By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Republicans are terribly confused over illegal immigration.
They still can’t quite figure out its role in the last election.
Did the issue lose them the Latino vote? Maybe — but why
did they also forfeit the Asian vote, and by nearly the same margin? Why did
the caricature of Republicans as old white nativists resonate with Asians as
well? If support for closing the border and refusing amnesty lost Republicans
the election, why do a majority of Americans continue to poll in opposition to
any sort of collective amnesty?
And why, in some polls, did Latinos seem more concerned
about continuing big-government readiness to help the poor and tax the wealthy
than about immigration reform? Alan Simpson and Ronald Reagan, who helped to
give us the 1986 amnesty, are not heroes to the Latino community. Is there statistical
support for the often-repeated axiom that Latinos, as a group, are more likely
than members of the so-called majority culture to embrace traditional family
values — lower divorce rates, lower rates of illegitimacy, lower crime rates,
higher graduation rates?
Of course, kinder, gentler talk — unlike the buffoonery
that was heard in some of last year’s sloppy Republican primary debates — would
have helped. Yet in 2008 circumspection and prudence did not aid all that much
the moderate John McCain, who in the past had championed a sort of amnesty
lite. And all the silly and often gratuitous braggadocio about upping the
height of the border wall or electrifying it was more than trumped by the crass
pandering of Barack Obama, who called on Latinos to “punish our enemies”;
joined with a foreign nation, Mexico, to sue one of his own states, Arizona;
and claimed his opponents wanted to arrest children on their way to ice-cream
parlors. Note there is no national commentary deploring the fact that the
president of the United States engaged in just the sort of crass ethnic
showmanship that characterized the Republican debates. Apparently, because his
pandering worked and the Republicans’ did not, under the laws of politics only
the latter was pandering.
Confused by questions like these, Republicans don’t quite
know what to do about the 11 to 15 million illegal aliens in our midst, with
more to come in future years. And in lieu of wisdom, principles, and
consistency, Republican are mostly experimenting, trying to square the circle
and win the Latino vote with clichés about conservative values and a vaguely
familiar message of amnesty for those already here predicated on no additional
illegal immigration. But the problem can be only reduced, not solved, by
kinder, gentler language and outreach to Latino groups, for in the end it is an
existential issue well beyond trimming.
In truth, illegal immigration is illiberal to the core,
based on reducing the legal applicant to a formalistic naïf, making a mockery
of the law, undermining the American poor, enabling the worst policies of the
Mexican government, and aiding the American well-off. True, it was mostly
conservative employers and mostly liberal partisans, hand in glove, who have
created the problem in the last 30 years — the one wanting cheap non-union
labor, the latter wanting future dependents and constituents. But that said,
there are now forces in play that ensure that the status quo is antithetical to
everything the Republican party claims it stands for.
Republicans profess that they favor a meritocracy and a
nation that looks at the content of our character rather than the color of our
skin. But contemporary illegal immigration is not a theoretical issue about
federal law. Rather, in terms of particular immigrant groups, it is largely of
concern to Latin Americans, who want more Latin Americans to enter the United
States, preferably legally but, if not, then illegally. This is largely for
reasons of ethnic solidarity, never mind that it interferes with integration
and assimilation. If it is a question of keeping the present system of massive
influxes of illegal aliens, periodically remedied by amnesties of the 1986
sort, versus an entirely legal system that privileges education and skill sets,
and therefore might well result in true diversity, with tens of thousands of
Asians, Africans, and Europeans entering legally, rather than mostly a
monolithic influx of Latin Americans entering illegally, then I fear most
activists would prefer the present non-system.
In other words, if the southern border were closed, and
only legal immigration were permitted, predicated on criteria other than ethnic
profile, proximity, pseudo-historical claims on the American Southwest, and
family ties, then Republicans would still lose the Latino vote, at least for
the short term.
The situation is probably even worse than that for
Republican immigration idealists. As they are learning in their disastrous
cobra dance with the administration, Barack Obama and his activist supporters
define “comprehensive immigration reform” quite differently from the way most
Republicans would. If the latter are willing to concede de facto green-card
status, with the much ballyhooed “pathway to citizenship,” to foreign nationals
who have long resided here, are not on public assistance, and do not have
criminal records — in exchange for closing the border, crafting a meritocratic
legal-immigration system, and imposing fines on employers who hire illegals —
the Democrats most probably would not be on board.
In a word, too many illegal aliens are recent arrivals
and would not benefit from this scheme. Too many thousands are on public
assistance. And too many thousands have criminal records. That these latter
groups are, of course, a minority amid a much larger hard-working majority
matters little to liberals. It is not so much that they are for amnesty for
most, as that they are against deportation for some — a group that in aggregate
could be in the hundreds of thousands. Watch the eroding negotiations, as Obama
casts his alluring bait, hooks his Republican fish, and then yanks them around
on requisite border enforcement, prior arrests and convictions, and the
unemployed on public assistance. For demagogic purposes, there is only a Dream
Act, not a non-Dream Act; all are eligible for citizenship, almost none for
deportation; only future brain surgeons crossed the border illegally, not those
who sometimes commit felonies or drive while intoxicated.
For the political liberal, the children of illegal aliens
vote solidly Democratic and will be expected to do so in bloc fashion for the
future. For the cultural liberal, everything from Chicano Studies Departments
and La Raza to affirmative action, setasides, and cultural chauvinism are
predicated on massive influxes of foreign nationals that take two or even three
generations to assimilate fully and so skew statistical surveys of the status
of the resident Latino community. The old melting pot is derided in elite
ethnic circles as much as the bankrupt model of the salad bowl is praised.
Without illegal immigration, Latinos eventually would
become something akin, for example, to the mostly middle-class Italian-American
community (does it have a lobbying group known as La Razza?) — politically
balanced, without tribal appendages in the media and academia, with a young
person named Lopez no different from one named Pirelli, ethnicity becoming
merely incidental rather than essential to his persona.
What then should be the Republican position?
First, in the short term, insist on civil speech, and
refer to illegally residing foreign nationals with respect and dignity — and
yet also without the fawning and transparent obsequiousness that earn contempt
rather than respect. Make the argument that the present state of entitlements
is unsustainable and that conservative approaches to the economy and the
popular culture are more in tune with immigrants’ longer-term aspirations. And
then hope for charismatic, high-profile national leaders like Ted Cruz and
Marco Rubio, who, for largely emotional reasons, might be able to help peel off
maybe 40 percent of the so-called Latino vote.
All that said, Latinos will not break for Republicans, or
even split 50/50, until ethnicity becomes a secondary issue. That evolution
will take more than civility, courtesy, and sympathetic Latino spokesmen. It
will demand years of melting-pot principles instead of tribal pandering. Some
of these principles are:
1. There must be a closed and enforceable border that
eliminates all illegal entry. That reality must precede, not follow or be
simultaneous with, pathways granted to citizenship.
2. Green-card residence could be offered to those who
initially broke our immigration law — but only with carefully crafted
prerequisites, including substantial residency in the U.S., a clean criminal
record, and proof of employment and independence from public assistance. For
those who qualify, the green card should be forthcoming; for those who do not,
the road should lead back to one’s country of origin.
3. An eventual pathway to citizenship for the qualified
green-card holder should hinge on acquisition of proficiency in English and
other traditional citizenship tests, presumably satisfied as the resident
applicant waits behind those legal applicants whom he cut in front of in illegal
fashion when he first came here.
4. We should insist on an ethnically blind
legal-immigration system focusing on granting citizenship on the basis on
education and skills — and not prejudiced on the basis of national origin.
Sticking to these principles would probably mean that the
Republicans would at best capture no more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in
the next few elections. But the reform offers the best hope that Latinos, like
most other ethnic groups, would eventually become indifferent to immigration
policy, politically ambiguous, and more likely to vote for the candidate on the
basis of his positions and his character, and not the nature of his ethnic
agenda.
For those very reasons, expect the president and his immigration
supporters to praise these principles in the abstract and oppose them bitterly
in the concrete. Their purpose is not to institute comprehensive immigration
reform, but to demand amnesty, to renege on its prerequisites, to blame
Republicans for the failure of compromise, to demagogue the issue in the next
election, and to rest content with the continuance of the present non-system
that has so greatly benefited both professional ethnics and Democratic
operatives.
