In the short term Republican's may have much to gain from whipping up an anti-immigration hysteria among the uglier pockets of their base voters. Midterm elections, as we saw in CA-50, are all about turn-out. And the GOP is focused like a laser beam right now on retaining their slim hold on the House and Senate. They may succeed this time around. But longer term, according to demographic data I will show below the fold, they will almost certainly pay a very steep price for this short term wedge.
Tom Wolfe, in his great book about the space program The Right Stuff, popularized a number of phrases including the overused "pushing the envelope." That was what test pilots called the edge of high altitude flight performance. Another phrase Wolfe introduced readers to was the euphemistic phrase early NASA astronauts used for the act of using the
panic button that would blow the doors off the capsule after splashdown if you could not wait to be rescued: screwing the pooch. Yes, the button worked to insure you got out of the capsule before drowning--but then the capsule would sink, NASA would be unable to reuse it, and your career would be over. Right now on immigration the GOP is screwing the pooch.
Here's how: According to this Associated Press report in 2005 the Department of Homeland Security approved 600,366 naturalization applications. In 2006 the number is on track to total 685,000. The trend's rise corresponds to the rising interest in citizenship.
The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics estimates that in 2004 there were about 8 million residents in the United States who had completed residency and other requirements and are eligible to apply for citizenship.
Requirements include being at least 18 and a permanent legal resident for at least five years.
If these numbers for approved applications are near average for every year since 2004 then it seems reasonable to conclude that between 2 million and 3 million new citizens will have been added to the pool of eligible voters by the 2008 presidential election (ie: since the last election). If the rate of increase stays the same then the implications for 2012 and beyond are even more dramatic. Plus, these numbers only refer to naturalized citizens. They do not include the many children of immigrants who are born on US soil, and as such are automatically US citizens. Every year a certain percentage of these children turn 18 and are also added to the overall pool of eligable voters, regardless of the status of their parents.
Smart Republican strategists such as Matthew Dowd understand this data and have warned their party about the inexorable nature of this change. Luckily for us Democrats, Dowd is not being listened to. Instead, the armed and ski-masked Minutemen and the harsh voices of Talk Radio are running the GOP show.
But it is not just the growth through immigration that matters. The much larger factor is family growth by Hispanic Americans who are already citizens, have been so for many years, and are already assimilated. This group is having larger families on average than other groups in the US. Here is conservative columnist George Will on the cost of the GOP's new interest in immigration politics:
The cost of this, paid in the coin of lost support among Latinos, the nation's largest and fastest growing minority, may be reckoned later, for years. Remember this: Out West, feelings of all sorts about immigration policy are particularly intense, and if John Kerry had won a total of 127,014 more votes in New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, states with burgeoning Latino populations, he would have carried those states and won the election. But for now, the minds of Republican candidates are concentrated on a shorter time horizon -- the next four and a half months.
If you were a smart Democratic stretegist (I know, they seem to be missing these days) you would do the following:
1. Keep a detailed database of all the harshest rhetoric from the right on immigration--and keep it available for spanish language television, radio, email, and direct mail campaigns.
2. Keep a video archive of the most mean spitited anti-immigration rallies. Use this video to tar the GOP with the xenophobic label.
3. Craft a message on this issue that is optimistic and plays to the American spirit of hard work and opportunity.
4. Use the harshness of the anti-immigration hysteria not only to make clear to Hispanic Americans that the Democratic party is their natural home, but to open the eyes of moderate non-Hispanic suburban swing voters to the uglier side of the GOP base. Moderate suburban swing voters recoil at anything that smacks of xenophbia or racism.
Longer term, if Democrats get strategic and play this issue correctly, the GOP could end up at a serious electoral disadvantage. Plus, it has the added advantage of being the right position from a moral and ethical standpoint. How many winning plays can you say that about?
Get to work DNC!