Memo to Karl Rove: try dynamic scoring on immigration
We are struck by the simple-minded approach the Republican hierarchy has taken to immigration and election. From the SF Chronicle:
“This is a defining moment for the Republican Party,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who supports the Senate bill, said over the weekend. “If our answer to the fastest-growing demographic in this country is that ‘We want to make felons of your grandparents, and we want to put people in jail who are helping your neighbors and people related to you,’ then we’re going to suffer mightily.”
Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman and a White House ally, added a similarly stark warning, specifically citing California’s experience and urging his party to resist the siren song of anti-immigration rhetoric.
The GOP majority “rests too heavily on white voters, given that current demographic voting percentages will not allow us to hold our majority in the future,” Gillespie said. He noted that President Bush increased his percentage of the Hispanic vote by nine percentage points, to an estimated 40 percent, between 2000 and 2004. “Had he not,” Gillespie said, “John Kerry would be president today.”
Such thinking (Graham’s straw man aside) is simplistic and based on static scoring, of the kind the GOP routinely derides when it is applied to things like the capital gains tax rate. You’d think they would have the brains to do it on immigration too.
Instead, it looks like they focus-grouped things like “fence” and “wall” and so forth, and tried to create something that would look like enforcement to the enforcement-minded, but not offend other people, one presumes mostly Hispanic. That is how we got the terrible and disingenuous speech by the President, and the shameful and embarassing Senate bill.
Thomas Sowell points out that the proposed legislation not only moves illegal aliens to the front of the line, it empowers them as a minority under affirmative action law. Does it strike you too that more than a few Democrats might have a problem with this? How many Democrats would be furious to learn these things:
Some people are worried that amnesty will give illegal aliens the same rights that American citizens have. In reality, it will give the illegals more rights than the average American citizen. Since most of the illegals are Mexican, that makes them a minority. Under affirmative action, combined with amnesty, they would have preferences in jobs and other benefits.
Those who set up their own businesses would be entitled to preferences in getting government contracts. Their children would be able to get into college ahead of the children of American citizens with better academic qualifications. Illegals who graduate from a high school in California can already attend the University of California, paying lower tuition that an American citizen from neighboring Oregon.
Under the supposedly “tough” immigration bill in the U.S. Senate, illegals don’t have to pay all the back taxes they owe. An American citizen gets no such break from the government and can end up in federal prison, like Al Capone.
If an American citizen gets stopped by the police for a traffic violation and the cops discover that he is wanted for some other violation of the law, they can arrest him for whatever else he has done. But if an illegal alien gets stopped for going through a red light and the police discovers that he is in the country illegally, in many communities the cop is forbidden to arrest him for that — or even to report him to the feds.
If an American citizen forges a Social Security card in order to get a job, he can be arrested. Under a provision recently passed by the Senate, illegal aliens who forged Social Security cards not only get a pass, they get to collect Social Security benefits.
Are we to believe that all Democrats and independent voters are fine with this? Are we to believe that all Democrats and independent voters are against border enforcement now as the number one priority, and dealing with the rest of the issues can be done more slowly and thoughtfully? That’s what the GOP and its pollsters apparently believe, that Republicans are a fixed group, and no Democrats or independents could be brought to the GOP side if it insisted on something as neanderthal as border-enforcement-now-other-solutions-later, as in the plans favored by Krauthammer, Babbin and us, among so many others.
Of course, maybe we are wrong, and it doesn’t matter whether you use fixed scoring or dynamic scoring on the immigration issue. Maybe Democrats and independents don’t get as worked up on this issue as the Republican base appears to. Maybe it’s just fine with all of them to have token border enforcement and to give illegal immigrants affirmative action preferences. Maybe all that is just fine and dandy with everyone except for a few troglodytes in the Republican base. Maybe. But if so, America’s problems run far deeper than this awful Senate bill.