Why ever would people be alienated by attempts to separate their families?
New York Times headline:
Some in G.O.P. Fear That Their Hard-Liners Will Alienate Latino Voters
Gee, you think? One major quibble with the headline—and the worry itself—is that it's not so much a thing that might happen as a thing that has happened. Sure, Latino (and Asian-American) voters have other reasons to vote for Democrats or against Republicans, but the numbers strongly suggest that alienation has already happened. The question is whether and how much it will intensify.
A lot, if Reps. Steve King and Michele Bachmann and their ilk have their way. (And so far they have.) Bachmann decided not to run for re-election this year, so her time is limited to say things like "The social cost will be profound on the U.S. taxpayer—millions of unskilled, illiterate, foreign nationals coming into the United States who can’t speak the English language" while she's still a current Republican officeholder. But King will continue to be with us, and it's hard to dismiss him when, as the Times puts it, he is "once a fringe figure against immigration and now a voice of rising prominence." After all, the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill, but:
House Republican leaders have refused to consider that Senate bill, and the only immigration legislation they allowed to pass, sponsored by Mr. King, called for deporting Latino “Dreamers” who were temporarily spared the threat of deportation by Mr. Obama’s more limited executive order in 2012.
Luckily for Republicans, right now newspapers like the
Times and the
Washington Post seem inclined to balance anti-immigrant nastiness from people like King and Bachmann with as many quotes from Republicans fretting about how bad it makes their party look. But in the end, the legislative votes they hold and the prominence they allow voices like King's will tell the tale. And King's rising prominence and that vote on his deport-the-Dreamers bill tell you what you need to know.