I’m not sure what specifically Kevin was referring to when he wrote in his piece yesterday on the Texas GOP convention that “our friends at the Center for Immigration Studies just last week published some unfortunately sneering remarks about Hispanics being ‘natural conservatives’” – but since “natural conservatives!” is part of my snark repertoire on Twitter (follow me!), I plead guilty.

But I think Kevin misunderstood. The sneering isn’t directed at Hispanics, or immigrants, or Hispanic immigrants. Rather, the object of my mockery is the Republican Brain Trust, the kind of people who, as Kevin noted, send Florida Cubans every two years to do outreach to Texas Mexicans. They actually imagine that immigrants are, as the saying goes, “natural conservatives” who just need to be given a little push to get them to support capital gains tax cuts and Social Security privatization.

As even the most cursory examination of the data shows, though, immigrant communities in general, and those of Latin origin in particular, vote heavily Democrat because the Democrat party is more in line with their own views. As I spelled out in some detail last year, drawing on Eagle Forum’s well-nigh encyclopaedic collection of survey data, immigrants are disproportionately likely to be big-government, pro-gun control, pro-affirmative action, environmentalist liberals. This isn’t a moral critique, but it is a fact. They are split on social issues like abortion similarly to the native-born – with Hispanic immigrants somewhat more pro-life and Asians slightly more pro-choice – but they don’t generally vote on such issues in any case.

If immigrants were really hungering for conservative policies, what explains the politics of San Francisco and New York, two of the most immigrant-heavy cities in the country?

In the face of these facts, the GOP Brain Trust’s response is to combine inept and patronizing outreach (Cubans selling to Mexicans) with promotion of amnesty, loose enforcement, and huge increases in future legal immigration. This is akin to the proverbial shopkeeper who loses money on each sale but seeks to make it up in volume. As the Eagle Forum report noted:

But Republicans can never turn liberal-leaning immigrants and their adult children into supporters of limited government faster than the current high level of legal immigration (one million a year) is bringing in new liberal voters.

So what to do? Cut immigration and improve outreach. The first is actually the easier task. As I laid out here a while back, we need to put in place specific enforcement systems, then (and only then) follow with a grand bargain of a quick, rip-off-the-band-aid amnesty in exchange for deep cuts in future legal immigration. The message to immigrants would be that you get to stay, but your brother-in-law and second cousin don’t get to come, legally or illegally. Not everyone’s going to jump for joy at the prospect, but fair-minded people will see the justice in it.

The outreach part is harder. It’s certainly not impossible – Greg Abbott put real effort into campaigning among Mexican Americans and got something like 45 percent of their vote, though, admittedly, he had a dopey and hapless opponent. But Abbott’s success was in getting Democrats to split their tickets, not to change allegiances. George W. Bush had similar success in his gubernatorial runs, but one of his ads suggests the problem: it said something to the effect of “Vote for Bush: Who cares if he’s a Republican?” Changing that, and getting more Mexican Americans to come to party conventions like the one Kevin reported on, is a generations-long effort.

Of course, you should start by not insulting people, a la Trump. But even if he underwent a personality transplant tomorrow, the basic problem would remain – a deeply ingrained immigrant preference for Democratic policies – and the solution is the same – reduce the number of new arrivals while doing missionary work among those who’ve already joined our society.

As for outreach, I offer again my idea of either the GOP or wealthy conservatives setting up American Opportunity Centers in immigrant communities, to teach English, help with tax returns, navigate municipal paperwork, etc. No politicking, no preaching, just helping newcomers assimilate – and thereby humanizing Republicans for immigrants, and vice versa. Something the Kochs might consider, if the reports are true that they’re going to spend less on national politics.