Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States Obama. In 2009, Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican descent, to be the first unequivocally Hispanic Justice. Both the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the Hispanic National Bar Association count Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice. Some historians contend that Cardozo—a Sephardic Jew believed to be of distant Portuguese descent—should also be counted as the first Hispanic Justice. Schmidhauser wrote in 1979 that "[a]mong the large ethnic groupings of European origin which have never been represented upon the Supreme Court are the Italians, Southern Slavs, and Hispanic Americans." The National Hispanic Center for
Stereotypes of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States are vilified. The term "illegal alien" is defined as "a foreign person who is living in a country without having official permission to live there" Despite many Latino/Hispanic Americans being born in the U.S. or having legal status, they can be dismissed as immigrants or foreigners who live without proper documentation taking opportunities and resources from real Americans. Immigrants have been represented as depriving citizens of jobs, as welfare-seekers, or as criminals. Especially with the recent political/social movement in the United States for stricter immigration law, Americans are blaming Hispanics for "stealing jobs" and negatively impacting the economy. A very