The Politics of Permanent Immigration

How pro-immigration forces triumphed--and why they're likely to keep doing so.

John J. Miller from the October 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

At the national level, Republicans paid a price for their failed attempt to cut immigration and their successful attempt to deny welfare to noncitizens. Hispanic voters flocked to the Democrats. In 1996, they gave 70 percent of their support to President Clinton, up from 55 percent in 1992. Republican candidate Bob Dole earned only
21 percent Hispanic sup-
port--a smaller share than any other GOPer on record. What's more, polling data suggest that the Democrats may have carried 85 percent of Hispanic voters who had just become citizens and that they also made deep inroads among the traditionally GOP-leaning Cubans in Florida.

EVER SINCE, THE Republican Party has engaged in a massive damage control operation. Political candidates in California have sprinted away from ballot propositions that allegedly run counter to the interests of the state's Hispanics. In 1998, Attorney General Dan Lungren, who is currently the GOP nominee for governor, publicly opposed Proposition 227, an initiative intending to eliminate bilingual education. (Other prominent California Republicans, such as Wilson and GOP Senate candidate Matt Fong, supported it.) Prop. 227, inspired by Latino immigrant parents in Los Angeles who boycotted a local public elementary school for not teaching their children in English, suggested an electorate more concerned about state-enforced multiculturalism than immigration levels. Polling sponsored by Ron K. Unz, a Republican who bankrolled the initiative, revealed that conservative anxieties about immigration would be substantially relaxed if the government didn't promote racial preference policies or bilingual education programs that refuse to teach kids in English.

Prop. 227 won with 61 percent of the vote in June. Most Latinos opposed it, despite pre-election surveys showing widespread sympathy for the cause. Lungren won only 17 percent of La-
tino votes in California's
June 2 gubernatorial open primary, compared to 43 percent of whites and 39 per-cent of Asians, according to
the Los Angeles Times exit
poll.

In Congress, Republicans have spent much of the last two years undoing their welfare law as it applies to immigrants. Noncitizens who were living in the United States at the time of the bill's passage are now allowed to retain most of the benefits Congress had stripped. (To Republicans' credit, those who weren't in the country at the time now find it more difficult to receive welfare than immigrants once did.) The upshot is a political disaster for the GOP: It spent an enormous amount of capital passing the restrictions, which are sensible from a public policy perspective. Then it repealed most of what it had done. So Republicans earned an anti-immigrant political tag and two years later do not have much to show for it--except for a bad reputation among Hispanics.

There's a grand tradition in American politics of attempting to win the immigrant vote--even bribing editors of ethnic newspapers not to run ads from opponents, as was done in the 1912 presidential race--but the GOP lately has succumbed to blatant pandering. Last year, Congress increased the annual appropriation earmarked for bilingual education to more than $300 million. Today, House Speaker Newt Gingrich gives serious consideration to the disastrous idea of Puerto Rican statehood, promises to settle the land claims of Mexican Americans who say their ancestors' property rights were violated under provisions of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and regularly issues press releases in Spanish. (These releases, incidentally, often contain amusing grammatical errors. One, celebrating Cinco de Mayo, asserted that the holiday honoring Mexico's defeat of French invaders in 1862 resulted in "the right of the people to personality determination," instead of self-determination. Another referred to Gingrich as "Hablado," which is Spanish for windbag.)

This isn't to say that nobody tries to offend the immigration lobby anymore. Lamar Smith is sponsoring a modest naturalization bill meant to clean up citizenship fraud. Rep. Steve Horn (R-Calif.), reacting to evidence of illegal aliens' voting in 1996, wants voters to show identification before they cast election ballots. This proposal remains a legislative long shot, though it may yet find its way into a campaign finance reform package.

Few pro-immigrant groups, and none of those on the left, like these small-bore proposals. But having defeated recent attempts to cut admission levels, they can hardly complain about where they're sitting. One of their major concerns right now is to block Smith's effort to make elderly citizenship applicants have their fingerprints taken--something they're currently exempt from doing. "Many elderly applicants have arthritis and other conditions which make them time consuming, if not impossible, to fingerprint," complains one backgrounder on the Smith bill. That about sums up the gravitas of the immigration debate today: Should seniors trying to become citizens have their fingers stained with ink?

Big pieces of immigration legislation tend to come along every four to six years: 1980, 1986, 1990, 1996. It's too soon to expect another major package right now, and the first rumblings for one can't be heard anywhere on Capitol Hill. But with the economy humming and a pro-immigration political structure firmly in place in Washington, odds are immigration levels won't fall anytime soon. They may even go up--perhaps by a lot--in the next decade.

The 20th century helped define the United States as a nation of immigrants, even though relatively few came for nearly half of it. If today's patterns continue, the 21st century may find the United States calling itself a nation of permanent immigration. In the opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 book The Uprooted, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin famously remarked, "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." At the end of the 20th century, it looks like immigrants also may be the American future.