It used to be that legal immigrants would divide their votes once they became citizens. But that was then.
Few seem willing to admit it, but mass immigration appears to be killing democracy in the United States. Two-party democracy withstood the unprecedented mass immigration of the 1870-to-1914 period because the European immigrants tended, for one reason or another, to vote for both parties. That is not true today. In the 19th century, newcomers voted along religious lines to a remarkable degree: Irish Catholics 80 percent Democrat and all Catholics 70 percent Democrat. But after the Civil War, Germans and Scandinavians, heavily Lutheran, voted Republican, as English Canadian and British immigrants did. In the famous turning-point presidential election of 1896, urban working-class immigrants tended to vote Republican, organized by the active and powerful political machines in big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Very few in the mass migration of that day moved to the American South, which remained solidly Democrat. The two-party system survived throughout most of the country as both parties had urban political machines that provided social services to immigrants.
The present massive wave of immigration that began in the 1970s, largely as a result of the extended family clause in the 1965 Kennedy immigration reform bill, has had remarkably different results. The new immigrants are voting overwhelmingly Democrat: Hispanics 2 to 1, Asians about 70 percent (all election figures from the Pew Research Center). The children of Asian immigrants voted 82 percent for Barack Obama in 2008. In addition, black Americans who used to vote Republican now vote 90 percent or more Democrat, as do black immigrants.
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