More on Republicans and immigration

There was an Op-Ed yesterday by Michael Gerson (a former top Bush aide now at the Council on Foreign Relations) in the Washington Post about Republicans and immigration, on the heels of a similar analysis from the WSJ that I recently critiqued. The overall argument is the same: the Republican stance on immigration is alienating Latino voters. It’s safe to say this is reaching conventional wisdom status.

I didn’t think this was a particularly compelling Op-Ed. For example, he argues that at the beginning of his political career, George W. Bush took a balanced stand on immigration. “The political effects were immediate. Bob Dole got about 21 percent of Hispanic votes in 1996.” So Dole’s gains were due to newly minted Governor Bush?

Gerson lumps together three issues and collectively calls them “immigration,” but it occurred to me that understanding this issue requires separating them. They are immigration reform, treatment of immigrants, and attitude toward Spanish. I would argue that failure to enact immigration reform will not doom Republicans, especially since Democrats have similarly refused to do so. Treatment of immigrants, however, becomes more important, and respect for Spanish even more so.

There is a difference between legislative failure and moral failure. Although many people may believe the former as an example of the latter (as I often have) I’m not sure how widely shared that view is. Moral failure is telling people they should stop speaking their native language, otherwise they are not sufficiently “American.” Undocumented immigration can fall somewhere in between. Many Latinos (as many other groups in the U.S.) do not support a legalization path, or at least wish it to be quite stringent, but also do not support local harassment policies, detention camps and forced separation of families. One is about rule of law while the other is about dehumanization.

Separating the legislative and moral tells us more about what types of policies will alienate Latino voters, and also what either party should do if they wish to court those voters. Conflating them leads to unconvincing hypotheses.