Xenophobia and Latino support are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. Bush and Rove's efforts to court Latino voters -- which has met with some success --
appears finished as their party's anti-brown-people isolationist wing gains supremacy.
Why did they do it? Among the possible reasons:
- It's a popular crusade in U.S. border states, which are suffering from congested hospitals, roads and public schools because of the massive influx of Latin American migrants. Several fear-mongering media celebrities -- CNN's Lou Dobbs and radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh among them -- are building a following by raising the ''broken borders'' theme in their daily broadcasts.
- Some Republicans may want to use illegal immigration as a smoke screen to drive public attention away from the Iraq war fiasco, the Hurricane Katrina mishandlings and the corruption scandals around former Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, as we get closer to the 2006 and 2008 elections.
- Many Republicans, fearful of a debacle in upcoming elections, may want to use the Hispanic threat theme as a way to get disillusioned conservatives to the polls, much as they did with the gay marriage issue to increase turnout from churchgoers in 2004.
But pollsters warn that, even if these measures don't pass the Senate as expected, isolationist Republicans are playing with fire. Their crusade is likely to trigger an angry response from Hispanics, much like what happened when former California Gov. Pete Wilson lashed out against illegal immigrants in the mid-1990s.
''If the Republicans come across like they are just bashing immigrants, there is a potential for a strong negative reaction,'' says Roberto Suro, of the Pew Hispanic Center, which conducts some of the most comprehensive nationwide polls of Hispanics.
According to a recent Pew Center poll, about 80 percent of Latinos believe immigrants help strengthen the U.S. economy while 14 percent say they are a burden. While there is some support for anti-immigration measures among U.S-born Latinos, it tends to vanish when Hispanic voters smell racist motivations, other polls show.
As the author of this piece notes, the only way to stop mass undocumented immigration is to reduce the income disparities between the United States and Latin America. The money spent on bolstering border enforcement is essentially money flushed down the toilet. But if that money was used to aid in economic development south of the border, traffic across the border would slow to an insignificant trickle.
You want proof, look to Costa Rica. One of the most developed and economically prosperous nations in Latin America, Costa Ricans are almost non-existent in this country (compared to Mexicans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Dominicans). In fact, Costa Rica is trying to figure out how to deal with undocumented immigrants living within its borders from the rest of Latin America.
But despite any backlash from Latino voters, we can't underestimate the power of the immigration issue. It's a very salient one. And if the GOP has mastered one thing -- it's the ability to use fear and hate to drive their supporters to the polls. Their Southern strategy and the gay-bashing initiatives bear witness to the effectiveness of those efforts.