Thread: The Great Immigration Reform Mirage

The Great Immigration Reform Mirage

campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com
June 12, 2012, 11:27 pm By ROSS DOUTHAT

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressFormer Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida at a hearing before the House Budget Committee in June.

In a breakfast interview with Bloomberg View on Monday, Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, expressed general disappointment with the Republican Party’s rightward drift since his brother left the White House in 2009. He also cited a specific place where his party needs to return to the center: The issue of immigration reform. According to Bush, Mitt Romney’s focus on border enforcement has placed him “in a box” and limited his appeal to Hispanic voters.

Similarly, in a piece in this week’s New Yorker on President Obama’s potential second-term agenda, Ryan Lizza reported that many White House aides believe that comprehensive immigration reform offers the president his best chance of “achieving a major piece of domestic legislation in his second term.” If Obama wins re-election narrowly while Romney runs poorly among Hispanics, the White House theory runs, Republican leaders will feel that they have a strong political incentive to accept some kind of path to citizenship for the nation’s illegal immigrant population.

To the extent that Republican lawmakers are influenced by the conventional wisdom of the city they inhabit, then this theory might be correct. But there’s a reason the push for some sort of amnesty or earned legalization for illegal immigrants failed repeatedly under George W. Bush, and a reason it wasn’t much of a priority for Democrats during their Obama-era window of Beltway dominance. At the grass-roots level of both parties, the politics of the issue are simply more fraught, and the advantages of the pro-legalization position less obvious, than the elite consensus tends to assume.
That consensus is founded on two indisputable realities: First, that the Hispanic share of the electorate is increasing as America’s Anglo majority diminishes and disappears, and second, that Hispanics as a bloc are more likely to favor liberal immigration policies than other voters.

But it’s also founded on three unwarranted leaps. The first leap takes the projected demographics of America in 2050 and reads them back onto the politics of America in 2012. The reality is that 2050 is still two generations away, and today the Hispanic vote is expanding much more slowly than many pundits have assumed, in part because Hispanic voter participation lags behind that of other groups.

Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics, for instance, has cited exit poll data showing the Hispanic share of the electorate at 8.2 percent in 2004, 7.9 percent in 2006, 8.4 percent amid the Obama wave of 2008, and then back to 8 percent in 2010. This short-term fluctuation doesn’t mean that Republicans don’t need to win more Hispanic votes in the long run, or that frank xenophobia can’t rebound on them in the short term. But it suggests that the party’s political problem is less inevitably urgent than many analysts suggest.

The second leap assumes that Hispanics are essentially single-issue voters, focused narrowly on immigration and primed to switch coalitions based on appeals to ethnic solidarity. The reality, as I’ve written before, is that Hispanics are like most voters: Pocketbook issues often trump social and cultural concerns (especially with unemployment as high as it is), and a party’s overall brand matters more than its stance on a single issue. A more moderate Republican candidate will usually win more Hispanic votes — but only in the same way that a more moderate Republican candidate will usually win more votes in general.

The Hispanic community is also more internally divided on immigration than the elite consensus assumes. As you might expect from a large and demographically diverse population, there are Hispanic voters who oppose any kind of amnesty outright, and Hispanics who swing back and forth (again, like many Americans) depending on how poll questions are phrased. Even on an issue as controversial and racially charged as Arizona’s recent immigration law, a Quinnipiac poll from earlier this year found Hispanics almost evenly divided: 49 percent opposed the law, but 47 percent supported it. This suggests that Republicans who take moderately restrictionist positions — for instance, by emphasizing their support for legal immigration while advocating tougher enforcement on the border, as Romney has been doing — aren’t necessarily forfeiting the Hispanic vote by doing so.

The third leap is the idea that immigration is a wedge issue that only divides Republicans – by pitting moderates like Bush and business interests against the right’s populists. The reality is that the Democratic coalition is almost as easily divided by the issue: Many working-class Democrats, white and African-American alike, are skeptical of immigration for the same reason that they’re skeptical of free trade agreements — because both tend to expose them to competition from cheaper foreign labor — and there’s a streak of anti-immigration populism running through the Democratic Party’s rank and file in many regions of the country.

These Democratic divisions were a significant reason the Bush-era push for comprehensive immigration reform foundered repeatedly. It wasn’t just that conservative Republicans rebelled against the White House-led effort to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. It was that the Democratic leadership wasn’t eager to deliver the votes for a measure that could split their own party along lines of race and class.

What was true in Bush’s second term will probably be true in a hypothetical second Obama term as well. There might be a bipartisan coalition for a relatively limited measure like the Dream Act, which provides a path to citizenship for college graduates who were brought to America as minors. But if Jeb Bush Republicans and Obama Democrats try to fast track a more comprehensive bill, they will be reminded that there are other sorts of Republicans and Democrats, and that bipartisanship cuts both ways. Even if the president wins re-election, the populist coalition that opposes amnesty may still be as large as — if not larger than — the elite coalition that supports it.

The Great Immigration Reform Mirage - NYTimes.com

Jeb Bush and his brother both should be in jail instead of hanging out with that traitor Michael Bloomberg talking to the New York Mexican Times.

W

It was a sorry day indeed when amnesty was granted for estimated 2,000,000 aliens. Much of the debates and time spent today would'nt be being wasted had Americans stood up for American's rights then and prevented that amnesty. The republican party is so split on what they stand for as a party, I for one cannot trust any of the party's politicians. The republicans need to fight this out amongst themselves until they've reached strong enough concensus to become trustworthy. I'd rather contend with someone that lets me know they are against me than those who try to cater to both sides.


That said I have republican and democratic friends. Upon hours of discussion, many of them have come to see what I've said for many years. Aliens, undocumented workers and drug dealers are dangerous to America and its unity. I will not vote for either Presidential candidate, one does not get it, the other will not commit i.e., has'nt decided. Does'nt want to offend big contributors and once bought it's same ol', same ol'.