Perhaps race relations is the next issue but it is not the next most important election issue. The most important issue after immigration is trade. Concern about trade is simply concern about jobs, always among the top one or two issues which move voters. Trade means more than just jobs it means the whole economic health of the nation. It means the existence or the further decline of our manufacturing base without which there is simply no economic future in a global economy. Put another way, without the ability to make things and sell into the world we will be defenseless against our mercantilist enemies. There is no future in the twenty-first century for a nation of shopkeepers.
Services are becoming an increasingly important element of trade. Because new technology services which had been formally firmly rooted in the soil are now readily transportable over the Internet. There are literally scores of thousands of Indians sitting in front of computer screens performing work for American companies that could be done by Americans eager for those jobs. It might well be that the physician who reads your x-ray and determines what sort of treatment you are eligible for under your insurance policy is reading it in India. The lawyer who writes the brief in your litigation might be English-speaking and trained in Anglo-Saxon law but he might reside in New Delhi.
Trade therefore is the obverse side of the immigration coin and both have very much to do with jobs and jobs have always to do with elections.
Republicans should be all over this issue if they react only to the math. There are exponentially more employees concerned about their jobs being shipped abroad than there are CEOs of megacorporations who lobby for the right to export those jobs. Democrats have always found a way to align themselves with the majority even if their position is in reality a minority position. The trade and jobs issue is a majority issue if the Republicans will only seize it.
Indeed, the potential to harvest votes and electoral college votes at that is so enormous that it is mind-boggling that the Republicans have forsaken the issue and taken precisely the wrong side in return for lobbyists' coin. The phenomenal rise of Donald Trump, despite all his deficiencies of ideology, biography and character demonstrate the potency of these issues.
Reagan Democrats, lunchpail Democrats, blue-collar Democrats, out of work coal minors, Rust Belt refugees, unemployed college graduates, whatever the label connect trade with immigration and win elections.
