GOP Still Battles Common Sense on Immigration Reform

Richard Nadler has another essay taking restrictionist conservatives to task (this one caught my attention last month).  Again, I like his imagery.

Even as whole sections of the country are bleached Democratic blue, Mark Krikorian and Marcus Epstein continue to circulate the myth of their obsession's invincibility. Indeed, they have come to resemble the Black Knight of Monte Python fame, who bellows his triumph while being chopped into messes.

Nadler explains how claims of restrictionist victories at the polls are easily proved false.  One reason for this electoral failure is that the mass deportation platform alienates many in the fast rising group of Latin@ voters.

Examining polls conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, we find that 43 percent of Hispanic citizens fear a deportation action against a friend or family member, and 40 percent hear deportation denounced in the churches they attend.

Recent Latin@ immigrants often bring with them the cultural conservatism of their heavily religious homelands.  As American conservatives have noted often in recent years, there is a natural constituency for the GOP's culturally conservative, religiously-oriented perspective in newly arrived Latin@ migrant populations.

But the GOP is not only leaving that constituency to wither on the vine, they are actively rejecting it.  They are trying to deport those potential voters and their U.S. citizen kids.  Latin@ voters won't vote for a party that rejects them.

I am an atheist.  I haven't gone to church for personal religious purposes for over 10 years.  But I go to churches now because that is where my clients are; that is where people are turning to for information and support as the government of their adopted land tries to keep them in the shadows.  I was on the payroll of the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn for two years.  I worked with deacons, priests, and parishioners to represent immigrants in court and inform congregations of their rights.

Where is the Republican Party in all of this?  Where is the compassion and humanitarianism that evangelicals have displayed on other issues like Darfur or AIDS in Africa?  With few exceptions, conservatives are nowhere to be found-they have been cheering on the helicopters and ICE vans.

Here are Nadler's predictions:

• If the Republican party embraces deportation, the pro-life movement will perish as a political force. Hispanics are on average 15 percent more pro-life than non-Hispanic whites. If they are balkanized into routinely voting for pro-abortion candidates, as blacks have been, we will not see another pro-life president in our lifetimes.
• If the Republican party embraces mass deportation, the family disruption involved in that policy's execution will irremediably tarnish the party's pro-family image.
• If the Republican party embraces the economics of restricting low-cost and seasonal labor, the ranks of the unemployed will swell by the millions - and the unemployed, needless to say, vote for left-wing Democrats far more consistently than immigrants do.
• If the Republican party refuses to negotiate guest-worker measures simultaneously with border-security measures, it will obstruct needed border reforms imperative to crime control and national security.

In short, mass deportation, an option unthinkable in conservative circles a mere four years ago, undermines every tenet, and every goal, of the conservative agenda.

I don't much mind if the GOP shoots itself in the foot on the first two of Nadler's issues, at least, but I would prefer to see them not do that and support sensible immigration reform instead.