OPINION: Republicans lost Latinos
Remember all that anti-immigrant hysteria that was so common during the past few years? Things have been eerily silent of late, even though the faux issue of immigration may have cost John McCain the election.
Talk show pundits, who viewed immigration as low-hanging fruit, have moved on to more relevant topics. Immigration was never a direct issue in the presidential race - never mentioned in a major speech, debate or interview.
That's because the immigration influx was a simple function of economics that would adjust to the country's economic status. Immigrants were in demand here, earning wages in excess of minimum wage mandates, because a hot economy needs a labor force. White Americans, who've chosen to severely limit family sizes, have declined to produce an adequate domestic labor pool. Baby boomers so outnumber subsequent generations that younger citizens have had the luxury of choosing the most desirable careers. Typical American-born children go to college and take professional work. Manual labor, in a bull market economy, must be imported.
With the market collapse and recession, however, has come growing unemployment.
That means Americans can no longer cherry pick when deciding how to earn money.
That means imported labor is suddenly less in demand. That means someone who was working as a paralegal last year may be cleaning motel rooms this year. It means the person at the drive thru, who speaks broken English, may soon be replaced by an English professor.
A recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington shows that illegal immigration has been dropping for the past three years. Today, foreigners immigrating legally outnumber those who sneak in and growing numbers of immigrants are going home.
"We don't usually think of illegal immigration as responding to the labor market, but apparently it does," said William Frey, a demographer at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Why wouldn't we think of illegal immigration as responding to the labor market? It couldn't be more obvious. When someone moves to the United States, often finding freedom in what many Americans consider menial labor, that person is responding to the labor market. Why else would they come here? We don't see them begging on street corners. They're not here to lounge on the beach, or to bum around in Aspen. They came for jobs we couldn't or wouldn't fill.
Today, they're leaving. The Mexican Consulate's office in Dallas reported in August that it was seeing unprecedented numbers of Mexican nationals requesting paperwork to go home.
"It's almost 100 percent more this year than it was the previous two years," said Enrique Hubbard, the Mexican consul general in Dallas, as quoted by Fox News.
The Center for Immigration Studies reports that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has dropped 11 percent in the past year. They were here because we needed them, and we were willing to pay them. Today, we can't afford them. So they're doing what's natural for workers who are no longer in demand. They're going home and staying home and they won't come back until we ask them to with the offer of jobs that pay better than what they can earn at home. So why was illegal immigration such a crisis to be solved? Quite simply, it wasn't.
Instead, it was easy material for pundits and obscure politicians (Tom Tancredo) who needed an emotional cause in a conservative movement that had lost its way. Was it harmless right-wing fun? Absolutely not. The cost to the GOP has been staggering.
President Bush, who never indulged hysteria about immigration, was elected twice because of substantial Hispanic support approaching 50 percent. As the late President Reagan explained, Hispanics are conservative. The demographic consists predominantly of pro-life, family values Christians. But conservative pundits, who've become the image of the GOP, were so callous in their attacks on immigrant labor that they managed to push Latino voters to the left. In this election, some 10 million Latino voters favored Obama by a 2-1 margin over McCain. They were instrumental in delivering former red states - including Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Florida - to the Democrats. Even in Texas, Obama received 63 percent of the Latino vote.
All kinds of exit polling indicated that immigration was a key factor in the Latino support for Obama. Though McCain has long been moderate on immigration, he appeased his party's pundits by embracing an "enforcement-first" policy on immigration, placing him squarely in the camp of conservatives who've ostracized Latinos with needless and offensive years-long tirades about illegal immigrants. And where are these menacing visitors today? They're crossing the border to go home, now that we can't afford their help. Their Latino brethren, conservative-minded citizens who live and work in the United States, are waving goodbye ... while flipping Republicans the bird.
