General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSo, you racist POTUS SOB, worried about Spanish speaking brown folk coming to the USA?
Demanding that Congress appropriate 10 Billion or more for a wall on our southern border to stop them, eh? Afraid all those Hispanics will figure out how to vote in our elections so they can put Democrats back in power? Is that it, or at least a PART of it?
Well you are right to worry. A major new surge will be heading here shortly, but your great big beautiful wall won't stop them, even if you somehow manage to get it built. They won't be crossing the Rio Grande to get in. They'll be crossing big water instead, you know, big ocean water, so they won't need coyotes to help them cross. No, they'll use valid U.S. ID's, like birth certificates, passports and drivers licenses to enter your sacred fatherland. And they won't be seeking a path way to citizenship either. Because Puerto Ricans are already American citizens. They already can legally vote.
If you had any sense (we already know you don't have a shred of common decency) even just a tiny pinch of it, you would ditch the wall pronto and send that ten billion to Puerto Rico immediately, to be delivered by the U.S. Army Core of Engineers. Let them use it restore some infra structure with it, help get an electric grid up and running while they are at it. Oh, and you can throw in that 33 million you made out like a bandit with too, when you stiffed Puerto Rico by declaring bankruptcy there. You know, that handy legal mumbo jumbo that makes debt disappear in a cloud of smoke that a billionaire like you is entitled to exploit but a U.S. Territory like Puerto Rico is forbidden by law to use.
Because, you racist piece of sh*t, if you leave Puerto Rico sitting in utter devastation for very much longer, Puerto Ricans won't just quietly sit there and die. Poverty stricken Mexicans spend thousands paying coyotes to smuggle them into the U.S. but a plane ticket from San Juan to Miami, Philadelphia, Cleveland or New York costs a whole lot less than that. Maybe not this week, when stranded tourists are at the front of the line, but within a month or so, well before all the lights come back on across Puerto Rico.
By now you no doubt figured out that residents of Puerto Rico are in fact American Citizens. Most likely you didn't know though that Puerto Ricans living here on the mainland traditionally have a relatively poor record of registering and voting in U.S. elections. Let me quote from Wikipedia for you:
"Compared to the United States, voter participation by Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico is very large. However, many see a paradox in that this high level of voting is not echoed stateside. There, Puerto Ricans have had persistently low voter registration and turnout rates, despite the relative success they have had in electing their own to significant public offices throughout the United States."
Lucky for Republicans, huh? How much longer do you figure that trend is going to hold, the way that things are looking now? According to the 2010 U.S. Census (which doesn't reflect more recent increases in Puerto Rican U.S. residents), a list of the top 10 large cities (over 200,000 in population) with the highest percentages of Puerto Rican residents include
Orlando, FL (13.1 percent), Philadelphia, PA (8.0 percent), Cleveland, OH (7.4 percent) and Tampa, FL (7.2 percent). You don't expect Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to figure much into your reelection prospects, do you?
Oh there's a lot more information available for you to chew over, but I know by now we are far over the total word count that you can absorb in a single sitting. So I will summarize for you:
The worst things get in Puerto Rico the more Puerto Ricans will move to the mainland. Puerto Ricans can legally vote. The worse you treat Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, the more they will hate you, and the more motivated they will be to register to vote against you. Puerto Ricans are already an important voting bloc in Florida, but they concentrate in some other states of some interest to Republicans also. There currently are a lot of Puerto Ricans in Allentown, and Reading PA for example, and in Milwaukee, WI as well.
And soon there will be a whole lot more of them - unless things start improving in Puerto Rico immediately. And there's no telling what they will say, in Spanish no less, to Mexican Americans.
grantcart
(53,061 posts)at least in the short term he is turning Florida to purple faster than the natural demographics could have imagined.
Tom Rinaldo
(22,913 posts)Their homeland also lies in the Caribbean, in the general path of many of the same hurricanes. I expect there will be strong sympathy for Puerto Rico within that community too - and Republicans count on at the very least breaking even with Cuban American voters in Florida.
grantcart
(53,061 posts)Those under 50s are a lot less anti communist reactionaries.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/24/after-decades-of-gop-support-cubans-shifting-toward-the-democratic-party/
The CA split in 16 but that is likely to change because there is one strong emotional tie that is likely to resonant with CA, the Cuban diaspora sends money home and is emotionally tied to their homeland. They are unlikely to respond well to Trumps unsympathetic incompetence.
http://cri.fiu.edu/research/cuba-poll/2016-cuba-poll.pdf
malaise
(269,157 posts)Rec
PJMcK
(22,048 posts)If only someone would read your post to Trump, Tom.
He needs to know that we think he's an idiot.
Tom Rinaldo
(22,913 posts)DK504
(3,847 posts)Cubans coming to America and becoming Americans and voting, yada, yada. But they are brown and they speak Spanish ......
Iggo
(47,565 posts)My dog is all, "You can totally hear that, right?