Hispanic voters were never a monolith: Republicans in Texas and Florida always had more success than in California. The optimistic case argued that Hispanic voters tended to vote Democratic for many of the same reasons that previous groups of immigrants (the Germans, the Irish, the Italians) voted Democratic when they were composed heavily of first-generation immigrants living in poor and working-class urban enclaves and relying on a lot of public services and benefits. Individual voters in those groups, as they moved up the economic ladder and assimilated more into American culture, began to see themselves more as part of the American mainstream, with a stake in the system. With that came voting more often for Republicans…

Improving one’s economic status doesn’t automatically turn people into Republicans, but it does make them much more receptive to persuasion by Republicans, who traditionally emphasize opportunity, economic optimism, and letting people keep more of what they earn. That is even a good part of the story of how Republicans broke through with white Southerners; Trende, in his book The Lost Majority, details at some length not just the shift among Irish and Italian immigrants as they became more economically established but also how the breaks in the Democratic Solid South tracked the growth of suburbs and the middle class in the “New South,” especially after the Second World War, while poorer and more rural Southerners were slower to change their voting behavior (at least until much more recently)…

On the other hand, paranoia about immigrants and non-white ethnic groups can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Republicans who give up trying to reach voters will find that they do not reach them.