You don't even need a ladder! Click on image to see girls climb US-Mexico border fence in under 18 seconds. (Roy Germano, The Other Side of Immigration)
Five weeks ago
I wrote that immigration would be a problem for Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the GOP primary. And while he's had higher profile problems in the most pathetic campaign rollout since Fred Thompson in 2007, immigration is certainly
working against him.
Less than two months into Rick Perry's presidential candidacy, a record on illegal immigration that served him well politically as a border-state governor is proving a tough sell with voters looking toward Iowa's Republican caucuses this winter.
It came up unbidden in the crowd line of neighbors waiting recently for the Texas governor to drop by Uncle Nancy's Coffeehouse in Newton, the former corporate home of the washing-machine giant Maytag.
"I'm not sure I like Perry's approach to immigration," said Doug Ringger, a retired Maytag marketing man. "That concerns me a little bit — or a lot. I haven't heard him say we need to seal the borders." [...]
Though Iowa remains the sixth-whitest state in America, its Latino population has surged from 33,000 in 1990 to 152,000 last year, census figures show. Even in the absence of precise figures showing how many residents are undocumented, that cultural shift has helped turn illegal immigration into a key issue for Republican caucus voters, said Dennis Goldford, a politics professor at Drake University in Des Moines.
"That presence, particularly with regard to very small-town rural Republicans who tend to think the country they know is disappearing, this becomes a problem for them," Goldford said.
Yup. White Republicans are seeing more brown people around them and it's freaking them out. A nearly five-fold increase in Latinos in Iowa in just a generation is a startling number, and feeds into conservative paranoia. Just take a gander of this promotional snippet from MSNBC's Pat Buchanan new book:
--Chapter 4, “The End of White America”: “A rebellion is under way in America: a radicalization of the working and middle class, such as occurred in the Truman-McCarthy era, during the George Wallace campaigns, and in the anti-amnesty firestorm that killed the Bush-Kennedy-McCain push for a path to citizenship for illegal aliens. What all these movements had in common was populist rage against a reigning establishment. … Why the alienation of Middle America? … They sense that they are losing their country. And they are right.”
Perry is on the wrong side of the issue. He hasn't crusaded against a border fence, since apparently he's smart enough (just barely so) to grasp that billion-dollar fences can be bested by an $80 ladder, or none at all (see video at the top of this post). He signed a law allowing the innocent children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at state universities because, you know, that's better than having them roam the streets stealing shit. And he opposed Arizona's draconian SB 1070 because it would "turn law-enforcement officers into immigration officials," and they have more important things to worry about.
He's no liberal on immigration, but at least he's not hateful. But in this year's GOP primaries, that fails one of the key litmus tests: Conservatives must be hateful.
Yet Bill Salier, a farmer and former U.S. Senate candidate who has been outspoken on illegal immigration, said Perry faced an uphill task in winning over the caucus voters who cared most about the issue. Salier recalled that he and several like-minded Republicans were put off by Perry's statement at another Florida debate that the Texas tuition law was "sending a message to young people, regardless of what the sound of their last name is, that we believe in you."
"The left uses that lingo to hype people up," said Salier, who rejected the implication that race was a factor in opposition to illegal immigration. "That turned a lot of people off right there."
Believing in young kids? That's just unhateful liberal propaganda.
