Republicans Don’t Need to Abandon Immigration Hawkishness to Win Hispanics

F or years, elite conventional wisdom held that Republicans needed to liberalize on immigration to make inroads with Hispanic voters. This theory enjoyed bipartisan support: On the left, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s “emerging Democratic majority” thesis — which Teixeira has since retracted — posited that the growing Hispanic share of the electorate would result in a permanent leftward shift in the nation’s politics. On the right, the RNC’s famous post-2012 “autopsy” called for a softening of the party’s stance on cultural issues to adapt to the country’s changing demographics, particularly with regard to immigration. “Among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,” the autopsy urged. “If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”

Going a step further, the RNC autopsy argued that “comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.” Given the context in which the 100-page document was written, that thesis seemed logical: A commitment to more permissive immigration policies not only looked like the right call in the face of the “emerging Democratic majority”–style political framework that Republican consultants and strategists had implicitly accepted, but it also conveniently coincided with the preexisting policy preferences of the Republican donor class and powerful business interests, for whom mass low-skill immigration was a way to maximize economic productivity. In other words, from where most of the Acela Corridor was sitting, immigration liberalism just made sense. There was a time not so long ago when I even subscribed to a version of this theory myself.

But times have changed. The cracks in the vision laid out by the post-2012 GOP autopsy began to show with Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016, which was won by channeling the very cultural passions that the Republican consultant class had wanted to leave behind. Republican elites may have seen worker visas and amnesty packages as the party’s future; their voters, however, did not. To be sure, Trump’s razor-thin margin of victory was primarily delivered by the white working class, whose shrinking share of the electorate may well not be enough for a winning coalition in the future. But the GOP’s more recent inroads with Hispanics — a cohort that is on track to be the largest share of nonwhite voters in the country — points toward the possibility of a genuinely competitive national coalition. And those gains are being made without liberalizing on issues such as immigration.

A widely discussed new Wall Street Journal poll shows that Hispanic voters are now evenly split between the parties, polling at 37 percent apiece, with another 22 percent still undecided. It’s just one poll, but it reflects a broader rightward trend in the demographic that has become increasingly unambiguous in recent years. Trump increased his support with Hispanics by about eight points from 2016 to 2020, but the swings were far more dramatic in states such as Florida and Texas: Florida’s Miami-Dade County, which is 68 percent Hispanic, swung toward Trump by 22 points, while Texas’s Starr County, which is 99 percent Hispanic, swung toward Trump by 55 points. More recently, Glenn Youngkin beat his Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe outright with Hispanics in the Virginia gubernatorial race. And the across-the-board decline in Biden’s approval ratings has been sharpest among Hispanics. As of the end of October, it was sitting below 40 percent.

In other words, the conditions that are pushing Hispanic voters toward the GOP are the exact inverse of the strategy laid out by the RNC autopsy. The autopsy argued that Hispanic voters saw “our Party’s position on immigration [as] a litmus test” and advocated instead for a focus on free-market economics and opportunity — i.e., the traditional Reaganite economic message — repackaged with more emphasis on “diversity” and “inclusion.” But Republicans in the Trump era have leaned in to the culture war, and new cultural issues such as transgenderism and critical race theory have proved to be potent political mobilizers — not least among relatively socially conservative demographics like Latinos. And while there is still a lack of reliable polling on Latino views on these issues, the demographic’s relative social conservatism would suggest that those issues played a role in their swing toward Republicans in races such as Virginia, where gender ideology and CRT featured prominently. At the same time, the party has moved in a populist direction on economics and embraced its simmering immigration-hawk tendencies.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, this realignment of priorities actually better reflects the views of Hispanics themselves. A major new 2020 post-mortem released by the Democratic polling firm Equis Research helps explain some of the rightward shift among Latino voters: According to Equis, 55 percent of Latinos who voted in the 2020 election favor more spending on border security (polled separately from building a wall, which only 39 percent favored), 51 percent support limiting refugees and asylum-seekers, and 49 percent are for reducing the rate of legal immigration. Even among members of the demographic who self-identify as “liberal,” support for limiting refugees and asylum and reducing legal immigration is in the high 40s, and more border spending enjoys majority support. At the same time, corporate tax cuts — one of the core tenets of the Paul Ryan–era GOP platform — musters only 41 percent of support overall.

To be sure, in a moment when inflation and high gas prices are a significant cause of dissatisfaction with Democrats, aspects of the more traditional Republican economic program have a role to play. In contrast to the relative unpopularity of corporate tax cuts, the Equis report showed middle-class tax cuts and reopening the economy enjoy heavy Hispanic support, polling at 69 and 66 percent, respectively. And Republican attacks on socialism resonated with many Hispanics, particularly those who had fled socialist regimes in countries such as Venezuela and Cuba; 42 percent of Hispanics said they were concerned about “Democrats embracing socialism/leftist policies,” as opposed to 38 percent expressing concern about “Republicans embracing fascist/anti-democratic policies.” This demographic — what Equis’s pollsters aptly dubbed “the American Dream voter” — is clearly sympathetic to parts of the Reaganite message, and long-standing free-market principles can be adapted to expand the party’s appeal with Hispanics.

Repurposing the laudable GOP affinity for low taxes and less regulation to reflect the priorities of the party’s working-class and middle-class voter base would be a good place to start in this regard. As Matthew Continetti wrote of Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia, “Youngkin’s economic agenda fits well with the emerging Republican coalition of non-college-educated voters. Rather than cut marginal tax rates, Youngkin would double the state standard deduction, eliminate the grocery tax, and suspend the gas tax, easing the burden on lower- and middle-income taxpayers suffering from a rising cost of living.”

But as Continetti also notes, Youngkin’s victory was in no small part due to outrage over critical race theory, gender ideology, and other culture-war battles in the state’s public schools. Immigration did not play a prominent role in the race, given Virginia’s distance from the southern border, but the broader lessons that national Republicans should be taking from what we’ve seen in polls and elections alike over the last year are clear. As the Democrats continue to move leftward on culture, Hispanics — a heavily Christian, family-oriented demographic — will increasingly make sense as a Republican constituency. For that to happen, however, Republicans must embrace — rather than shy away from — the defining cultural debates of our time.