Fears grow that amnesty will kill conservatism
Democrats are 'actively using immigration policy as a political tool'
Published: 5 hours ago
Conservatives say they aren’t surprised that President Obama believes and hopes that increasing “social diversity” in America will make it harder for conservative policy ideas to gain traction.
They’re just surprised he’s admitting it.
Conservative interest group Eagle Forum recently published a report titled “How Mass (Legal) Immigration Dooms a Conservative Republican Party.”
Drawing on a large volume of survey data from immigrant communities, the report revealed that immigrants and their adult children overwhelmingly favor big government. Therefore, the report argued, conservatives must reduce the future volume of legal immigration or watch millions of liberal immigrants drown out conservative voters.
Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly believes Obama is using immigration not only to secure new voters but to transform the country.
“He certainly wants to change America, and he wants to bring in people who will vote Democratic, who are not accustomed to our form of limited government or balanced budgets or cutting spending,” said Schlafly, author of “Who Killed the American Family?”
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, is similarly aware of the ways immigration helps the Democratic Party.
“The left not just views immigration as helping them but is actively using immigration policy as a political tool,” Krikorian said.
He pointed to two examples. In June 2009, Eliseo Medina, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, bragged to a liberal audience that rising immigration would “create a [progressive] governing coalition for the long term.”
Also, in 2007, then-Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., admitted that immigration is bad for blue-collar workers. But never fear, said the congressman, because immigrants will help elect Democratic majorities, and those Democrats will strengthen unions, offsetting the negative effects on working Americans.
Krikorian said those who support both small government and robust immigration are deluding themselves.
“The money people and the libertarians have this fantasy idea that immigration is somehow not going to undermine the cause of small-government conservatism, and they’re living in a fantasy world,” Krikorian said.
CIS published research by James Gimpel, a professor of government at the University of Maryland, which found that more immigrants are correlated with fewer Republican votes everywhere in America, regardless of the local GOP’s stance on immigration.
“The Republican Party will survive pretty much no matter what,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, predicted. “I don’t think it’s going to go the way of the Whigs; it’s just that it will move to the left if immigration continues, and the conservative element within the party will become increasingly marginalized and increasingly small.”
Fitton said Obama’s record on immigration, including the executive amnesty announced in November and the lax enforcement of existing laws, shows a president who scoffs at the will of the American people.
“For him to chortle over the impact [mass immigration] will have on our nation’s public policy debates shows how contemptuous he is of self-government,” Fitton said.
Fitton also said the president’s comments reveal his animosity toward conservatives.
“He’s exposing why he’s doing things that ought to have him turned out of office in a sensible system,” Fitton said. “He’s doing it because he hates conservatives. He thinks the folks that are working, that he is allowing to stay here illegally and encouraging to come, will vote for people who share his socialist outlook.”
Fitton expressed concern that illegal votes have tipped the scales in Democrats’ favor in the past. He pointed to an Old Dominion study released last year which found that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008, and 80 percent of their votes went to Obama. The authors posited that those illegal non-citizen votes may have helped Obama eke out a win in North Carolina and put Democrat Al Franken over the top in the Minnesota Senate race.
However, Krikorian is not as worried as Fitton about illegal votes. The CIS executive director acknowledged that voter fraud exists but said legal immigration remains a greater threat to a conservative Republican Party simply because there are many more legal immigrants in the country.
“Most immigration is legal, and the only people who can become citizens are legal immigrants, so legal immigration is what matters when we’re talking about shifting politics to the left,” he said.
Krikorian also asserted that mass immigration, legal and illegal, exacerbates the very problems that liberals attempt to solve with their policies, such as the growth in child poverty, the uninsured population and income inequality.
“All of those are things that the Left then says, without mentioning immigration, ‘Look at how bad these problems are. Vote for us, and we’ll redistribute the wealth,’ or whatever,” Krikorian said. “There are a lot of middle-of-the-road people who are going to be persuaded to consider statist, big-government solutions to problems that immigration is actually exacerbating.”
President Obama often says immigrants are “a net plus for our economy and our society.”
Schlafly, the longtime conservative activist, disagrees.
“It’s a net plus in numbers, but it’s not a net plus in people who believe in America,” she said. “It’s not a net plus of jobs, because the more immigrants he brings in, the more jobs the new people take, and American citizens are left out in the cold. And I think the scandal of our high unemployment is due to Obama bringing all the people he could.”
http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/fears-gro...-conservatism/
