Democratic zeal for immigration persists even though “immigration tends to harm those the Democratic Party traditionally has claimed to want to help the most, such as less-educated workers,” the Eagle Forum notes. Immigrants are “never going to live the American Dream” if successive immigration waves keep wages low, Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly argued. “Democrats only care about immigrants until they can vote,” Coulter concurred. No amount of otherwise necessary “bolder and more intensive outreach” to minorities, argued the report, can change the fact that “ethnic voting patterns…tend to endure for decades.” As George H. W. Bush’s 1988 seven-point Hispanic vote drop from Ronald Reagan’s 37% in 1984 following the 1986 illegal immigration amnesty shows, for example, current amnesty proposals are unlikely to sway Hispanic voters in particular. Even though the Department of Homeland Security estimates that illegal immigrants are at least three-fourths Hispanic, immigration has a low political priority among Hispanic voters in polls. Coulter noted that past Barack Obama advertisements hardly mentioned amnesty. Alternatively, a hardline immigration position also has little effect among Hispanics, as Mitt Romney won the same percentage in 2012 of their vote in California as he did nationwide (27), irrespective of the legacy of the state’s oft-maligned Proposition 187. Amnesty, meanwhile, would be “disastrous” for a key Republican base, “working-class white voters with less than a college education,” a voting bloc much larger than immigrant communities. Between four and six million of these voters stayed home in 2012 compared to 2004. The Eagle Forum notes “general agreement” that low-skilled immigration “reduces wages for the least-educated American workers.” Given a recent “massive decline in work” and “very little wage growth” for the past 13 years, Camarota judged that “only in Congress is there a labor shortage.” The Senate with S.744 has “voted to declare war on the American worker,” Rosemary Jenks of the immigration restriction advocacy group Numbers USA stated at NSAS. Thus supporting amnesty “will only reinforce the perception that Republicans care only about business interests and the rich,” the report noted. Immigration reduction advocacy, though, “can turn the tables on the Left” as “serving the interests of businesses” with cheap immigrant labor. The report advocating limiting family immigration to spouses and minor children as opposed to what Eagle Forum’s Glyn Wright called at the CPAC panel a current “immigration system…of essentially no limits.” Acceptance of immigration changing America “isn’t a natural process,” Coulter argued, any more than a rapist saying to a woman “sorry, my penis is inside of you, there is nothing you can do about it.” Slowing immigration now would allow immigrants to slowly assimilate and become amenable to conservative messages while conservative, religious Americans increased their numbers through birthrates. Otherwise “Republicans are fools” to support measures such as amnesty entailing “suicide” for their party, Schlafly warned. The Republican Party “can either change its position on legal immigration or it can change its position on almost every other issue,” according to the Eagle Forum report.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 16:53:48 +0000
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