Is there any trend or event out there that is a “real” reason driving the increased attention that immigration is getting right now?
It feels like this was manufactured by Republican strategists to have a Gay Marriage-like issue to strengthen their base, but it back-fired…
Here I asked the same thing.
I’m pretty convinced of it, but the thing you’re forgetting is that Bush’s electability and popularity are now pretty much irrelevent.
He’s out in 2009 and that’s that.
What you’ve got going on now (IMO) is one of two things.
A carefully calculated and focus-group’d plan that GOP strategists believe will result in a net-gain of votes for them. They’ll lose most or all of Group X but will stir up Group Y sufficiently to more than make up for the loss of Group X.
A GOP that’s beginning to be torn apart by infighting. Not over immigrants or illegal wiretapping. It’s being torn apart by the idealogues on one side and the pragmatic “I wanna get reelected” guys on the other.
I should be happy about this, of course, but I’m pretty confident that the Democrats will find a way to fuck up this gift on a platter as well.
Of course, some fools will believe that the Minutemen were responsible for this happening - but that’s just the kind of terminal shortsightedness that leads from thinks like WMDs/Tonkin/USS Maine.
-Joe
I looked! I swear I looked! :smack:
GWB and his not-very-bright brain trust have been trying to do this since shortly after he got into office. That is, grant an amnesty and create a bracero program.
The literal answer to why it is coming up now is that September 11 forced him to back off from publicly endorsing it.
Why does he want it?
Rove and Hughes and he have convinced themselves that this is a brilliant triangulation move. They can steal a march from the Dems by copping the Hispanic vote. Most of this is based on some flawed, indeed patronizing, view that “Hispanics are conservative and have great family values.” Well, they are “conservative” in some social senses, at least in their home environs, but not in others. They are not largely “conservative” voters in the U.S. [see caveat below], and no amount of telling them that the GOP’s agenda is really theirs is going to make them believe it. BTW, Mexico has been a corrupt, one-party socialist society for decades. It could be that Mexicans are yearning to exercise democracy and capitalism, but it could also well be that the socialism and un-democracy have given many Mexicans a different set of viewpoints than the self-sufficient, small-state Jeffersonian democrats that the GOP “strategists” apparently envision when they simplistically refer to “conservative Hispanic values.” Even as to religion – anyone who’s spent time in Latin American societies can attest that the relationship of many modern Latin Americans to their Church is sometimes as much cultural as philosophical, and does not guarantee “conservative” behavior (I’d be surprised if there is a Mexican drug cartel leader who doesn’t have a Virgen of Guadalupe medal somewhere on his person).
All of this delusional thinking about “conservative Hispanics” (of course there are some, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near a majority of Mexicans or other Latins) is based on, I think, the completely anomalous (and now waning-in-influence) 1960s Cuban exiles. Who were upper middle class to upper class European-stock ideologues displaced and impoverished by a fairly abrupt communist Revolution, and who had personal cause to be radically conservative across the board. That is not remotely close to a description of the Mexican immigrants of today (unless the 2,000 caudillo-type families who run the country were the ones wading across the Rio Grande). N.B. that if you look at how second and third generation descendants of Cuban exiles vote, even they are far from as conservative/pro-GOP as their parents. Thus, Rove et al. are, factually, likely extremely wrong in predicting that new or recent immigrants will become significant sources of net support for the GOP (unless the GOP changes its policies so significantly as to become analogous to the kind of candidates that Hispanic immigrants currently here tend, in fact, to vote for, viz., fairly liberal Democrats). Immigrants from the days of the Irish and Italians tend, in the U.S., to vote solidly Democratic for at least two or three generations (the Cubans of 1962 are the only significant exception that comes to mind). This is true even for comparatively-prosperous immigrants such as middle class Chinese. The GOP is making a huge bet, and it is unlikely to win it.
Also, cheap labor does, no doubt, appeal to big business.
In summary, this is the first time in recent memory that there has been no party that is, at its top level, formally or actually opposed to mass amnesty and open borders. Until now, there was a political price to be paid by, say, a Dem. advocating for more immigration. Now, it’s only GOP backbenchers who are opposing it, so it can be publicly advocated if GWB thinks he can weather the intramural storm by promising to deliver lots n’ lots of new and hyper-fertile Republican voters.
I suspect most Hispanics who were inclined to vote Republican in November have already been pissed off by the thinly-veiled racist rhetoric coming from the right in the past few weeks. The GOP’s misleading ads on Spanish-language radio (wherein they blamed the Democrats for the Republicans’ bill to make illegal immigration a felony) only made the matter worse, by acting as if Hispanic voters weren’t smart enough to realize which party was pissing them off to begin with.
It doesn’t have to be about Bush. The midterm elections are less than six months away.
My opinion is that GWB has made this issue into a diversion fromt he real problems facing America now- the War and the Deficit- in which both issues he was taking a such a HUGE lambasting in the press and in the public opinion that he had some lackeys in the House come up with a Immigration bill that no one expected to pass, but was guaranteed to cause lots of debate and acrimony. And, it’s working very very well. IMHO, of course!
I don’t think that there will be a lot of ¡Viva “Republican Presidential Canidate”! bumper stickers in this next Presidential election either. And there were a lot of them in my neck of the woods last election. I think that they’ve managed to alienate are fairly large percentage of this ethnic group for a long time.
You nailed it.
George W. thought he had a good angle, because he knew how immigration played in Texas among his rich pals who needed cheap undocumented labor.
But he’s so isolated that he forgot that relatively few people live in Texas as those outside of Texas, and that the rich who can’t live without cheap labor are an even tinier subset.
It’s really weird. On the whole, Geoge W. Bush is right on this, and for much the right reasons. Where he’s wrong is that the US should be trying to get more skilled immigrants, more refugees, and fewer unskilled Mexicans, but then none of the politicians are saying that either. But trying to make the illegals legal is right, and trying to get the Hispanic vote is right (at least in strategic terms).
The people opposing him are doing it for all the wrong reasons: populist fears of being swamped by Hispanics, and of losing low-skilled jobs to Hispanics. Nobody is talking about the real solutions to those issues, like special classes in English for all those immigrants who want them, and protection of wages and job conditions for the bottom end of the labour market.
So Bush is going to lose the immigration debate for the wrong reasons, and US immigration policy is going to become even worse than it is at present. (Even if that seems impossible!). It makes me (a legal immigrant) despair.
Quite likley. But the root answer is, as always, quite simply, political expedience. To give another recent example, which is not to be construed as excuse-making for Bush, Clinton had both his universal health insurance initiative and the gays in the military thing. Neither were really hot-button issues at the time; that is, until he started pushing 'em.
Yep, it’s another perfect Rovian storm against liberals. Watch out, Republicans are busy at work, always behind the scenes… Be afraid, I hear they are planning on putting even more floride in water.