Forget Immigration. It's Big Government Hispanic Voters Want.

[Geee]

American Thinker:

If we are to believe the polls, Hispanic voters love big government. Just adore it. They want more of it. Lots more. And they will vote to make that happen.

Pundits are currently tying themselves into knots trying to figure out how the presidential candidates' positions on immigration will impact their popularity with Hispanic voters.

The answer? Who cares? What drives Hispanic voters is simple, and it was captured with shocking clarity by a Pew Hispanic Center poll in April.

A mind-blowing 75 percent of Hispanics tell Pew they want bigger government with more services. Contrast that with just 41 percent of the American public that says it wants bigger government with more services. (Some 45 percent of the general American population wants smaller government with fewer services. For Hispanics, it's 19 percent.)

This Hispanic love affair with big government isn't a short-term result of the Great Recession. It isn't a temporary product of the first-generation poverty; immigrants, legal or otherwise, have always struggled through in America. This affection for big government is uniquely cultural for Hispanics, and so strongly embedded that it apparently persists for generations.

Some 81 percent of first-generation Hispanic immigrants tell Pew pollsters they prefer big government. In the second generation, it's 72 percent. By the third generation, the number is just shy of 60 percent. Contrast that, again, with the mere 41 percent of the general American population that feels the same.

Part of this probably comes from the fact that most Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, come from countries with deeply socialist and often quasi-dictatorial governments. This is what they are used to, except that here, the government benefits are much more generous, providing a standard of living that far exceeds that of their countries of origin in most cases.

By our measurements, this standard of living is abject poverty. But when you come from a Guatemalan village with a single well and you've spent your whole life carrying water from that well in buckets for cooking and you've never seen a doctor, flipped a working light switch, or experienced indoor plumbing, our lowest standards of living must seem like Nirvana.

Why push your children to excel when by merely coming here and putting your American-born children on government programs, you've already provided a life for them far beyond what would be possible, or even fathomable, where you come from? You, too, would develop a near-religious fervor for government programs, as Hispanics apparently have, had this been your history.