Guest Post by Morbo
It has been fun watching the Republican presidential candidates savage one another. But eventually, enough GOP voters will cast ballots and settle on a candidate. That’s when the real fun will start. What will he run on?
Continuing the smashing successes of the Bush administration? Um, no. The performance of the economy? I don’t think so. The pressing need for more wars in the Middle East? Probably not.
For a long time, I thought I knew: The GOP campaign would be some variation of this theme: “Those damn illegal aliens! Let’s round them all up and ship them back to where they came from, and then let’s build a giant fence around the Southern border. Illegal aliens bad! Grrrr!”
But oddly enough, for all of the ranting and raving you hear about this topic in the mainstream media, it apparently doesn’t promise much of a payoff for the Republicans. As Ryan Lizza noted in The New Yorker recently, the rise of “Tancredoism” in the GOP (so named for House member Tom Tancredo of Colorado, whose hardline views on illegal immigration fuel his long shot presidential campaign) so far has only led to more trouble for the party.
Not long ago, leading Republicans embraced policies on immigration that were nearly sensible. The emergence of Tancredoism as the party’s default position has alienated the growing body of Hispanic voters and so far has not delivered at the polls. Some House members who embraced Tancredo’s views lost in 2006, and the GOP’s efforts to use the issue in Virginia’s statewide elections last month flopped badly.
For all of the blather on talk radio and the nightly obsessions of Lou Dobbs, the immigration issue does not resonate much with the average voter. Notes Lizza:
Anti-immigrant passion also owes much to the disproportionate influence of a few small states in the nominating process. National polls show that, as an issue, immigration is far behind the Iraq war, terrorism, the economy, and health care as a concern to most Americans; a recent Pew poll shows that, nationally, only six per cent of voters offer immigration as the most important issue facing the country. But in Iowa and South Carolina, two of the three most important early states, it is a top concern for the Republicans who are most likely to vote.
As I’ve observed this dynamic unfold, I’ve wondered why this approach isn’t working. It has in the past.
In the 19th Century, you could openly beat on the Irish, the Slavs and the Chinese and no one would blink. But today it’s no so cool to be an open bigot. Yes, it’s permissible to harbor concerns about border security, but when you start criticizing someone for the way they look, speak or celebrate their culture, a lot of Americans cringe.
And the anti-illegal forces always go there. Consider Dean Allen of South Carolina. Allen is working with Buddy Witherspoon, a Republican who is mounting a primary challenge to U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, mostly over the immigration issue. Allen told Lizza:
“The illegal Hispanic population, it’s definitely growing. I can tell you just from how many you see when you walk in Wal-Mart, and you drive down the street and you see buildings now with writing in Spanish that says ‘tienda,’ which is Mexican for ‘store.’ You didn’t see that even a year or two ago.”
The problem with this statement is that it’s not an argument against illegal immigration. It is an argument against people speaking Spanish and using Spanish-language signs on their shops. Every one of those shop owners may be here legally. We could completely seal the border tomorrow, and those signs would still be there.
You don’t have to push the hardcore anti-immigrant faction too hard to get them away from talking about border fences to moaning about the fact that you have to press 1 to hear English when you call the bank. They are nativist bigots, plain and simple, and I would like to think that the American people will reject their divisive approach.
So far, at least, the polls show we are.