The Surprise Issue Driving GOP Campaigns

K atie Britt won the Alabama GOP Senate primary runoff last night, and one of the main issues she ran on was immigration. Britt has endorsed Senator Tom Cotton’s 2017 RAISE Act, which was a plan to decrease legal immigration by 50 percent. Britt is not the only Republican Senate candidate to come out in favor of stricter immigration policies. Blake Masters, running for the GOP nomination in the Arizona Senate race, wants to triple the size of the Border Patrol, wants to finish the border wall, and opposes all amnesty for illegal aliens. While he has espoused liberal immigration policies in the past, he now pledges to “end illegal immigration.” The winner of the Ohio GOP Senate primary, J. D. Vance, is focusing part of his campaign on illegal immigration, promising changes similar to Masters’s. Yet Vance goes a step further, seeking to overhaul the current legal immigration system: “Millions of people want to come here, and we should only allow them if they contribute something meaningful to our country.” Vance wants to curb the number of legal immigrants coming into the country, prioritizing skilled immigrants. In one of his primary-campaign ads, called, “Are You a Racist?,” Vance said, “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” These Republicans clearly believe immigration is an issue that can drive voters to the polls, even in an election year dominated by inflation and other economic concerns.

The RAISE Act, endorsed by Katie Britt, was a plan pushed by Senator Cotton and former Georgia senator David Perdue in 2017. The bill, reintroduced in 2019 by Cotton and Perdue as well as Senator Josh Hawley (R, Mo.), was pitched as a way to boost job and wage growth, end chain migration, and welcome the highest-skilled immigrants to the country. The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act would cut the number of green cards issued on an annual basis from 1 million to 500,000.

Until recently, Republicans generally maintained a position on immigration that illegal immigration needs to be halted, but legal immigration is good and should be encouraged. And after Mitt Romney lost the presidential election to Barack Obama in 2012, Republicans believed that in order to cater to the Hispanic vote, they would have to move their immigration stance to the left. Some, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), endorsed amnesty for some illegal immigrants. Even the staunchly pro-Trump Fox host Sean Hannity suggested in 2012 that some law-abiding illegal immigrants should be granted citizenship.

Donald Trump’s clinching of the nomination in 2016 and the ascent of populism within the GOP pushed immigration restrictionism to the forefront of Republican politics. Trump campaigned on building a wall on the southern border and deporting illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration, Trump maintained, undermines the American workforce by taking American jobs and lowering wages for native-born Americans.

The pre-2016 notion that Republicans could not win the Hispanic vote while espousing a hard-line immigration stance was proven wrong in 2020, when Donald Trump significantly increased his share of the Hispanic vote in Florida and Texas despite losing the election. In Nevada, one poll found that Trump increased his vote share of Nevada Hispanics by nine points between 2016 and 2020. In Florida’s Miami–Dade County and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Trump made significant gains in the 2020 election. Trump won 45 percent of the Latino vote in the Sunshine State. In Texas, Trump flipped Zapata County red, a 38-point improvement from 2016. This should come as no surprise, since Zapata is a border county and therefore one of the areas bearing the brunt of illegal border crossings. Republican momentum with Hispanics in Texas was further demonstrated with Mayra Flores’s House special-election win last week.

All of these developments are a clear signal that a Republican Party that staunchly opposes illegal immigration is a party that can still attract the Hispanic vote, and more. In 2018, a Harvard–Harris poll revealed that a combined 63 percent of Americans favored capping the number of immigrants let into the U.S. every year at 500,000. The plan also included allowing the over 800,000 illegal aliens living in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to stay in the country.

Ultimately, this is a battle that must be fought in Congress and likely will not advance for Republicans until a president of their party is in the White House. After a year and a half of the Biden administration’s open borders, during which time 1.9 million illegal immigrants have crossed into the country and nearly 19,000 pounds of fentanyl has made its way into the hands of vulnerable populations, the American public is likely more receptive than ever to stricter immigration policies. If Republicans in Congress are paying any attention to where their voters are positioned on immigration, they should think twice before caving on amnesty for illegal aliens.