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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to use harsh words, but that's bullshit.

Recent immigrants are a very small minority in the United States. The only reason they can affect the election is because approximately half of non-immigrants vote Democrat. They can be "the straw that broke the camel's back", but the straw can't break the back if the camel wasn't overloaded to begin with.

And by talking about non-whites vs whites you're confusing the issue. Hispanics whose family have lived in the United States longer than the United States has existed are far more American than European immigrants who came over last year.

Also, it takes a long time to get citizenship, so it's not like they're just came off the boat.

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Your argument is both irrelevant and incomplete.

The parent claimed that a greater level of immigration would likely have dramatic electoral consequences. You implied that the current level of immigration does not have dramatic electoral consequences. These claims are completely orthogonal.

Furthermore, the latter implication (which I assume you made on the basis that it is the only way the rest of your post conceivably supports the claim that the parent argument is bullshit) doesn't follow from the fact that the electoral consequences of immigration represent a continuation of an existing trend.

Doubling a really small number does not make a large number. We're still talking well under 1% annually. The only reason that recent immigrants can affect the election is because recent immigrants are voting the same way as a large portion of the current electorate. That argument applies today and it will apply in the future even if immigration levels double. If they go up an order of magnitude, it might not, but nobody is suggesting that.

I'm having trouble parsing your last paragraph. There are at least 3 different things that "latter implication" can refer to...

We're still talking well under 1% annually.

I.e., 10% over 10 years. Or 20% over 10 years if we double our immigration rate.

Note that I'm generally in favor of increased immigration, I just don't think we should ignore the possible negative consequences.

Recent immigrants are a very small minority in the United States.

The articles I linked to discuss recent and not so recent immigrants, together with their children. The group being discussed is currently the largest minority group in the US.

The only reason they can affect the election is because approximately half of non-immigrants vote Democrat.

That is true because, as you note, immigration numbers are low. If immigration numbers do not stay low, that will change.

Hispanics whose family have lived in the United States longer than the United States has existed are far more American than European immigrants who came over last year.

Very true, though "americanness" is tangential to the point I'm making. Also, European immigration to the US is extremely small, and basically irrelevant to the numbers.

Americanness is a very central argument, though. In my experience, many immigrants are much more enthusiastically "American" than are most of the rest of us. They made the huge decision to move to America of today and very enthusiastically do not want America to change. Ironically many of them are very anti-immigration.

There are at least 40 million people who either have green cards or have become citizens, who were not born in the USA.

Plus all the illegals who are not supposed to vote (but it is reasonable to assume that some small percentage of them do).

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