Immigration Bill Post-Mortem

Walt, Marc, and an analysis from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall:

Walt:

The other night, I received a call from an opinion pollster. I like getting such calls; I may actually have more influence through participation in polls than by voting! Polls ask only 500 to 1000 people; so I contribute 0.1 to 0.2% of the total, in contrast to a national election, where my vote is 0.000001% of the total.

The questions made it clear that the poll was sponsored by US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Graham is a freshman senator, up for his first re-election next year. Before he became senator, he was a US House Representative for 8 years. The town where I live is in his former congressional district – it's part of his home base.

The questions focused on which Republican presidential candidate do I like, and on Graham’s re-electability. There was a question on do I approve or disapprove of the immigration bill. I said “strongly disapprove”. Up to that point, the poll could have been organized by Graham or alternatively by someone else considering challenging him. But the next question made it clear it was Graham paying for the poll. “If you knew that, in addition to legalizing aliens, the immigration bill also did X and Y and A and B and C and D and E and F…would you then support the bill?” It was a long list of bill provisions which were supposed to make people feel better about amnesty. It was the longest question I’ve ever heard in a poll – much too long to remember the content, and give a considered answer. Obviously, Graham himself wanted that question, as some sort of self-justification.

I answered “No, I would still not support the bill, even if I knew all that stuff”. Because of the poll structure, I couldn’t tell her why I didn’t support the bill, so I’ll do it here.

I am aware that the immigration bill is supposed to be a compromise, which gives illegal aliens amnesty, but also has provisions for strengthening the Border Patrol, and for extending the border fence. I got that. So it’s supposed to be a “give and take”, with something for everyone. I don’t really have a problem with the way the bill is written. I just don’t believe that border security provisions will ever be seriously implemented, if the bill passes.

We already had a compromise immigration bill. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was passed by a Democratic House, a Republican Senate, and signed by a Republican President. The bill gave amnesty for several million illegal aliens, and also criminalized employment of illegals. I naively supported it, thinking that several million amnesty grants was an acceptable price to pay for legislation that would make additional illegal immigration unattractive for aliens. However, when implementation time came, the amnesty was granted, but the employment laws were never enforced. I feel like the Indian who stopped fighting in order to sign a peace treaty, only to find that the treaty stole his land.

Who would be so stupid to, after having fallen for a dishonest trick once, agree to fall for the same exact trick a second time? Lindsey Graham, that’s who.

What about me? Am I an ostrich who has his head in the sand, who can’t face up to the immigration problem? I don’t think so. I know there are millions of illegal aliens in this country, and more on the way. I know that most of them are honest people (if you excuse breaking immigration law, and continued evasion of law enforcement). But I also believe, as Fred Thompson said, that America is our home, and we get to say who comes into our home. I also have no illusions about the “Great Father in Washington”: someone who acts in bad faith once, will not shrink from lying a second time. I will not support any new amnesty package until, first, I see enforcement of the provisions of the 1986 amnesty bill. This Indian agreed to an unjust treaty once, but he will not do so again.

Marc:

As far as it's possible to be, I'm neutral on this current bill. I think people have trouble grasping adequately with immigration issues in general, and the secretive way the negotiations were handled in the Senate were not a good omen for coming success.

I'm trying to come up with an adequate answer to this blogpost regarding exactly what drives conservatives so nuts about immigration reform. Hilzoy's argument is quite clever, drawing a parallel to Israel's 1982 Lebanon War. Nevertheless, his end point strikes me as too pat:

I think that if people did not already have the sense that their country was in some sense slipping away from them -- if they felt secure enough about our country and its direction -- then they would be a lot less inclined to think that illegal immigrants were taking it away from them. But the reason they think their country is slipping away from them need have nothing to do with illegal immigration itself, as opposed to a more general sense that the rules are stacked against them, and no one obeys the laws, and decent people who work hard get screwed.

People have always felt that the rules are stacked against them. There is more at work here than that.

Ever since the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, I've been trying to figure out why the conservative grassroots campaigners here thought that the recall campaign was a good model for dealing with immigration issues. Immediately after that election, and I mean literally the next day, they started to campaign on immigration issues.

In some ways (I think in many ways), the recall campaign was a protest against what conservatives saw as the illegitimate nature of the 2002 California gubernatorial election. The nearly non-partisan former LA mayor Richard Riordan was the Republican candidate most likely to defeat the incumbent Democratic governor Gray Davis. Riordan was not the conservatives' choice, but he was the one most likely to win the Republican nomination.

Davis poured millions of dollars into a campaign to impeach Riordan's conservative credentials with Republicans in their primary, focusing on Riordan's failure to even register to vote as a Republican until about ten years prior. It was a brilliantly-dirty strategy: Riordan's campaign imploded in the primary, and the conservative but painfully-wooden William Simon won the Republican nomination instead, and went down to predictable defeat in the general election.

The conservative grassroots were furious with Davis' interference in their primary. In their view, it wasn't Davis' place to skew their choices. Thus, despite proper formalities, they saw (and I think properly so) that the 2002 gubernatorial election was essentially illegitimate, and they wanted a do-over. Thus, the following year, Riordan's friend and pupil Arnold Schwarzenegger ended up as governor instead.

Yet immigration was a much broader, and much older, subject. What exactly might be illegitimate about our approach to immigration reform? Why would the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election be a good template for national action?

I think your reply helps fill in a piece of the puzzle. We already had immigration reform in 1986, and it failed in crucial ways. Thus, the debate regarding the current bill was essentially false, and maybe just theater: other interests were being addressed instead. Once again, people wanted a do-over.

It's funny how the debate over immigration will tie people in knots. In 2005, on conservative talk radio, the DJ and a caller ended up agreeing the problem was that the incentive structure of immigration favored illegal immigration, and things would greatly improve if legal migrants were treated much better. I suppose that might be true. If all it took to immigrate to the U.S. was a simple signature, then every one of the millions of illegals crossing our borders could be made instantly legal, and our illegal immigration problem would disappear. Of course, other problems might ensue........

An analysis from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall:

But you have to be far more than ordinarily clueless to believe that the Republicans aren't overwhelmingly the losers in this whole debacle. The whole episode is only a little short of a catastrophe for the GOP, indeed, twice over.

The fact that the episode has further revealed President Bush's political impotence is relatively unimportant, given his extreme unpopularity. More important is that the whole run-through has further divided Republicans in the lead up to the 2008 election. But even that isn't the really big deal.

The real fall-out is that this has dealt a massive and probably enduring blow to Republican efforts to at least compete for, if not win over, the growing hispanic electorate. The model here is then-Gov. Pete Wilson's (R) 1994 reelection campaign in California -- a set of events that played out somewhat more amorphously but to real effect across the country in the mid-1990s.

Briefly, Wilson successfully rode the anti-immigration issue to victory, in particular through his embrace of Prop. 187 -- a successful ballot initiative to deny social services to illegal immigrants and get local cops into the business of policing people's immigration status. It helped Wilson get reelected. But it also basically destroyed the California Republican party. Destroyed may be too strong a word. But it put the state's rapidly growing hispanic population firmly into the Democratic camp and played a big part in making California into the solidly Democratic state it is today. (People forget, it didn't used to be that way.)

The kicker here is that at least Pete Wilson won his election. Indeed, anti-immigrant politics, in California and elsewhere, helped fuel the Republican sweep in 1994. In this case, the Republicans didn't even get it together and get a win in the short run. They managed to damage themselves in the short run and deal themselves a massive long term blow. That's great work.

Now, some people might say that Democratic votes in addition to Republican votes helped to scuttle the bill in the senate. But this ignores the salient fact that Republican opposition to the immigration bill -- not just in the senate but across the board -- has been overwhelmingly nativist in character. Democratic opposition has tended to focus either on the guest worker provision or other details of the bill. It's really as simple as that, indeed so simple it barely requires saying.

This whole episode has branded the Republicans as the anti-immigrant party. And that's not good for a party that wants to compete for the votes of America's largest bloc of new immigrant voters.