Too Late
by David Atkins
Republicans are starting to get scared that their whole “hate Latinos” shtick might hurt them in the future:
While the Republican presidential campaign trail bristles with talk of moats, militarization and electrified fences when it comes to illegal immigration, the view among some Congressional Republicans has become more nuanced and measured.
Now many Republican freshmen, lacking the scar tissue of previous Congressional attempts to make sweeping changes in immigration law, are advocating that policy be changed in small, bite-size pieces that could help bring order to the system and redefine their party’s increasingly anti-immigration image, even as they maintain a strong push for better federal border security.
The move comes as some leading Republican voices are warning that the view of their party among Hispanics is doing significant political damage and causing economic disruption.
“It does cause me a great deal of concern,” said Mark Shurtleff, the Republican attorney general of Utah, where the Republican-controlled Legislature recently passed a law to give some protections to illegal workers who find employment in the state. “The rhetoric I hear from the Republican candidates, and that state legislatures that are passing enforcement-only provisions, are both damaging the economy. We ought not to be doing things to hurt the economy right now, and I think this hurts us politically.”
In addition to worrying that Hispanics are turning away from their party, some Republicans feel the heat from local employers, who need immigrant labor to fill jobs they have repeatedly been unable to fill with American workers. Others still worry about the drain of American-trained math and science students back to their home countries, where they will compete with Americans in building businesses.
“We Republicans are hearing more and more from businesses and the agricultural communities that this system isn’t working,” said Representative Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho. “The subtle difference that I see right now is that more and more Republicans are saying that, yes, we need border enforcement, but we also need to create a guest-worker program that works at the same time.”
Nice try, fellas. Too late. Some sort of immigration reform will happen, of course: big business interests and progressives alike want it to. But that’s not the point.
The notion that one should do everything one can to win in the short term with no thought for the morrow is central to the conservative free market mentality in both business and politics. But for the “Greenspan Put,” almost all of Wall Street would be out of business right now due to short-sighted bets. The idea that we can invade other countries at will and worry about blowback later is a short-sighted bet. The notion that big business can ignore climate change today and just deal with the effects later is a shortsighted bet being proven wrong even today as the Thai floods disrupt industrial supply chains. The idea that a country can run up massive income inequality and massive deficits through tax cuts on the rich while imposing austerity, without fostering revolutionary sentiment, is a short-sighted bet that elites have come to rue time and again.
During much of the latter half of the 20th Century, Republicans made a short-sighted bet: they would take all the racists who hated the Civil Rights Movement, all the homophobes, all the misogynists, etc., and worry about dealing with the blacks, the gays, the feminist hussies, etc. later. Then later on they would repair the damage by paying lip service.
Sarah Palin didn’t fool women. Herman Cain, like Alan Keyes before him, isn’t fooling African-Americans. No matter how hard the Tea Party tries to appropriate the imagery of Martin Luther King, Jr., no one is fooled about who they really are. The Log Cabin Republicans aren’t fooling the LGBT community.
And Marco Rubio and his guest worker program won’t fool Latinos, either. Groups that have suffered discrimination have long memories, and they know better than anyone who has been an ally and who hasn’t.
Republicans have been political grasshoppers, eating up all the older white suburban and rural voters as fast as they could, using whatever tactics it took to get them agitated. But their demographic winter is coming. And unlike Wall Street, there won’t be anyone politically able to bail them out. As Meg Whitman found out in California, all the money in the world can’t buy you love from people who know exactly where your heart is.
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