(Not saying I agree…just saying a) that this is a topic worth discussing; b) around FPE election time there is always at least one person–OK its the same one–agitating for more ideological diversity on the FP; c) my tenure is almost done, my grasp on the reins of power slipping…and d) merry holidays everyone… – promoted by ClubTwitty)
In this November election’s wake, many conservatives have had their immigration views “evolve.” A second group of conservatives view this not as progress but rather as “pandering” at principle’s expense.
This second group is half right: political realities are motivating conservatives to re-examine their immigration positions. However, the possible change would be a return to principle rather than a move away from it.
We know immigration is influencing the Hispanic vote, both from polling and also the steady decline in the GOP Hispanic vote share since immigration became a national issue. We also know this population is rapidly increasing as a percentage of the electorate. In fact, their numbers have now reached the point where Romney could have won the election with sufficient Hispanic support.
Even worse for the GOP, the Hispanic vote becomes ever more important each election, not merely relative to those who would restrict immigration on suspect reasons (“Nativists”), but also to the electorate as a whole.
Yet the Nativists greet any call for reforming the immigration code with catcalls of “amnesty” and “secure the border first.” For them, an immigration policy of anything other than enforcing existing law or reducing further avenues for legal immigration smacks of pandering. What is noteworthy about these nativists is that although they couch their opposition to changing immigration law in the name of “principle,” they never describe how the law as it is written embraces conservative values or free market principles. They never describe how for a simple reason: their cry of “principle” is empty.
Granted, an immigration system based on those values and principles would screen people at the border. However, this screening for legal residency would be based solely on keeping out security threats and economic burdens.
It would not be based on giving freebies to special interests by keeping out their competition. And it would be humane – doing its utmost to respect the dignity of American families.
The immigration system described above is not our immigration system. For many employment visa applicants, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services require certifications to “ensur[e] that foreign workers seeking immigrant visa classifications are not displacing equally qualified U.S. workers.”
And if the worker is unskilled, there are few, if any, avenues for legal immigration. Apparently this lack of an avenue is due to “job protection” again. Moreover, for U.S. citizens or soldiers who find true love with an unauthorized immigrant, they all too often are forced to choose between exile from this country or living without their spouse for 10 years or more.
Separating American citizens or soldiers from their spouses for 10 years or more is not a policy based on family values. And requiring that we use immigration law to “safeguard” jobs from competition is not based on adherence to the ideas of free market capitalism.
It is nothing other than pandering. And it is pandering with a high cost. As an illustration, one eventual Colorado gubernatorial candidate proposed a three year moratorium of all legal immigration in a 2010 article entitled “Ultimate Jobs Program: Immigration Timeout.”
In the election later that year which he lost, he is estimated to have received less than 15 percent of the Hispanic vote while the winner received over 75 percent and a third candidate got most of the remainder.
Sacrificing principles to pander to Nativists makes no sense if it costs you elections. And although we need a serious and principled-based discussion on immigration, to thoughtlessly repeat “secure the border first” and “enforce the existing law” is to instead parrot a mantra based in pandering.
So when you see some in conservative circles float ideas beyond the above mantra, they are not necessarily contemplating straying from principle – they are perhaps contemplating returning to it. And such a return to principle cannot happen soon enough if the GOP hopes to remain politically viable going forward.
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Elliot Fladen is a commercial litigator practicing in Denver. He blogs at www.fladenlaw.com.
This article first appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette and is reprinted in full with permission from the Gazette and the Author: http://www.gazette.com/article…
Full story: GOP’s evolution on immigration: No more pandering to lose?
Note the post remains promoted.
More Hispanic votes might have tipped Colorado (and NM, FL, NV) and is important in the future.
However, reports I’ve read such as this one: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes… suggest that the election would have been closer, but Obama would have still won re-election.
So believe the statement that Romney would have won with more Hispanic votes is an over-statement. The GOP needs to address additional issues as well.
I scheduled it for promotion, then Twitty promoted it before I scheduled it to pop up
We just have a quota system where pretty much every right-wing diary gets promoted, because there are so few of them.
If not, why?
I would call it a diary intended to speak to and about right-wing policies, in the language of the right wing.
Elliot posts from the right, but his views on immigration are hardly right-wing.
Do you disagree with any of his primary assertions? My reading of it is that they are:
1) The right-wing voices decrying comprehensive immigration reform on “principle” are unable to articulate exactly how current immigration law is “principled,” either in terms of family values or free market economics
2) This is because current immigration law is NOT aligned either with family values or with free market economics
3) Current immigration policy is inhumane in that it separates families
4) Current immigration law is a regulatory burden in that it prevents foreign workers from competing for US jobs, so is not consistent with the right-wing desire for deregulation and free markets
5) The right-wing opposition to immigration reform (of a sort that would lead to more immigration, legal status for those already here, etc.) is costing the Republican party votes.
I may not care about GOP family values (as they define them) and I may oppose laissez-fair economics–and I do–but I find nothing to disagree with in those five points.
By far the biggest problem is that it’s vague. Who is the first group of conservatives? Who is the second group? Can you name a representative? What are their opinions? What are the “suspect reasons” of the Nativists? What’s the percentage of Hispanic voters relative to the Nativists? Or in absolute terms? What proposals are the Nativists shooting down? Can you quote any of them? You mention someone who ran for governor and wrote an article; who is that person?
Some of these things are easy to guess, while others would require a lot of research on my part. Why make the reader work so hard to try to understand what you’re talking about?
Other issues:
1) You claim the true conservative philosophy would be more open borders, but don’t provide any evidence for this, which makes it sound like the “true Scotsman fallacy.” It’s easy to imagine someone on the other side writing the same thing.
2) You sound like you’re going to make a moral or principled case for a change in immigration policy, but you spend most of your time critiquing pandering while emphasizing that positions need to be changed to get more votes.
3) The best part is the middle where you mention the plight of unskilled workers and quote what I presume is immigration law. You talk about true love, and it seems like you’re really going somewhere with this, but then you abandon it to criticize unnamed enemies who are wrong about everything again.
I think you mentioned at some point that you were romantically involved with an immigrant. I forget the details. But there’s a hint of that story in this column. If you wrote a column where that personal story were the focus, and where promoting a specific change in policy were the point, I think it could be compelling and effective.
And I was aiming to persuade, I was intentionally vague on some of the points (such as identities) in the interest of politeness. Its one of those things where you don’t want to name specific people that you are going to attack in an Op-Ed in a major newspaper because the goal is to get them (or their close friends) to change their mind. As for who wrote the article – same principle: do some googling though and you’ll quickly figure out who I am talking about.
As for the numbers of nativists, let’s put it this way – with the growth rate of the hispanic population that is eligible and willing to vote, whatever there numbers are now, they aren’t going to increase in importance.
Regarding conservative principles, a core conservative principle is adherence to free markets. This was stated explicitly and repeatedly in the Tea Party movement. Whether you agree with such a principle or not, it is pretty obvious the Nativists are advocating policies opposed to it.
Regarding making a moral case – I struggled with this point in terms of flow. I could have gone seriously in depth in terms of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, but I had a word limitation in the Op-Ed’s place of publication…and there is the problem that too much detail will cause people to get bored and stop reading. Ultimately I decided to axe a lot of the substantive legal issues that cause moral problems (crimes of moral turpitude issues, issues with mistaken and innocent claims of us citizenship, issues regarding visa wait times while relatives are here, etc.)
Thanks though for your comments.
Hope to see Elliot keep some of it in mind in future diaries here. It will be good for the blog if we can get some articulate and thoughtful conservative diarists here. I wouldn’t want Pols to stop being left-leaning, but I don’t think we’ll ever again attract the caliber of “insiders” we used to if we keep going in the echo chamber direction.
You’re not trying to change the Nativists’ minds here though. In fact you’re strongly hinting that they’re racists, so they’re likely to double-down in response. Instead you’re trying to convince the persuadable conservatives in between. The problem is that without specifying who you think is on one side or the other, the reader is left with the impression that he is neither too anti-immigrant nor too pro-immigrant but instead just right. Without changing his mind at all.
It’s like that George Carlin joke: Whenever you’re driving, everyone going slower than you is an idiot and everyone going faster than you is a maniac. I think you need to be willing to offend some people if you want to persuade others. You have to make someone like Tancredo look bad if you want to peel off his weak supporters.
Also, I would not have advocated adding stuff about the legal and moral issues to this article; instead I’m suggesting you start from scratch and write something that’s purely a personal story, then throw in some numbers about how your case is not unusual at all, then throw in a common-sense solution that’s already been proposed and that people can call their Congressmen about.
I used to write opinion columns regularly, and it’s really difficult. I’m not sure I was ever very good at it, but it’s easier to see what could be improved in someone else’s article than in one’s own. Anyway, good luck.
They are malthusians or otherwise deceived by thorough poorly thought out statistical “studies”….we should chat about this sometime.
Thanks again for taking your time to put together a critique. You are right – opinion writing is VERY difficult. Especially on a highly controversial topic.
Would you consider using any of the arguments I advanced if you were discussing immigration policy?
There are one or two ideas on my mind. I might eventually do a diary on how to rebut calls to statutorily undo birthright citizenship from an orginalist perspective. I might also do some stuff on anti-commandeering and marijuana if the Feds try to sue Colorado over Amd. 64. Depends on my motivation, time, and whether an issue becomes salient – and also if I am writing stuff for the Gazette and/or other publications.
One thing I might be interested in writing as well is how to respond to Personhood arguments. I don’t think the pro-choice crowd does a very good job in rebutting Personhood positions, when in fact there are some really good responses just sitting out there as low hanging fruit. In fact, I think these arguments were how I got to know PCG in the first place if memory serves me right.
I definitely remember talking a great deal about the personhood issue with you. I wonder where Barron X has been lately? He’s a personhood supporter (he’s ACP) who hangs around here sometimes. I don’t agree with him on very much, but I sure miss having him around sometimes.
… was a basic talking point of the anti-Personhood campaign. In additional to being unassailable, it appealed to the left & right alike. Guessing you didn’t like the “ban common forms of birth control” angle, but maybe not. What didn’t you like?
You’ll definitely need to flesh that out better, because Celinda Lake (the Frank Luntz of the left) did the focus group and language work, and we’ve won 3:1 twice and kept them off the ballot most recently. What more could you ask for?
You need to realize that what you think may be the best argument in your ivory tower isn’t what appeals to the average voter. I’ve given and written many an argument about personhood, and I stick with what the pros tells me works, not what I want to say.
It should be winning 50 to 1.
That is called the ‘real world.’ HINT: good place to start for discussions…
And non-responsive.
If your brilliant rebuttals will be in the area of exegesis, you’ve already conceded the argument. Scriptural interpretation has no business in governance, and most people know that.
And non-responsive.
If your brilliant rebuttals will be in the area of exegesis, you’ve already conceded the argument. Scriptural interpretation has no business in governance, and most people know that.
The Personhood supporters make a really big deal about their reading of scripture. They are reading it wrong.
Whether you think scripture has no place or not, a good number disagree with you and those people vote on things you dislike. So you shouldn’t just write them off anymore than Romney shouldn’t have purportedly written off 47% of americans.
And outline all the great arguments the pro-choice crowd misses?
As for writing off the people who think there should be a scriptural basis for law, don’ t blame me, blame this thing called the US Constitution.
And outline all the great arguments the pro-choice crowd misses?
As for writing off the people who think there should be a scriptural basis for law, don’ t blame me, blame this thing called the US Constitution.
1) Pro-lifers cite to scripture/judeo christian values, but:
a) Judaism does not view a zygote as a person. See Yevamot Talmud 69b (stating that “the embryo is considered to be mere water until the fortieth day.”)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm…
b) Exodus makes clear under the traditional translation that a fetus is not a person. See Exodus 21:22 (stating: “And should men quarrel and hit a pregnant woman, and she miscarries but there is no fatality, he shall surely be punished, when the woman’s husband makes demands of him, and he shall give [restitution] according to the judges’ [orders].”) See also Rashi (but there is no fatality: with the woman. -[From Sanh. 79a, Jonathan] Ч•ЧњЧђ Ч™Ч”Ч™Ч” ЧђЧЎЧ•Чџ: Ч‘ЧђЧ©Ч”)
c) Scripture phrases that evangelicals cite to stand for personhood are taken out of context and don’t stand for what they think they stand for (classic would be Jeremiah 1:5 which is God knew Jeremiah before he was born – evangelicals take it to mean Jeremiah was a person at conception when passage actually means God is omniscient and knows everything before it happens).
2) The argument that science says a zygote is ethically a person.
a) Science can’t make normative conclusions – it can only make conclusions based on falsifiable testing.
b) Whether somebody is ethically a person is a normative conclusion – it can’t be tested in a manner to see if it is true/false
c) Ergo, Science can’t make any normative conclusion regarding whether somebody is a person
3) Unintended consequences – if, as some personhood (but not all) initiatives have had a simple redefinition of person then:
a) Jogging (may cause miscarriage) may be criminal
b) Breastfeeding while having unprotected sex (may cause miscarriage) may be criminal
c) Caffeine, lifting heavy objects, etc. etc. may be criminal (haven’t checked on recent research on these point).
I could go on, but I got some work to do. Hope these points will be of use.