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.
