Conservatives are terrified of immigration reform because they think it will only accelerate the leftward drift of the country. Part of it is just the presumption that nothing can persuade Latinos to vote for conservatives. I think that is misguided on at least two levels. The first is that George W. Bush actually got something like 44% of the Latino vote in 2004. That’s not a majority, but it’s good enough for the GOP to compete in a national election. Getting near to parity is a realistic short-term goal. The second problem with the idea that Latinos will never vote for conservatives is that we’ve seen all prior waves of immigrants go through a predictable process. At first, they are overwhelmingly with the more populist party. But, over time, after a couple of generations, about half of them gravitate to the more business-oriented party and they become indistinguishable from the rest of the American population. We’ve seen some small variations on this (blacks moving from GOP to Dems, Cubans moving from GOP to parity) but it’s a pattern that is likely to repeat itself with Latinos.
If it doesn’t, it will be because the conservatives in the Republican Party convince Latinos that the GOP is a racist organization. More accurately, a sustained inability of the GOP to reach parity with Latinos will result if the party doesn’t cease being a racist organization. For people like Michelle Malkin, there is something about Latino culture that makes them incapable of assimilation and permanently hostile to conservative economic principles. I don’t know why she thinks Latinos are different in those respects than the Irish or the Italians or the Poles. But she is far from alone in making that argument.
Part of this is more focused on the short-term. Will Republicans get an immediate advantage out of producing an immigration bill? I suspect that the debate itself will do the most damage to the GOP’s standing with Latinos. If we could pass a bill without people like Malkin and Tancredo and a bunch of other xenophobes making stupid racist comments, then the GOP would probably benefit quite a bit. But that’s not going to happen. In the short-term the Republicans lose either way, because the main thing Latinos will take away from the whole effort is that the Republican Party is chock-full of people who hate them.
In the medium term, there will be more American citizens who were formerly undocumented workers, and more than 50% of them are likely to vote for the Democrats. Yet, as I stated above, it makes a bigger difference to the GOP’s prospects if they are getting 44% of the Latino vote (as they did in 2004) rather than 27% of the Latino vote (as they did in 2012).
If we could remove the issue of race from this topic just for a moment, it would seem like conservatives were misplacing their fears. It’s a bigger problem that people under thirty do not share their views at all on almost anything, and they are solidifying their negative views about the Republican Party. The GOP is losing the next generation of Americans. Without them, it’s not going to matter how many Latinos there are or whether or not they can vote.
Conservatives have been fighting the leftward drift of the country since John Dickenson was reluctant to declare independence from Britain. The difference always is the peur du jour. And that is what determines the precise constituency at any given time.
And if that next generation improves on the off-year election performance of their predecessors, the Doom song can be sung that much quicker.
There are always extremists who would rather be right (in their own minds anyway) than tolerate any measure of compromise. They exist on our side of the political spectrum too, but without nearly the same influence. We even have one or two in this community. (Fortunately, no one listens to any of us in this remote corner of the interverse.)
The question is whether Republicans can regain control of their party. To do so, they have to convince Tea Party and other paranoid types who have been fed a constant diet of hatred, lies and xenophobia to stand down. People tend to defer to the script of their chosen tribe, so if done with a deft hand (incrementally and with subtlety) it may be possible. But Republicans have let things get so out of hand, essentially stirring up the crazy to try to knock Obama (and the entire political universe) off balance, getting them back in their cages would take more skill than anyone in that world appears to have. They entered a pact with the devil and now they’re chained to said hoary beast, at least in the short term.
Obama being as smart as he is, I think he uses it to smash them to pieces. There are so many potential wedges. I’ve not had this much fun, politically speaking, since Nixon was publicly humiliated and forced to resign (and hell, I was just ten years old).
I’m sorry, but you know what? I’ve been hearing about Republicans “taking back” their party for 5 years now. It does not appear to be happening. Reince Priebus is cheering on the “we got nothing wrong but the messenger” crowd, and that little shit KNOWS where his butter is coming from: THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
I think we are seeing the Republican party that has always been there, just couldn’t control the leadership that wanted to win more than they wanted to be right. The Republican Party is racist, homophobic, misogynistic and xenophobic … and you can see the same damn thing in ’84, 64, 44, 24, and so on. Eisenhower was the exception, not the rule.
Are ALL Republicans like that? No. But enough are to keep alive the presidential hopes Bachman, Perry and Santorum; three of the worst candidates to ever stalk the heartland. Enough are to offend pretty much every single person of Hispanic ethnicity. There were on one-handed Latinos voting for Mitt.
I have said before, and I’ll say again: This generation and the next generation are as Republican as they are always going to be. There will be no “drift”, no “great migration” and no “come home America” moment for the Republicans for at least 20 years.
damn,
There were on one-handed Latinos voting for Mitt
meant to say
There were no one-handed Latinos voting for Mitt
I hope you’re correct. Would love nothing more than to see the opposition implode. As Booman pointed out, W managed to take 40+% of the latino vote. It wouldn’t take much more than that to make the Republicans a national party again.
It’s certainly a challenging position they’re in. Can a party dog whistle against blacks but not other minorities? Probably not. Can they stop dog whistling and keep their base motivated? Hard to imagine. Can they back off on total obstruction 24/7 and keep their stormtroops fat, dumb and yappy? Won’t be easy.
And if they can’t convince Latinos that they are not racist, the GOP will start trying to convince African Americans that the Dems are racists. I have already see some articles in newspapers talking about how immigration reform will hurt blacks by taking the low paying jobs away from them.
2012 saw a unique (up til then) collaboration between a lot of groups that have not always worked closely together. It appears a major goal of the GOP is to drive wedges between those communities again.
That is what they do best. The Empires of Europe were case studies in how to rule through division. But African-Americans trusting Republicans is quite a stretch. I don’t think that community will soon forget the outrageous smears dropped on President Obama.
If we could pass a bill without people like Malkin and Tancredo and a bunch of other xenophobes making stupid racist comments, then the GOP would probably benefit quite a bit. But that’s not going to happen. In the short-term the Republicans lose either way, because the main thing Latinos will take away from the whole effort is that the Republican Party is chock-full of people who hate them.
This does raise the possibility for Republicans to have a “Sistah Souljah Moment,” and actually help themselves with Latinos.
We’ll see how many of them are smart enough to take it.
Electoral politics is zero-sum, and, in a two party system, that means what gains the Democratic share of votes loses Republican share. There is therefore no mutually-beneficial solution. One can trade short term for long, or better policy for electoral advantage, but basically, one party is going to lose on any agreement. It is unlikely to be the Democrats.
Bush’s strong standing may well be specific to him. He had strong ties to President Fox, as was well known in Mexico. I would like to see stats on how Republicans have done generally over the last decade or so.
If they could find a credible Latino to run for president (No, not Rubio), I could see them giving us a run for our money. Brian Sandoval? Susan Martinez? It’s hard to see either of them getting through a Republican primary field.
On our side, we should figure out a way to get the Castro brothers the kind of experience that would put them in position to take a shot at the nomination. They won’t be ready in 2016, but perhaps by 2020 or 2024.
I’d rather get past the tokenism. Tokenism is how the Repubs will play it, put a Spanish name on the same BS – custom-made for Rubio. By 2020, we may be looking at people not yet visible.
Rubio is a Cuban. Cubans are acceptable to other cubans. Not to the vast majority of hispanics, since Cubans get a very unfair advantage.
Miami is changing, BTW. The entire city is filled with Haitians now. All the cabbies are Haitian. I wonder how long Cubans will have the dominant role in S FL politics.
The party has done a comprehensive job at being a racist organization. This is a worse problem for the GOP at the state level. All those House Republicans who are in safe/gerrymandered districts are working in concert with red state legislatures to punish migrant populations who are mostly Latino (though Asians are the fastest growing segment of the subset).