Obama Will Have to Fight His Own Party to Ease Deportations

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times highlights some interesting political stats in an immigration study Pew released last week: 

[T]he gap between the ends of the Democratic coalition on favoring stricter enforcement and on legalization is twice as large as the gap between hard-line Republicans and their more libertarian-leaning cohorts.

[W]hile 94 percent of self-identified liberals wanted a path to citizenship, just 61 percent of so-called "hard-pressed" Democrats did. That is about twice the gap between conservatives and libertarians in the GOP's coalition. On enforcement, the gap was just as stark: Just 55 percent of liberals wanted to continue the crackdown, while 88 percent of hard-pressed Democrats did, compared with a 7 point gap between main street Republicans and conservatives on the GOP's side.

Also interesting: The source of respondents' anxiety over illegal immigration is not, as so many close-the-border types claim, immigrant crime (which has fallen off in border states): 

Asked to choose among four options, 40% of the public say their biggest concern about illegal immigration is the burden it places on government services. About a quarter (27%) say their biggest concern is the impact on jobs, while fewer cite the impact of illegal immigration on crime (9%) and America's customs and its way of life (6%).

Americans are scared that immigrants will make our crappy entitlement programs worse. That's a great argument for entitlement reform. 

Comments

[Warty]

Why is the subtitle misspelled? It's DEY TUK AR JERBS, you numbskulls.

[Brandybuck]

They took our welfare!!!

[shep the herd & his brass band]

well Obama took a job from a real American

[OO]

yes he did "take" a position that real americans offered

[R C Dean]

Well, Obama will be giving a speech in El Paso on this very topic in a few days. He tacked it onto his fundraising trip to Austin so he could stick the taxpayers with the tab for his trip.

Say what you will, it takes balls to fundraise in a state after you denied disaster assistance for fires that consumed an area 2 1/2 times the size of Rhode Island.

And brass ones to give a speech on open borders after a big shootout on a lake between Texas and Mexico that left over a dozen dead.

Big brass ones, or a bad case of megalomania and a tin ear.

[Mike M.]

So you're saying he's probably not going to win Texas in the next election?

[P B]

And traffic is going to be SO much worse today because "O" arrives at 5pm drives to the downtown area for a fundraiser the west of town for another.

http://www.statesman.com/news/.....64637.html

[Guy on the Grassy Knoll]

Don't worry. I'll be here... waiting.

[Law Student]

Oh man I'm so glad I'm not driving today. Austin traffic is already god awful on weekend afternoons, let alone rush hour.

[John]

It is not brass balls. It is just not giving a shit. There is a difference. To Obama the people in Texas barely qualify as human beings. To him the are "bitter clingers" which something a little less than fully human.

[cynical]

"And brass ones to give a speech on open borders after a big shootout on a lake between Texas and Mexico that left over a dozen dead."

Especially when your administration is supplying arms to the Mexicans.

[prolefeed]

He tacked it onto his fundraising trip to Austin

He's not fundraising in Texas in general -- he's fundraising in The People's Republic of Austin.

[Barely Suppressed Rage]

Thread detour: these guys tear down an FBI GPS car tracking device, and post photos, videos and details of how they did it and what's inside.

[Episiarch]

TEAM BLUE: showing they can be just as nativist-protectionist as TEAM RED.

[Kool]

Don't you wish you could be *shocked* anymore? I often tell people about things from this site. The response is usually something like: "Unbelievable." To which, my response is, "No. The sad thing is it is entirely believable."

[Episiarch]

Don't worry, dude. You'll get shocked again. I mean, some of the shit that went down during the bailouts was pretty shocking.

I mean, we don't want to get shocked because if it can shock us, well, it's bad.

[Slap the Enlightened!]

Don't forget the independents.

Seventy-nine percent (79%) of Republicans and 56% of voters not affiliated with either of the major political parties support ending federal funding of sanctuary cities. A plurality (45%) of Democrats disagrees and supports such funding.

Similarly, while most GOP voters and unaffiliateds think the Justice Department should take legal action against cities that provide sanctuary for illegal immigrants, Democrats are almost evenly divided on the question.

[Hugh Akston]

The really interesting thing about Pew is their continuing dunderheaded assumptions that libertarians are part of some Republican rainbow coalition.

[MWG]

Few things annoy me more, as a libertarian, than being constantly associated with republicans.

[Free2Booze]

Everyone associates libertarians with the GOP, except the GOP. They think you are all a bunch of hippy liberals.

[John Thacker]

The libertarians in Pew's study (based on policy preferences) are as a majority "Independents who lean towards the GOP because, as bad as they are, they're better than the Democrats usually."

[ClubMedSux]

I used to describe myself as that, but it seems to be less and less applicable each day.

[John Thacker]

It's less applicable in the wake of Sen. Rand Paul's election than it was in 2004? Really?

[Britt]

Leftists have a geocentric view of the political solar system, where social democracy is in the center of the system. Everything else is on the edges. Libertarianism and conservatism are equally far from the center of social democracy, thus extreme right wing. Everything is extreme right wing, they are the moderate center.

[Episiarch]

Is it as annoying as being associated with the "right-wing"? Or with the Tea Partiers? Or with corporatists? Because libertarians seem to get associated with everything but what they actually are.

[Free2Booze]

I'm sure much of the association has to do with the Barry Goldwater brand of conservatism.

Has anyone here read "The Conscience of a Conservative"? If so, would you recommend it, or would reading it be a waste of time?

[Jason]

Why don't you read it and tell us?

[Free2Booze]

Because I would rather waste someone else's time, than my own.

[Free2Booze]

Because I would rather waste someone else's time, than my own.

[Slap the Enlightened!]

Is it as annoying as being associated with the "right-wing"? Or with the Tea Partiers? Or with corporatists? Because libertarians seem to get associated with everything but what they actually are.

True enough. But "assholes" isn't a political party.

[ClubMedSux]

It's actually two (at least).

[John]

+1000. The world waits with baited breath to hear with whom .5% of the electorate will associate itself.

[Barely Suppressed Rage]

...or with bated breath, even.

[prolefeed]

"baited" makes sense if they just ate sushi.

[MWG]

You're right, I should have said the 'right-wing' in general.

[John Thacker]

The party classification in the Pew survey was based on asking people to indicate which party they identified with or identified as leaning towards, if any. However, they classified people as libertarians based on policy beliefs, not self-classification.

See the nice chart here in Matt's article.

Pew's Libertarians are classified as "Republican leaners" because while only 28% of people holding those views call themselves Republicans (vs. 5% Democrats and 67% independents), if you ask people to state what party they lean towards, 77% say R and 11% say D, the rest refuse to state.

You can't have it both ways on libertarians. If you want to claim "big tent libertarianism" that includes a whole bunch of people who "are libertarians but don't know it" or "have libertarian views," then you have to include not only a bunch of people who call themselves Republicans, but even more people who call themselves Independents but admit that they lean more to the Republicans than they do the Democrats.

OTOH, if you only want to include the hardcore who don't want to be associated with Republicans at all, then it becomes harder to claim that a significant percentage of Americans are libertarians.

Though you can always claim that more libertarians should refuse to vote to Republicans at all, a lot of people do the lesser of two evils thing.

[John]

Exactly. The Epiarch fuck you we hate everyone strategy is a strategy. But it isn't going to accomplish much.

[MWG (Not MNG)]

There's more to 'accomplishing much' than associating yourself permanently with a political party. Libertarians can, and have promoted change in the WoD, WoT, fiscal responsibility, etc. We do not need to kiss conservative ass (or liberal ass for that matter) for our ideas to take hold.

[John Thacker]

Oh sure, but there's strategies that involve both being on the inside and being on the outside. It's all a tactical question about the value of compromises. Some of the libertarians who can and have successfully promoted change have done so from the inside. Reason just had a Rand Paul article on this.

Milton Friedman took a post on the Commission on an All-Volunteer Force appointed by Richard Nixon, and he did more to promote change and sway opinion than if he had been too scared to be associated with a politician.

The leaning of libertarians towards Republicans is particularly strong in the latest Pew poll, much stronger than it was in the mid 2000s, for obvious reasons.

[MWG]

...and there's nothing wrong with those examples you provided. I think you lose me when you begin to argue that libertarians share a special bond somehow to the republican party and conservatives in general when, in reality, they are merely the opposite side of the same statist coin they share with the left.

[prolefeed]

I think it is more that, when you look at the actual candidates, your Ron and Rand Pauls and Gary Johnsons are rarely found running as Democrats. So, on occasion, the Republican who has the cojones to publicly advocate legalizing heroin is a rational choice for a libertarian. Whereas, when was the last Democrat who seemed to have a fucking clue on economic matters? They all voted for Obamacare in the end, IIRC.

[prolefeed]

Though you can always claim that more libertarians should refuse to vote to Republicans at all, a lot of people do the lesser of two evils thing.

If there are only two choices on the ballot, and neither is a libertarian, the lesser of two evils isn't an unreasonable choice.

If the choice is between two equal evils, then blank ballot makes more sense.

[Ken Shultz]

"Asked to choose among four options, 40% of the public say their biggest concern about illegal immigration is the burden it places on government services."

I think this is pretty standard.

There may be an outlier here or there, but generally speaking, the more people are forced to pay for each other's healthcare, education, etc., the more picky they are about who they're willing to pay for.

Like I said, there may be an outlier out there or two, but generally speaking? Show me a country with generous social benefits, and I'll show you a country that's more intolerant of illegal immigrants.

Want to make America a more tolerant society? Get rid of ObamaCare and privatize our public schools.

[Joe M]

It's almost like a voluntary system would work better...

NAH.

[jtuf]

Americans are scared that immigrants will make our crappy entitlement programs worse. That's a great argument for entitlement reform.

Agreed. It works on a local level too. My local suburbs won't allow new housing, because they don't want people moving in and using our public schools. This is an argument for abolishing the public schools.