OUR VIEW: Arizona law may hurt Colorado Republicans (vote)

Colorado Republicans may fall apart on immigration before November. An AP article on gazette.com Tuesday screamed “Colorado GOP wants immigration law like Arizona’s.”

In Phoenix, the Republican Study Committee of Colorado is meeting in a quest to make a law similar to Arizona’s illegal effort to arrest people on suspicion of residency disputes.

“They are acting on their own,” Dick Wadhams , chairman of the Colorado GOP, told The Gazette’s editorial department. “They are all friends, and I support them, but they are not there as an arm of the Republican Party.”

Traditionally, genuine conservatives have advocated generous immigration policies to hedge against the nightmare posed by declining reproduction rates among native-born Americans. They have known we can’t sustain real estate values, pensions, Social Security or other aspects of our economy if retirees dwarf generations that produce wealth. That’s one reason President Ronald Reagan signed amnesty in 1986 .

To sell draconian immigration laws, Republicans must explain their solution to an inverted population pyramid in which consumption outpaces production. They must explain why we should deport, rather than legalize, a labor force our economy needs so badly it has made a farce of outdated immigration quotas. Laws that constrain economic vitality don’t work. Jim Crow laws didn’t work and the 55 mile-an-hour speed limit didn’t work. History is replete with laws abandoned for slowing production and imposing hardship.

Republicans eager to exploit immigration will shill fear, warning of horrific crimes caused by “illegals.” As truth emerges, immigration hysteria will look increasingly foolish.

In Reason magazine, Steve Chapman dismantled the myth that illegal immigration causes crime (see article ). In fact, it dilutes crime and makes us safer. Since the amnesty bill of ’86, the U.S. murder rate has dropped by 37 percent. Each year immigration has increased, violent crime has decreased. Illegal immigrants comprise only 5 percent of the population of state prisons, which house most violent convicts. Incarceration rates are lower for immigrants than for any other ethnic group, reports the Immigration Policy Center. Violent crime in Phoenix plunged 16.6 percent in 2009.

Harvard’s Robert Sampson documents that Mexican-Americans comprise the demographic least responsible for violent crime. He found that illegal immigrant Latinos commit fewer crimes than Latino U.S. citizens.

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The American Conservative magazine reported that illegal immigrants commit crimes at below-average rates. The murder rate in Los Angeles, mecca for illegal immigration, has dropped to a 40-year low. They commit few crimes because they come here to work. The Urban Institute found that fewer than 1 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants receive cash assistance; 5 percent of households headed by U.S. citizens receive cash assistance (see more data ).

“The major issues for Republicans will be jobs and the economy — issues Democrats have failed us on,” Wadhams said.

He’s smart. Lies about immigrants may be politically stylish, but they won’t survive scrutiny and will cost the GOP.

— Wayne Laugesen , editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend him on Facebook