“[W]e must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” – RNC 2013 autopsy
The anti-borders crowd was crowing before yesterday’s election that Trump’s certain defeat was proof that the Republican Party would eventually have to accept a Schumer-Rubio-style package of amnesty and increased immigration. For example, Todd Schulte, who runs Mark Zuckerberg’s amnesty lobby, FWD.us, ended a piece on the subject last month this way:
In summary: Donald Trump’s campaign, built on anti-immigrant policies, was heading toward defeat long before the tape surfaced.
The candidate’s anti-immigrant policies were unpalatable to the vast majority of many key demographic groups. Because of the prominence of immigration reform in the 2016 campaign, Party leaders are likely forced to take affirmative action to pass commonsense immigration reform in order to ward off ward off massive political challenges.
As Nelson says on the Simpsons, HA-ha!
Even the mainstream media was forced to acknowledge the obvious once the returns showed a Trump win:
"All this talk abt how a Republican can't win the White House unless they support immigration reform-apparently it's not true"-@davidgregory
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) November 9, 2016
Trump didn’t just win the election – he earned a modestly larger share of black, Hispanic, and Asian voters than Romney. From Romney’s 6 percent of the black vote to Trump’s 8 percent, from 27 to 29 percent of the Hispanic vote, and from 26 to 29 percent of the Asian vote.
One of the reasons I was not optimistic yesterday afternoon was that I had started to believe the triumphalist press releases of the leftist and Hispanic chauvinist groups about the massive early-voter turnout and how Hispanics were going to “build the wall” that kept Trump out of the White House. It was like Khrushchev banging his shoe on the desk yelling “We will bury you!” And had about the same outcome.
But the bigoted bravado of these groups – indistinguishable in spirit from the white nationalist cretins on Twitter – isn’t shared by our fellow citizens whom they claim to represent. As our recent poll demonstrated, there’s significant support among Hispanics for better enforcement and a more moderate level of future immigration. The anti-borders organizations are simply creations of Soros and Ford and other leftist foundations and have no membership, unlike genuine civil-society groups like the American Legion or the Teamsters or the Knights of Columbus.
Outreach to our fellow Americans of Hispanic and Asian heritage is still important, for both civic health and future political success. And some share of them may well believe the propaganda of the radical groups that yesterday’s victory represents a threat to their safety. But ironically, the election gives the GOP an opportunity for outreach from a position of strength, rather than as supplicants. The premise of the autopsy and the Gang of Eight and Jeb’s candidacy was that Republicans needed to humble themselves before immigrant groups and sue for peace by passing Chuck Schumer’s immigration agenda into law. We can reach out now showing them respect while at the same time maintaining our own self-respect. We can point out what some significant portion already know – the racial-grievance groups have deceived them and do not serve their interests. And we can explain how depoliticizing ethnic differences and controlling immigration, among other things, can help improve the lives of all Americans, themselves included.
As Churchill said: in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity. We successfully defied the anti-borders crowd for a decade. Now that it has been defeated, at least temporarily, let us embrace and champion, not its noxious policies, but our fellow citizens that it pretends to speak for.