Mathematically, how would supporting citizenship for illegal immigrants help the GOP?

Politics & Elections
41

No one is going to believe the GOP if they suddenly start supporting immigration reform. Probably not even as much as people believe democrats that support the keystone pipeline - or some democrats that support gun control.

The problem also is primaries. My understanding is that (especially for republicans) - the more extreme sides seem to vote more in primaries. Therefore tea party candidates have a better shot - as you get more extreme voters out to the polls. Candidates that espouse more moderate positions don’t seem to do so well - and can’t even win a primary often in order to be able to run in a general election (where they might win).

There are exceptions to this - as John McCain won in part as republicans sometimes didn’t like him, but thought he had the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton (who many thought was going to win).

The republicans are IMHO screwed as they can’t afford to upset their base - which is dying off - and can’t attract new members - as the stuff they need to attract them pisses off the old members.

I’m sure they will try some way around this - and I haven’t been paying much attention for the last couple years - so maybe they already are. They are politically savvy, but will need to come up with something even better than the southern strategy.

42

What the Republican Party needs to do is disassociate immigration policy from racism. We see it a lot on this board let alone in the general public. Anti-Obama = anti-blacks or anti-illegal immigrants = anti-Latino. I’m not saying that there aren’t people that hate Obama because of the color of his skin or think there should be fewer brown people in the country. There definitely are, but the illegal immigration discussion should be about expecting people to immigrate the legal way. The Republicans could easily do that by making it easier for Mexican nationals to work here and enforcing the laws on the books. Say what you want about Joe Arpaio and argue about his methods all you want (FTR I think his methods are based on racism) and Arizona in general but it is hard to argue that enforcing Federal laws is a mistake. If the Republican decide to enforce the law in a sane way and not pick one of the two extremes (Arpaio “You’re brown so get the fuck out of the country” or Obama “Let’s not enforce the law”) then that would go a long way to making it a immigration issue and not a Latino issue.