Blame Pedro

An ugly fit of immigrant-bashing has taken hold of the GOP, and Democrats are poised to reap the benefits

TIM DICKINSON

Posted Feb 07, 2008 11:00 AM

Back in 2005, when Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee fought against an "un-American" and "race-baiting" proposal to deny undocumented workers access to health care and other government services, he declared that the bill "inflames those who are racists and bigots and makes them think there's a real problem." Impugning the piety of the bill's state-senator sponsor — like the governor, a Baptist preacher — Huckabee quipped, "I drink a different kind of Jesus juice."

That was then. Today — with the nation bogged down in a disastrous war, oil prices at $100 a barrel, climate change cooking the planet and the economy veering into recession — the geniuses vying to lead the Republican Party have decided what's really wrong with America: Mexicans. Even the Rev. Huckabee is chugging the GOP's nativist Kool-Aid: In December, the same man who two years ago called on America to "be a place that opens its arms, opens its heart, opens its spirit to people who come because they want the best for their families" unveiled his "Secure America Plan," which would target 12 million of these good folks for mass deportation 120 days into his first term.

The immigrant-bashing had the desired effect, winning Huckabee the coveted endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, leader of the Minuteman Project border vigilantes. Gilchrist — who, in a nod toward moderation, clarified to Rolling Stone that his group does not believe that undocumented workers ought to be "mowed down with machine guns at the border" — has high praise for Huckabee's plan. "It appeared to me that I had written it myself," he says. "It was that strong."

Exploiting the spasm of xenophobia that has taken hold of the GOP base helped Huckabee win Iowa — where entrance polls found illegal immigration the primary issue among the party's voters. But top Republican strategists are petrified that pandering to a narrow band of nativists will ruin the GOP's future with the nation's fastest-growing bloc of voters. This November, Hispanic turnout is expected to jump by fifty percent over 2000, with more than 9 million Latinos predicted to cast ballots. "I have never seen an issue where the short-term interests of Republican presidential candidates in the primaries were more starkly at odds with the long-term interests of the party itself," Michael Gerson, former White House senior policy adviser, wrote recently.

Grover Norquist, a top ally of Karl Rove, believes that the "vicious" rhetoric by GOP candidates could prompt Hispanics to flee "in droves" to the Democrats. "Talking about a strong border is one thing," Norquist says. "It's when you get into enforcing the law — which means deport — that you lose people's votes. Oddly enough, people resent the idea that you might throw their mother out of the country."

Other strategists are even more alarmed. "This issue is destroying the Republican Party of the West and Southwest — annihilating it wholesale," says Richard Nadler, president of the archconservative think tank Americas Majority. A study of precinct-level data released by Nadler's group projects that a full-scale backlash among Hispanic voters would drive formerly red Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida and Iowa into the blue column in November — and with them, the presidency.

Democrats, meanwhile, can hardly believe their luck. They predict that a swell of Hispanic support could even tip Arizona their way — and that the party's chances grow stronger with every mile of border fence pledged by the Republicans. "We've seen this movie before," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the Democratic think tank NDN. "It's Pete Wilson. Here was a Republican governor of California in the 1990s who lashed out at immigrants and made a state that had produced Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan irrevocably blue, because of the huge demographic tide that went against the party."

Looking at the same trend, Norquist points to an even more dire precedent: In 1884, the GOP attacked Democrats as the party of Romanism. "It cost them the Roman Catholic vote for 110 years," he says. "So it is entirely possible for a political party to be that stupid. It is my hope that it is not possible for a party to be that stupid twice."

THE REPUBLICANS' XENOPHOBIA hit a fever pitch in recent weeks. When Mitt Romney unveiled the first GOP attack ad of the season, he hit Huckabee for being soft on illegal aliens and picked up the endorsement of Tom Tancredo, the immigrant-basher whose TV spots demonized illegal border crossers as gangbangers, child rapists and backpack bombers. Even Rudy Giuliani — praised by immigrant advocates as "a god" for championing the cause of undocumented workers as mayor of New York — joined in the act, blasting Romney for employing Guatemalan gardeners and calling for Big Brother biometric data collection on every immigrant in the country. John McCain — whose support of immigration reform devastated his candidacy last summer — now says he "got the message" and speaks only about securing the border. So perverse has the debate become that Ron Paul — whose entire campaign is premised on restoring the letter of the Constitution — has proposed rewriting that sacred text in order to prevent the children of immigrants from receiving health insurance and welfare.

The party's eagerness to demonize Latinos is puzzling in light of the president's remarkable success at luring them into the GOP fold. "Bush did a great job making inroads with the Hispanic vote," says Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). "It's obvious that Republican support is eroding with all of this immigrant-bashing."

In 2000, Karl Rove understood that the GOP could not remain a viable national party unless it improved its standing among Hispanics. Embarking on an unprecedented outreach project, he peeled off Latinos by appealing to them with a "values agenda" that focused on family and faith. In short order, Bush carved out a thirty-five percent share of the Latino vote — up from the pitiful twenty-one percent who had supported Bob Dole four years earlier.

In 2004, Bush built on that support, garnering forty percent of the Hispanic vote. "The Bush campaign certainly understood this strategic opening," says Rosenberg. "The Kerry campaign didn't — and it may have cost him the election."

But after the election, red-meat commentators like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh needed a new scapegoat. "Right-wing radio couldn't harp on the Democrats about the war or anything else because the GOP was basically in charge of every branch of government," says Joe García, director of Hispanic strategy at NDN. "So they turned the resentment of white Americans to this new 'threat.' It's not your fault you're fucked economically, it's not the president's fault — so it must be Pedro's fault."

"I blame the Bush administration for not giving talk-show hosts something else to talk about," says Norquist. "They got everybody riled up on this." By 2005, the House passed HR 4437, which would have made felons not only of the nation's undocumented immigrants but of those who clothed and housed them — in short, their legal relatives. The bill stalled in the Senate, but not before unleashing the anger of Hispanic Americans, who staged massive protests — including marches by 500,000 demonstrators in Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas.

THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES treat immigration as if it were 2008's answer to gay marriage: a wedge issue to knock independents and conservative Democrats into the Republican column. But while sixty-three percent of Americans opposed gay marriage in 2004, sixty percent favor comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship. And while immigrant-bashing drives Hispanics away from the GOP, it doesn't boost turnout among white voters. "Find me in America somebody who wasn't planning on voting for the Republicans who will now vote for the Republicans because they're more aggressive on immigration," says Norquist. "There isn't such a person. It's not that there aren't a lot of them. There isn't one!"

The 2006 election proved his point. In congressional races from Arizona to Indiana, GOP candidates like J.D. Hayworth and John Hostettler ran on a deport-'em-all platform — and were roundly defeated. The party's numbers among Hispanics, meanwhile, slipped to thirty percent.

To staunch the bleeding, Bush loyalists installed Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida — himself a Cuban immigrant — as the head of the Republican National Committee. But he resigned less than a year later, apparently unable to stomach the nativist ads being crafted by the party's campaign committees. "It was sort of like having a black man running the Ku Klux Klan," says García. "He had to leave."

Today, GOP support among Latino voters is in full free fall. Only twenty-three percent of Hispanic voters now lean Republican, and more than half say the anti-immigrant campaign has had a negative impact on their lives.

"The die is cast," says Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, one of the nation's top immigrant-advocacy groups. "The Republican Party is doing to the nation what it did to California — turning it from purple to blue — because they've offended the fastest-growing group of new voters. It's only a matter of how far-reaching and how long it lasts. They are so fucked."

Yet despite such evidence, the Republican candidates continue to undercut one another in a race to the xenophobic bottom. At every event, says Norquist, the candidates "get further and further right — it's not even right, it's just further and further hostile — trying to outdo each other. They somehow think that by putting the word 'illegal' in front of immigrant, they've cleared themselves of any ethnocentric bigotry: 'Oh, I'm only against the illegal ones.' Ha."

That equation, experts say, misses the reality of most immigrants, whose families are a mix of citizens, permanent residents who want to become citizens and undocumented immigrants desperate to get legal status. "When the candidates say they're for legal but not illegal immigration," says Sharry, "what they're saying is 'We want to deport your brother. We want to deport your cousin. The child who came with you — but not the children who were born here — would have to go home.'"

GOP STRATEGISTS hope that the current xenophobic rhetoric will cool off after the primaries. "I think it will change after the nomination," says Norquist. "The candidates are reacting incorrectly to radio-talk-show hosts and a handful of columnists who mau-mau people."

But other political analysts aren't so sure. "The Republicans have shot themselves in the head on this thing," says Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank. "One in four Americans is going to be of Hispanic descent by 2050. One in four. Long-term, this has a quarter of Americans trending toward the Democratic coalition."

A coalition of leading Hispanic groups, which mobilized more than 1 million immigrants to apply for citizenship last year, has launched the largest Hispanic voter turnout drive in history. Democrats are also paying far greater attention to the Southwest, moving the Nevada caucus to January and holding the national convention in Denver.

"If you flip the Southwest, you're already over the edge," says Leyden. "You can win the presidency just with that" — even while losing traditional swing states like Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire or Florida. And given the wave of Hispanic discontent, Florida looks like an increasingly good bet for the Democrats. For the first time ever in a presidential race, non-Cuban Hispanics in the state are expected to outnumber Cubans at the polls. "Even Cuban Americans, who are very pro-immigrant, are deserting some Republicans over this issue," says Bill Richardson, the nation's first major Hispanic presidential candidate.

But despite the historic opening presented by the GOP's immigrant-bashing, Richardson doesn't think his own party really gets it. "Democrats are not capitalizing on an incredible opportunity to permanently put Hispanic votes in the Democratic column," he says. "Obama and Clinton voted for the wall, inexplicably. I don't see how you can talk about a sensible immigration policy having voted for the monstrosity of a wall. What's wrong with being for a fair legalization? It's not amnesty. It's not full citizenship. It's earned legalization."

Yet even without full-fledged support for immigrant rights, the Democrats would be hard-pressed to misplay the hand they've been dealt. "It's not out of the question to see Hispanic voters making up ten percent of the electorate and swinging seventy to thirty — or even seventy-five to twenty-five — Democratic," says Rosenberg. "And if that happens, the election is over."

[From Issue 1045 — February 7, 2008]