Immigration is only the 6th-most-important issue for Latino voters in California when casting a vote for a candidate for U.S. Senator or for U.S. Congress, according to a statewide survey conducted by Univision.
When registered Latino voters were asked to name their most important issues, the results, in order, were: education (21%), jobs (16%), government spending and the deficit (15%), social security (13%), "how what they do will affect my wallet" (10%), health care (9%), immigration (8%), and crime and personal safety (5%).
An overwhelming 86% of those surveyed support comprehensive immigration reform. However, a majority--53%--of registered Latino voters in California also answered that they believe that, “…we should require borders to be secured before providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants."
Furthermore, when asked, “Which of the following is your major concern or complaint about the Republican Party?”, only ten percent of those surveyed named Republican opposition to immigration reform.
The number one gripe was that Republicans "care mostly about corporations and big business" (17%). Other concerns, in order, were that Republicans: care only for themselves (17%), favor the rich (14%), are against immigration reform (10%), don’t stand up strongly for their beliefs (7%), "don’t understand people like me" (6%), and favoring white people not minorities (5%).
The survey also asked Latino voters in California their opinions about the Affordable Care Act, and while the survey found that 65 percent supported the ACA, more than 40% cited increased health care costs, high deductibles, and reduced work hours as concerns.
“Latinos are focused on pocketbook issues. They want to know how a proposition or legislation is going to affect them financially, “ said Hector Barajas, a partner at the Revolvis political consulting firm, and a leading expert on Latino issues.
Barajas advises those seeking to make Obamacare an issue not to attack the program itself, but instead to focus on the costs.
To illustrate how to communicate with Latino voters, Barajas singled out legislation authored by State Senator Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) that would ban plastic grocery bags and mandate that store owners charge a 10-cent fee on every paper bag.
“While a 10-cent-per-bag mandate may not seem like much to some, when you’re barely making ends meet on minimum wage, it all adds up quickly,” Barajas. told Breitbart News.
Some other interesting tidbits from the survey data include the fact that fully 28% of California’s Latino voters are millennials (ages 18-34); that 61% of respondents most closely identified with the Democrat Party and only 15% identified themselves as being Republican; and that 6% of Latino households are Spanish-speaking only, 30% are English-only, and 64% are bilingual.
The survey, commissioned by Univision, was conducted by Moore Information. 400 interviews were completed statewide, with an additional 100 interviews later conducted in the Central Valley specifically. The margin of error in the poll is +/- 4%.
According to Nielsen Media Services, Univision is one of the largest audiences of Spanish-language television viewers in the world, with local stations in over 50 markets with large Hispanic and Latino populations.
One of the arguments used by the unfettered immigration proponents is who will pick you fruits and vegetables? But, that's a total fabrication. We have farm workers who are suffering and the additional workers will do nothing but further depress their wages.
Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Robert Silva, mayor of Mendota, California, Sam Rubio, owner of a coffee shop in the town and president of the local chamber of commerce, and Bill Diedrich, a farmer in Firebaugh, California, talk with Bloomberg's Michael Marois about the impact of California's drought on the central valley, the U.S.'s most productive agricultural region. Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for the world's 10th largest economy after 2013 turned into the driest year on record. President Barack Obama will visit the area today. (Source: Bloomberg)
Joe Del Bosque’s workers are tending irrigation lines and priming pumps for the cantaloupe season on 1,000 acres north of Mendota, California, an area bigger than Central Park. The drought gripping the most productive U.S. agricultural region may claim more than half that land.
Mendota, in Fresno County near the middle of the state, calls itself the Cantaloupe Center of the World. In the last big drought five years ago, unemployment in the town soared to almost 50 percent and the line of farmworkers at the local food bank stretched for blocks. Del Bosque had to cut his payroll 30 percent, and it will probably be worse this year, he said.
“Those are wages lost,” said the 64-year-old farmer. “It’s wages lost to real people. It’s a loss of revenue into the community. That money supports families, it supports businesses. It’s a terrible effect. And I’m just one farmer, a medium-sized farmer. So if all farmers suffer the same thing, you can imagine the ripple effect throughout the community.”
Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for the world’s 10th largest economy after 2013 turned into the driest year on record. President Barack Obama will visit the county today as more farmers prepare to idle thousands of acres, boosting food prices across the U.S. and leaving thousands of farm workers jobless.
Photographer: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
The cracked-dry bed of the Almaden Reservoir on Feb. 7, 2014, in San Jose, Calif.
Mendota is in a 200-mile zone on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley that grows about 70 percent of California’s cantaloupes. The state provides three-quarters of the cantaloupes sold in the U.S. Planting begins as early as April, with the harvest between June and October, according to the California Cantaloupe Advisory Board.
Poor, Hispanic
The city of 11,000 rises from a flat state highway that pierces farmland 230 miles north of Los Angeles. The community depends mostly on agriculture and is 97 percent Hispanic. Just one in three people graduated from high school and per-person income is about $9,000 a year, according to U.S. Census data.
Mendota already suffers from 34 percent unemployment, five times the national rate. The numbers vary seasonally, with farm workers migrating to Mendota every year from as far away as El Salvador and Oaxaca, Mexico.
“These people live week to week and if their paycheck is short by $5, they go hungry,” said Chuck Herrin who runs an employment agency that provides contract laborers to local farms. “A lot of these people, frankly, they don’t have legal status so they can’t go on unemployment.”
Photographer: Ken James/Bloomberg
Rows of grape vines stand near Mendota, California.
$122,000 Houses
A federal medium-security prison on the southwest edge of town provides some jobs outside of farming. There’s a new subdivision of modest one-story houses and apartments on the north side, and a rundown mobile home park on the west. In 2012, the median home value was $122,000, one-third of the average price in California, according to Census data. Many buildings in the seven-block downtown are older, showing their wear in broken shutters and weathered paint.
In 2009, farmers in the area got 10 percent of the federally-controlled water they requested during a milder drought. At the time, unemployment soared to almost 50 percent.
This year, no one expects any federal water.
“Without water we can’t produce,” said Bill Diedrich, a fourth-generation California farmer who grows almonds along the west side of Firebaugh, eight miles up the road from Mendota. “Without water, we don’t have jobs for folks. It’s going to be devastating.”
Small-Town Life
Sam Rubio, a 30-year-old former science teacher, is the president of the local chamber of commerce and owns a small coffee shop anchoring a one-story downtown commercial building. He sells some pastries and a place to plug in laptop computers. He offers chess boards for kids and a room where local non-profit groups can meet.
Photographer: Ken James/Bloomberg
A canal, which supplies water to Central Valley farm land, stands near Mendota, California.
People live in the area because they are dedicated to farming and enjoy the quiet, small-town life, Rubio said. Yet more and more of them are talking about moving, he said, in search of a place where the crops are more certain.
“My worst fear is that we would have to close up shop,” Rubio said. “We’re a luxury. That’s just the truth. We are the last thing that parents are thinking about when they are thinking of providing for their children. They think the grocery store first, then gas and clothing and shoes.”
Top Producer
Fresno County supplied $6.6 billion of agricultural products in 2012, the top-producing county in the U.S. by gross value. With the drought, its farmers and ranchers are expected to fallow 250,000 acres this year, a quarter of its irrigated land and an area bigger thanManhattan, according to Ryan Jacobsen, chief executive of the Fresno County Farm Bureau.
It’s not only the lack of rain that’s crippling farms. For years, the federal government and the state have reduced water allocation to a fraction of what is needed because of environmental laws protecting endangered fish and wildlife. As the state’s population grew to more than 38 million, few new dams and reservoirs were built to guard against dry years.
“Our farmers have been imaginative enough to maintain a good business until now,” said Steve Malanca, general manager of a John Deere (DE) farming equipment dealership in Firebaugh. “We’re going to be in some uncharted territory. With the zero allocation, I can tell you that my customers’ priority is not farm equipment. It’s water.
‘‘That translates into less sales, and not only farm equipment,” he said. “It’s farm fertilizer, farm seeds, it’s the local parts house in town, the local restaurants and the local barber. It affects us all.”
Price Spike
Ranchers and farmers who can buy water on the open market are paying as much as 10 times what it would cost in a typical wet year. Sheridan Nicholas, the water resources manager at the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa Water Storage District near Bakersfield, bid on water that a neighboring district had put up for sale, only to find that local cattle ranchers were offering about 35 percent more, as much as $1,350 per acre-foot.
An acre-foot is the volume needed to cover an acre of land one foot deep with water and is used as a measure of large volume.
“If a state water contractor got 100 percent of their allocation, that water would typically go for about $100 an acre-foot,” Nicholas said. “It is so dry that there just isn’t enough water to buy, and that’s what made that water so valuable.”
The state saw relief last weekend as the most powerful storm to hit California in more than a year dropped several inches of rain in some spots and several feet of snow in the mountains. One reservoir rose as much as 15 feet in four days.
Northern California, where rainfall and snowmelt is collected and then fed down to cities and farms, has received just 8 inches of rain since July 1, according to the National Weather Service. That’s 14 inches below normal for Feb. 12, with more than half of the rainy season already over.
“I pray to God that we continue to get some rain,” said Mendota’s Mayor Pro Tem Joseph Amador, a retired detective who runs a local hotel. “There are some hard working people out here that want to work. They don’t need to be home stressing about what food is going to come to their table for their family tomorrow.”
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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