Chris Cillizza appears to agree with Rush Limbaugh that the House Republicans will be shooting themselves in the foot for the midterms if they agree to do anything about immigration policy.
At least Mr. Cillizza musters some data to support his position rather than sputtering racist bile, like Limbaugh. But what Cillizza shows is not that the Republicans should think twice before passing immigration legislation, but why they will think twice.
The reason I say that is because Cillizza demonstrates that individual Republican members of Congress have little to fear from angry Latino constituents, and that their endangered members are better off juicing their base rather than alienating them in an effort to appeal to Latinos. But what Cillizza doesn’t focus on is that so few Republicans are endangered that their best play is to pass immigration reform and set their 2016 nominee up nicely to compete for the presidency. Making marginal gains in 2014 that come at the expense of a drubbing in 2016 that wipes out those gains (and then some) and hands the Democrats another four years in the White House? That’s a sucker’s game.
The real problem is exactly as Limbaugh describes it:
We ought not be granting citizenship to people who don’t love the country,” he said. “We ought not be granting citizenship to people who don’t understand the history of this country. … But we do, in the interest of fairness and multiculturalism and being nonjudgmental and all this. But the real reason we do is because the people granting citizenship to people like this share that opinion this is no place special. And that’s what’s so damn frustrating and inconceivable about the Republican Party wanting to open the country up to this kind of immigration. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s the end of the Republican Party. It’s the end of the country as we know it.”
For conservatives, the problem is that Latinos “don’t love this country,” “they don’t understand…this country,” they don’t think America is any “place special.” Letting Latinos have citizenship would be “the end of the Republican Party [and] the end of the country as we know it.”
These conservatives only care about elections to the extent that they think they can use them to slow down history and keep America white for whites. They don’t want to be more accommodating so they can win elections. They want the Latinos kicked out, whether they’re here legally or not, or even if their ancestors were here since before the Constitution was ratified or California became a state.
When you say that a party should do something, you should mean that in a moral sense. I dare anyone to argue that Cillizza’s analysis is based in any kind of morality.
Is the bill worth supporting? It’s been so long since I last saw it and I’m not aware of any changes which were made, but the Senate’s bill was pretty damn awful with its border militarization and visa free-for-all.
Republican House members don’t care one bit about the 2016 presidential election. Or, if they do care, President Hillary Clinton would be fantastic for fundraising.
Americans.
You can’t have both.
Either we employ American citizens, or we reform immigration and allow millions more into the labor pool.
The two are simply not compatible.
And, no, expanding the labor pool DOES NOT expand the jobs. That’s a fiction of economics. If it does, the effect is so far into the future that it is irrelevant.
Huh? All of the deadbeats in congress, including the “democratic” variety just want to keep their well paid jobs. jobs where they actually work for us what? 110 days per year?
as far as “keeping America white”, they’ve already succeeded at that. current studies indicate even more wealth controlled by fewer (white) people. and the studies show if you are unfortunate enough to not win the “birth lottery”.. you’re not born into an already middle to upper class family with both parents intact–the likelihood you will make it into the upper wealth bracket is slim, very slim.
Economic power is what matters here, not political power.
Sometimes, it’s a good thing that Republican politicians are such selfish sociopathic assholes (and, honestly, a lot of Democrats, too).
And this is one of them.
The Republican House members, in their carefully gerrymandered districts – mostly white districts – gain little to nothing in voting FOR immigration rights, up to and including citizenship.
Senators, who run state-wide elections, DO need to factor in Hispanic votes.
And it’s critical for Presidential candidates to appeal to people all across the spectrum.
So, while Republican House members have little to gain, and nothing to lose, by ignoring the rights of immigrants, their Senatorial and Presidential candidates do.
Nice bottle the Republicans have pickled themselves into!
Using Rush’s criteria, there are an awful lot of RWNJ’s we’d be stripping of their citizenship…
..including Rush..and deported back to Outer Dumbfuckistan.
Oh wait, they already live there!
Not to worry, Rush. I’m pretty sure that people becoming naturalized citizens have to pass a test about US history and government and then swear their allegiance to the US.
That’s not what Rush meant. The popular buffoon meant that today’s immigrants have cultures which are completely incompatable with those of Real Americans. Where he says “cultures”, insert “skin colors”, and you get to hear the dog-whistle to his dittoheads.
That the history they refer to is a complete fabrication is beside the point. Wouldn’t want them reading Chomsky or Zinn, or question the heroism of the man who single-handedly started both the slave trade and the genocide of twenty-five million First Americans (Colombus)… a genocide now perpetrated with our money and moral sanction upon the indigenous descendants of the biblical Jews. There is nothing special about this place, other than its embrace of Hitler.
If you don’t what I say, get the fuck out. I was here first.
No fear.
Boo, you got me to read that Cilizza column. I hate enabling these immoral people with site hits, but I wanted to see the column you were responding to. It is always, always, always, always, always, always about the horse race with these motherfuckers. Nowhere, NOWHERE does Cilizza discuss the moral and economical implications of our current system and the most commonly discussed reform alternatives.
I wrote about this very phenomenon yesterday:
http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2014/2/1/81128/74379/5#5
As you imply here, BooMan, Cilizza may not be a racist, but in all ways he ENABLES racists. It angers me beyond end that he and his cocktail-weenie-eating Beltway buddies have completely divorced themselves from the reality of WHAT GOVERNMENT DOES. It’s all about “how will they win the next news cycle/election,” and not at all about “How will this effect 320 million people?”
Cilizza and most of his colleagues are horrendously immoral.
You expected anything less from a person involved in that “Mad Bitch Beer” crap?
They don’t love this country or understand its history, do they?
Addressing dataguy’s comments above:
dataguy, undocumented immigrants ARE in the U.S. labor pool. It doesn’t have anything to do with “either/or”; it is what exists NOW. Also, there are a thousand gradients in between the two polarities you present here.
We are clearly unwilling to conduct mass enforcement of immigration laws by having Federal law enforcement agents arrest and deport over 10 million people who are currently living in the U.S. without legal status. In fact, it is moral and practical to avoid conducting forcible mass deportations. I hope we can agree on the immorality of mass forced deportations, and recent misguided policies by States like Alabama have revealed the real-world effects of impractable immigration laws.
Because undocumented immigrants are made extremely vulnerable by our current laws, most of them have difficulty gaining employment which compensates them fairly, because their employers exploit their vulnerability. That is why immigration reform must bring some form of safe legal status so that undocumented immigrants currently in our country can gain bargaining leverage, and physical and economic mobility.
I join you in opposing immigration reform creating great numbers of guest worker visas, as it would extend the weakening of worker power. But I don’t sign onto your whole program on this issue.
Exactly. We’re talking about people who are already here, and who are here moreover because our economy has a place for them. The “broken” system that we have now is actually working very well for a lot of people, just not the immigrants themselves.
If there is an either/or, it’s this: either we continue to employ a permanently disenfranchised underclass to do our dirty work, or we allow them to share in the rewards of the system that they help to keep running.
That covers a whole lot of native born citizens.