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By BRIAN A. HOWEY
INDIANAPOLIS - "If the Republicans aren’t careful, they are going to become the Whigs of the 21st Century." I am quoting myself, but seated at the South Bend Chocolate .jpg)
Company table with me last week was U.S. Rep. Mike Pence and the topic was immigration. What was striking about my audacious quote was that Pence could only chuckle a bit and wince.
It wasn’t a notion he could contest. And then he told me about the various town hall events he had done since he and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison had tried to forge a national compromise in 2006. They advocated illegal immigrants returning to their countries of origin, then reporting to "Ellis Island Centers" where they could be processed, given U.S. work permits, sign pledges to learn English and attain citizenship, and pay a fine for breaking U.S. laws. "Only by meeting the demand for labor through a temporary worker program coupled with enhanced border security measures can we ensure national and economic security," Pence and Hutchison wrote. "Without a legal method to enter our country and work, foreigners will continue to slip across our southern border, remain unidentified, and drain the resources of our social infrastructure. "
For this, Pence was branded by people like U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo as caving in to "amnesty." The whole thing crashed, there was no compromise, and that created the kind of xenophobic presentations that then Indiana Congressman John Hostettler did in the summer of 2006. Pence said Tancredo and others warned him that he would face the wrath of voters. Last I looked, Pence won comfortably in 2006 by more than 38,000 votes. He said he went to numerous town hall settings in Indiana’s conservative 6th CD and found most people simply wanting a solution. Meanwhile, U.S. Reps. Hostettler, Mike Sodrel and Chris Chocola, the latter of whom participated in Hostettler’s show hearings, all went down to defeat. Most of that was attributed to the Iraq War, but I suspect that some of their intolerance impacted voters, particularly swing independents and moderate Republicans who are fed up with the various phobias that take aim at Latinos, gays and, I suppose, Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer.
The demise of the Pence-Hutchison compromise means that individiual states are taking the issue into their own hands. We saw an early incarnation of that in 2006 when Francie Metzger ran some of the crudest, most intolerant TV ads on the issue at State Rep. Teri Austin (and lost by 4,500 votes). Now we have State Sen. Mike Delph’s SB335 that targets employers who hire illegal immigrants. "We cannot allow the federal government’s impotence on enforcement to erode our respect for rule of law, nor can we continue to allow businesses to violate human rights by exploiting cheap labor," Delph said in an Indianapolis Star op-ed article. "I ask all Hoosiers, regardless of race or ethnicity or whether born here or overseas to support my effort to eliminate illegal immigration from our state once and for all." Responding in the Indianapolis Star was Mary Jane Gonzalez, president of the Indiana State Chamber of Commerce who said that 50,000 to 80,000 undocumented immigrants "have deep roots in our state." She urged, "Instead of SB335, why not take a lead role in comprehensive immigration reform and work to unite all people who desperately want nothing more than a better life and to be able to assimilate into American culture in our great state?"
A key question here is does anyone really believe that a state legislature is going to end illegal immigration "once and for all?" The reality is that if laws like Delph’s passes into law, like others in Arizona and Oklahoma, the illegals will only head deeper into the lawless shadows. Or, as the Star reported, they will flee the state.
When we conducted the first Howey-Gauge Poll on Feb. 17-18, a number that didn’t exist jumped out at me. In an open ended question as to what the top issues are, immigration didn’t even make the list. Other polls I’ve seen have immigration far, far down on the priority list if at all. A vast majority of Americans simply want the federal government to do its job, protect the borders and help the 14 million to 20 million Latinos already here to assimilate into American society. They don’t want, as Hostettler said during the 2006 immigration rallies, millions of Latino workers thrown into county jails and deported.
Republicans like Tancredo, Hostettler and Delph are in the process of digging a deep hole for the Republican Party. There isn’t a Republican African-American or Latino member of the Indiana House, Senate or Congressional delegation. There are no African-American Republicans in Congress. The GOP is becoming a party mostly of middle-aged white guys. Pew Research released a report recently that shows the American population will increase from 296 million in 2005 to 438 million in 2050. "Of the 117 million people added to the population during this period due to the effect of new immigration, 67 million will be the immigrants themselves and 50 million will be their U.S.-born children or grandchildren. Among the other key population projections, nearly one in five Americans (19%) will be an immigrant in 2050, compared with one in eight (12%) in 2005. And 29 percent of the U.S. population in 2050 will be Latino, compared to the current 15 percent .
Now here’s where the 21st Century Whig thing comes into play. The Pew Hispanic Center notes that 57 percent of registered voters now call themselves Democrats, while just 23 percent call themselves Republicans. There is now a 34 percent gap in partisan affiliation among Latinos. In July 2006, a month before Hostettler’s 18-city immigrant bash tour, the gap was just 21 percent. In essence, the Republicans of today are condemning themselves to being at an 80/20 or 90/10 disadvantage with the fastest growing demographic group in America. In the Howey-Gauge Poll, just 1 percent identified themselves as Latino. But that number will only grow.
Pew Research notes that in 2008, Latinos will comprise about 9% of the eligible electorate nationwide. If past turnout trends persist, they will make up only about 6.5% of those who actually turn out to vote next November. But despite these modest numbers, Hispanics loom as a potential "swing vote" in the presidential race. "That’s because they are strategically located on the 2008 Electoral College map. Hispanics constitute a sizable share of the electorate in four of the six states that President Bush carried by margins of five percentage points or fewer in 2004: New Mexico (where Hispanics make up 37% of state’s eligible electorate); Florida (14%); Nevada (12%) and Colorado (12%)," the Pew study states.
Tags: Brian A. Howey, John Hostettler, Mike Delph, Mike Pence
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This entry was written by and posted on February 28, 2008 at 12:35 pm and filed under HPI Weekly. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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