Alien Politics
Looking for votes in all the wrong places.

August 22, 2001 9:35 a.m.

remlinologists who have examined the data tell me that Paul Gigot's column in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, entitled "Alien Notion," was almost certainly a lightly coded attack on me and on Peter Brimelow, the author of the immigration-skeptic book, Alien Nation. (Alien Notion, Alien Nation, geddit?)

Deploring the reluctance of some Republicans to endorse President Bush's proposal to grant amnesty to illegal Mexican immigrants, Mr. Gigot blamed sinister "advice from British transplants, the same folks who turned the Tories into a minority. As Grover Norquist quips, "they haven't assimilated yet" to America's pro-immigrant culture."

I suppose I might conceivably take offense at the first gibe since the only political campaign in which I have been involved was Margaret Thatcher's 1987 campaign — which resulted in a Tory majority of 101. One likes these little things to be remembered accurately. But I am considerably mollified by the reflection that, since I have been living in the U.S. since 1988, my baneful influence over the Tories must have been exercised by some sort of occult remote control.

As for Mr. Brimelow, I imagine he is as flattered to be credited with preternatural powers as I am. He has been living in North America continuously since the late sixties. Yet in that time, from his eyrie in Forbes magazine, he has apparently been able to manipulate the Tories across the Atlantic into destroying themselves politically. Quite a feat-even more remarkable than Mr. Bush's father's number on the GOP.

How did he do it? Mr. Gigot has helpfully hinted at the terrifying explanation: A magus of Mr. Brimelow's status naturally never bothered with immigrating to the U.S. like any respectable illegal. No, Mr. Gigot tells us that he was transplanted here — just like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Alien Nation indeed!

Paul, stay awake! Be vigilant! Who knows what you and Grover might find yourselves believing if once your eyelids droop? You might even begin to distinguish between a culture that is "pro-immigrant" and a culture that favors "open borders" immigration; between admiring hard-working and decent people from abroad on the one hand and thinking that their interests should be elevated above the welfare of low-income fellow-Americans on the other; between an immigration policy that strengthens America and one that balkanizes it.

Similar questions might also addressed to those Republican strategists whom Mr. Gigot praises for advising President Bush that he needs to legalize the status of illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. in order to win the next election. They maintain, apparently, that Mr. Bush needs to lift his 35 percent of the 2000 Hispanic vote to 40 percent in the 2004 election in order to win. And they advise that the way to do that is to make immigration easier by, among other measures, a "guestworker" program that would allow illegal aliens to obtain residency, citizenship and voting rights.

Where shall I begin?

In the first place, the Hispanic vote in 2004 will be about six percent of the total electorate. To gain an additional five percent of six percent of the electorate would increase Mr. Bush's share of the total vote by 0.3 percent. A similar increase in his share of the white vote would increase his electoral total by about 4 percent — giving him a clear majority of the popular vote.

Of course, in a democracy political parties have a moral obligation to seek votes from all groups. But no party is under an obligation to woo all groups equally. The Democrats, for instance, concentrate on winning Black votes — and they succeed to the point where minorities and labor unions are now the Democratic party's base. They won more than nine out of ten Black votes in the last election.

Republicans have lost ground among their own base, namely white voters, in the last decade. They have been made morally ashamed of seeking to win elections mainly with white votes to the point where Republican strategists like Rich Bond and Ralph Reed actually disclaim any desire to do so. Yet if they could lift their 54 percent in the 2000 election to the 59 percent Mr. Bush's father gained in 1988, they would win electoral landslides. An amnesty for illegal aliens, however multiculturally appealing, is unlikely to help them achieve that.

Indeed, it might not even help them with Hispanic voters who are a tough call for the GOP in any event. A new report from the authoritative Center for Immigration Studies by two political scientists, James Gimpel and Karen Kaufmann, points out some electoral facts about the Hispanic electorate that seem to have escaped GOP strategists:

• Democrats lead Republicans in party identification in every Hispanic national group by margins ranging from 21.5 percent (Salvadorans) to 57.6 percent (Dominicans.) The sole exception is Cubans among whom a once-solid GOP lead, now only 6 percent, is rapidly declining.
• Contrary to GOP predictions, Hispanics become more Democratic both with increasing education and the longer they remain in the U.S.
• Also contrary to GOP hopes, even though Hispanics do move rightwards to the GOP as their incomes rise, the Democrats retain a 10 percent lead even among Hispanics earning more than $100,000 a year.

And high levels of Hispanic immigration are making the situation worse for the GOP every day. For new immigrants, being poorer and more amenable to policies that favor labor unions and the welfare state, lean much more than their American cousins to the party advocating such policies, namely the Democrats. Legalizing another three million such voters, as the amnesty implies, would weaken the GOP still further.

In the face of such discouraging evidence, Mr. Gigot diverted from his pursuit of dangerous British transplants to defend Mr. Bush's amnesty on two grounds.

The first is that Hispanic voters, like Italian voters, will gradually become more Republican over time. As the evidence collected by Gimpel and Kaufmann underscores, however, there is more optimism than strategy here : for there is no evidence that a significant percentage of Hispanic voters is "in play."

And his comparison with Italian voters omits a significant fact: Italian voters, like the Poles and Irish, gradually switched from Democratic to Republican sympathies during the period of strict immigration control that lasted from the early twenties to the mid-sixties. The fact that there was almost no net immigration in those years made assimilation much easier since Italian cultural ghettoes were not being constantly reinforced by the arrival of new Italian-speakers. Italians therefore assimilated, and short of joining the military, voting Republican is about the most assimilated thing an immigrant can do. If there had been regular amnesties for illegal Italians, they might be a mainstay of the Democratic coalition still.

Mr. Gigot's second argument was that since the Hispanic electorate will grow anyway the GOP should woo them for the long term. That is reasonable enough in itself. But where he stumbles is that he simply assumes Hispanic voters all favor an open door immigration policy, etc., like so many clones of Grover and himself.

Many Hispanics do, in some polls most — but they are the same Hispanics who identify strongly with the Democrats and would never pull the GOP lever. As Gimpel and Kaufmann point out, the Hispanic voters who lean to the GOP tend to favor less immigration, "English immersion" programs rather than bilingual education, an "American" identity over a hyphenated ethnic one, and so on.

So a policy such as an amnesty for illegal immigrants, far from winning Hispanic votes, is likely to dispirit the GOP's natural Hispanic supporters and depress the party's turnout among Hispanics — and indeed in all ethnic voting groups including whites.

Is there anything to be said in favor of the political effects of an amnesty? Well, it wins President Bush favorable comment from liberal newspapers, liberal ethnic pressure groups such as La Raza, Democratic politicians, and the usual suspects. But he might like to ponder carefully on exactly why that is. So might Mr. Gigot.

Editor's note: This piece is based on a column that originally ran in the Chicago Sun-Times.