New at Reason

Radley Balko | November 22, 2006

Shikha Dalmia looks to Arizona, and finds that one big loser in Election 2006 was....Lou Dobbs.

Comments

|11.22.06 @ 1:04PM|#

Seriously guys.... this is starting to get annoying.... Immigration had little to nothing to do with the anti GOP sweep this election.

Shikha, I mean, good article over all, and I do enjoy your writing, but I can't agree with the main thesis.

For better or worse this was a national wave caused by a combination of anti-war and anti-status-quo forces. Hoping that the election somehow proves that immigration is a dead issue is mostly a result of wishful thinking. Yeah, it would be nice if the situation were resolved with sanity, but the election results don't even vaguely point to that. When are people going to let go of this canard?

|11.22.06 @ 2:18PM|#

I don't see how you can have this quote in the article

Voters there overwhelmingly approved four of the harshest anti-immigrant measures ever -- ranging from requiring immigrants to learn English to denying illegal immigrants bail in felony cases and barring them from collecting punitive damages in civil cases.

And maintain that restrictive immigration policy is what caused the republicans to lose.

|11.22.06 @ 3:45PM|#

We need to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration, which have very different effects on society, the economy, and the rule of law. The author above doesn't, but my legal immigrant wife does.

Moreover, many of the preachy self-described "big tent" conservatives who decry any criticism of illegal immigration as "nativism" are deafeningly silent about attacks on legal immigration and the presence of people like my wife.

Legal immigrants and illegal immigrants both provide useful labor, but legal immigrants, who are better-paid amd more-skilled, pay enough taxes to support the social services they receive, whereas illegals typically don't, meaning that Uncle Sam effectively subsidizes their presence here, and, arguably, the institutions that employ them as well.

My legal immigrant wife is double-taxed on some of her income, as a requirement of a waiver she executed as part of her green card application. The taxpayers benefit from her presence and the taxes she pays.

Meanwhile, the illegal immigrants who shop at the same immigrant-oriented grocery store she does receive taxpayer-provided food stamps for their U.S.-born children. The taxpayers suffer from the illegals' large families, and local property taxes are high partly to school all the low-paid illegal immigrant kids.

Yet the Democrats actually prefer illegal to legal immigrants. My wife wonders why she bothered to come here legally.

When a Washington State law permitting immigrant non-citizens to get in-state tuition was used by legal aliens -- not just illegal aliens -- a Hispanic Democratic legislator proposed chopping the legal ones out of the program, and the Seattle Times praised that proposal to discriminate in favor of illegals and against legals.

The Raising Kaine Democratic-Party web site, which pushed successfully for Tim Kaine (D) to be elected governor of Virginia and Jim Webb (D) to be elected to the Senate, ceaselessly bashes legal immigration.

That liberal web site attacked Virginia Senators John Warner and George Allen for supporting increased legal immigration, even as it simultaneously attacked Allen for seeking to prevent illegal immigration.

I don't recall anyone in the establishment objecting to its attacks on legal immigration, which has been a big benefit to the national economy, and the Northern Virginia economy.

Yet they were were quick to bash Jerry Kilgore (R-Va.) for opposing taxpayer subsidies for day labor centers for illegal aliens, which would have cost over a thousand dollars a year for each illegal alien they would have served.

This was so even though Kilgore bent over backwards to emphasize that he did not object to legal immigration, and in fact told local colleges to start abiding by Toll v. Moreno, which gave legal (as opposed to illegal) aliens the right to in-state tuition under appropriate circumstances.

There's nothing nativist about opposing illegal immigration, which results in large numbers of new liberal, big government voters (the children of illegal aliens, who are citizens if born in the U.S., are usually big believers in an activist welfare-state government), and higher taxes for the schools, health care, and social services used by the illegals' large families.

We do need more legal (as opposed to illegal) immigration in many sectors of our economy.

Maybe we would get that if libertarians spent as much time explaining the benefits of legal immigration to our economy, as they do mindlessly attacking anyone as a "nativist" for opposing illegal immigration and pointing out the very real costs of the continuing mass migration into America of unskilled laborers attracted by our generous social-welfare system.

|11.22.06 @ 3:56PM|#

I really agree. "Get rid of these brown people!" nativism is a political loser and a way to unify hispanics against it. "Immigration is cool, but punish illegals" is the opposite--those who came here legally are likely to be all in favor of that.

|11.22.06 @ 7:11PM|#

Latinos comprise a sizeable majority in every state where immigration was a major issue. They make up 10.6 percent of the population in Connecticut, 28 percent in Arizona, and about 40 percent in California and Texas.

Should majority perhaps be minority?