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.

Since estimates are that 1/2 the folks in construction and building maintenance are illegal wage slaves of the capitalist stooges, I suspect that we would have to demolish a large fraction of the homes and offices constructed in the US in the last 10-15 years.

Whew, with your above passage, no wonder hillary has found a small constituency on FR.

BTW, when you all can show gestapo guards, pointing machine guns, at those "slaves" building houses, in America, then maybe you will be taken seriously, you won't though, for that doesn't happen in America, no matter your hyperbole.

The reason that there is little national consensus on eliminating the labor pool that these guys provide is, I suspect, that your premise is wrong, that their labor comes at the expense of someone else.

No, the point I'm addressing is that under the Bush plan illegal aliens would have an advantage in being accepted to the "guest worker" program because they are already matched with employers by virtue of their illegal employment. Law abiding foreign nationals never had a chance to compete for those jobs, and would therefore be at a disadvantage.

So, a guest worker program that legalizes illegal aliens does so at the expense of those who haven't broken our laws.

In addition, to reward a behavior is to encourage it.

"Unless you see Hillary making a similar mistake it's hard to see how Saul Alinsky will be in play."

Read what I wrote again. You missed the point. The mistake she ALREADY HAS MADE is the fact that she has already aligned herself with Marxists. Marxist theory is the ONLY "morality" she will be able to wrap herself in. It's the same "morality" that Kerry and everyone else on the Left embraces. When Liberals are EXPOSED for who they are, they can't win national elections.

I have become extremely suspicious of the cultural conservatives....We have questions about privacy and civil liberties. We have questions about enforcability and whether or not maybe we need to loosen things up in certain areas. We wonder if it's wise to deport people here since they were very young kids and who are now going into college.

You also realize that a lot of these folks are Catholics!

A nation which cannot control its own borders cannot control its own future. Right now, the Bush Administration is more driven by the corporate interests who want cheap, pliable labor. It is not listening to the majority of its members who want immigration to be legal, only.

It saddens me to wind up on the same side of an issue as a number of classic bigots. But anyone can get the analysis of an issue correct, despite of any specific barriers of prejudice.

The thesis of the article is correct. The Republicans need to figure this issue out correctly for the long run. They are far from that status as of now.

Congressman Billybob

Click for latest, "A Tale of Two Grinches, US and UN"

Replacing pro-Hillary "conservatives" with people sensible enough to recognize that the future of conservatism in the US and particularly social issue conservatism, personal weaponry conservatism, faith-based conservatism, tax cut conservatism, military conservatism, etc., is far more important than transitory "immigration issue" pandering to hysterical anti-immigration, pro-population control and racial purity xenophobics.

The anti-Mexican fusilades and theatrics are approximate modern day equivalents of the "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" anti-Irish Know-Nothingism and stupidity of the 1880s GOP which delayed the journey of the Irish to the GOP by about 90 years.

Also, your diagnosis of Frum's argument seems at odds with his rendition on C-SPAN this morning. We are dealing with an issue---not a crisis of Biblical proportions. One solution is that people who seek freedom should be prepared to offer it. Offering that freedom to others may piss some people off, as you put it. That does not mean that the GOP should pander to people simply because they are pissed off. We aren't re-running the Ohio presidential vote of 2004 or the Florida presidential vote of 2000 either no matter how many delusionals are "pissed off."

Also anyone imagining himself or herself as a conservative but clinging to Border Obsessives for Hillary!!!!! as a guideline for 2008 and succeeduing at electing her will get the government (and ten times more of it than necessary) that he or she deserves. It Takes a Village to Do Your Hair, Cut Your Lawn, Decide What You Want for Lunch and Everything Else; It Takes the Demonratic National Committee to Set your Tax Rates; It Takes Al Qaeda to Run the State Department; Anti-Faith Based Social Programs and Re-Education Camps; etc.; etc.; etc.; ad infinitum et incarceratum ad nauseam.

As ever, the pro-cheap labor lobby whines "anti-Mexican", "racist" whenever their agenda of reducing America to Third World level is questioned. Why, all California has to do is reduce it's levels of health care and education spending to Mexican levels and the budget problem is solved ! And we will leave aside the nonsensical argument about Canada (as if sneaking across the Dakotas on foot were a viable al-Qaeda route). Canada isn't sending masses of poor people to consume our social services (in fact, our elderly cross over to buy their prescription drugs cheap). I am not aware of any Canadian gangs in the Northwest.

Illegals are not political emigres, so your Eastern Europe analogy is ridiculous. They are Mexico's excess rural population, created by Mexico's failure to develop an economy to absorb them. No sovereign state has the right to dump its problems on its neighbors and we certainly have no duty to accept them. And as it happens a massive influx of poor people has overwhelmed public services in California (your solution. get rid of public education). And as happens historically immigrant communities create gangs. The Irish did. The Italians did. The Jews did. The Chinese, Vietnamese and Russians did. And now we have Mara Salvatrucha. Face it. Illegal immigrants have become such a plague that unless the GOP rejects your approach and gets serious it will cost the GOP the Southwest.

And how exactly do you get America to "horselaugh" at Hillary when most Americans find the "Clinton-haters" tinfoil hat fringe nuts ?

You got that right,

Hillary has got several big guns she can use to blow the GOP out of the water. Immigration, the GOP is so out of touch with real Americans on this issue that the GOP may as well be on Mars. And then there is the huge budget deficit. Hillary will remind voters that Bill balanced the budget and was actually paying down the national debt. And then there is the GOP version of "free trade" and "out-sourcing". Hillary or another creditable Democrat running on immigration, federal spending and jobs would wipe the floor with a GOP candidate forced to defend the Bush administrations record on these issues.

It saddens me to wind up on the same side of an issue as a number of classic bigots. But anyone can get the analysis of an issue correct, despite of any specific barriers of prejudice.

The thesis of the article is correct. The Republicans need to figure this issue out correctly for the long run. They are far from that status as of now.

Congressman Billybob

Click for latest, "A Tale of Two Grinches, US and UN"

Please answer the question posed to you in reply #187. Should all buildings and/or houses built by "illegal" labor be bulldozed.

You're funny. Your post at #187 ignored the question posed twice at #183:

Is it good to reward lawbreakers at the expense of those who obey the laws?

You ignored it a third time at #195.

Afterall according to your overall rhetoric on FR those buildings are illegal/impure.

Unless there is a law against those buildings, I don't see how they could be illegal. I don't recall ever posting on the subject of what might be "impure," but feel free to post a link.

Now:

Is it good to reward lawbreakers at the expense of those who obey the laws?

As I recall, you and I have occasionally disagreed on matters religious. Today, that is of little moment.

Your post to which I respond is the best in show on this or probably any other thread today. It is indeed our business to begin immediately the process of educating the American public about Alinsky and Shrillery's Alinskyite roots and to destroy her accordingly. We could also profit from unsealing her sealed senior thesis at Wellesley, written when she was directly involved with Alinsky efforts.

Bravo! Bravissimo! Congratulations! Thanks!

You're funny. Your post at #187 ignored the question posed twice at #183:

Is it good to reward lawbreakers at the expense of those who obey the laws?

Uh no, the question was posed to you after your rhetorical question(Is it good to reward lawbreakers(who build houses, clean toilets).

Like I said before, this debate is like the chicken and the egg.

JMO, people building houses are not criminals. Criminals are those who break into houses(and they come in all ethnicites).

There are indeed some very thoughtful and well written posts on this thread. Giving all the competing considerations, and the relatively high stakes, getting immigration policy just right isn't easy - it's at least as tough as sailing the Magellan Straits in winter. We need to have the hyperbolic howling on both sides abate in order to have a chance of making it through.

LOL! Wipe your keyboard.

Also, your diagnosis of Frum's argument seems at odds with his rendition on C-SPAN this morning. We are dealing with an issue---not a crisis of Biblical proportions.

My mind must be going. Do you have a link to my "Biblical proportions" post?

Here's Frum's lead paragraph:

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.

That's a warning, don't you think?

Do you think former Bush speechwriter David Frum is advocating "pandering to hysterical anti-immigration, pro-population control and racial purity xenophobics?

Sounds a little overreductionist.

Uh no, the question was posed to you after your rhetorical question(Is it good to reward lawbreakers(who build houses, clean toilets).

It's not a rhetorical question. Attempt #6:

Is it good to reward lawbreakers at the expense of those who obey the laws?

Do you acknowledge that illegal aliens violate laws?

Is a "cultural conservative" a one-issue border-obsessive voter or a social issue conservative who will organize and vote for God, guns, straights, the Constitution, tax cuts, and keeping the military available for such matters as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Korea and defense of Taiwan as necessary, and against abortion, "gay" "rights", anti-Vietnam War purveyors of treason, neo-isolationists, etc.?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.