Later Generations Move to the Mean
I have long thought that generation is the key to understanding the political behavior of ethnic voters in the United States. Immigrants may identify strongly with one party over another (like Cubans with Republicans or Puerto Ricans with Democrats), but later generations all move to the mean. Cuban immigrants, for example, may be single issue Fidel Castro voters and therefore Republicans, but their children and grandchildren are more worried about education and health care and are therefore open to Democrats. Mexican immigrants, to use another example, start off strongly Democrat, but later generations start worrying about red-blooded U.S. issues like taxes and are more likely than their parents to consider Republicans.
My-Thuan Tran and Christian Berthelsen of the Los Angeles Times report on a classic example of the phenomenon taking place with Vietnamese in California’s Orange County:
Since they first began arriving in the U.S. after fleeing Vietnam’s communist regime in the 1970s, Vietnamese immigrants — much like the Cuban refugees who settled in Florida — have developed a political profile that is almost monolithically Republican, identifying with the party’s historic anti-Communist stance.
Now, after years in which they were eclipsed by their more dominant Republican counterparts, Vietnamese Democrats are beginning to emerge in Orange County, home to the nation’s largest Vietnamese American community with a population of more than 150,000.
