Thread: Immigration debate puts up a wall in the GOP

Immigration debate puts up a wall in the GOP
Pursue Latino voters or please the party's base? The Senate overhaul bill reveals a split on what political road is best for Republicans.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... ome-center

By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer
May 27, 2007

WASHINGTON — The roiling congressional debate over a plan to legalize undocumented immigrants has rekindled a bitter fight in the Republican Party over the best strategy to restore the GOP to political dominance — with each side accusing the other of following a course that would destroy the party for decades.

The clash has grown increasingly intense in recent days, drawing in the most senior figures in Republican politics. President Bush aimed unusually pointed language Thursday at critics, many in his own party, who opposed a more permanent status for illegal immigrants.

Two conservative senators were booed by Republican crowds in their home states last week for endorsing the legalization effort. And conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh attacked the Bush-backed plan as the "Destroy the Republican Party Act."

On Friday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) tied his presidential campaign more tightly to the view that a welcoming immigration policy would boost the GOP in important swing states as he scheduled a June 4 address on the plan in immigrant-rich Miami and attacked his leading rivals for opposing the measure.

At issue are not just different approaches to immigration but competing visions for how to rebuild and maintain a base of loyal Republican voters.

Many Republican strategists and Bush allies blame election defeats last year in part on the loss of Latino voters after a flurry of anti-illegal immigration ads that strategists say exploited ethnic stereotypes. They say Republicans cannot hope to win a national majority without substantial support from the fast-growing Latino voting bloc.

"I believe that not to play this card right would be the destruction of our party," said Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), the Cuban-born general chairman of the Republican National Committee, who helped write Senate legislation creating a path to citizenship for most of the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. "Hispanics make up about 13% of our country and by 2020 will be closer to 20%. It is a demographic trend that one cannot overlook."

Directing his criticism squarely at Limbaugh, Martinez added, "He has emotion on his side, but I think I have logic on mine."

But conservatives and many opinion leaders argue that backing the immigration bill is a dangerous course because it angers the GOP's mostly white base, as well as swing voters open to the message of national security and law enforcement.

Some argue that new citizens may be more likely to vote Democratic, so strategically it makes little sense to increase their numbers. Limbaugh, with an estimated 13 million listeners each week, described the Senate legislation as Democrats "getting a brand new electorate, reshaping it and being able to win election after election after election."

A public spat such as this would have been unheard of three years ago, when Limbaugh and others like him teamed with the White House and Republican National Committee to reelect Bush and build a network designed to ensure long-term dominance.

Even when running for Texas governor in the mid-1990s, Bush and his political aides worked to forge stronger ties to Latinos, the country's fastest-growing minority. They continued that effort during Bush's two presidential races, waging a sophisticated, bilingual campaign that many credit with helping the GOP make inroads into a constituency that had been moving to the Democrats.

Now, some party strategists fear the effort will end, whether or not Congress approves an immigration overhaul. They point to high emotions stirred up by the legislation, and note that all of the GOP's major presidential contenders except McCain are saying the measure may be too soft on illegal immigrants.

"We are at a crossroads in our country and, yes, in our political party," said Rudy Fernandez, a former deputy to White House strategist Karl Rove and one of the GOP's chief architects of Latino outreach.

The citizenship plan is part of a bipartisan bill being debated in the Senate. The bill would increase border security and stiffen penalties on employers who hired illegal immigrants, a priority for conservatives. But it would offer probationary legal status to illegal workers who were in the U.S. before Jan. 1 of this year, and create a path to citizenship for most of them, provisions that anger many conservatives.

Another contentious provision would permit hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to enter the country temporarily.

Shortly after senators announced the compromise bill, two top presidential contenders, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, criticized it. Romney called it an "incredible gift" to illegal immigrants and described it as a form of amnesty.

McCain, a key negotiator on the compromise, seemed to be keeping his distance when the deal was announced last week. Now he has decided to tackle the matter head-on, frustrated by what his aides called pandering by his rivals and buoyed by polls showing that a majority of Americans supported a welcoming approach to immigrants.

He directly challenged one leading critic, conservative talk show host Sean Hannity, who warned Thursday of a growing anger among conservatives and a "groundswell of opposition" in the GOP base.

"So I am supposed to gauge my behavior on whether I am booed or not? Please, Sean," McCain responded during an appearance on the show.

By embracing immigration in Miami, McCain will be staking a claim to a key issue in an early primary state that Giuliani and Romney have made central to their strategies for winning the nomination. Romney and Giuliani have both hired aides to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But the president's younger brother, whose wife is Mexican American, has expressed dismay about the anti-immigration views held by some in his party.

Aides say McCain, like the president, understands the importance of building ties with Latinos.

"We're getting close to the point where we will no longer be a national party if we try to define it as a white male, cul-de-sac, gated-community party," said John Weaver, McCain's chief strategist.

Some strategists think the GOP field is being pulled to the right in part by Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who is not a top-tier candidate but is running as the most prominent anti-illegal immigration member of Congress.

In an interview, Tancredo accused Bush's allies of risking the party's future by ignoring the GOP base. Deflecting criticism that the immigration issue hurt Republican candidates last year, he argued that the party alienated Latinos in 2006 for the same reason it lost support of other voters: the Iraq war, scandals and other administration failings.

"We lost a lot of white males too," he said.

The grass-roots anger at the party elite was on display last week in Georgia and South Carolina, when Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) were heckled by otherwise friendly Republican audiences for their support of the immigration measure. Graham was booed when he mentioned that Bush understood the politics of the issue and performed well among Latinos.

Nationally, exit polls show the GOP share of the Latino vote dropped sharply from an unusually high 40% in 2004 — the result of intensive outreach by Bush's campaign — to 30% in 2006. Democrats see an opportunity to expand their share of the Latino vote, an important bloc in states such as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado that are expected to be pivotal in the 2008 presidential race.

Surveys compiled by the pro-Democratic group NDN, and not disputed by leading Republican strategists, show that immigration has rocketed from near the bottom to near the top of the list of concerns to Latino voters. More than half, the NDN surveys show, say the issue increases their interest in voting.

Some Republicans in Florida, Texas and Arizona performed well among Latino voters last year. But analysts say the national trend and the tenor of the current debate could spur the kind of realignment that boosted California Democrats after Republican Gov. Pete Wilson's 1994 embrace of anti-illegal immigration measures.

"Republicans have become a more menacing party to Hispanics over the past year," said Simon Rosenberg, president of the NDN, which has spent millions of dollars targeting Latino voters and documenting the pre-2006 GOP gains.

The tone of the 2006 campaign, along with recent comments by Romney and others, has at least one lifelong Republican questioning his loyalty.

Lionel Sosa worked as a political strategist for Bush, President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush. But if the eventual Republican nominee adopts a harsh tone on immigration, Sosa said he would not vote for the candidate.

"Blood runs thicker than politics," said Sosa, of San Antonio, who is helping organize a fundraiser for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat who is Latino. "I'm not saying I would vote for a Democrat. But I'm saying I would not vote for a Republican who opposed immigration reform."

This article is so much disinformation and I do not believe that Hispanics who came here legally want a bankrupt, overpopulated nation any more than any other American citizen! This is a bill pandering to the radical element in the Hispanic community. Maybe we should be telling our Republicans leaders this, too.

According to Tom Tancredo, yesterday,
2 of the Fort Dix 6 would have been given AMNESTY had this already been law.

Comforting, isn't it, to know that TERRORISTS can get LEGALIZED in the USofA

It sure would be nice if the Democratic Party was more divided on this issue too! Unfortunately the majority of Democrats support amnesty which makes our job all the more difficult.

"Hispanics make up about 13% of our country and by 2020 will be closer to 20%. It is a demographic trend that one cannot overlook."

Maybe if our borders were secured and the issuance of legal immigrant quotas weren't so discriminatory that would change. First off, we need to completely end chain migration now, not reduce it eight years from now as called for in S. 1348. Furthermore, we need stop giving automatic citizenship to illegal immigrant children! Unless the Republicans in the U.S. Congress have no problem marginalizing the future of the Republican Party in the political arena, they should be fighting this amnesty bill with everything they've got. However, they seem bent on destruction, why else would they be worrying about 8% (if that high) of Hispanic-American voters that want the amnesty?

Has everyone seen this article:

[quote]Hispanic Family Values?
Heather Mac Donald

Runaway illegitimacy is creating a new U.S. underclass.

Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future.

The government social-services sector has already latched onto this new client base; as the Hispanic population expands, so will the demands for a larger welfare state. Since conservative open-borders advocates have yet to acknowledge the facts of Hispanic family breakdown, there is no way to know what their solution to it is. But they had better come up with one quickly, because the problem is here—and growing.

The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate—even more than unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current ratio. In states such as California and Texas, Hispanics will be in the clear majority. Nationally, whites will drop from near 70 percent of the total population in 2000 to just half by 2050. Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reports.

But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.

As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.

The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. To put these numbers into international perspective, Japan’s teen birthrate is 3.9, Italy’s is 6.9, and France’s is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate is dropping, it continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which Hispanics contribute disproportionately.

To grasp the reality behind those numbers, one need only talk to people working on the front lines of family breakdown. Social workers in Southern California, the national epicenter for illegal Hispanic immigrants and their progeny, are in despair over the epidemic of single parenting. Not only has illegitimacy become perfectly acceptable, they say, but so has the resort to welfare and social services to cope with it.

Dr. Ana Sanchez delivers babies at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the city of Orange, California, many of them to Hispanic teenagers. To her dismay, they view having a child at their age as normal. A recent patient just had her second baby at age 17; the baby’s father is in jail. But what is “most alarming,â€