George W Bush and Immigration

George W Bush seems to agree with me. This isn't as alarming as it might sound. Here's some of what the President had to say at his final press conference this morning:

I am concerned that, in the wake of the defeat, that the temptation will be to look inward and to say, well, here's a litmus test you must adhere to.

This party will come back. But the party's message has got to be that different points of view are included in the party. And -- take, for example, the immigration debate. That's obviously a highly contentious issue. And the problem with the outcome of the initial round of the debate was that some people said, well, Republicans don't like immigrants. Now, that may be fair or unfair, but that's what -- that's the image that came out.

And, you know, if the image is we don't like immigrants, then there's probably somebody else out there saying, well, if they don't like the immigrants, they probably don't like me, as well. And so my point was, is that our party has got to be compassionate and broad-minded.

Quite so. Now it's true that immigration reform is a tough subject for conservatives. True too, that when it comes to immigration there are some many on the restrictionist wing who consider Bush to be either a) a sentimentalist or b) corporate America's pawn or c) both of the above. Equally, the orthodox Republican position on immigration  - border enforcement first, then reform - is not desperately unpopular. But a popular (or at least not unpopular) position is only half of the matter: you have to sell it well too. And on a subject as contentious as immigration, that requires a degree of tact and sophistication that, by and large, seems alien to many Congressional and grass-roots Republicans.

Immigration reform isn't just a matter of courting the hispanic vote either. It's about white votes too, particularly college-educated, middle-class white votes. Pretty much every American under 35 has been educated in a system that is extraordinarily sensitive to racial issues; they are well-attuned to the nuances of language when race is discussed. They understand the code. Republicans too often seem to forget this. When they talk about immigration, they do so in tones that too often seem brutish, narrow and exclusionary. And this costs them support from voters* who might actually agree with the essence of the GOP position, but balk at signing on to it because of the way it is expressed.

So it isn't just that legal Hispanic immigrants might be turned off by the GOP's language on immigration, so too are educated, upscale white voters who don't like the idea of endorsing a party that gives the impression, unwittingly or not, of being hostile to immigration. The GOP's posture on immigration fosters the impression, fairly or not, that they're the "nasty party". As far as political branding goes, that's a toxic position for any party to find itself in. 

It's a shame, then, that Bush was never really in a position to make a real push for real immigration reform. That, like so much of his domestic agenda, was another victim of 9/11 and the resulting foreign policy distractions. This in turn persuaded Karl Rove to run negative campaigns in 2002 and 2004 that, by retreating to the base, abandoned any hope the GOP might once have had of expanding its support amongst Hispanic and black voters (though Bush did win 11% of the black vote in 2004, up from 9% in 2000, if I recall correctly). That was a perfectly sensible ploy in the short-term, but it hasn't done the GOP many favours in the longer-term. No surprise then that Bush's verdict on the Clinton years  -"So much promise, to so little purpose" - also applies to much of his own Presidency. 

*But what about working-class white voters? Ah, yes, that's a different matter entirely, worthy of consideration some other time.

UPDATE: See Weigel for the kind of thinking that will lead has led the GOP to ruin.

[Hat-tips: Dana Goldstein and MPG&S]

Comments

[Ottovbvs]

Of course he's right about immigration. If he'd had his druthers he'd have put forward an even more generous bill than the one he tried to pass in 2007. Unfortunately, what he and Rove didn't account for was what a great job they'd done in whipping up xenophobia and racism amongst the base. I don't think Bush is particularly racist it was just a useful political tool. And it came back and them big time.

[Mark Thompson]

Alex:
As you noted the other day, I've also been farming in this pasture for the last few weeks. For what it's worth, E.D. Kain has managed to beautifully combine our respective insights into one coherent succinct argument that you may find worth looking at here.

[superdestroyer]

Bush is wrong about the comeback of the Repubican party. Considering that less than half of the children in kidergarten are white, the long term prospects for the Repubicans or any conservative party are extremely poor.

Second, the Repubicans understand that importing millions of poor Mexicans and putting them on the road to citizenship means that the program will create millions of automatic Democratic Party voters.

There is no way to keep taxes reasonable, keep the size of the government in check, or keep the government from limiting freedom while maintaining a policy of open borders and unlimited immigration.

The upper middle class whites would rather slit their own throats instead of taking a policy position that will allow someone to call them a racist. Those people are very easy for the left to manipulate and will suffer for it in the future.

[Pete Murphy]

Rampant population growth threatens our economy and quality of life. Immigration, both legal and illegal, are fueling this growth.

I'm not talking just about the obvious enrironmental and resource issues. I'm talking about the effect upon rising unemployment and poverty in America.

I should introduce myself. I am the author of a book titled "Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America." To make a long story short, my theory is that, as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption of products begins to decline out of the need to conserve space. People who live in crowded conditions simply don’t have enough space to use and store many products. This declining per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty.

This theory has huge implications for U.S. policy toward population management, especially immigration policy. Our policies of encouraging high rates of immigration are rooted in the belief of economists that population growth is a good thing, fueling economic growth. Through most of human history, the interests of the common good and business (corporations) were both well-served by continuing population growth. For the common good, we needed more workers to man our factories, producing the goods needed for a high standard of living. This population growth translated into sales volume growth for corporations. Both were happy.

But, once an optimum population density is breached, their interests diverge. It is in the best interest of the common good to stabilize the population, avoiding an erosion of our quality of life through high unemployment and poverty. However, it is still in the interest of corporations to fuel population growth because, even though per capita consumption goes into decline, total consumption still increases. We now find ourselves in the position of having corporations and economists influencing public policy in a direction that is not in the best interest of the common good.

The U.N. ranks the U.S. with eight third world countries - India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia and China - as accounting for fully half of the world’s population growth by 2050. It's absolutely imperative that our population be stabilized, and that's impossible without dramatically reining in immigration, both legal and illegal.

If you’re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, I invite you to visit my web site at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com where you can read the preface, join in my blog discussion and, of course, purchase the book if you like. (It's also available at Amazon.com.)

Please forgive the somewhat spammish nature of the previous paragraph. I just don't know how else to inject this new perspective into the immigration debate without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.

Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"

[NoMoreBlatherDotCom]

How exactly would pushing "reform" help the GOP gain Hispanic voters? What Alex Massie doesn't know is that "reform" would give even more power to far-left groups closely linked to the Dems, and they'd use that additional power to a) keep Hispanics in their corner, and b) push for future "reforms" in order to obtain more power. I explain that here:

http://24ahead.com/s/comprehensive-immigration-reform

As for Weigel, he won't even make a ten minute phone call to Hawaii to confirm his assumptions about this issue:

http://24ahead.com/s/obama-citizenship