This comes up from time to time, but Tom Edsall had a good piece today reminding us of the political consequences of the right’s rhetoric in the immigration debate.
Republican opposition to liberalized immigration reform has put at risk the loyalty of a key constituency – evangelical Protestant Hispanics. The loss of this Hispanic support endangers the GOP’s ability to win presidential elections.
In the view of Republican strategists, it is crucial for the party’s candidates to win a substantial share of the Hispanic vote to remain competitive in the Southwest mountain states – Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico – and, looking farther ahead, in Florida and Texas.
Key leaders in the rapidly growing Latino evangelical community who had provided strong support to President Bush in 2004 are deeply angered by the opposition among Republicans to immigration legislation now stalled in the Senate.
“The Republican Party does not have a clue just how the perception of them among Hispanics has completely deteriorated in the last few years,” said Marcos Witt, Senior Pastor of the Hispanic congregation at Lakewood Church in Houston and a three-time Latin Grammy winner for his Christian recordings.
And Witt is a conservative Republican who actively supported Bush’s 2004 campaign. He’s been listening to Latino resentment in Texas and concluded that Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both critics of the compromise bill, “can kiss the Hispanic vote goodbye.”
Now, in most instances, that may not matter. Indeed, for many conservative Republicans, the bigger danger is embracing the Bush/Kennedy/McCain compromise legislation and getting challenged from the right.
But nationally, and with a long-term view, the GOP is going out of its way to alienate the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. Politically, this is probably more unwise than they realize.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanics accounted for nearly half of the 2.8 million people added to the U.S. population in 2004 and 2005. People of Hispanic origin now make up 15% of the U.S. population, about 43 million people. Nearly half of the nation’s children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, and the percentage is increasing mainly because of rapid growth in the Hispanic population.
Bush made substantial gains among Hispanic voters between 2000 and 2004, but discontent with the GOP has blossomed since.
[Reverend Luis Cortes, Jr., a 2004 Bush supporter], president and CEO of Philadelphia-based Esperanza USA, the largest Hispanic faith-based community-development corporation in the country, is now outspoken in his criticism of the GOP.
“Evangelical Hispanic voters have to lay the brunt of the blame on the members of the Republican Party” for the Senate’s failure to provide a path to legal status for illegal immigrants, Cortes told Huffington Post. A conservative on abortion and gay marriage, Cortes said that those issues are now trumped by his concern with family preservation and reunification provisions, which are threatened by new immigration measures proposed by the GOP.
“Family is our number one value, after loving God. Our family comes first. We must elect people who are for our families and for immigration reform. That is how we would begin to organize our people for every House and Senate election,” Cortes said.
Florida Senator Mel Martinez, who is also chairman of the Republican National Committee, warned, “I believe that not to play this card right would be the destruction of our party.”