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GOP and Immigration

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EXCERPT #1

Immigration was no longer a marginal issue that few Americans knew or cared about or felt it didn’t affect them. This had a lot to do with the troop of Hispanics to Southern, Northeast and America’s heartland towns and even states such as New Hampshire, Iowa, Tennessee, and North Dakota. A decade ago these towns and states had barely seen a Hispanic. In many of those towns, the number of Hispanics living, working and sending their children to school had sharply risen. Spanish was commonly heard on many more city and neighborhood streets, in the schools, and in the workplaces.

In campaign jaunts through the early primary state of Iowa in mid and late 2007, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani and the other fringe GOP presidential candidates thundered against illegal immigration and demanded a tough border crackdown. Though the state was still more than 90 percent white, the Hispanic population had increased by nearly 40 percent since 2000. Immigration was now an explosive minefield for the Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls.

Polls before the great immigration debate renewed in May 2007 showed that a majority of voters opposed a Berlin Wall style armed border. An even bigger majority of them backed a controlled amnesty plan. Those weren’t just paper numbers.
Immigration 2006, a group of public interest advocates and pollsters, closely examined how immigration played out in the 2006 midterm elections in fifteen key state and national races.

In twelve of the races pro immigration reform Democrats handily beat their Republican opponents. The Republicans who won most notably California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger backed the Senate’s immigration reform bill and actively outreached to Latino voters. There was absolutely no evidence that voters paid much attention to the turn of the anti-immigration card in the midterm elections, let alone rallied behind it to sabotage Democrats and pro-immigration reform Republicans.

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EXCERPT #2

One group that did pay very close attention to the immigration debate was Latino evangelicals. They now make up about one fourth of the membership of evangelical churches in America, and their numbers are getting bigger. Throw in the millions more Latinos who are charismatic Catholics into the equation and they make up a potentially potent political force. They are staunchly anti-gay marriage, abortion, and pro-family values.

They were prime targets for the GOP. The immigration battle changed that in March 2006. They flexed their political muscle when they forced several prominent national evangelical groups to back peddle fast from their rigid stance on immigration reform, and either remain neutral in the debate, or issue cautious and bland statements calling on Congress to enact a fair and balanced immigration reform law.

The dilemma for the GOP presidential candidates was how to avoid further ruffling the political feathers of the Latino evangelicals, and yet not give an inch in their opposition to immigration reform. The one place the GOP faithful started was at the annual National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast held in Washington, D.C.

Every year that he’s been in the White House, Bush has spoken to the breakfast audience.  He did the same in April 2007 when he tossed out his trademark scattering of Spanish phrases to the group and thanked them for making immigration reform a priority. Bush was the only top GOP official to say that. In fact, other than Florida Senator Mel Martinez, he was the only name GOP official to even show up at the breakfast.

EXCERPT #3

The major challenge for the Republicans and Democrats wasn’t just getting Latino votes. It was getting them in the right places. It was where those votes came from and where they could come from in the 2008 presidential elections that could spell the difference between victory and defeat. The greatest number of Latino voters is in California, Florida, Texas, and New York. In the next two years, the Latino vote will swell in Illinois and New Jersey. The number of Latino elected officials doubled and tripled in those states in 2004.

Even before immigration became a national issue, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie sounded the alarm bell. In a Wall Street Journal editorial before the GOP 2006 midterm debacle, he warned Republicans that it would be political suicide for them to appear to be an anti-immigrant party.  Gillespie played with the numbers too and contended Republicans couldn’t win without the swing states of New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Nevada that Bush won in 2004.

Still, immigration and its undertone of racial and ethnic tension and turmoil had in less than a decade jumped to become the issue that could raise voter anxiety, stir heat and divisions, and dominate political talk in cities and towns across America on the presidential campaign trail if not actually tip an election to a pro or anti-immigration reform candidate or incumbent.  Immigration also had another unintended political consequence for Bush. He had worked so hard to publicly make the GOP a user-friendly party to Latinos. It now threatened to unhinge all the work he put into it. The GOP contenders didn’t just reject immigration reform they rejected Bush.

A chagrined John Weaver, McCain’s political strategist, sounded the warning siren “We’re getting close to the point where we will no longer be a national party if we try to define it as a white male cul-de-sac gated community party.”  Wall was a better term for the corner that the GOP had hemmed itself up against. At least for a time in 2007 the GOP and Bush’s effort to draw thousands more GOP leaning Latinos into the fold crashed hard against it. The Democrats hoped it would stay that way.

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