By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I think it safe to say that American voters in the early 1960s would not have backed the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act if they realized it would lead to white Christian Americans becoming a minority in the United States by the mid-21st century.
Lyndon Johnson and Ted Kennedy understood that. They made repeated assurances that the new law would not change the racial and ethnic mix of the American people.
Were Johnson, Kennedy, and the other politicians of the era lying? Or did they merely fail to foresee the impact of the new law, especially how its goal of “uniting families” would give preference to relatives of immigrants from Third World countries already in the United States?
Whatever the unspoken intentions of the liberal Democrats of the 1960s — or the intentions of modern Democrats when they push for immigration “reform” — the demographic transformation of the country has been dramatic.
If the testimony of your own eyes is insufficient to convince you, consider an article in the July 12 issue of The Atlantic, entitled “The Eclipse of White Christian America.” I do not know the political and ideological views of the author, Robert P. Jones, but he works hard at being nonpartisan. He describes what is happening, not whether it will be good or bad for the United States.
What is happening is dramatic. Jones observes, “In 2004, the same year that Americans reelected George W. Bush as president, the U.S. Census Bureau made waves by predicting that by 2050 the United States would no longer be a majority-white nation.”
By 2012, when Barack Obama was reelected, “population experts forecasted that by 2060 whites will see their numbers decline for the first time in American history, while the number of people who identify as multiracial will nearly triple and the number of Hispanics and Asians will more than double. Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, summed up the magnitude of these shifts for The New York Times: ‘No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change’.”
Jones breaks down the numbers. As the current time, “the proportion of white Christians (including Protestants and Catholics) in the country, while still comprising the largest single wedge in the pie chart, has slipped below a majority to 47 percent.” There are “22 percent non-white Christians.” Moreover, “young adults, ages 18 to 29, are less than half as likely to be white Christians. Nearly seven in 10 American seniors are white Christians, compared to fewer than three in 10 young adults.”
Jones underscores what this means: “To understand just how fundamentally the American religious landscape is being altered, it’s important to look back to the 1970s, when — despite the growing acceptance of Catholics and Jews in the mainstream — Protestantism was still pervasive enough to be thought of as America’s default faith. Sixty-three percent of Americans identified as Protestants in 1974, while approximately one quarter identified as Catholic. Only a 7 percent sliver of the population claimed no religious affiliation.”
He makes some projections based on these numbers: “By 2051, if current trends continue, religiously unaffiliated Americans could comprise as large a percentage of the population as Protestants — which would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.”
“White Christians will likely make up 55 percent of voters in 2016 and drop to 52 percent of voters by the following presidential campaign in 2020. If current trends hold steady, 2024 will be a watershed year — the first American election in which white Christians do not constitute a majority of voters.”
Jones notes that “Bill Clinton’s winning coalition in 1992 was 60 percent white Christian,” whereas “Obama’s winning coalition in 2012 was only 37 percent white Christian. The result is that the white Christian strategy has left Republicans dependent on a steadily shrinking slice of the electorate.”
How should white Christians react to these numbers? Donald Trump’s wall might stop the process Jones describes from escalating. But even if it will, the horse is outside the barn. The demographic change brought on by the immigration policies of the liberal Democrats has changed the country in ways that cannot be undone, regardless of future immigration policies.
But how bad is that? Think back to the pie chart that Jones analyzed. It showed that “white Christians” were now only 47 percent of the population. But it also showed 22 percent were “non-white Christians.” That means nearly 70 percent of the country is Christian. Only 22 percent of our fellow citizens described themselves as “unaffiliated,” with 5 percent listing themselves as members of “other religions” and 2 percent telling the pollsters they “don’t know/refused.”
This means the United States is still an overwhelmingly Christian. I think it safe to say that large numbers of the group listed as “non-white Christians” are Hispanic and Catholic.
The bottom line: The United States is not faced with the situation in Europe where massive numbers of immigrants are Muslims. In this country — unless the Democrats find a way to increase the number of refugees from the Middle East — the flow of immigrants, legal and illegal, is from Catholic countries to our south.
This does not mean that illegal immigration is not a problem — it is. Nor that we should not seek a way to control our borders — we should. But it does mean that there is no need to panic or raise our arms in surrender. A case can be made that Hispanic immigrants are not assimilating as rapidly as earlier immigrant groups. Ann Coulter argues that point. But they are assimilating. Only a small number become criminals and dependents of the welfare system. Many of us know them as fellow parishioners — even as our parish priests.
Former U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales is the son of Mexican immigrants, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are the sons of Cuban immigrants. We could make a long list of Hispanics who have succeeded in show business and corporate America. Many Hispanics have risen to leadership positions in the U.S. military.
Consider the illegal alien Hispanics working in food services and the construction industry. More than once I have heard restaurant owners and contractors praising them as “the best workers in the world,” as “great people.” One might object that these businessmen are looking for cheap labor. The restaurant owners and contractors deny the charge. They insist that they cannot find blue-collar American workers who are as competent and reliable, even at significantly higher salaries than they are paying the Hispanics.
I can’t prove the employers are telling the truth, but my hunch is that they are, or something close to it. Be honest, now: Whom would you rather see coming to do repairs on your home? A crew of Hispanics you suspect are here illegally, or a group of the American-born young men you see hanging around the local mall?
There are those who see the figures cited by Robert P. Jones in his article in The Atlantic as a call for American Catholics to “go Amish,” to separate ourselves from the mainstream and live as a remnant of Christians is a post-Christian world. Such a scenario is not an impossibility. But we are not there yet.
The “non-white Christians” Jones points to in his analysis of the “eclipse” of white Christian America do not present that kind of threat. The liberal politicians may get the demographic transformation of the United States they were looking for through their immigration policies, but it might not be to their liking.
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