Debra Saunders has a piece on why worries of an immigration backlash are unfounded. Getting tough on illegal immigration is not a political loser for the GOP – quite the opposite in fact. It won’t cause Hispanic voters to abandon Republicans either, as Saunder explains:
The Los Angeles Times duly reported, “Some Republicans fear that pushing too hard against illegal immigrants could backfire nationally, as with Proposition 187 (the 1994 ballot measure that sought to deny benefits for illegal immigrants that) helped spur record numbers of California Latinos to become U.S. citizens and register to vote. Those voters subsequently helped Democrats regain political control in the state.”
Call that the Backlash Myth. In fact, Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent of the vote, and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed the measure, was re-elected in 1994. In 2003, when Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses, he so enraged voters that he sealed his political demise. After Davis was recalled from office, the heavily Democratic California Legislature repealed the bill.
That’s your backlash.
Don’t blame racism. While some in the media may think all Latinos vote alike, the Los Angeles Times poll found that 38 percent of Latino voters in California strongly opposed giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.
The GOP has a major chance to make inroads with the growing population of middle-class Hispanics in America today – they’re socially conservative and quite serious on national defense. As many second-generation Hispanic immigrants further assimilate into American society, their voting behavior tends to become more in line with their social views. If anything, an increase in immigration helps the Democrats rather than the Republicans.
The fact that Hillary Clinton has actually tried to outflank Bush on the right on the immigration issue suggests how the political winds are shifting. Amnesty for illegals is not a particularly popular option, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal notwithstanding. The assumption that there are jobs that “Americans just won’t do” doesn’t seem to hold – chances are that Americans don’t do them because wages have been depressed or they’re jobs that could be accomplished through automation. Bringing in immigrants from Mexico to perform those jobs doesn’t strike me as an economically beneficial arrangement – cheap imported labor tends to lower industrial innovation (see the prebellum South for instance), and it also encourages Mexico to continue its dysfunctional politics since they have a nice release valve for their discontented citizens.
Legal immigrants end up bearing the brunt of the suspicion engendered by illegal immigrants streaming across the border. It’s one thing to make it easier for honest workers to come across the border on a contract basis – sealing the borders to everyone else. But to provide a legal form of support to cross-border human trafficking and the coyotes who are often involved in narcotics trafficking as well as smuggling human cargos is simply bad policy.
If Bush were smart, he’d put a guest-worker program right alongside tough border protection – but Karl Rove is making the political calculation that Hispanics are going to be crucial for electoral success in the US in future elections (true) and that cracking down on immigration harms the GOP’s chances at picking up the Hispanic vote (totally false). This calculation is neither sound policy nor good politics, and if Bush is going to get serious about reforming immigration, he can’t do so unless he’s willing to see beyond the myth of immigration backlash.
“The assumption that there are jobs that “Americans just won’t do†doesn’t seem to hold – chances are that Americans don’t do them because wages have been depressed or they’re jobs that could be accomplished through automation”
You’re finally seeing the light here….I hope.
“cheap imported labor tends to lower industrial innovation (see the prebellum South for instance), and it also encourages Mexico to continue its dysfunctional politics since they have a nice release valve for their discontented citizens.”
Not only that, it ensures public assistance program outlays will swell to accommodate the growth of impoverished workers….at the very same time as retirement entitlements will swell spending on seniors. So both the workers and the retirees will be draining a higher percentage of public coffers at the same time. There’s no way that’s gonna come together effectively.
“If Bush were smart, he’d put a guest-worker program right alongside tough border protection”
Here’s where you cling to your “business whore” roots. There’s nothing the business community would love more than a permanent disenfranchised labor force in the nation’s most vulnerable industries. Taxation without representation=quasi-slavery. And how in the hell would you propose we convince these “guest workers” to leave after their guest status ends and business wants to replace him with another disempowered warm body? Of all proposals on the table regarding immigration, none are more noxious that the “guest worker” canard.
I’m all for securing borders. If we have to build a big ugly wall on the border, so be it. I support legal immigration and would even favor expanding quotas if we targeted the influx to professional or semi-professional fields (such as nursing) where the demand for labor can be met without saturating labor supply. A continued influx of legal low-skill/semi-skill workers is fine as long as its done at a controlled level. New blood in the labor market is good for a growing economy and to serve as a competitive motivator for the domestic workforce, but the current approach of deliberate saturation of the low-skill/semi-skill labor market to suppress wages is unacceptable.