GOP, You Are Warned

No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration. There's no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party's leaders. Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP.

President Bush won reelection because he won 10 million more votes in 2004 than he did in 2000. Who were these people? According to Ruy Teixeira--a shrewd Democratic analyst of voting trends--Bush scored his largest proportional gains among white voters who didn't complete college, especially women. These voters rallied to the president for two principal reasons: because they respected him as a man who lived by their treasured values of work, family, honesty, and faith; and because they trusted him to keep the country safe.

Yet Bush is already signaling that he intends to revive the amnesty/guestworker immigration plan he introduced a year ago--and hastily dropped after it ignited a firestorm of opposition. This plan dangerously divides the Republican party and affronts crucial segments of the Republican vote.

The plan is not usually described as an "amnesty" because it does not immediately legalize illegal workers in this country. Instead, it offers illegals a three-year temporary work permit. But this temporary permit would be indefinitely renewable and would allow illegals a route to permanent residency, so it is reasonably predictable that almost all of those illegals who obtain the permit will end up settling permanently in the United States. The plan also recreates the guestworker program of the 1950s--allowing employers who cannot find labor at the wages they wish to pay to advertise for workers outside the country. Those workers would likewise begin with a theoretically temporary status; but they too would probably end up settling permanently.

This is a remarkably relaxed approach to a serious border-security and labor-market problem. Employers who use illegal labor have systematically distorted the American labor market by reducing wages and evading taxes in violation of the rules that others follow. The president's plans ratify this gaming of the system and encourage more of it. It invites entry by an ever-expanding number of low-skilled workers, threatening the livelihoods of low-skilled Americans--the very same ones who turned out for the president in November.

National Review has historically favored greater restrictions on legal as well as illegal immigration. But you don't have to travel all the way down the NR highway to be troubled by the prospect of huge increases in immigration, with the greatest increases likely to occur among the least skilled.

The president's permissive approach has emboldened senators and mayors (such as New York's Michael Bloomberg) to oppose almost all enforcement actions against illegals. In September 2003, for example, Bloomberg signed an executive order forbidding New York police to share information on immigration offenses with the Immigration Service, except when the illegal broke some other law or was suspected of terrorist activity. And only last month, a House-Senate conference stripped from the intelligence-overhaul bill almost all the border-security measures recommended by the 9/11 commission.

The president's coalition is already fracturing from the tension between his approach to immigration and that favored by voters across the country. Sixty-seven House Republicans--almost one-third of the caucus--voted against the final version of the intelligence overhaul. And I can testify firsthand to the unpopularity of the amnesty/guestworker idea: I was on the conservative talk-radio circuit promoting a book when the president's plan was first proposed last January. Everywhere I went, the phones lit up with calls from outraged listeners who wanted to talk about little else. Every host I asked agreed: They had not seen such a sudden, spontaneous, and unanimous explosion of wrath from their callers in years.

Five years ago, Candidate George W. Bush founded his approach to immigration issues on a powerful and important insight: The illegal-immigration problem cannot be solved by the United States alone. Two-thirds of the estimated 9 million illegals in the U.S. are from Mexico. Mexico is also the largest source of legal immigration to the United States. What caused this vast migration? Between 1940 and 1970, the population of Mexico more than doubled, from 20 million to 54 million. In those years, there was almost no migration to the United States from Mexico at all. Since 1970, however, some 65 million more Mexicans have been born--and about 20 million of them have migrated northward, with most of that migration occurring after 1980.

Obviously, the 30 years from 1940 to 1970 are different in many ways from the 30 years after 1970s. But here's one factor that surely contributed to the Mexican exodus: In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, the Mexican economy grew at an average rate of almost 7 percent a year. Thanks to the oil boom, the Mexican economy continued to grow rapidly through the troubled 1970s. But since 1980, Mexico has averaged barely 2 percent growth. The average Mexican was actually poorer in 1998 than he had been in 1981. You'd move too if that happened to you.

Recognizing the connection between Mexican prosperity and American border security, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations all worked hard to promote Mexican growth. The Reagan and Clinton administrations bailed out Mexican banks in 1982 and 1995; the first Bush administration negotiated, and Clinton passed, NAFTA. George W. Bush came to office in 2001 envisioning another round of market opening with the newly elected government of his friend Vicente Fox, this time focusing on Mexico's protected, obsolete, economically wasteful, and environmentally backward energy industry.

Bush's hopes have been bitterly disappointed. The Fox government has actually done less to restore Mexican growth than the PRI governments of the 1990s. And so Bush has been pushed away from his grand vision and has instead accepted Fox's demand that the two countries concentrate on one issue: raising the status of Mexican illegals in the United States. But this won't work. Just as the U.S. cannot solve the problem by unilateral policing, so it also cannot solve it through unilateral concession. Bush had it right the first time.

Some of the president's approach to immigration remains right and wise. He is right to show a welcoming face to Hispanics legally resident in the United States. He is right to try to smooth the way to citizenship for legal permanent residents. He is right--more controversially--to give all who have contributed to Social Security, whatever their legal status, access to benefits from the Social Security account.

But he is wrong, terribly wrong, to subordinate border security to his desire for an amnesty deal--and still more wrong to make amnesty the centerpiece of his immigration strategy.

Right now, of course, the president does not have to worry much about political competition on the immigration issue. But Republicans shouldn't count on their opponents' ignoring such an opportunity election after election. "I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants," Hillary Clinton told a New York radio station in November. And later: "People have to stop employing illegal immigrants. I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work." Okay, so maybe Hillary will never pick up many votes in Red State America. But there are Democratic politicians who could.

Republicans need a new and better approach--one that holds their constituency together and puts security first.

First, Republicans should develop and practice a new way of speaking about immigration, one that makes clear that enforcement of the immigration laws is not anti-immigrant or anti-Mexican: It is anti-bad employer. Illegal immigration is like any other illegal business practice: a way for unscrupulous people to exploit others to gain an advantage over their law-abiding competitors.

Second, Republicans can no longer deny the truth underscored by the 9/11 commission: Immigration policy is part of homeland-security policy. Non-enforcement of the immigration laws is non-protection of Americans against those who would do them harm.

Third, Republicans have to begin taking enforcement seriously. It's ridiculous and demoralizing to toss aside cabinet nominees like Linda Chavez over alleged immigration violations while winking at massive law-breaking by private industry--or to regard immigration violations as so trivial that they can be used as a face-saving excuse for the dismissal of a nominee damaged by other allegations.

Fourth, skills shortages in the high-technology and health-care industries are genuine problems that have to be addressed--but they should not be used as an excuse to void immigration enforcement. Republicans can say yes to using immigration law to attract global talent, while saying no to companies that systematically violate immigration law to gain an advantage over their more scrupulous rivals.

Fifth, Mexico should not be allowed to sever the migration issue from trade and investment issues. Mexican political stability is a vital national-security issue of the United States--and just for that reason, Americans should not allow Mexican governments to use migration as a way to shirk the work of economic and social reform.

Finally--and most important--Republicans need to recognize that they have a political vulnerability and must take action to protect themselves. An election victory as big as 2004 can look inevitable in retrospect. But it wasn't, not at all. The Democrats could have won--and could still win in 2006 and 2008--by taking better advantage of Republican mistakes and making fewer of their own. And no mistake offers them a greater opportunity than the one-sidedness of the Bush immigration policy. The GOP is a party dedicated to national security, conservative social values, and free-market economics. The president's policy on immigration risks making it look instead like an employers' lobby group. That's the weak point at which the edge of the wedge could enter--and some smart Democratic politician is sharpening it right now.

Yes.

There are 40% who "love" her nationally. It's called the Democratic base. If the 40% who hate her come across like you do she has a superb chance of winning.

Clinton beat impeachment because Democrat and independent voters easily outnumbered the "Clinton haters".

Should of been mandatory from the get-go.....

I don't disagree, but I'll take my incrementalism and my silver linings where I can find them. With a voluntary period, employers have no one to blame but themselves if the program becomes mandatory and they're caught short of workers.

I'm pretty sure workplace verification was part of the Ronald Reagan 1986 amnesty but was never implemented so it would work in the real world with an SS# database. IOW employers can legally go through the charade of verifing phony work documents. There is no penalty for doing so.

You are correct, under the Reagan Amnesty workplace verification was a charade. The new program, however, enables employers to check SSNs and TINs given to them by applicants and employees against the SSA database with an 800 call.

He's warning of the threat Bush's illegal alien policy poses to the GOP with good reason: it's very unpopular and pisses people off

That is one pundit's opinion, I disagree with it, I think that Bush's proposal puts some sanity into the system that has gone haywire after festering for 40 years.

OH BTW, Frum also writes for the New York Times(i.e token conservative), what better way to keep a paycheck from the NYT than write a wedge article. Granted it's during a slow time and not in the NYT, a wedge article none the less, to put on his resume to keep Pinch Sulzberger happy.

This is an issue that affects people where they live. It affects the quality of life of your community, the safety of your family, and the value of your house. It is a red button issue, like crime in the 70's and 80's and conservatives who think they can ignore it or dismiss it with "racism", "racism" are just like "society is to blame" root causes liberals back then.

It is ludicrous to pretend that the NYT is creating an issue where there is none.

IOW the Reagan amnesty was poorly thought out from the get go. No doubt certain large employers made sure that the enforcement provisions were (are) toothless. With George Bush we once again will get a very badly designed amnesty. Give them amnesty and you ensure this nation will be flooded with even more illegals since we will have rewarded illegal behavior. If we aren't going to expel illegal aliens then let them work in the shadows in the lousy jobs. Only bad part is their American born offspring will greatly benefit by their parents illegal immigration to the United States. Legal immigrants resent the way illegal Mexicans and Central Americans are catered to. How they get to jump to the head of the line.

I'm pretty sure workplace verification was part of the Ronald Reagan 1986 amnesty but was never implemented

Exactly why we now have millions of illegal employers 'paying' millions (more than 1986) of never-ending invaders.

Illegal employers are not going to start *operating legally* simply because they've been *asked* to.

Hello, Homeland Security? Why does GWB cling stubbornly to ignoring immigration law? Why are clusters of hostile Islams allowed to exist all over the country? Why is the RNC going along with all of this?

Bush is literally throwing this nation to the wolves because HE HAS NADA TO LOSE! If something isn't done about this soon, Bye, bye, Republican Party! Bye bye, sovereignty!

Hello Washington? Anybody there speak English?

I agree with the political aspects of this. But, frankly, I wish we could achieve more of a Conservative consensus on important issues--perhaps different Conservatives on each issue, as motivation dictates--without worrying so much about partisan politicians. If the public is sufficiently aroused, with adequate spokesmen, the politicians will fall in line. The need is for an aroused public, with spokesmen who will not crawl off with their tails between their legs, when the leftist media start their ineveitable barking.

I invite criticism of my article on immigration. If there is some point that I have missed, I want to address it. Ultimately the character of America, the very existence of America, as we and those who vouchsafed it to us understood the concept, is at stake. There should be no mood of compromise over that issue. (For my approach, see Immigration & The American Future.)

William Flax

Untrue. David Brooks is the regular conservative op-ed writer there, is who you are thinking of. Frum is not an op-ed columnist there.

That is one pundit's opinion, I disagree with it, I think that Bush's proposal puts some sanity into the system that has gone haywire after festering for 40 years.

You disagree that illegal aliens are unpopular, and that rewarding them pisses people off? LOL

I've seen your "restoring sanity" posts about the Bush amnesty on a few occasions, and have found them lacking. It's not especially sane to repeat a failure and expect a different result, against all experience and common sense.

Reward illegal behavior and you will get more of it.

Say this ill-conceived Bush "guest worker" amnesty passed and millions of illegals were legalized. What would happen to the other millions of illegal aliens that didn't qualify as guest workers? Round ups and deportations? Probably not.

So, would President Bush leave those non-qualifying millions of illegal to live in the shadows of our "compassionate society?"

Or what?

With George Bush we once again will get a very badly designed amnesty. Give them amnesty and you ensure this nation will be flooded with even more illegals since we will have rewarded illegal behavior.

The only well designed amnesty for illegal aliens is the one that's defeated.

It is ludicrous to pretend that the NYT is creating an issue where there is none

Well see that's the difference. The vast majority of these illegals who crossed the border are not committing violent crimes, unless you think taking a job of cleaning toilets as a crime.

Yes, IMO, they haven't assimilated as fast as other groups before in American history. Why should they when they have a built in "be kept in poverty, always be a victim" infrastructure built by 40 years of liberalism, and the automatic hostility of a reletively small political lobby, who use hyperbole against them as their bread and butter.

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