Washington Post (Plum Line)
By Greg Sargent
July 8, 2015
Really,
now — nobody could have predicted that if Republicans failed to pass
immigration reform when they had the chance in 2013 and 2014, it would
become a major issue
in the 2016 race, in ways that are alarming GOP strategists. Yet,
shockingly, here we are.
Donald
Trump’s foray into the immigration debate has now sparked a flare-up
between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. And some Republicans are openly
warning that Trump’s
comments threaten to do severe damage to the GOP brand among Latinos.
CNN’s
Maeve Reston has a good rundown of the latest, reporting that “many
Republican strategists have watched with alarm as Trump has sucked up
all the oxygen in the presidential
race on the issue”:
“We’ve
gone from 44% to 27% among Hispanic voters, for a reason. You’ll never
convince me that it hasn’t been about the way that we’ve handled this
issue,” South Carolina
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said in a telephone interview with CNN
on Tuesday.
“Mitt
Romney showed a lot of political courage by saying that (his comment
about) ‘self-deportation’ was a mistake, and now here we have Donald
Trump casting 11 million
people in a very derogatory manner. That’s a problem,” said Graham, who
is also seeking the GOP presidential nomination.
“There
are some within the 11 million that are bad people, but I cannot tell
you how harmful it is to reinforce a narrative that Republicans
basically have very little
respect for people.”
This
quote gets at what this whole debate is really about. Trump’s comments —
he referred to undocumented immigrants as drug dealers and rapists —
have been properly condemned
by some of the GOP candidates. But as Graham suggests, they are a
reminder of a lingering, deeper fundamental difference between the
parties that could prove crucial to deciding the Latino vote and the
2016 outcome. Broadly speaking, many Democratic officials
think undocumented immigrants have something positive to contribute to
American life, and many Republican officials don’t. Or, even if they do,
they are just not willing to countenance legally integrating them —
because of their previous lawbreaking — under
any set of workable conditions.
This
is exactly what Jeb Bush was saying when he insisted a year ago that
the plight of undocumented immigrants is a morally complex one — yes,
they broke the law, but
only to seek a better life for their families — and that they could be
making “a contribution to our country if we actually organized ourselves
in a better way.” Bush’s comments were met with a tremendous backlash.
Since then, the GOP has only trooped to the
right on immigration, voting to roll back President Obama’s efforts to
re-prioritize our deportation policies around the idea that many of
these immigrants represent something more than full-blown criminals. The
GOP candidates have pledged to do the same,
and have retreated to a safe-zone where mere consideration of
legalization can only begin if the border is made entirely secure first.
Hillary
Clinton is explicitly highlighting this fundamental underlying
difference between the parties, noting that the GOP candidates “range
across a spectrum of being
either grudgingly welcome or hostile toward immigrants,” and adding:
“I’m
going to talk about comprehensive immigration reform,” Clinton said
Tuesday. “I’m going to talk about all of the good, law-abiding,
productive members of the immigrant
community that I personally know, that I’ve met over the course of my
life, that I would like to see have a path to citizenship.”
As
I noted yesterday, Democrats shouldn’t get complacent about the
durability of their gains among Latinos. But Clinton’s aggressive
contrast-drawing on immigration suggests
she won’t — and as such, it’s not surprising that the latest turn in
this debate has GOP strategists so worried.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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