Just a friendly reminder here folks. Trump may have turned the immigration debate into a national earthquake but nobody should have been surprised that the issue was going to be front and center for 2016. There was a very substantial warning tremor more than a year ago:
The Tea Party has proven it still packs a political punch in 2014, thanks to the debate over immigration reform.
In the most stunning upset so far of this midterm season, the second-highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives lost his party’s primary on Tuesday. Eric Cantor, the man seen as next-in-line to become House Speaker, was handily defeated by college professor Dave Brat.
It’s extraordinary for a congressional leader to lose his or her primary race and, in this case, one of the big reasons for the upset was the highly charged issue of immigration.
Cantor had previously supported a “Dream Act”-like proposal to provide a path to citizenship for children who were brought to the United States illegally. “One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents,” Cantor said in a speech a year ago. “It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home.”
In his long-shot campaign, Brat attacked Cantor on that stance. “Eric Cantor is saying we should bring more folks into the country, increase the labor supply – and by doing so, lower wage rates for the working person,” Brat charged.
To protect his right flank on immigration, Cantor sent out mailers saying he led the fight against President Obama’s “amnesty” — that is, comprehensive immigration reform that had passed the Senate a year ago.
But as Tuesday’s Virginia primary proved, that ultimately wasn’t enough.
That was from Mark Murray at NBC News.
Nobody wanted to admit at the time that the GOP was going over the cliff on an issue that is bound to damage them substantially for a long time to come, but they have been rushing for the edge for some time now.
For all the blabber about Trump being the avatar of “tell-it-like-it-is”, anti-Washington fervor, they really just love him for articulating their hatred for people who don’t look and sound like them. That’s what powers right wing populism, here and elsewhere. Sure they are against Big Gummint and bailouts etc. But mostly they just hate foreigners and African Americans taking things they don’t deserve.
Regular Republican elites are nervous about all this because they can see the demographic problem they face nationally if large numbers of young American Latinos come to identify as Democrats and see Republicans as their enemies. (Party ID tends not to change.) It wouldn’t last forever but it’s likely to be a problem for quite some time, particularly since Mexican and Central American migration is different than earlier waves of immigration. It’s always there.
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