For all sorts of reasons, the “comprehensive immigration reform”—i.e. amnesty—on behalf of which Marco Rubio and a whole lot of other Republicans in Washington and “the conservative” media have been advocating from the time of Barack Obama’s reelection is a sham and a disaster.

But these Republicans have convinced themselves that, given the ever growing Hispanic segment of the electorate, their party’s survival depends upon it.

Some of us have always suspected that the influence of Hispanics over our politics has been greatly exaggerated by those who want for Hispanics to achieve more influence, or at least to be perceived as having done so.

Thanks to the Census Bureau’s recently released findings, we now know that we have been right all along.

Exit polling data from last year’s election revealing that Hispanics constitute 10 percent of the electorate was mistaken.  In reality, Hispanics are slightly above 8 percent of the voting public. As writer Steve Sailer remarks: “So the standard story you’ve been hearing in the MSM [“Mainstream Media”] for almost seven months is indeed inflated by 19 percent.”

It wasn’t Hispanics that propelled Obama to victory, but blacks.  In fact, even more blacks came out to support Obama in 2012 than did so in 2008.  As Sailer says, “blacks added another 10 percent to their vote total from 2008 to 2012.  Nationally, 66.2 percent of eligible blacks voted compared to 64.1 percent of whites, 48.0 percent of Hispanics, and 47.3 percent of Asians.”

Sailer continues: “The growth in black turnout was particularly concentrated among those over age 65.  Also, black women traditionally vote at significantly higher rates than black men, and the black gender gap in turnout hit a new record in 2012.”

This is significant, for as Sailer observes, the phenomenon of elderly black women seeking “to keep the White House black” is not exactly “the wave of the future.”  At the very least, it certainly doesn’t call for anything along the lines of “comprehensive immigration reform.”

In fact, even the Hispanic vote doesn’t call for this.  All of the hype regarding the alleged Hispanicization of American politics aside, Hispanic voter turnout was actually down in 2012.  Sailer asserts: “Among Hispanics eligible to vote, gross numbers continued to rise—but the rate of those taking the trouble to vote dropped from 49.9 to 48.0 percent.”  Furthermore: “The number of Hispanics who claimed to be eligible but didn’t bother to get to the polls soared from 9.8 million to 12.1 million.”

Compared to many of his fellow partisans, to say nothing of his Democratic rival, Mitt Romney was a hard-liner on the immigration problem.  Yet, pace those of Romney’s critics who swore that this stance of his would cost him the election among Hispanics, the latter actually showed up at the polls in fewer numbers than before.

Yet it isn’t just the upsurge in blacks voting for Obama that accounted for Romney’s defeat.  Romney still could’ve prevailed—had the rate of white turnout not been at record lows.  It is worth quoting at length Sailer’s summary of the Census Bureau’s findings:

“In contrast to the fervent black effort to re-elect Obama, whites were strikingly unmotivated by Romney. The total white vote dropped from 100 million in 2008 to 98 million in 2012 (down 2 percent).  Only 64.1 percent of eligible whites voted in 2012, down from 66.1 percent in 2008 and 67.2 percent in the recent high-water mark year of 2004.”

Last year was “the first time in the history of the Census survey that whites were not the highest-ranking group in terms of their rate of voting.”

The Census Bureau’s findings suggest a few things.

First, the relentless and rapid rise of Hispanic political power is a myth.

Second, the idea that Republicans can capitalize on this power only by supporting amnesty is a myth.

Third, in promoting these myths, the establishment media proves itself once again to be less than entirely trustworthy.

Finally, if Republicans want to win more elections, they should worry less about engaging in self-defeating pandering to minorities and more about stopping the hemorrhaging of their ever-shrinking white base.