On December 4, I attended a forum in NYC, organized by the Labor Research Association, on "The Immigration Debate: Now What for Labor?"
Good talks were given by Eliseo Medino from Change to Win, and Ana Avendaño from the AFL-CIO.
But the presentation I found most interesting was by Simon Rosenberg of NDN, which bills itself as a progressive think tank and advocacy organization.
In a nutshell, Rosenberg's argument is that the uniformly anti-immigrant pronouncements of the GOP candidates are going to absolutely scuttle their chances of winning the presidency. Bush "won" partly by garnering 38-40% of the Hispanic vote, which he was able to do by assiduously cultivating the Spanish language media (and saying different things there from what he said to his Anglo supporters). Since the GOP has so uniformly fled from any form of road to legalization, Latinos have fled from the GOP. Ironically, immigration is not one of the top issues for the American public in general; it is, however one of the top issues for Latinos. Rosenberg analyzes how the electoral college vote would be different if Latino support for Republicans is at about the level it is today rather than what it was in '04. It's a pretty interesting -- and hopeful-- analysis.
The whole presentation can be downloaded in pdf form from the NDN site. It's worth a look.
A corollary of this argument is that immigration CANNOT be used as a wedge issue by the Republicans. It is just too dangerous for them, since they are they ultimately need all the undocumented workers in this country. In fact, not only Rosenberg but most if not all the other speakers agreed that immigration cannot be this year's gay marriage.
However, it is hard not to notice that the Republicans do not seem to have figured this lesson out. They are, of course, all using immigration as a wedge issue.
Stupidity or death wish? I can only hope it's both.
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This is an interesting line of argument. It relies on the California experience. It might not hold as strongly in a lot of other states, though. What happened in California was the mass movement to citizenship of many immigrants who previously had been legally documented but were not citizens. That added a lot of new voters who hated the GOP because of governor Pete Wilson's behavior. Many states do not have anything near comparable numbers of people to be nudged into becomoing citizens by these attacks. So, the dynamics may play out differently, at least in the short run. On the other hand, I'm quite confident that IN THE LONG RUN, this was boomerang on the Republicans because of how it alienates Latinos, but that may not necessarily be the largest short-run impact. The history of our country is full of examples of short term popularity for nativism and xenophobia that then turns the other way. Sometimes it got "no nothings" and others elected, although usually for very short periods. Unfortunately, a lot of short term reaction to the issue has been vicious.
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