In the Washington Post today, George Will tries to take apart Republican resistance to immigration reform piece by piece. The most interesting element of his argument is expressed in his opening and closing paragraphs:
Distilled to their discouraging essence, Republicans’ reasons for retreating from immigration reform reflect waning confidence in American culture and in the political mission only Republicans can perform — restoring U.S. economic vigor. Without this, the nation will have a dismal future only Democrats can relish: government growing in order to allocate scarce opportunity.”
Opposition to immigration because the economy supposedly cannot generate sufficient jobs is similar defeatism. Zero-sum reasoning about a fixed quantity of American opportunity is for a United States in a defensive crouch, which is not for conservatives.
As Mr. Will sees it, Republican opposition to immigration reform reflects a “waning confidence in American culture” and he sees their position as a “defensive crouch.” Reading Ann Coulter’s syndicated column today, I can see why Mr. Will feels that way. Coulter argues that the Republicans haven’t begun to lose the political argument in this country because their arguments stopped convincing Americans, but because a bunch of immigrants became voting citizens and their political views have diverged from the conservative consensus from the beginning.
With all the smirking on the left about their electoral victories, it’s important to remember that Democrats haven’t won the hearts and minds of the American people. They changed the people. If you pour vinegar into a bottle of wine, the wine didn’t turn, you poured vinegar into it. Similarly, liberals changed no minds. They added millions of new liberal voters through immigration.
On one level, Coulter reduced the issue of undocumented workers to a purely partisan consideration.
Americans are under no moral obligation to admit huge numbers of people who have no particular right to be here just because the Democrats need 30 million new voters.
I don’t think the Democrats need 30 million new voters, nor do I think we would get that many votes from immigration reform. While I would expect some electoral benefit over time from immigration reform, what motivates me is simple fairness. We ask these people to come here and work thankless jobs, and we benefit from the work they do. We should have allowed them to immigrate legally, and we should have made sure they were paid adequately so they didn’t create any downward pressure on wages. We needed the labor, and they supplied it. It’s our fault that we allowed the transaction to be in technical violation of the law.
Yet, that’s not what is really eating at Coulter and her fellow-conservative travelers.
If this country were the same demographically today as it was in 1980, Romney would have won a bigger victory in 2012 than Reagan did against Carter. And we wouldn’t have to hear about soccer all the time.
We’re living in a different country now, and I can’t recall moving! Had I wanted to live in Japan, I could have moved there. Had I had wanted to live in Mexico, Pakistan or Chechnya — I could have moved to those places, too.
I’m sure they’re lovely, but I wanted to live in America. Now I can’t.
With the repeal of Obamacare in the balance, I have argued that it’s insane for Republicans to waste resources primarying their own guys in 2014.
But any Republican who supports mass immigration has forfeited that claim. If the country is going to be ruined anyway, it could not matter less who wins any particular seat on this Titanic.
It’s hard to decipher where the line should be drawn between opposing immigration because the immigrants are brown and opposing immigration because the new Americans tend not to vote like Ann Coulter. The country is changed in both senses. In Coulter’s terms, “the country…is ruined” either way.
But Coulter isn’t speaking only for herself. She’s speaking for the conservative movement. As a result, I think Mr. Will is fully justified to characterize this sentiment as lacking in confidence about the culture and entirely defensive in nature.
I’ve said it before, but the Republican Party is a vehicle that can carry different kinds of passengers. It can carry Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller or it can carry Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It can carry Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe or it can carry Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. It can carry some combination of the two. In recent years, it has become an almost uniformly conservative-ferrying vehicle. What Mr. Will understands is, that has to change. The GOP must moderate significantly, or it will not compete on the national level again. Acceding to immigration reform is a first-step in that process.
