The GOP’s new motto on immigration reform? Yo quiero pander…to all sides of the debate:
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Politico that he’s open to giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship in exchange for a temporary moratorium on all legal immigration while they “assimilate.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a longtime proponent of reform, said legalization should be paired with the repeal of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. And Republican House Speaker John Boehner told reporters on Friday that he would not commit to including a path to citizenship in his immigration reform efforts…
Juan Hernandez, a Texas-based Republican political consultant who served as Sen. John McCain’s director of Hispanic outreach in 2008, said whatever the potential disagreements, congressmen should start hammering out a deal now.
“Should it be with two, three or four steps? That’s fine. Let’s negotiate. But let’s starting taking the first steps immediately,” Hernandez said. “We may not find a political moment again in which at least I see everyone saying it’s time for immigration reform.”
The cries that demographics equal destiny for an eventual GOP shift to the left on all issues pertaining to immigration reform have been shouted for some time. And in the wake of a narrow popular vote re-election for Barack Obama, carried in part by a 44% margin of victory among Latino voters, the cries have renewed with vigor. Even some in the conservative intelligentsia have backed a 2007-esque immigration reform stance, including Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer.
But would backing amnesty, a path to citizenship, however the GOP wishes to define such legislation, really give the GOP any electoral edge? Republicans have gained nothing among African-American voters despite the GOP’s critical role in civil rights legislation. Yet pollsters love to mention Bush’s 44% showing among Latinos in 2004 and equally enjoy pointing out 65% of all voters (including 3 out of 4 Latinos) support some opportunity at citizenship for illegal immigrants. Of course, Bush’s Latino support was greatly inflated and was more likely around 38%. And last, but not least, is the data suggesting that immigration from Latin American countries may be actually reversing.
That last part is critical because Latino attitudes towards immigration reform vary depending on whether they were born here or immigrated. While 42% of all Latino voters called immigration reform their number one issue, only 32% of U.S. born Latinos agreed compared to 54% who were foreign born. Financially stable ($80k+ incomes) Latinos and those who are second generation are less likely to focus on immigration reform or support carte blanche amnesty. Those who called Spanish their first language were far more interested in immigration reform than those who said English was their primary language. The greater integrated recent immigrants had become, the less interested they were in immigration concerns.
Republicans focus on Latinos when speaking about immigration reform ignores a number of other demographic groups who have more at stake in any immigration conversation. Asians are now the largest block of recent immigrants, surpassing Hispanic migration. And as a voting block, Asian-Americans voted by similar margins to Latinos for Obama. Where are the breathless newspaper column inches declaring the GOP must court Asian-Americans?
Republican outreach to minority groups has been a priority mothballed election cycle after election cycle. If an election where nearly 13 million fewer voters showed up prompts the GOP to finally engage demographics they’ve thus far all but ignored, then great. But if Republicans try and out liberal liberals on issues like immigration reform, they will continue to find no real opportunities for political gain.
ADDENDUM: Rachel Campos-Duffy at National Review hits the nail on the head of the broader challengers standing between Republicans and Latino voters:
Hispanics come to America for the American Dream. They are “trabajadores,” and you would be hard pressed to find an American farmer, contractor, or restaurant owner who would not testify to their work ethic. Unfortunately, the communities in which they live and work are teeming with liberal activists: farm and service-industry labor unions, well-intentioned community-based social services providers and more radical and racially motivated Latino groups such as La Raza, LULAC, and Mecha. In addition, the curricula their kids encounter in public schools are either hostile or silent on the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and ideas that are the foundation of conservative thinking. All of these activist groups and institutions have a common ideology and an affinity for big and centralized government, and of course, entitlements. They go out of their way to sign folks up and to begin the cycle of government dependency. Once hooked to the IV of government handouts, a steady drip of ideology, and a heavy dose of raunchy pop culture, the once vibrant American Dreams and traditional family values of Hispanics drift into a slow, deep coma.
Blog Owner’s Note: While “Dog Gone” is leaving a comment, I need to ask: Ms. Gone, have you got a detailed explanation on your thesis that Representative Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill was “crap legislation”?
I’ve been patiently waiting for almost six months, now.
Honestly – it doesn’t bother me that you have adopted an air of unearned arrogance, or have completely bastardized the concept of “fact-checking” (I mean, all you really do is “check for congruence with current lefty conventional wisdom) – that’s fine. I don’t care…
…but as you’ve tried to set yourself up as a “Fact-checker”, I’d like to make sure you provide, y’know, “facts” on this issue. You want to wax arrogant on any issue, you’ll get a challenger (and skip away from this blog without ever engaging them). But you’re on that subject. And I’d rather you quit skipping away from this one.
Thanks for seeing to this.
Back to the comment.
———-
The GOP that fought for civil rights in the 1960s were the moderates, who reached across the party lines to join the Democrats that initiated that civil rights legislation – notably our own Hubert Humphrey. The conservative GOP and the conservative DFL were who opposed the civil rights movement — and those Dixiecrats who subsequently became Republicans opposed were the opposition.
The moderate pro-civil rights conservatives started leaving the party when the candidate for president was Barry Goldwater, along with his VP, Robert Miller, father of liberal radio host / current tv pundit Stephanie Miller.
The current GOP has no legitimate right to claim credit for either Lincoln or the civil rights movement that had figures like Everett Dirksen. You have instead opted to become the party that embraces racism and bigotry like the John Birchers who were properly repudiated by the mainstream GOP back in the 60s. Your party is the party of the old right and the new right, which are racists and bigots.
So long as you are the party that portrays your opposition this way, you are wrong, and will continue to alienate Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and women.
In addition, the curricula their kids encounter in public schools are either hostile or silent on the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and ideas that are the foundation of conservative thinking.
Bullshit. There are no schools that do not include American History in their curricula, and no schools should be teaching a politically biased curricula, much less the grossly factually inaccurate Tea Party revisionist history.
Once hooked to the IV of government handouts, a steady drip of ideology, and a heavy dose of raunchy pop culture, the once vibrant American Dreams and traditional family values of Hispanics drift into a slow, deep coma.
Bullshit again. Even your own Republican leaders like Bobby Jindal dispute this description of those who voted against Romney / Ryan and the Republican platform. So long as you characterize people or points of view this way, you will lose them, in increasingly larger numbers every election cycle.
The repeat of the statements made by Romney post-election to his big donors that parallel his 47% comments demonstrate that he never did really intend to be a president who represented those people he dismissed so offensively.
The real irony – the blue states, like MN, contribute more money to the red states than they get back from the federal government – and that’s fine, because those red states, with their failed conservative policies need it. Blue states are more successful than red states, and a good number of those voting for Romney were exactly those 47% he intended to hurt the most with his policies.
You clearly are one of those who apparently fails to understand the problems with excessive executive compensation, the decline in wages for the majority, and the actual wealth distribution crisis in this country that has resulted from favorable legislation for the 1% at the expense of the 99% – especially the lower 47%.
http://penigma.blogspot.com/2012/11/does-this-explain-why-47-would-wrongly.html
Those 47% may not pay at the same rate as the upper income brackets in some taxes, including income tax, but they make up for it in other kinds of taxation. The upper income brackets often pay far less than the working poor / blue collar economic strata because of how deductions work to their benefit. And corporations are all too frequently paying zero income taxes, despite the nominal rate. So long as you ignore or deny the reality of that inequity – you will lose elections, and only gain voters who are too ignorant to vote their own interests OR the best interests of the country
You are wrong, in your assumptions, wrong in your analysis, and you are going to keep losing demographics while the left, which is more centrist, continues to gain them for very different reasons than you hypothesize.
I just came back from the election audit for my county. Funny – no Republicans came, despite it being a predominantly Republican district. Attendance would have demonstrated a REAL interest in election integrity, but you prefer fantasies. What you’ve written is just one more right wing myth, like election fraud.
The real irony – the blue states, like MN, contribute more money to the red states than they get back from the federal government
Aaaand that’s more of those lefty chanting points.
That’s a bit of lefty conventional wisdom that Paul Krugman blurted out four years ago, and has been debunked over and over and over again. But the lefties keep on regurgitating it.
Krugman’s thesis was that red states, especially the western ones that were the home of the Tea Party, “get” more federal money than they take in.
He didn’t control for the fact that most red states have lower per-capita incomes than “blue” states AND commensurately lower costs of living. $35K a year buys the same living in rural South Dakota that $50K gets you in Minneapolis. Higher incomes pay higher taxes.
So are you suddenly complaining about progressive taxation? Because that’s behind part of the “disparity”.
He also ignored the fact that most “red” states “get” most of their money in the form of…
– federal land
– military bases
as opposed to entitlement spending. Oh, they’re certainly federal spending “in” a red state, all right. But while stationing a wing of KC135 tankers in Grand Forks “gives” a couple hundred million dollars to North Dakota, it’s not the same as giving that amount in cash or food stamps to the locals.
And yep, the rural red states “benefit” from farm subsidy programs. This is a lot of money, but still small in the grand federal scheme of things – except when divided per-capita among a sparse population in a rural area.
But Krugman, intellectually-dishonest fop that he is, doesn’t see fit to tell you, his chanting-point-bot, that fact. And (I’ll be charitable) thus, you don’t know it.
If Krugman were intellectually-honest, he would…:
But that would involve intellectual honesty. Krugman doesn’t have it.
Do you?
I just came back from the election audit for my county. Funny – no Republicans came, despite it being a predominantly Republican district.
They were probably, y’know, WORKING and being productive, instead of community organizing, mooching, leeching and parasiting.
I just came back from the election audit for my county. Funny – no Republicans came, despite it being a predominantly Republican district.
So it was Democrats only conducting the audit. Check.
My God I wonder if DG knows how what she writes looks like to a normal person?
First Ringer isn’t the first person to notice that modern immigrants no longer assimilate so there’s no reason to believe they’ll abandon the values they learned in their former homes. Immigrants always have brought their home country values to the new land and patterned their new government after the old one, which is why Minnesota (predominantly Scandinavian-German) is a Social Democrat state while Virginia (predominantly English-Scottish) is a far more Libertarian state and Muslim immigrants agitate for sharia while Mexican immigrants vote for the candidates who promise the most welfare. Noting the facts is not racist. Drawing obvious conclusions from observed facts is not racist. Planning strategy based on conclusions drawn from facts, is not racist.
Romney was wrong to say that 47% of the people voting in this election weren’t on his side so there was no point wooing them. It was 51%. He’s wrong on the magnitude of the problem, not on the existence of the problem. Bread and circuses only work for so long. Printing imaginary money only works for so long.
Dog Gone blithely assumes a post-American United States will be pro-choice, feminist, socialist and prosperous so she’s eager for immigrants to remake the nation. Based on the governments our immigrants left but are historically likely to import, I don’t share her optimism.
I just came back from the election audit for my county. Funny – no Republicans came, despite it being a predominantly Republican district.
It’s good, Miss Ann, that your husbands wealth affords you the luxury to spend time with your little interests. As is usual with your posts here and at your blog, you offer no information that reflects original thought. Given that the President’s campaign relied heavily on messaging coordinated with a dream team of behavioral scientists who easily, it appears, manipulated low information types like yourself with a combination of fear and agitprop to vote for him. The fact that a million less people fell for this manipulation than in ’08 is a sign of hope.
But Krugman, intellectually-dishonest fop that he is . . .
Krugman is catching more Hell for this from economists than he used to. The complaint is always the same: Krugman claims the mantle of an economist when he writes his column, but what he writes is partisan hackery, not economics.
One example: a few years ago he wrote a column singing the praises of higher taxes. In Keynesian terms it is difficult to justify higher taxes if you want an economy to grow robustly, e.g., if an economy is growing too fast and producing inflation you would raise taxes to slow economic growth.
When you re-read the column you noticed that he was giving the impression that he was using anecdotal data to imply that higher taxes would not hinder growth (‘we all remember the higher taxes of Clinton’s dot-com boom’), but he was really arguing that higher taxes on the wealthy were justified by his own subjective idea of ‘fairness’. Yet a casual reader who has drunk the liberal kool-aid would come away believing that Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman had endorsed higher taxes because it would help the economy.
Yeah, Seflores, that does seem to be the line, doesn’t it?
‘GOP candidate got 500k fewer votes than in 2008. They need to adopt Dem policies before demographics grind them to eternal also-ran status! Obama got 6.5 million fewer votes than he got in 2008. It’s a resounding endorsement of his policies!’
Current totals show Obama with 50.6% of the vote, barely a plurality. Conservatives in national government, especially in the House, need to keep this in mind. They will not be rewarded for cooperating with Obama.
While I’m all for encouraging all people to at least take a look at the conservative side of things, does anyone really believe that a Biden/Klobuchar ticket will attract the same number of African American/Hispanic votes? Unless the Democrats nominate another young, charismatic, (half) African American in 2016 I doubt that the percentages of voters choosing the Democrat will be the same.
Those 47% may not pay at the same rate as the upper income brackets in some taxes, including income tax, but they make up for it in other kinds of taxation.
This is just stupid, and it demonstrates that DG just repeats Lefty chanting points.
Most of the taxes paid by people who do not pay income taxes are payroll taxes, SSI and Medicare.
These are social insurance programs. They will get it all back, and the less money they pay into these programs, the more they will get back as a percentage of their contribution. A person who pays SS on $15k annual income get more than 1/6 as much of a payout as a person who pays SS on $90k income.
You get nothing back on the income taxes that you pay.
Put another way, if you don’t pay into SS and Medicare, you get no SS or Medicare (dependents of SS & Medicare contributors aside). If you pay $1,000,000 or if you pay $0 in income tax each year you get the same benefit.
The fact that Lefties ignore this — or simply can’t figure it out — is more proof of their stupidity.
Good piece, FR.
DG;dr
I’ve been listening to a lot of post election talk radio. What concerns me is that the majority of responses are either;
1) Double down and just be louder, more forceful and stay the course.
or
2) Change all our positions to be just like the Democrats but promise to do them more successfully.
Neither one will be successful.
For the first, if you don’t persuade someone the first time, you can’t merely use the same arguments and expect him to listen to you just because you start to shout. As to the second, never get into a bidding war with Democrats. They’ll just go higher.
Specifically to immigration, I don’t know a single person that has any experience with the current system that thinks it currently works. The “conservative” idea of, build the Great Wall of America & just deport every illegal, is not only unworkable, but it also is contrary to our history as a country of immigrants and the land of opportunity. On the other end, the “liberal” solution of ignore immigration rules/status and pretend borders don’t exist leads to the USA effectively dissolving as a country.
The idea of high walls and wide gates is the only sustainable solution. We have a compelling interest to know who is coming into our country and blocking individuals we don’t want here, but we need to make it easier and quicker to come here legally. Fixing the process to come here legally will decrease the appeal of illegal immigration. That includes streamlining the process of getting visas and will probably include increasing certain types. I’ve heard about visas for high skilled laborers such as engineers, but I also think we need to make it easier for low skilled workers for industries such as construction and agriculture. Actually deporting people that are found to be here illegally will also reduce the appeal of simply ignoring immigration laws and bypassing the process. I’d suggest starting with people that get picked up for other crimes and withholding bail. Ultimately, there will have be some form of amnesty. I will argue against citizenship, but permanent legal resident status without the ability to sponsor new immigrants could be an acceptable compromise to many.
Why can’t conservatives merely point out to blacks and latinos with citizenship that giving ten million or so illegals green cards will increase competition for existing affirmative action job slots? And remind working class whites that the number of people competing with them using an affirmative action boost will increase?
Mitch, it’s your blog; your call. But while I stand 100% behind the decision to let ignorant leftist mongrels spew their stupidity unhindered (as you know I followed the same code of inclusion on Pair O’ Dice), I wonder if I’d allow them to post links to their own fetid little corners of the blogosphere.
The reason I have a problem with that has nothing to do with any concern that conservatives that might follow it wouldn’t be perfectly capable of tearing the pelt off her, it’s that, unlike conservative blogs (like SITD), they won’t get the opportunity because ignorant leftist mongrels censor their own comment sections.
Just ask Mongrel Cur to guarantee the same respect for freedom of speech she enjoys here, and let her silence her own inane papspew.
“Blue states are more successful than red states…” Heh, yeah that explains why I had to chase my job to South Carolina, and why Caterpiller just moved it’s last manufacturing plant to Georgia, and why 3M has spend hundreds of millions expanding in Alabama and Texas while they tore down every building they once owned on the East side of Saint Paul.
It also explains why New York city would have gone bankrupt if the fed hadn’t bailed it out, and why Detroit Michigan looks like Mogadishu, and why California, the biggest moonbat colony on the planet, is teetering on bankruptcy.
Mongrel Cur’s stupidity is painful to witness.
“”Blue states are more successful than red states…” ”
Except for the ones that actually exist.
North Dakota, Utah and Texas are creating jobs by the truckload.
California is hemorrhaging jobs faster than people.
It’s just a chanting point.