Conservatives Try to Woo Latinos to GOP and Republicans to Immigration Reform Camp
By Diego Graglia &bull 2/22/10 • Categorized as Hispanic,Immigration News,Immigration Reform 
U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio from Florida speaks at CPAC. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
The Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend in Washington illustrated the conundrum Republicans face when considering the immigration issue against the backdrop of a growing Hispanic electorate. While most conservatives still adhere to the accustomed recipe of more restrictive policies and fighting against “amnesty” for the undocumented, some right-wing activists have started advocating a new approach to woo Latinos with a mix of conservative moral values and immigration reform.
At CPAC, a new group called the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles hosted a panel where it promoted attracting socially-conservative Hispanics to the GOP column in future elections and –a bit counterintuitively– convincing Republicans that immigration reform is not a bad thing.
The partnership “will campaign among Latino voters and invest substantial resources to support pro-immigration candidates who are committed to fundamental conservative values and ideals,” it said in a press release (opens pdf file).
The group’s proposals –supported by prominent conservative organizer Grover Norquist– spurred a withering critique from former anti-immigration presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, in an online column under the headline “CPAC betrays America on immigration.”
Tancredo wrote:
“Whereas grass-roots conservatives and millions of 912 patriots – along with 80 percent of the American people – understand the need for border security as a precondition for immigration reform, CPAC board member Grover Norquist is busy launching a new project in support of the Obama administration’s plan to grant another amnesty to 20 million illegal aliens.”
Tancredo’s restrictive position is the one Republicans have most often expressed in recent years. But conservatives are not blind to the growth of the Hispanic electorate.
“If current demographic and voting trends continue, Hispanics’ growing share of the electorate could make Republican electoral college victories a near impossibility as early as 2020,” a Wall Street Journal article warned Monday.
Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant, told The Washington Post: “If Republicans don’t do better among Hispanics, we’re not going to be talking about how to get Florida back in the Republican column, we’re going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”
“What’s happening at CPAC is a microcosm of the debate that’s taking place in the Republican Party,” wrote pro-immigration reform activist Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, in The Huffington Post.
“And while the immigrant bashers remain ascendant for now –Sharry said–, the Hayworth-Tancredo-Malkin axis may just be the gift that keeps giving for progressives.”
That may be just so: the Journal noted that even a Hispanic candidate as Cuban-American Marco Rubio, running for the U.S. Senate in Florida, is courting “anti-illegal immigration advocates” by taking extreme right positions on the issue.
If conservatives successfully take this route, I will do the unheard of – at least in terms of my family of lifetime, diehard Democrats – and become a Republican. I have no doubts my father, a child of immigrants and longtime union member, will do the same. We are so disenchanted with how the Democrats have handled immigration. They had a chance to land a lifetime majority of the biggest demographic shift in this country’s history of the last 200 years and they have utterly ignored it. Who would want to be associated with such a loser party?
Haha: the GOP has already become the party of angry old white males. The message has been clear: if you don’t talk, look, or act like Billy Bob, we don’t like you.
[ Edited by Feet in 2 Worlds ]
This will be the end of his political career. Long term, if the GOP continues its anti-immigrant hatred, they will never win another election: they are on the wrong side of both history and demographics!
Marco Rubio should also read this aND learn that his path is wrong because its based on GETTING ELECTED ON THE BACKS OF POOR MIGRANTS THAT CANT DEFEND THEMSELVES. GOD DOES JUSTICE.
US economy largely unaffected by illegal immigration
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 12.03.2009
WASHINGTON — A study released Wednesday concludes that illegal-immigrant workers do not drain jobs or tax dollars and have a neutral impact on the U.S. economy.
Because illegal immigrants occupy a small share of the work force — about 5 percent — and work low-skilled jobs at lower wages than other workers, their overall influence on the economy is trivial, according to the report, sponsored by the Migration Policy Institute, a pro-immigration think tank in Washington.
“The fate of the U.S. economy does not rest on what we do on illegal immigration,” said Gordon H. Hanson, author of the report and economics professor at the University of California-San Diego.
Illegal immigrants contribute a tiny 0.03 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, with that gain going to employers who save money on cheap labor, the report says, while their cost to the economy is 0.10 percent of GDP, which mainly comes from public education and publicly funded emergency health care.
The net impact at minus 0.07 percent of GDP means that illegal immigrants have an essentially neutral effect on the economy, Hanson said.
The report does not factor in the spending or entrepreneurship that illegal immigrants contribute to the economy, said Marc Rosenblum, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
Where illegal immigrants do have a substantial impact, Hanson added, is in specific labor-intensive and low-skilled industries such as agriculture, construction, hospitality and cleaning services, where the share of native-born workers has dropped precipitously.
Because the U.S. has dramatically raised the education level of its adult population in the last 50 years — going from about 50 percent of all working-age adults without a high school diploma in 1960 to just 8 percent today — the native-born, low-skilled work force has shrunk, while employers continue to require low-skilled workers.
This leaves room for illegal immigrants to take such jobs at a low cost, the report says.
Illegal immigrants now account for 20 percent of working-age adults in the U.S. who don’t have a high school degree.
While the influx of illegal immigrants is one of the factors keeping low-skilled wages stagnant, the biggest losers in the current system are legal low-wage workers, both native and foreign born, who compete with the illegal immigrants, Rosenblum said.
Meanwhile, employers reap higher profits because of lower labor costs and more productive businesses.
The solution to this imbalance, proposed by the Migration Policy Institute, is to provide more visas and legal channels for unskilled workers to enter the U.S.
Today, low-skilled workers must have a green card — effectively requiring them to have close family members in the U.S. — or obtain a temporary work visa.
“We really need to approach migration control comprehensively by both strengthening enforcements and creating legalization mechanisms that will control the unauthorized population and improve the economic outputs that we get from immigration,” Rosenblum said.