While polls show that more Hispanics prefer Hillary over Trump to occupy the White House those Hispanics need to take a close look at what Hillary’s party has done for -- and more importantly, to -- Hispanics in the U.S.

The Hispanic population has grown so rapidly that it is difficult to believe that the 1970 Census questionnaire did not include a racial or ethnic category called “Hispanic.” But this was not because Hispanics did not live in the U.S. in significant numbers. The musical West Side Story from the 1950s featured several Puerto Rican main characters, and cities like New York and Chicago had relatively large Puerto Rican populations, numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

After 1950, with the passage of the Federal Highway Act Americans began to move out of big cities and into suburbs. They were looking for green lawns, cleaner air, and bigger homes. As they moved away from cities, however, city populations began to decline and are still declining. To counteract this decline President Lyndon B. Johnson started the Great Society package of Federal programs. While on paper and in speeches these programs were allegedly designed to lift people out of poverty, the result was to isolate black and later Hispanic persons into highly segregated neighborhoods. While these programs proclaimed to help the disadvantaged and poor, the result was more disadvantaged and more poor.

Chicago, for example, doubled the proportion of its residents who lived in segregated low-income housing from ten to twenty percent from 1960 to 1970. These Federal programs rewarded single mothers with children, leading to a great increase in the number of fatherless children. The school systems of these big cities were all controlled by the huge public sector teacher unions of the Democrat Party. They did a terrible job of educating children to obtain good paying jobs, effectively guaranteeing that these children would never leave poverty.

But as city populations continued to decline, the city fathers of the north needed still more residents. And the way to finance this population increase was to utilize federal program dollars earmarked for poverty. In 1965 Senator Kennedy modified the immigration laws to allow relatives of people in the U.S. to move to the cities. But this still wasn’t enough; the numbers who entered the declining cities of the Midwest and Northeast still failed to keep the populations of these cities stable.

The strategy that was then adopted was illegal immigration: to allow people to illegally bypass the rules of legal immigration. Two general types of illegal immigrants were created: those who overstayed visas obtained legally, and those who entered via the southern border. The model used to provide for these new residents became a duplicate of the model used to create black ghettoes: highly segregated neighborhoods with residents supplied by Federal, local county, and state welfare programs. To justify this scheme Democrats said the nation needed illegal immigrants to do “low paid jobs no one else will do” such as picking lettuce and tomatoes. Never mind the fact that New York City and Chicago don’t have any farm fields.

So the illegal immigrants were supported by government benefits to do whatever work they could do. And in cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago sanctuary policies were enacted which paved the way for them to work.

This all happened so quickly that no one thought about the immigrants themselves: how they could learn to read, write, and speak a new language. And whether their new lifestyle in the north would provide good lives for them and their families.

It is not only accurate but entirely fair to portray illegal immigration as created by the government and promoted by the Democrat Party. After all, it is Democrats who control all the sanctuary cities of the north and the public-sector union jobs.

But Hispanics are beginning to see that there’s a price to pay to be wards of the Democrat Party, that their socioeconomic situation has become more like that of blacks and less like what they had hoped.

Hispanics should look at blacks under Democrat Party control and wonder if their fate will be the same or worse. Blacks today, under the first black president, are living in greater poverty than before the Obama presidency. Their food stamp use has increased and employment rate declined. Looking to Obama for inspiration and an improvement in their lives, blacks realize all he has inspired them to do is blame white society for the poverty and racism he has, to some extent, increased. Their families are in greater poverty and their prospects are grimmer.

Blacks tell the story: fifty years of big city social programs has hardly improved the lot of any of them. Those who have lifted themselves up out of poverty and out of the ghetto have only done so through herculean individual effort. They have received little help from Democrats.

And now Hispanics, having been placed in big sanctuary cities under the same Democrat model of community development, are facing the same situation. The Pew Hispanic Center Study Between Two Worlds reported in 2009: “Young Hispanic females have the highest rates of teen parenthood of any major racial or ethnic group in the country.” And that “about one in four Hispanic females (26%) becomes a mother by age 19. This compares with a rate of 22% among young black females, 11% among young white females.”

There is a high correlation between single motherhood, poverty and poor education. “The high school dropout rate among Latino youths (17%) is nearly three times as high as it is among white youths (6%) and nearly double the rate among blacks (9%). These figures are for the entire nation, not just sanctuary cities. And more than half Mexican-heritage young Latinos had experience with gangs (56%) than Latinos of other Hispanic national origins.

These discouraging facts go on and on. The movement of people of color, first from Africa and then Mexico, have some very interesting similarities. Both were initially brought into the U.S. to work in agriculture. Both ended up being encouraged to migrate north, with their living expenses subsidized by taxpayers. Both ended up with similarly tragic socioeconomic issues.

At some point Hispanics may start thinking about what’s best for their families, not just what’s best for Democrats running for election. And whether it’s a good idea to trust Democrats to make a better life for them in big city barrios. Blacks have trusted them for over eighty years, and are now starting to evaluate how it’s worked out for them. Black leaders are still complaining about how bad things are in their communities.

At some point Hispanics may wonder, if they continue to vote for Democrats, if their neighborhoods will get any better, when they never got any better for blacks. Hispanics may wish to think about whether fifty years from now they will still be complaining about bad schools, gangs, poverty, and low-paying jobs. Hispanics should already know what Democrats have planned for them.