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March 12, two quite separate events combined to undermine the Bush
administration's strategy for building a new GOP majority by winning
Hispanic votes with such policies as an amnesty for illegal Mexican
immigrants. The first event was the result of the Democratic primary
in Texas, in which conservative millionaire Tony Sanchez handily defeated
former attorney general Dan Morales with a campaign that stressed
the rise of Hispanic power. The second was the near defeat in the
House of Representatives of Section 245(i) — a measure to allow
more than 200,000 illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. while regularizing
their status, rather than requiring them to return home to apply for
U.S. entry from there.
The Texas primary
strengthened the evidence that the Hispanic vote is drifting firmly
into the Democratic camp — irrespective of the GOP's immigration
policies. And the House vote signaled that in the aftermath of September
11 most Republicans want to tighten immigration policy rather than
liberalize it. Together, they suggest that the Bush administration's
Hispanic strategy is falling apart.
In particular,
the House decision — in which the Republican leadership averted
defeat by a single vote — established that the White House
no longer has the Re publican votes to push through its larger plans
to amnesty 3 million illegal Mexican "guestworkers" as
a favor to Mexico's President Fox. Not only did a clear majority
of Republicans, including some close to the leadership, rally to
the standard raised by Colorado representative Tom Tancredo in opposition
to 245(i); but those who voted against it included all the Republicans
(and some Democrats) who are considering a run for higher office
this year, with the sole exception of New Hampshire representative
John Sununu Jr. The measure achieved its narrow victory only with
the support of congressmen like Lamar Smith of Texas and Judiciary
Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, who generally
favor tighter immigration controls and would almost certainly oppose
the broader amnesty proposal.
The measure
now faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where Robert Byrd of
West Virginia has announced that he will prevent its passage under
the "unanimous consent" provision that was its best hope
of an early win. He expressed theatrical astonishment that the House
and the White House should be so keen to pass "what amounts
to an amnesty for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, many
of whom have not undergone any background or security check."
The politics of an immigration amnesty just got more perilous.
It may have
helped the opponents of 245(i) that the previous week President
Fox, in between eloquent appeals for a warm American welcome for
Mexican immigrants, had handed back to Castro's secret police the
handful of Cubans who had sought asylum in his own embassy. But
that merely provided them with a nice secondary justification: Their
main incentive was changing public opinion. Those Republicans with
the most urgent reason for getting public opinion right — their
own electoral interests — voted against the White House. One
congressman, when taxed by a loyalist, gave his reason simply as
"September 11th." Tancredo's immigration-reform caucus,
which a year ago had a membership in the low teens, now boasts more
than 60 adherents. And Robert Byrd has just reminded the GOP that
even if the national Democratic party favors Hispanic immigration
even more fervently than the White House does, local Demo cratic
candidates may still flay them for a vote that seems to endorse
and encourage illegal immigration.
The lesson
for the White House is — or should be — clear: It can
only pass the broader immigration amnesty it has been promoting
over and against the votes of the majority of Republicans. That
course will doubtless be urged upon it by some political analysts
and pressure groups, citing the precedent of Clintonian "triangulation."
That precedent, however, suffers from an obvious flaw: Clinton's
triangulation meant supporting a welfare reform that was overwhelmingly
popular with the American public, whereas illegal immigration is
highly unpopular. Indeed, pollster John Zogby reports that 83 percent
of Americans believe immigration laws are too lax. So the GOP majority
would have public opinion on its side in resisting any move to make
immigration easier. In which case the White House cannot deliver
the goods on which its electoral outreach to Hispanics is based
— and it would therefore be well advised to adopt a different
strategy.
The good news
from the Texas primary is that this may not matter very much, since
the old strategy was doomed to fail anyway. It was based on a whole
series of assumptions about Hispanic voters, each one of which was
either plainly false or highly questionable: for instance, that
Hispanic-Americans favor high levels of immigration. In fact, opinion
polls clearly show that Hispanics differ only slightly from other
Americans on immigration. A clear majority of Hispanics favor either
the current or lower levels of immigration. Hispanic voters are
swayed much more by the general policy stances of both parties than
by immigration.
Another questionable
idea is that Hispanic voters are "natural Republicans"
because of their conservatism on moral questions such as "gay
marriage" or abortion. Sure, in a California referendum on
gay marriage, Hispanics voted disproportionately against it. But
Hispanics tend to be liberal on economic questions, and when it
comes to voting and party identification, in the self-satisfied
but accurate words of liberal California analyst Harold Meyerson
(now of The American Prospect), "their economic progressivism
has consistently trumped their moral conservatism."
Are Hispanics
likely to become more Republican the longer they stay in the U.S.,
and the more they rise up the income scale? No. A study by political
scientists James G. Gimpel and Karen Kaufmann showed that Hispanics
became more Democratic the longer they stayed in the U.S., and though
Republican identification did indeed rise with prosperity, the Democrats
retained a 10-point lead even at the highest levels of income.
The Texas primary
confirmed these gloomy results for the GOP even before the results
were tabulated. Hispanics were 12 percent of the Texas electorate
in 1998, and are expected to be 20 percent — the "tipping
point" at which their rise will make Texas a Democratic-leaning
state — within six years. As GOP pollster Matthew Dowd, a longtime
booster of the Hispanic/amnesty strategy, conceded to Dan Balz of
the Washington Post: "The question this year is whether
the Sanchez campaign advances that [i.e., making Texas a competitive
swing state rather than a reliably Republican one], compressing
six years into six months." It might do so; Sanchez combined
an ethnic appeal to Hispanics — objecting to his opponent's
wish to answer questions in English and Spanish rather than solely
in Spanish in a televised debate — with an economic appeal
to moderate middle-class whites, calling for low taxes.
For that very
reason, however, his looks like a transitional candidacy even if
he wins in November. For as Hispanic voting strength grows, so it
is likely to reflect in Texas the liberal economic voting patterns
celebrated by Meyerson in California.
What lies behind
this political drift in Texas? Exactly the same force that is pushing
once-reliable GOP states like California and Florida into, first,
the "undecided" and eventually the "Democratic"
column: demographic change driven by immigration. The Hispanic share
of the population has risen sharply in these major states in the
last 30 years; the Hispanic share of the electorate is now catching
up, as immigrants become citizens and register to vote; and their
votes heavily favor the Democrats. What has happened in California
and now Texas is destined to happen in all the states with large
concentrations of His panic immigrants. This is not a political
prediction; it is a mathematical relationship.
As the study
by Gimpel and Kaufmann demonstrated, moreover, this drift will be
very hard to reverse. Republican hopes for major gains in the Hispanic
electorate are without foundation. Democrats lead the GOP by large
margins in every Hispanic group except Cuban-Americans. There is
no sign that any significant group of Latino voters is "in
play." Because Hispanic voters lean to the Democrats on economic
and social grounds, the GOP would have to change almost all its
policies (on taxes, welfare, regulation, labor law) to have any
hope of attracting Hispanic crossovers in the long term. Above all,
insofar as there is a modest drift rightwards among Hispanics as
they rise economically, that is more than canceled out by the fact
that continuing immigration channels new, poor Hispanic voters into
the Democratic ranks.
Of course,
there are Hispanics — between one-quarter and one-third of
the total Latino electorate — who loyally pull the Republican
lever. But they are the very voters who are least likely to favor
sectional appeals to a separate Hispanic identity, such as an amnesty
for illegals, and most likely to respond to traditional Republican
arguments for patriotic assimilation. In the post-9/11 atmosphere,
other Hispanics might be won over to their side by a patriotic appeal
of that kind. But unless the Bush administration wakes up to the
electoral impact of continuing immigration, the most the GOP can
hope for is to slow the pace of its decline.
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