In an unusually tiresome lecture from Christopher Buckley, there is this line:

It’s also true — odd — that Mr. McCain is popular among Hispanic voters, who are themselves paradigms of cultural conservatism [bold mine-DL] and without whose support any “conservative” candidate for president may be doomed to failure.

No doubt McCain’s immigration position accounts for his popularity with some Hispanic voters.  I remain very skeptical that selling out on this issue will yield the electoral benefits promised when there are many native-born Hispanics and other naturalised citizens who take just as dim a view of amnesty as anyone, but there is certainly a constituency for what McCain offers.  What is absolutely wrong about this sentence, as you can see for yourself, is this claim of “paradigms of cultural conservatism.”  (Arguably, this same criticism could be leveled at some key voting blocs of the GOP with respect to divorce rates and the like.)  Of course, particularly in the context of the immigration debate the phrase “cultural conservatism” is ambiguous, since there is no clear agreement about which culture it is that is being conserved.  Even when separated from this phrase and recast in dubious “family values” language, the claim does not seem to be true.  As many others have observed before me, the flip side of assimilation is assimilation to the sorts of “values” that cultural conservatives would not recognise as their own.  What do I mean?  Specifically, I mean this:

Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down.

And this:

Conservatives who support open borders are fond of invoking “Hispanic family values” as a benefit of unlimited Hispanic immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of those family values.

And again:  

As Mona’s family suggests, out-of-wedlock child rearing among Hispanics is by no means confined to the underclass. The St. Joseph’s parishioners are precisely the churchgoing, blue-collar workers whom open-borders conservatives celebrate. Yet this community is as susceptible as any other to illegitimacy.

If Steve Sailer is right and voting patterns coincide closely with being married and, importantly, the stability of marriage, these Hispanics are very likely to be Democratic voters.  On the other hand, as Reihan has observed, many so-called “values voters” are often concentrated most heavily among those that suffer from the most family instability, so it might be that these same Hispanics would make reliable Republican voters if you assume the exact opposite of what all open borders advocates have been saying for decades, which is that they are obvious GOP voters because they are natural, habitual conservatives.  Instead, you would have to assume that they are going to become Republican voters because they are drawn to the symbolism and rhetoric of social order that they find lacking in their own surroundings. 

However, I think even this would be a serious misreading of this particular set of voters, since there are any number of non-immigration economic and social policies that the GOP is not likely to modify or abandon that do not or do not seem to serve their interests.  Of course, once voting patterns in a family or community become established they are not easily broken.  If it is true that the political preferences established in youth endure throughout one’s lifetime, and if it is true that children tend to inherit their parents’ political views, and we know that 18-29 year olds are now trending Democratic by a huge margin (a phenomenon that is even more acute among minorities), the odds of Hispanic voters becoming a reliable source of Republican electoral strength at any time in the next half century are extremely poor.