In the weeks following Mitt Romney's defeat there has been much ado about the importance, nay, the necessity of the Republican Party making inroads with the Hispanic vote by the time of the next election. With a rapid growth rate that will make them about 30% of the population by 2050, there is a certain amount of inevitability to Republican outreach to Hispanics. The effort would hardly be awkward—after all, it has been said enough that Hispanics "are natural conservatives because they're hard working, family-oriented, and religious." While your author has found this to be mostly true in his frequent personal dealings with Hispanics, it misses two other important traits of the Hispanic voter: a communitarian reflex and skepticism toward free market economics. As long as the Republican Party continues to be the party of free market individualism, even just rhetorically, its share of the Hispanic vote will never grow.

Understanding the communitarian reflex among Hispanics requires an understanding of their cultural patrimony. Through the Spanish Empire, Latin America inherited a medieval, Catholic social structure; one marked not only by hierarchy but by a decentralized society thick with "intermediating bodies" such as the family unit, the parishes of the Church, the universities, the workingmen's guilds, the local authorities, etc. This is the sort of social vision the folks at ResPublica in the UK are working towards and to which traditionalist conservatives this side of the Atlantic are quite sympathetic to. In the United States, our culture (and therefore our politics) is marked by the cultural patrimony of Deist liberals and Calvinist work ethicists, combined with the Western pioneers and their "rugged individualism." This ethos has led to a neglect of the civil institutions, all the way down to the family unit itself, which is the last line of defense against government and market tyranny. An injection of communitarianism is what is needed and engaging Hispanics (otherwise eager in many cases to do as the Romans do and to assimilate to our Protestant-Individualist culture) in a fruitful way would be key to the success of such an effort.

The skepticism towards free market economics is easier to understand. After all, most Hispanics migrate to the U.S. for economic reasons. Mexicans in particular have the North American Free Trade Agreement and the neoliberal reforms that followed to blame for this decision. The actions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can be credited for similarly motivating people from other parts of Latin America to look north for opportunity. Meanwhile our own workers find their jobs sent either south of the Rio Grande (to be worked with zero dignity in the maquilas) our to China or other places that do not afford their employees to work with the same dignity as we do. These white, blue collar workingmen were Nixon's Silent Majority. They were the Reagan Democrats. They were the Buchananites (to a smaller extent). And they were the men who sized up Mitt Romney the "vulture capitalist" in 2012 and did not vote for him. These are the beneficiaries of a communitarian politics that subordinates economics to the common good and, God willing, they will find that they are nearly the mirror image of the Hispanic migrant workers they are frequently pitted against.

Embracing immigration reform is a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful Republican outreach to Hispanics. It is necessary because many Hispanics view the desire to restrict immigration as a cultural hostility manifested into public policy. But it is not sufficient because Hispanics care about other issues just like everyone else; this is not a profound insight. A new civic conservatism that engages the communitarian instinct and orients the economy to serve families and local communities would not only save the Republican Party by appealing to a natural and promising constituency, it could—excuse the drama—very well save the country's soul.