Ed Kilgore
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
Protesters 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.
November ballot is a death match for Ohio unions
Labor goes all out to repeal law gutting collective bargaining rights
Union supporter Tom Ullom, of Westerville, watches a broadcast of the Ohio House debate on Senate Bill 5 at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, March 30, 2011. (Credit: Matt Sullivan / Reuters) After fierce but inconclusive battles in Wisconsin, the great labor struggle of 2011 is now centered in that ultimate swing state of Ohio. A richly funded national right-wing effort to break the economic and political power of the labor movement in its Midwestern heartland is now facing a ballot test in a Nov. 8 referendum to affirm or overturn a union-busting law, known as Senate Bill 5.
As in Wisconsin and other states, conservatives in Ohio have focused their fire on public-sector unions, which are easy to identify with unpopular levels of government spending and taxation. But just as there is little doubt the assault on public-sector unions this year is part of a broader effort to weaken collective bargaining rights and undermine labor’s political strength, efforts to repeal Senate Bill 5 will depend on the solidarity of private-sector union members who are not directly affected by the legislation, but can see the handwriting on the wall.
Continue Reading CloseThe truth about voter suppression
The GOP is pushing restrictive voting legislation unlike anything since the Voting Rights Act of 1965
(Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer) The national trauma of the 2000 presidential election and its messy denouement in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court made, for a brief moment, election reform a cause célèbre. The scrutiny of election administration went far beyond the vote counting and recounting that dominated headlines. The Florida saga cast a harsh light on the whole country’s archaic and fragmented system of election administration, exemplified by a state where hundreds of thousands of citizens were disenfranchised by incompetent and malicious voter purges, Reconstruction-era felon voting bans, improper record-keeping, and deliberate deception and harassment.
Continue Reading CloseAn absurd, candidate-killing spectacle returns
The Iowa straw poll gave life to Pat Robertson, George W. Bush and Mike Huckabee -- and took it from Dan Quayle
Republican presidential hopeful Dan Quayle greets people at the Iowa State Fair while campaigning August 12 in Des Moines. Presidential hopefuls from both parties are criss-crossing Iowa campaigning before the annual Iowa Straw Poll on August 14.
JM/TB(Credit: © Reuters Photographer / Reuters) In the college town of Ames on Saturday, the American political calendar will once again intersect with the arcane folkways of Iowa, as the state GOP’s much-derided, much-anticipated presidential straw poll kills off a few candidacies and perhaps gives fresh life to others.
Held only in competitive presidential cycles, the straw poll began as a publicity stunt in 1979 (following the precedent of a Democratic straw poll that had been held in 1972 and 1975, but that was then discontinued), quickly became the Iowa GOP’s major fundraising event, and assumed gigantic proportions as the first formal test of the nominating process by the mid-1990s.
Continue Reading CloseThe hypocrisy of “states’ rights” conservatives
The 10th Amendment is sacred to the right -- except when it comes to fighting abortion and gay rights
Jonathan Paul Ganucheau, 24, left, and, Denise Buckbinder Ganucheau, 26, both of Dallas, Texas, have a religious wedding ceremony performed as part of a protest against same sex marriage During the last two weeks, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, by most accounts on the brink of a presidential candidacy, has reversed himself on the question of the proper venue for dealing with the two of the hoariest cultural issues in American politics, same-sex marriage and abortion.
First, at a Republican governors meeting on July 22, he referred to the recent decision by the New York legislature to legalize gay marriage as something that was “fine with me,” and said further: “That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.” But then, in a matter of days, he was performing what can only be described as a public act of penance on Christian right potentate Tony Perkins’ radio show, trumpeting his support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage nationally.
Continue Reading CloseThe Tea Party is bigger than the South
Movement conservatism's conquest of the GOP is a national story, not a regional one
People hold signs during a "tea party" protest in Flagstaff, Arizona August 31, 2009. Organizers say the event is an effort to work against members of Congress who voted for higher spending and taxes. REUTERS/Joshua Lott (UNITED STATES BUSINESS IMAGES OF THE DAY CONFLICT POLITICS) (Credit: Reuters) Michael Lind is a very smart and wonderfully erudite writer with a bit of an obsession. His understanding of the deeper cultural wellsprings of American history and politics has left him, as a sort of side effect, with an abiding fearful hostility toward a particular group of people, the “Anglo-Celtic” Southerner. Lind sees them everywhere in our politics as a baleful, disturbing presence spreading bacilli of violence, bigotry and religious fanaticism. And in his recent Salon essay arguing that the Tea Party movement is an essentially Southern phenomenon, his prejudices blind him to a rather important and unprecedented phenomenon: the virtual disappearance of geography as a significant factor in the ideological character of the Republican Party.
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