is the gop intentionally trying to shed states?
I lived in California during the Prop 187 era. The lesson that I learned is this: you can win big points with anti-immigrant policy but lose in the long term. In Arizona, the new immigration law will certainly help the GOP win over the next few years in that state, but it seems to be political suicide to me. According to the Census, about 30% of the Arizona population is of Latino origin. And of course, immigrant families tend to be larger than natives. The wiki estimates about 460,000 illegal immigrants, out 6.5 million people. So even if they all left, you’d still have a hefty 25% or so of the population whose friends, parents, and neighbors have now been separated from you. Also, young people in the majority ethnic group won’t be attached to the policy as older voters, and, like in California, may go to the other party. Populist politicians and anti-immigration voters will see a modest decrease in public expenditures, but they will get a huge voting bloc that will hate the party for decades. Just look at California. See how Prop 187 helped the California GOP in the 16 years since its passage.
I think your analysis of the political consequences of the policy are correct and that is precisely what Plouffe and other Dem. strategists are betting on. But I disagree with the premise (that the AZ law was a part of intended GOP strategy). I think it’s fallacious to think that everything that happens at the local level (some people have begun to make this argument about the so-called tea parties) is either intended, engineered by or controlled by some centralized GOP bureaucracy.
If you lived in AZ, it would be easy to see that the type of backwards anti-immigration sentiment that buoyed this law is grassroots-based and spearheaded and abetted only by the most local of state-level political figures. Nobody with an ambition to ever be a national political figure is dancing enthusiastically behind this one, and those who have expressed some measured support toe the middle-of-the-road line.
My sense is that this is something that the GOP wishes wasn’t happening but it’s happening anyways, and as you note it will hurt them in the long-run (which is something that the few remaining party leaders with half a brain understand well I think).
Omar
April 30, 2010 at 11:06 am
i agree with Omar. you can see this by looking at the last comprehensive immigration reform bill. Karl Rove saw passage of the bill as part of a strategy to realign Latinos and maybe he would have been right but a grassroots backlash killed it and backfired the Latino realignment effort by making the issue more salient. there’s a reason political scientists talk about “two-stage games” and “party discipline”
gabrielrossman
April 30, 2010 at 2:45 pm
I agree with what both Omar and Gabriel have already said, but I wonder how many Republicans feel trapped between a rock and a hard place here because it’s a primary season where incumbents are being challenged. I can see a lot of republicans who realize being anti immigration is a bad long term strategy but necessary for short term survival.
In California, I think one thing that made prop 187 bad for the GOP in the long term is term limits. Since it is impossible to hold any statewide office for longer than 8 years, there have been tremendous opportunities for new politicians. Relatively young Latino politicians have taken these opportunities throughout the state, going to the democrats and building a significant voting bloc. Without term limits, the long term incumbents would have blocked opportunities for Latino politicians, so they may not have become as important of a voting bloc.
Noah
April 30, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Gallup: 51 percent of Americans who have heard of the Arizona law favor it.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/127598/americans-favor-oppose-arizona-immigration-law.aspx
Guillermo
April 30, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Thanks for the link Guillermo. That is sad.
thobie1
April 30, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Guillermo, I’m not sure how much I’d read into that poll. First, having “heard of the Arizona law” and actually understanding it are two different things. People’s knowledge of the law and opinions on the underlying policy could still be changing.
Second, as others have pointed out (see link below), we don’t know why people have the opinions they do and we don’t fully know what support the bill means. Do people who support the bill like the underlying policies, or are they just happy because some governmental unit passed something about immigration. If poll respondents are cheering for action of any sort, then this means they may also be in favor of a more progressive federal immigration reform, simply because it is nationwide immigration reform.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/04/gallup-plurality-of-americans-like.html
Noah
April 30, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Noah: your points are correct. In Gallup’s defense, however, it may be said that a higher level of sophistication in the info is very difficult to achieve through phone interviews.
For the record, I’m completely against that law.
Guillermo
April 30, 2010 at 9:53 pm
[...] keeps the Arizona immigration law in the news and keeps people talking about its consequences. As Guillermo pointed out in a comment in Fabio’s earlier post, right now roughly half of Americans think the law is [...]
why arizona should fear the boycott « orgtheory.net
April 30, 2010 at 11:13 pm
The GOP’s immigration stance didn’t hurt them among Hispanics in California. Their vote share didn’t change much. What did change was that GOP-leaning whites outmigrated to various mountain states and Hispanics grew as a portion of the population. Hispanics are a relatively low-income group which also do not identify with the cultural majority (plurality?). So it is perfectly predictable that they will vote Democrat (as immigrants have always done) and wise for the GOP to try to keep their share of the electorate down.
teageegeepea
May 1, 2010 at 2:59 am
What happened in California is that over a long period of time brown people became politically mobilized. Rates of voting are still abysmally low among American citizens of Asian, Latin American, and indigneous ethnic heritage. Hopefully, these overt acts of discrimination against citizens of (often distant) immigrant origins will result in political mobilization at the ballot box. The state legislatures of places like Arizona and New Mexico should not be filled with the “nativist” Anglo wackjobs who currently make laws like this one.
sherkat
May 1, 2010 at 8:54 pm
I wonder how much parallel we could draw with Irish immigration 100 years ago. It feels like history is repeating itself and the GOP still hasn’t learned its lesson. There’s a reason why the Irish still vote Democratic today.
joshmccabe
May 1, 2010 at 8:56 pm