My Sunday column sounded some skeptical notes about the immigration reform being considered in the Senate, raising the question of whether an America whose native-born working class is facing a slow-burning socieconomic crisis is really in an ideal position to assimilate low-skilled immigrants at an increasing clip. What I didn’t say is that these intertwined issues — working class dysfunction and the hard path to assimilation — are part of why the Republican elite’s political theory of immigration reform looks so dubious.
That theory, which is particularly popular with the party’s biggest donors, looks at the 2012 election, sees an electorate that was less white than ever before and a nominee who performed terribly among Hispanics, and concludes that most of the party’s problems can be solved by making a dramatic gesture to persuade Hispanic voters that the G.O.P. doesn’t just want them all to self-deport. It isn’t an entirely implausible conceit — as Sean Trende writes, the immigration issue does probably represent a kind of “information shortcut” that persuades Latino voters to reject the Republican brand out of hand. But it’s radically incomplete, and potentially self-defeating.
Why incomplete? Start with the broader economic context of the 2012 election, as limned by Ron Brownstein in a new piece for National Journal:
Led by Obama’s chief pollster, Joel Benenson, the [Obama] campaign had spent 2011 examining Americans’ views on economic security and the American Dream. They concluded that something fundamental had changed. It used to be political gospel that a candidate couldn’t risk talking about inequality because such a stance was so easily caricatured as an attack on the rich and because even working-class Americans believed they had an opportunity to be rich someday. But as Benenson explained in a recent interview, “There has been a recalibration of the American mind-set when it comes to economic change.”
What his polling found is that middle-class Americans are much more concerned about holding onto what they’ve got than in pursuing more. The Pew Economic Mobility project, the Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll, and other studies have arrived at similar conclusions. When Pew asked Americans in 2011 if they preferred financial stability or moving up the income ladder, 85 percent of respondents chose the safer, surer future.”
If that seems like a defensive crouch, it is. … The beginning of the 21st century was a “lost decade” for the middle class, Harvard economist Lawrence Katz said, but the decline has been under way for decades. In the early 1970s, middle-class households earned 62 percent of the national income; today, they bring in just 45 percent … The Great Recession exacerbated this decline. Sixty percent of the job losses in those years occurred in middle-income jobs. The recovery, instead of restoring those jobs, has replaced them with low-wage positions … People aiming to reach the middle class, or to stay there, have ample reason to worry.
Then take a look at two new studies on who actually voted in 2012, and who stayed home:
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would have won the presidency if the white and black turnout rates had stayed at their 2004 levels, according to a new analysis of [the] 2012 election.
… Overall turnout declined from 62 percent in 2008 to 58 percent in 2012, [The Brookings Institution’s William] Frey reported. The drop-off reduced the overall turnout by up to 5 million votes, despite a slight increase in the number of eligible white voters … The 2012 drop-off was concentrated among GOP-leaning white voters.
The AP’s report is corroborated by Resurgent Republic, a right-of-center polling and research firm, which measured turnout changes from 2008 to 2012 … the only group that turned out in greater numbers for the GOP were those who earned more than $100,000 per year, according to Resurgent’s analysis. That group’s turnout rose by 7 percent … Turnout fell by 3 percent among white women, 6 percent among white men, 2 percent among Protestants, 9 percent among married voters, and 15 percent among GOP-leaning middle class voters who earn between $50,000 and $100,000.
Now maybe these G.O.P.-leaning, non-rich whites were all staying home because they listened to talk radio during the primary season and decided that Romney wasn’t sufficiently ideologically pure. But these numbers seem more like rough vindication for the thesis that the Republicans lost in part because anxious middle-income voters in states like Ohio listened to their “you didn’t build that!” messaging (and, yes, to Democratic attacks on Romney’s corporate raider past) and didn’t hear much of anything that actually addressed their anxieties. A lot of these voters were too conservative to cast a ballot for Obama — but given a choice between liberal clientalization and conservative neglect, they chose none of the above.
So you have an economic context in which upward mobility looks more difficult and optimism more unwarranted, and a political context in which anxious white voters are already feeling alienated from the G.O.P.’s economic message (or lack thereof). Against this background, it’s almost painfully easy to see how a sweeping immigration reform blows up in the Republican Party’s face. First, it persuades downscale, culturally-conservative whites that the party really, really doesn’t have their interests and values at heart. Second, it does win the G.O.P. a second look from some Hispanic voters — but because racial wealth gaps make those voters even more economically anxious than whites with similar incomes, they don’t see any reason to actually start voting for a party that doesn’t have an economic agenda beyond austerity and entitlement reform. Third, it gradually adds more low-skilled immigrants to the voting rolls at a time when trends in the economy and the culture make it harder for them to rise into the middle class — and absent such upward mobility, these voters, too, prove less-than-eager to embrace the party of free markets, limited government and American exceptionalism.
Is there an alternative scenario where immigration reform turns out to be a net positive for Republicans instead? Sure — but only if such a reform somehow complemented a new conservative economic agenda rather than posing a substitute for one. My doubts about the design of the current bill notwithstanding, I can imagine an immigration overhaul finding a place in a broader right-of-center vision that’s geared toward reassuring blue-collar whites, enticing middle-income Hispanics, and boosting new immigrants into the middle class.
But that vision doesn’t exist at the moment, and it isn’t likely to emerge in a world where the Congressional G.O.P. can’t even manage to take baby steps toward an Obamacare alternative. And so long as that’s the case, the kind of immigration reform being contemplated is likely to be worse for the G.O.P. politically than a similar bill would have been under George W. Bush. For all his faults, Bush understood that his party couldn’t win over Hispanics — or any economically-vulnerable constituency — without substantive as well as symbolic overtures. Right now, his successors seemed poised to learn that lesson the hard way.