Immigration

Why immigration won’t go away in 2012

The crackdown in the states hits hardest among the Hispanic voters who are key to his reelection hopes

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Why immigration won't go away in 2012Protesters against Arizona's anti-immigration law SB 1070 lie on a street with their hands linked together. (Credit: Fred Prouser / Reuters)

According to the chattering classes, 2012 was supposed to be the election year when the “culture wars” of recent decades faded into unimportant skirmishes, as candidates and voters alike focused exclusively on economic and fiscal issues. But at least one culture war issue, immigration, has already shaken up the Republican presidential contest and is key to Barack Obama’s success in winning the Hispanic votes he desperately needs to get reelected.  With Congress missing in action, it is the battle over punitive new state immigration laws, in the legislatures and in the courts, that keeps this issue in the national spotlight.

The enduring potency of the immigration issue has been apparent since Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 in April of 2010. The measure signaled the intention of conservatives at the state and local levels to protest what they considered lax federal enforcement of immigration laws by inducting regular police officers into the unaccustomed role of harassing, detecting and arresting people without citizenship documents.  Though portions of the law were immediately struck down by lower federal courts, the measure became a litmus test issue in 2010 congressional and gubernatorial contests around the country, particularly among Republicans.

Copycat legislation was introduced in a host of states, with Utah, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Alabama enacting harsher laws and experiencing mixed results in court challenges. Alabama’s 2011 law, which goes well beyond the Arizona template by seeking to use school officials to identify “illegals,” has attracted national attention by spurring an exodus of undocumented people from the state and damaging the state’s agriculture industry as unharvested crops rot in the fields (as is also occurring in Georgia).

Until the federal courts sort out the various lawsuits and begin to define a permissible state role in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, the furor will mainly serve to keep pressure on Republican politicians to display their “toughness” on the issue. It will also draw fresh attention to the collapse of Bush-era efforts to enact comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented people already in the country.

In the crossfire of this controversy are Hispanic Americans, who are alternating between fearful rejection of Republican anti-immigrant rhetoric and deep frustration at the failure of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party to promote comprehensive reform.

The firestorm set off by Arizona showed that the grass-roots conservative rejection of prior Republican support for a “path to citizenship” — known simply and bitterly as “amnesty” on the right — associated with both George W. Bush and Arizona’s own John McCain, has if anything intensified despite the recession, the drop-off in the number of illegals entering the country and stepped-up federal enforcement measures.

If there was any doubt that comprehensive immigration reform had joined other elements of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” on the dustbin of political history, it should have been laid to rest by the recent experience of one-time GOP presidential front-runner Rick Perry of Texas. Perry’s support for what was once a non-controversial program that enabled undocumented immigrant children graduating from Texas high schools to obtain in-state tuition rates at public colleges destroyed much of his base of support among conservative voters.  The fact that Perry’s  attempt at a comeback began with a harsh attack on Mitt Romney’s alleged employment of undocumented workers in a landscaping project at his own home shows the Texan’s tardy understanding that the immigration issue was his most important albatross.

This passion play over immigration on the right is occurring in a larger context where Republican efforts to deny Barack Obama reelection may well depend on the size and direction of the Hispanic vote.  According to exit polls, Obama won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008, and a record turnout among Hispanics lifted them to 9 percent of the electorate.  As is usually the case, the Hispanic share of the midterm electorate dropped significantly, to 6.9 percent in 2010, with the Democratic share dropping to 60 percent.   A return to something approaching 2008 levels in both turnout and support levels could be crucial to Obama’s prospects in 2012.

But early measures of Hispanic enthusiasm for voting in 2012 are down significantly. Obama’s job approval rating among Hispanics (according to the latest Gallup weekly tracking poll) is at an anemic 49 percent, not much above Obama’s overall rating of 42 percent  Certainly the intensity of support for Obama has declined along with the approval ratings. A recent Latino Decisions survey showed the percentage of Hispanics “strongly approving” of Obama dropping from 41 to 28 percent just between June and August of this year.

With the unemployment rate for Hispanics standing about 2 percentage points above the level for the population at large (with home foreclosure rates a lot higher), some of the unhappiness simply represents the same economic factors that have drained Obama’s support in all elements of the electorate. But aside from the administration’s failure to revive comprehensive immigration reform legislation, its policy of stepped-up enforcement — nearly 400,000 undocumented immigrants were deported in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 — has drawn fire from Hispanic political activists.

The Justice Department’s recent interventions in support of legal challenges to the new state immigration enforcement laws provide an important point for Democrats seeking to buttress Hispanic support heading into 2012, but at the cost of some political peril in the broader electorate.  Polls taken last year in the wake of publicity over Arizona’s law consistently showed comfortable majorities supporting Arizona’s efforts, along with eroding support for “path to citizenship” initiatives.

More recent negative publicity from states like Alabama about panicked families fleeing their homes, struggling legal Hispanic businesses, and wasted crops are likely to undermine general support for more aggressive anti-immigrant measures, while raising Hispanic ire toward the (almost universally) Republican politicians promoting this legislation. Add in the Republican presidential candidate debates featuring competing and ever-escalating attacks on anyone who would defend undocumented workers or offer their children any benefits, and it’s no surprise that flagging Hispanic support for Obama has yet to benefit Republicans.

Even Rick Perry, who has suffered mightily for his relatively moderate position on immigration, registered only a 37 percent approval rating from Texas Hispanics in a recent survey (as compared with a 49 percent disapproval rating).  Since the usual benchmark for the percentage of Hispanic voters needed by a Republican to win a presidential election is 40 percent, that is hardly a comforting sign for the GOP.

One thing is certain. The slow but steady progress through the federal courts of lawsuits involving state immigration laws (federal appellate courts have already issued conflicting decisions involving the Arizona and Alabama laws) will continue as the 2012 election cycle intensifies, possibly concluding with a landmark Supreme Court decision.  As conservative Republican primary voters beg for anti-immigrant rhetoric from their candidates, and the Hispanic vote begins to take form in the swing states of the general election, we are likely to learn that reports of the demise of cultural issues in 2012 were wildly premature.

Ed Kilgore is the managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and an online columnist for The New Republic.

Florida purging voter rolls

Governor Rick Scott moves forward with a plan to disqualify thousands of mostly Hispanic and Democratic voters

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Florida purging voter rollsRick Scott (Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid)

Hated Florida Governor Rick Scott has a great idea: A big, massive purge of the state’s voter roll right before a sure-to-be-close presidential election. The governor ordered his secretary of state to compile a list of registered voters who might not be citizens, based on an unreliable and out-of-date state motor vehicle administration database. The secretary of state made a list and then realized the list was not actually very useful or accurate. Then he resigned, and now Scott is just purging away.

Some people (communists) have noted that the timing of this big voter roll purge is a bit suspect and that it’s also weird that the vast majority of people on the list are Hispanics who are registered Democrats or independents. But as hero-senator Marco Rubio said recently of voter ID laws, “What’s the big deal?” Hundreds of the 1,638 people flagged as ineligible in Miami-Dade County have already offered proof of citizenship, so the system works. Let’s assume the 1,200 people who haven’t responded to the letter are all definitely not qualified.

(If I were an illegal immigrant, do you know what I would definitely not ever try to do? Vote! When you’re evading detection by the government, registering to vote and then casting a ballot — and in the process committing a felony — seems like asking for trouble.)

As must always be pointed out when writing about these sorts of things, there is no voter fraud epidemic. At all. Where there is genuinely illegal voting, it tends to be accidental or so small-scale as to present no challenge to the legitimacy of an election. The liberal position on election security is something like, “Better to let a couple of isolated instances of fraudulent or improper voting happen than to preemptively disenfranchise hundreds or even thousands of perfectly legal voters.” The conservative position tends to be, “We mustn’t let the Mexicans steal the election for the nanny state socialists ACORN ACORN BILL AYERS ACORN.”

Here’s the Tampa Bay Times with more on Florida’s war on (certain people) voting:

This is part of a pattern. Republicans actively gin up voter fraud claims to justify turning voting into an obstacle course to dissuade Democratic-leaning constituencies. It’s what happened in Florida last year when the Legislature used voter fraud as an excuse to cut early voting days and make it harder for renters and college students to vote a regular ballot. The most disgraceful part of the law imposes steep penalties and fines on groups conducting voter registration drives that fail to meet burdensome bureaucratic rules and turn forms in within 48 hours, causing the League of Women Voters to cancel its drive.

But if we let renters vote, why would anyone buy a house? Then how would we save the economy?

Don’t worry, though, it will still be very easy for… certain other kinds of people to cast votes:

Meanwhile, there was no attempt by the Florida Legislature to tighten rules for absentee voting, which is probably the easiest way to produce a fraudulent ballot since there is no way of knowing who fills it out. Maybe this lack of interest stemmed from the fact that absentee voters tend to lean Republican, while early voters typically lean Democrat.

Well. Now that I know how easy it is to absentee vote in Florida, I am off to commit some voter fraud with my illegal immigrant friends. Next stop, Sharia!

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Will Latinos elect Obama?

Hispanic voters may not be as decisive a voting bloc as everyone assumes. Just look at the swing states

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Will Latinos elect Obama?(Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong)

The conventional wisdom is that the growing Latino vote is key to President Obama’s reelection prospects. By all accounts, Latinos favor the president over Mitt Romney by wider margins than they favored him over John McCain in 2008, when he won two-thirds of the Hispanic vote and captured crucial swing states with large Hispanic populations, including Colorado, Nevada and Florida. Bloomberg reported this week that lower-than-average unemployment in the key battleground states “coupled with the growth of adult minority populations in those states create a higher bar” for Romney in his quest to oust the incumbent.

But a closer look at the numbers is not so reassuring for the president. Much of the growth in the Latino population has occurred in California, Texas, Illinois and New York, which are not likely to be competitive come Election Day. While the Latino population is growing fast, the Latino electorate is not. Compared to other ethnic/racial groups, Latinos are more likely than whites to be under 18 years of age or to be non-citizens. “For every 100 Hispanic residents in the United States, only 44 are eligible voters aged 18 and over and U.S. citizens,” notes William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. “In contrast, 78 of every 100 white residents are able to vote.”

Frey has argued that “minorities will decide” the 2012 election, but he acknowledged in a telephone interview that Latinos, as a group, do not loom large in most of the dozen battleground states. According to his analysis of 2008 and 2012 census data, Latinos comprise less than 2 percent of the voting population in Ohio and Virginia. In North Carolina, New Hampshire and Iowa, they comprise 3 percent or less of the electorate. In Wisconsin, they comprise 3.1 percent of voters, down from 3.7 percent in 2008.  Even if Obama won an additional 10 percent of the Latino electorate in these states over what he did against McCain, the increase would be smaller than his margin of victory in 2008 in every case.

That leaves Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, where the Latino vote appears to be large enough to be decisive in a close race. The good news for Obama is that many of those states could make the difference between winning and losing the White House. The bad news is that the outlook is distinctly less favorable to a more decisive Latino role than 2008.

As Frey has noted:

Minorities mattered in 2008 for three reasons: first, their relative sizes compared with whites increased in each state; second, their enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate was greater than in 2004; and third, white support for the Republican candidate (John McCain) waned in comparison to the previous election.

None of those factors appear to hold true in Florida. Latinos comprise about 15 percent of the state’s voters, unchanged from 2008. While a Gallup swing state poll earlier this month found Democrats are more enthusiastic about the president than Republicans are about Romney, they are also less enthusiastic about Obama’s candidacy now than they were in 2008, especially minority voters. As Real Clear Politics  has noted:

Enthusiasm among non-white voters is down from 74 percent at this point in 2008 (vs. 58 percent for whites) to 48 percent today (the same goes for whites). And, indeed, in 2010, African-American turnout reverted to the mean. If this occurs in 2012, Democrats will need a massive surge in the minority population elsewhere to make up for this regression.

The most likely place for this to occur is within the Latino community. That population grew smartly over the 2000s. But — much less remarked upon — the Latino electorate did not. Indeed, since 2004, it has been almost perfectly flat, and it contributed only marginally to the decline of the white vote from 2004 to 2008.

Only in the three swing states of the Southwest — New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado — does the Latino vote seem big enough to be decisive. In New Mexico, Latinos are 38 percent of the electorate, down slightly from 2008. In Nevada, Latinos are now 17.3 percent of all voters, up from 13.3 percent from four years ago. And in Colorado, Latinos are now 12.1 percent of all voters, up from 11.3 percent in 2008.  Only in these states does the combination of the size and growth of the Latino electorate and Obama’s edge on Romney appear capable of giving him a margin of victory he might otherwise lack. In the rest of the swing states, he’s going to need something else.

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Jefferson Morley

Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday).

Rep. Steve King: Immigrants are like dogs

Updated: On Monday, the Iowa GOP rep used a degrading metaphor to describe how America should select immigrants

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Rep. Steve King: Immigrants are like dogsSteve King (Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing)

[Updated below]

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs at a town hall meeting yesterday, telling constituents that the U.S. should pick only the best immigrants the way one chooses the “pick of the litter.”

King told the crowd in Pocahontas, Iowa, that he’s owned lots of bird dogs over the years and advised, “You want a good bird dog? You want one that’s going to be aggressive? Pick the one that’s the friskiest … not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.”

King suggested lazy immigrants should be avoided as well. “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.” The liberal research group American Bridge captured the comments:

King has long been one of Congress’ most vociferous and toxic opponents of illegal immigration and “amnesty,” often partnering with notorious immigration hawks like former congressman Tom Tancredo and Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In 2010, he took to the House floor to declare that he could detect “illegals” by their footwear and his “sixth sense.”

Lately, however, King has backed off his inflammatory rhetoric, thanks to a tough challenge from Democrat Christie Vilsack. His bird dog comments suggest, however, that his mouth will continue to dog him.

Update: In a statement, Vilsack’s campaign said, “If we’re going to have a real discussion on immigration, we should start by acknowledging that immigrants are human beings. Iowans are taught in their community, in their church, and at the dinner table to respect each other, not to compare people to dogs. People expect a serious discussion between candidates and that’s what we’re committed to.”

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Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

Mitt’s new Latino hurdle

The conservative Hispanic group Romney will address this week once slammed "right-wing extremists" on immigration

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Mitt's new Latino hurdleMitt Romney (Credit: AP)

As part of an effort to win back Latino voters, Mitt Romney will address a conservative Latino business group this week that has advocated immigration policy views in stark contrast to his own. Romney’s “self-deportation” policy put him well to the right of many of his GOP primary challengers, and the Latino Coalition once slammed “right-wing extremists” who opposed comprehensive immigration reform.

The presumed GOP nominee’s Wednesday speech to the Latino Coalition comes as polls show Romney way behind President Obama among Latino voters and with little hope of capturing the 44 percent of the bloc George W. Bush won in 2004, a highwater mark for the GOP.  Even New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) — whom Romney floated as a potential vice-presidential choice — mocked the presumed GOP’s immigration policy last week.

The Romney campaign’s response has been that immigration is irrelevant to winning over Latino voters — jobs and the economy are the only things that matter. But his speech this week underscores just how difficult an argument that will be for him to make: In the past, the Latino Coalition has argued that immigration reform is part of a pro-business platform, not separate from it.

These days, the only immigration issue the Coalition mentions on its website is the “Mexican Trucking issue.” But the group aggressively advocated for comprehensive immigration reform under President Bush. In 2007, the Coalition’s president slammed “far right extremists” who opposed “common-sense [immigration reform] legislation that is so important for the security and economic vitality of our country.” The group “urge[d] Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Democratic leadership in the House to demonstrate courage and leadership on this issue and take on immigration reform,” saying Pelosi could pass a bill “without the level of Republican support she is demanding.”

In the 2008 GOP primary, the Latino Coalition favored Rudy Giuliani — a veritable leftist on immigration reform compared to most Republicans — with the former New York mayor capturing 64 percent of the vote in a straw poll of the group’s members. Romney apparently finished behind Sen. John McCain and former Sen. Fred Thompson, as his name was not mentioned in the statement.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce, whose grand D.C. offices will host the event Wednesday, also supported comprehensive reform under Bush, similarly seeing it as a boon for free market capitalism. The powerful business lobby still calls for “an effective and streamlined temporary worker program so that employers can hire immigrant workers” and “a pathway to legal status for undocumented workers currently in the United States.”

This was essentially Bush’s policy too. But Romney’s infamous immigration advisor, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who authored the draconian anti-immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, said his candidate would not support any kind of pathway to legalization for undocumented immigrants.

The Romney campaign briefly attempted to disown Kobach after Romney won the primary and the advisor’s utility was spent, but he may have to throw his entire immigration policy under the bus with Kobach if he hopes to win over the Latino business owners on Wednesday, let alone Hispanic voters more generally.

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Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

Obama’s broken immigration promise

ICE said it would target dangerous immigrants, but it's actually deporting a higher percentage of non-criminals

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Obama's broken immigration promiseA man in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, stands next to the border fence as two U.S. law enforcement officers look on from the U.S. side of the fence. (Credit: AP/Raymundo Ruiz)

The Obama administration claims that it is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants while focusing on those with criminal records. But new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows that the number of deportation orders has declined dramatically since last summer and non-criminals comprise a growing percentage of those expelled from the country.

That wasn’t supposed to happen under a policy of “prosecutorial discretion” announced by ICE director John Morton last June. The goal of the policy, announced with much fanfare in the Spanish language media, was to spare “longtime lawful residents” from deportation and to focus on criminals.

Since then, the adminstration has deported many fewer non-criminal aliens. But non-criminals remain the vast majority of those deported. And those with no criminal record now actually comprise a slightly larger percentage of those forced to leave the country than they did before Morton’s announcement.

In the three months before the policy was announced last summer ICE filed for deportation proceedings against 61,192 people of whom 15 percent had criminal records. In the first three months of 2012, ICE sought 37,659 deportations orders, 14 percent of which involved people with criminal records.

“The agency continues to be headed in the opposite direction of its stated goals,” said Susan Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which collected the data from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request.

The goal of prosecutorial discretion, Long said in a conference call with reporters, “was to target and bring before the court those with more serious criminal history. As yet we’re not seeing any change. They have not turned the ship around.”

The administration implemented prosecutorial discretion in response to complaints that young people with no criminal records continue to face deportation. But the new data will come as no surprise to student groups such as United We Dream, National Immigrant Youth Alliance and DreamActivist, which continue to highlight the cases of law-abiding young people facing deportation.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has championed the case of a South Carolina man, Gabino Sánchez, a married father of two, who was arrested for driving without a license last year and now faces deportation.

“Gabino Sánchez has lived and worked and raised a family here for more than a decade and it is not in anyone’s interest to have him deported,” Rep. Gutierrez told Fox News Latino on Tuesday after a deportation hearing in North Carolina.  ”I do not understand why ICE has not followed President Obama’s guidelines and decided to move on from this case to go after someone else, someone who is a threat to his community or a serious criminal.”

In response to the TRAC findings, Gutierrez  said, “The president should make sure the Department of Homeland Security is actually following its own rules and he should proclaim proudly and loudly that he will not deport another DREAMer or anyone else who fits the prosecutorial discretion criteria.”

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Jefferson Morley

Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday).

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