Blame the Bushes for the GOP’s death spiral There were a couple of seemingly unrelated items in the news recently. President Obama will be making immigration reform a keystone of his second term. And a third George Bush is considering a run for office.That’s George P. Bush. He’s the son of former Florida governor Jeb and he’s reported to be considering a run for some statewide office in Texas, possibly even governor.
How does this relate to immigration reform? Simple. Thanks to the prior two George Bushes’ positions on immigration, the national Republican Party is in what looks like a death spiral. The party has come to rely almost entirely on the votes of white people to win national elections. But thanks to the failure of the two Bushes to enforce immigration laws, white people are becoming an ever-smaller section of the electorate.
And yet Republicans think they can put a third George Bush past the voters? This is why the GOP is often called "the stupid party," I suppose. And it’s also why Obama’s got them cornered on immigration.
What the president is likely to propose is an amnesty even more open-ended than the amnesty enacted under President Reagan in 1986. This time around, however, neither party will call it an amnesty. That’s because the Republicans did Obama the favor of popularizing the term "path to citizenship" as a euphemism for amnesty. That lets GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, for example, offer a plan identical to Obama’s without calling it an amnesty.
That wasn’t always the case. Back in the Reagan years, everyone termed the bill that permitted 3 million illegal immigrants to stay in the country an amnesty. The reason was simple: All involved agreed that granting a one-time amnesty would solve the problem of illegal immigration once the bill’s new sanctions kicked in.
"Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders," Reagan wrote in the bill’s signing statement.
Alas, the law did not fully kick in until 1989, by which time a Bush was in the White House. Bush 41 didn’t bother with the border. Illegal immigration soared to even higher levels.
Bill Clinton welcomed all of those potential Democratic voters. That left Bush 43 with one last chance to straighten things out. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush could have made it clear that ending illegal immigration was central to national security. Instead he ignored immigration in favor of trying to fix the mess that Pop had left behind in Iraq. Oops.
By the time he returned to domestic issues, Bush pitched an immigration plan focused on finding cheap labor for his buddies in business. This followed from another line the pro-immigration Republicans invented, that one about "jobs Americans won’t do." Translated from Chamber of Commerce cant, that means "Jobs Americans won’t pay to have done."
Lost in all this was any acknowledgement that those new immigrants were likely to be inclined toward the Democratic view of the world. I discussed this at some length the other day with Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.
Krikorian summed up the GOP dilemma succinctly: The Republicans profess to be the party of small government. Yet poll after poll shows new immigrants see nothing wrong with big government.
"Pew did a survey that found the ethnic group that was most hostile to capitalism was Hispanic voters," said Krikorian. "There’s no way that ongoing immigration is going to do anything but doom the cause of small government."
Bush and his svengali Karl Rove thought they could win Hispanics over to the GOP. But then Rove also thought Mitt Romney was going to win in a landslide.
Now the Democrats have the Republicans trapped. They believe the only way they can win nationally is to give Obama his immigration reform. Yet that reform will produce millions of new citizens who will be welcomed by Obama into the loving arms of the Democratic Party.
All the Republicans will get out of this is another promise of eventual enforcement, said Krikorian. He calls this the Wimpy solution, after the character in the comic strip "Popeye."
"They’ll gladly promise enforcement on Tuesday for an amnesty today," he said.
Will the Republicans fall for it once again? That’s like asking if they’ll fall for a third George Bush. |
