an ever-higher percentage of university places from Boston to Berkeley. If there’s mounting frustration with Latino immigration, there’s also some evidence of increasing violence against Asians.

On balance, though, the equation is a plus. Escalating Latino and Asian immigration to the Sun Belt, especially Florida, Texas and California, is coming hand-in-hand with the transformation of those states into U.S. cultural, commercial, financial and even political windows on the world’s rising regions of East Asia and Latin America. The influx of middle-class professionals and upper-income expatriates from both regions--in some instances, a virtual brain-drain--helps nurture the rising international role of Los Angeles, Miami and other cities. What’s more, no other European or Anglo-Saxon nation enjoys similar economic, geographic and cultural windows to the emerging continents. So it ought to be a unique asset to 21st-Century America, cushioning our continuing loss of post-1945 world primacy--just as the global windows of the British Empire provided a sophistication and expertise that eased Britain’s early 20th-Century decline.

This mutual involvement is already elevating a new range of issues and a new set of U.S. ethnic political considerations in foreign policy. Latino-American attitudes toward U.S. military involvement in Nicaragua are becoming more important. The state of New Mexico, led by Gov. Toney Anaya, has proclaimed itself a “sanctuary” for refugees from Central America, U.S. immigration laws notwithstanding. Propositions opposing bilingualism and insisting on English as the official language are statewide ballot discussion topics in California. Washington diplomacy toward regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, Korea, Mexico and the Philippines now has to contend with growing “hyphenated American” constituencies like those that were so mindful of Europe in the first half of this century. And immigration reform is simultaneously a U.S. ethnic concern and foreign-policy issue.

However, for all that “sanctuary” seems like a far-fetched doctrine and some new immigration controls are probably a necessity, history is likely to view these various stresses principally as growing pains of a profound regional emergence. And it may just be that 21st-Century California candidates will find it politic to eat dim sum and develop a taste for serrano chiles before they pitch the electorate in greater Los Angeles.