I think the scientific literature is consistent in finding that conservatives are less comfortable with nuance than liberals and that they prefer to think in more black and white, right and wrong, terms. So, it’s kind of natural that conservatives would look at the issue of undocumented workers or illegal immigrants and feel that these folks broke the law to enter the country and that the law should simply be enforced. All of these people should be deported because that’s what the law says. Along the same lines of simplistic thinking, there shouldn’t be any reason why our borders couldn’t be made completely impenetrable. If it takes moats filled with alligators or laying down mine fields, then that’s just what it takes.
Liberals, on the other hand, understand that the reason that we have 11 million undocumented workers in this country is because it’s impossible to secure our borders completely at a reasonable cost or without killing people, and that people are coming here because there is a demand for their labor. Furthermore, liberals weigh the human cost of separating families and understand and empathize with the motives of immigrants, who are often fleeing violence in their home countries.
So, part of the distinction between how conservatives and liberals view the immigration dispute is temperamental and related to how the two groups just think differently.
But that’s not the end of it. Ron Fournier is offended that Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama thinks that advocates of immigration reform are waging a war on white people. Fournier thinks it’s ludicrous to level that accusation because lots of white people are advocating immigration reform. Lots of Republicans and right-wing institutions are advocating for immigration reform. Do they all hate white people?
What Fournier doesn’t understand is the second half of the conservative calculation. Yes, they are opposed to amnesty because it rewards law-breaking, and they oppose making exceptions on deportations because the law is the law. But the reason this is a war on white people is that many, if not most, conservative white people want to keep this country white. They oppose immigration reform first and foremost because they don’t want millions of brown people in this country. They want them to leave. Their secondary consideration is political. They don’t want to deal with a larger Latino community casting votes that conflict with their values. And they do not want to change or water down their values in order to be more appealing to Latinos or Asians or blacks or gays or women or anyone else.
Why do you think the Republicans first reaction to the changing demographics of the country isn’t to change their positions but to enact all kinds of voter suppression laws aimed at disproportionately disenfranchising Democratic voters? How much more effective is it to simply deport these would-be voters than to try to keep them from the polls. No, they can’t have a pathway to citizenship. No, they can’t stay.
So, when Reince Priebus comes up with some roadmap to make the party more appealing to Latinos, that’s the problem. They don’t want to have to do that because it conflicts with their principles. The far preferable choice is to attack people’s ability to gain citizenship and vote.
Fournier won’t understand the Republicans’ stance on immigration until he understands that the Conservative Movement doesn’t bend to satisfy the political needs of the Republican Party. They care much less about winning than they do about remaining consistent in their ideology. And part of their ideology is that America is a country for white folks and should be governed according to the preferences of white folks.
It’s the very act of asking them to change that constitutes a war against them, so Fournier is, in fact, waging a war on conservative whites.
