National Hispanic polling goes all the way back to Kennedy versus Nixon in 1960.
No Republican presidential candidate has EVER received more than 40% of the Hispanic vote.
NEP claimed that GWBush got 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004.
The Pew Hispanic Center and NBC News challenged that poll.
Independently, and using NEP’s data, both Pew and NBC concluded Bush got 40%.
Our CURRENT immigration policy creates 800,000 new Democrat voters EVERY year.
How can American Conservatives survive politically against numbers like that?
And your “non-citizen status” solution is not serious.
Before the ink is dry on your immigration bill, La Raza and the ACLU will be in Federal Court trying to overturn it.
Every Democrat in America will be chanting “Racist, Racist” before the 2014 election, even though they voted for your immigration bill just one year earlier.
Do you really not understand the political and cultural consequences of your idea?
Non-citizen permanent resident status exists in many countries world-wide (heck, in Japan, it exists multi-generationally, which wouldn’t happen here), was proposed quite seriously during the campaign by Newt Gingrich, and supported by the Heritage Foundation.
Congress having the power to regulate immigration and set requirements for citizenship would be perfectly within its rights to establish such a status. Make a challenge to it a poisoned pill by including a limited non-separability clause so that if a provision creating such a status is held unconstitutional, only the tightened enforcement provisions are separated, and other parts of the law desired by business constituencies, Hispanic rights groups and the left go down with it. The leftist professional Hispanics would howl, but surveys of ordinary citizens (not residents of the U.S., citizens) of Hispanic ancestry show they aren’t gung-ho for rewarding illegal immigrants from their homelands with citizenship.