The Production of Minorities –

One thing the United States produces with great and undiminished efficiency is minorities. The unparalleled engine of American democracy takes the raw material of peoples as diverse as Cubans and Brazilians, Mexicans and Italians or Germans from Argentina, and turns them almost overnight into that American invention, Hispanics. These people did not generally think of themselves as Hispanic when they were in their native or, for later generations, ancestral countries, but they become Hispanic here, just as Japanese and Chinese and Koreans and Filipinos et al. become Asian on these shores.

A nice example of this was in the Washington Post yesterday, in an article about the wooing of new Hispanic voters in Las Vegas. According to the Post, Democratic strategists call these newly minted voters “‘opportunity Hispanics’ because they are not yet partial to government programs or one of the major parties.”

In a revealing vignette, one of these new voters who had just registered as a Democrat told the visiting Democratic candidate for Congress that “Democrats have been known to help out a lot of minorities, which I am a part of.” The Hispanic candidate is Cuban, presumably a small minority in the Hispanic community of Las Vegas.

It would appear that the more successful Democrats are in making members of various ethnic groups identify themselves as minorities, the more successful they will be. It’s less clear that what’s good for the Democrats on this score is good for the country.

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