Why Republicans Will Cave on Immigration Reform

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Polls show that if the national elections were held today, Democrats would grab a majority in the House and make a deep inroad into the Republican majority in the Senate.

Judging from the cold shoulder conservative Republicans gave President Bush when he called for a humane, balanced immigration reform law in his recent Orange County, California speech, they won\’t budge one inch from their hard demand for a crackdown on illegal immigration. But eventually most of them will.

With stratospheric gas prices, the Iraq quagmire, creeping inflation, Bush\’s Herbert Hoover Depression level low ratings, the Republicans are in trouble. Polls show that if the national elections were held today, Democrats would grab a majority in the House and make a deep inroad into the Republican majority in the Senate.

The political peril is so great that the GOP can\’t afford to alienate its one tenuous voting trump card, and that\’s the Latino vote. Bush knows that better than anyone else. He also knows that immigration reform is the key to getting those votes. The Latino vote numbers tell the story. In 2002, the National Survey of Latinos: The Latino Electorate conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center found that one-fifth of Latinos were registered Republicans. In the 2004 presidential election, Bush got more than one-third of the Latino vote. Without those votes John Kerry would have won the White House.

It isn\’t just the votes. It\’s where those votes come from that cinched the victory for Bush, and where they could come from in the 2008 presidential elections that Republicans hope will cinch victory for them again.

The greatest number of Latino voters is in California, Florida, Texas, and New York. In the next two years, the Latino vote will swell in Illinois and New Jersey. The number of Latino elected officials doubled and tripled in those states in 2004. These are the key electoral states that virtually determine who will sit in the White House for years to come.

Bush got Latino vote support in 2004 by pumping millions into ads on Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo. The ads saturated the airwaves in New Mexico, Florida, Nevada and Arizona. The money was well spent. Bush won the four states, and he did it with substantial Latino vote support.

Republicans didn\’t just spend heavily on Spanish-language ads, and enlist a bevy of talking heads, and that at times included Bush with his weekly radio broadcasts in bad, broken Spanish. They adroitly tailored their political pitches to their Spanish audience in Florida, Texas and California, and other Southwestern states, complete with local accents and idioms.

If Republicans can hold a substantial part of those votes in 2004, and bolster those numbers with thousands more undocumented workers transformed into citizens and voters, that could potentially result in millions more Republican loyalists.

Then there are the evangelicals. Latino evangelicals both legal and illegal immigrants make up about one fourth of the membership of evangelical churches in America, and their numbers are getting bigger. They are staunchly anti-gay marriage, abortion, and pro-family values. They are prime political pickings for the GOP. Latino evangelicals flexed their political muscle in March when they forced several prominent national evangelical groups to back peddle fast from their hard nosed stance on immigration reform, and either remain neutral in the debate, or issue cautious and bland statements calling on Congress to enact a fair and balanced immigration reform law.

There is a cautionary tale for the Republicans in playing fast and loose with the immigration issue. During the hard fought Virginia Republican gubernatorial campaign in November 2005, Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore fanned the anti-immigrant flames with a series of 11th hour anti-illegal immigration campaign ads. It backfired. It cost him crucial votes in Northern Virginia where the Latino vote has leaped in the past few years.

Former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie read the political leafs and sounded the alarm bell. In a Wall Street Journal editorial in April, he firmly put the party on notice that it would be the political kiss of death for them to appear to be an anti-immigrant party. Gillespie crunched the numbers and noted that Republicans can\’t win without the key swing states of New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Nevada that Bush won in 2004.

Bush and the Republicans rivet their political eye on more than Latino population numbers and votes. They also see their dollars. In politics money doesn\’t talk it screams, and the disposable income of Latinos soared to nearly one trillion dollars during the 1990s, and continues to climb. Credit card, shipping, and communications companies, trade and tourist associations, hotels, airlines, and sports franchises are now feverishly marketing products to snatch a bigger share of their dollars. Republican campaign officials will do the same. Latino political cash can influence and shape political attitudes and politician\’s actions the same as conservative dollars routinely have.

Republican Senators warn that it\’s absolutely imperative to pass an immigration reform bill, and that the bill should look pretty much like the one Bush wants. For the Republicans its more than a matter of fairness, it\’s also a matter of votes.

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist, an author and political analyst.