Top Pollster: Higher Levels of Immigration Will Lead to Bigger Government

Top Pollster: Higher Levels of Immigration Will Lead to Bigger Government

on Tue, 25 Mar 2014

Pew Research Vice President Michael Dimock told establishment Republicans at the Ripon Society that non-whites will make up half or more of the next generation for the first time in American history—a phenomenon the U.S. Census Bureau has attributed to the “Second Great Wave” of immigration since 1970.

As the high levels of immigration continue, Dimock said, the newer generation will support bigger government.

“Their tendency is more liberal, their tendency is bigger government,” Dimock said of millennials—people born between 1979 and 1995—according to the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard.

“This is a generation that is 41 percent non-white; the generation behind it is likely to be close to 50 if not more than 50 percent non-white, and the anti-government kind of tone is one that really doesn’t resonate with that non-white sector in particular,” Dimock said.

Dimock told Republicans that because of this, they should abandon conservative principles and support big government. “Try to take as much of the anti-government rhetoric out,” Dimock advised Republicans, according to Bedard.

In a recent post on the U.S. Census Bureau’s blog, Elizabeth Grieco wrote that the millennial generation has been influenced by foreign-born individuals allowed into the United States as part of a late 20th century change in American immigration policies.

While many Americans can trace their heritage to the first “Great Wave” of immigration in the 1800s and early 1900s, “over the last four decades, the United States has experienced what many are calling the ‘second great wave’ of immigration,” Grieco wrote. “Since 1970, the foreign-born population has continuously increased in size and as a percentage of the total U.S. population. The foreign-born population quadrupled after 1970, reaching 40.0 million by 2010, and about 13 percent of the total population – or one in eight – were foreign-born.”

Immigration hawks like Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly have argued high levels of immigration are a demographic time bomb that will eventually wipe out the GOP.

“If the Republican Party is to remain a party that is conservative and nationally competitive, it must defeat amnesty and any proposed increases in legal immigration,” Schlafly wrote in the foreword of her organization’s report showing how mass legal immigration “dooms” a conservative GOP. “Further, conservatives must work to significantly reduce the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country from the current level of 1.1 million a year.”