The demographic politics of immigration

By W.W. | IOWA CITY

AS MY colleague noted below, Barack Obama gave a speech on immigration reform this afternoon in El Paso, Texas, reviving a debate largely dormant since the Senate voted down the DREAM Act in December. In my estimation, Mr Obama's earlier defence of the DREAM Act, which would have offered a path to citizenship to certain non-citizen children of undocumented immigrants, was both lacklustre and politically savvy. Mr Obama did not burn scarce political capital last year fighting tooth and nail for DREAM, but he did successfully signal strong and sincere support for a provision popular in America's rapidly-growing Latin-American immigrant population, even while appeasing law-and-order Democrats and swing voters by racking up record numbers of deportations. Keeping immigration reform at the forefront of the administration's agenda promises to consolidate Latino support for Mr Obama while capitalising on the tensions within the GOP's approach to this issue.

As NPR's Frank James reports:

The White House and congressional Democrats also want to take advantage of the fissures on immigration within the Republican Party. By pushing an immigration overhaul, they're banking on immigration hardliners in the Republican Party, through words and actions, doing their part to energize Latinos in the Democratic base.

Republicans really are in a tough spot. The GOP's best medium-to-long-run strategy—a continuation of George W. Bush and Karl Rove's efforts to court Latino voters—conflicts directly with the best short-run strategy of conservative candidates who bank on nativist populism to get them in office and keep them there.

This exchange between NPR's Mara Liasson and Marty Wilson, a Republican political strategist, illustrates the GOP's problem:

MARA: Republicans say they want to pass bills that would enhance border security—not legalize undocumented workers. But GOP strategist Marty Wilson thinks that's short-sighted. Wilson ran Carly Fiorina's Senate race in California, a race he says she lost because she didn't get enough Hispanic votes.

WILSON: The hardline approach on immigration, which is: "find em, arrest 'em, and throw 'em out," is not going to work. Latinos are a growing population in a state like California. They're a growing political force. And unless we come up with a better way to talk about immigration, we're going to continue to way underperform and that does not indicate that you're going to win many elections.

MARA: Wilson thinks Republicans should add a guest worker program to their border-security bills. That would allow them to appear welcoming to Hispanics without angering their conservative base with talk of amnesty.

As Reihan Salam recently noted in The Daily, the success of Canada's Conservative Party, which picked up seats and clinched a majority government in last week's federal elections, is due in no small part to it's concerted (perhaps Bush-inspired) attempt to attract immigrant voters:

[Prime Minister Stephen] Harper recognized early on that a large share of Canada's aspirational middle class were immigrants. Led by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, the Conservatives mounted an unprecedented effort to win the votes of Asian voters, many of whom had long been loyal to the Liberals. The gestures ranged from large to small, from reforming Canada's immigration policies to welcome more high-skilled immigrants to creating official committees celebrating the virtues of traditional Chinese medicine. The Conservatives realized that the key to winning immigrant voters is to demonstrate that you understand and value their concerns. One result of this outreach effort has been the election of a large number of Asian Canadians as Conservative MPs, a number of whom have made it into Harper's cabinet. Given that the American electorate is growing steadily less white, it is widely understood that Republicans need to make inroads in large and growing Latino and Asian communities. Harper's Conservatives offer a road map as to how they might do that.

When I was in Ottawa a couple years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with one of Mr Kenney's aides who stressed the folly of neglecting immigrant and ethnic voters simply because large majorities happen to prefer competing parties. The Tories don't need majorities of Chinese or Indian voters to stay in government, he told me, just a steadily increasing share of the Asian-Canadian vote. It looks like this strategy is paying off.

The GOP has much to gain by following Mr Harper's example, yet America's right-wing rank and file seems to me so invested in an immigrant-unfriendly expressive politics of American identity that I doubt the party will get its act together until it's too late—until it experiences a humiliating electoral defeat that finally brings it home that there is no other way. Mr Obama's move to put immigration reform on the front burner may help some Republican candidates in strongly anti-immigration districts, but it will almost certainly help Democrats generally, and keep the Obama family comfortably ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

(Photo credit: AFP)