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“No Room For Misinterpretation”: Donald Trump Warns Of Diseased Immigrants Coming Across The Border—Adds Insult To Injury

This afternoon, future United States President Donald Trump released a statement intended to clarify his remark that illegal immigrants from Mexico are “rapists.”

Trump is unhappy that people are interpreting his statement to mean that he believes all illegal immigrants from Mexico are rapists, when he merely intended to say that some of them are rapists.

Trump, who has publicly speculated that vaccines can cause autism, added that immigrants are responsible for bringing “infectious disease” into America.

Trump’s press release began: “I don’t see how there is any room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the statement I made on June 16th during my Presidential announcement speech.”

The speech, he said, was “deliberately distorted” by the media and to prove it he included an excerpt of his remarks so that readers could see for themselves how they have been taken out of context.

When Mexico (meaning the Mexican Government) send its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you (pointing to the audience). They’re not sending you (pointing again). They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume are good people! But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes sense. They’re sending us not the right people. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.”

“What can be simpler or more accurately stated?” Trump asked. “They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc…On the other hand, many fabulous people come in from Mexico and our country is better for it.”

Trump then noted that Mexican cartels bring heroin, cocaine “and other illicit” drugs into America via immigrants, and, “Likewise, tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border. The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico and, in fact, for many other parts of the world.”

About those vaccines: since at least 2012, Trump has claimed that vaccines and autism are linked.

During a Fox and Friends appearance to promote his cologne, “Success,” in 2012, Trump said, “I’m all for vaccinations, but I think that when you add all of these vaccinations together and then two months later the baby is so different…” Trump said, adding this was “a theory” but anecdotally, “It happened to somebody that worked for me recently. I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world, and all of a sudden they go in and they get this monster shot. Then all of a sudden the child is different a month later. I strongly believe that’s it.”

So that’s it.

Anyway, in the event that you’ve been slumbering unaware since Trump’s June announcement, his remarks about illegal immigrants have resulted in a mass exodus of businesses in the Trump Inc. orbit. Univision, a Spanish-language TV network, announced they would no longer air Trump’s beauty pageants; Macy’s pulled all Trump branded products; NBC dropped Trump’s show, The Apprentice. Trump has filed suit against Univision, for $500 million, and threatened legal action against NBC.

“I have lost a lot during this Presidential run defending the people of the United States,” Trump said in the Monday statement. “I have always heard that it is very hard for a successful person to run for President.”

Well, now he knows.

 

By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, July 6, 2015

July 8, 2015 Posted by | Donald Trump, Immigrants, Immigration | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Donald Trump Is A Complete Lunatic On Immigration”: But He’s No Crazier Than Much Of The GOP

Through the power of his bizarre brand of charisma, Donald Trump has moved from the sideshow to take up residence in the main tent of the GOP circus. And in the process, he’s bringing all kinds of interesting issues to light. Even as he is getting dropped by one corporate partner after another (how America will survive without its Trump-branded mattresses is a mystery), he has moved toward the front of the Republican pack, at least for the moment. And while I’m guessing he’s surprised that the backlash to his remarks on immigration has been so intense, Trump’s repellent views can help us understand the issue and why it divides Americans the way it does.

In case you missed it, during the free-style spoken-word performance that was his announcement speech, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

In the days since, he has not backed down. While most Republicans haven’t rushed to his defense, he got help from National Review editor Rich Lowry, who wrote in what I guess we could consider a refreshingly candid piece in Politico that “there was a kernel” in Trump’s remarks “that hit on an important truth,” which is that Mexican immigrants “come from a poorly educated country at a time when education is essential to success in an advanced economy.”

As it happens, the truth is that immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, regardless of what Trump or people like Bill O’Reilly might have you believe. But Trump exposes a particular line of thinking that we don’t usually hear from politicians, even as they know it exists and often seek to pander to it in subtle (or not so subtle) ways.

Most of the discussion about immigration is about policy. Are we spending enough on border security? Do we want to build more fences? Can we get the E-Verify system working better? Should undocumented immigrants get a path to citizenship, and how would it work? While all these question are laden with the values we bring to them, they’re essentially practical.

Then there’s the more fundamental question of how we think about immigration, which is where Trump comes in. At its heart, the question is this: Is immigration good or bad?

Pretty much every Democratic politician, and even most Republican ones, would answer that immigration is good. This is a country that was built by successive waves of immigration from all over the world. America is a land blessed in natural resources and with oceans that have kept foreign invasion to a minimum, but the real reason we have led the world in so many areas is that we’re a magnet for immigrants who continually remake the country. Our dynamism — economic, cultural, scientific, and in so many other areas — has always been a product of the fact that we are a society built on constant immigration.

That’s both because of who immigrants are and how they change the nation once they arrive. People who are willing to leave the place, people, and language they know in order to seek out a better life for themselves and their children are always going to be the kinds of people we want. They’re risk-takers, they’re entrepreneurial, they’re hard-working, and they’re willing to defer immediate gains for long-term success. And when you throw people from diverse backgrounds together, you get a country that is always changing, expanding, and progressing, with new foods, new music, new ideas, and new ways of looking at the world.

That’s the pro-immigration perspective. The other perspective fears that they might be criminals, that they’ll drain our resources, and that they’ll make it harder for native-born Americans to find work. And most of all, it doesn’t want our society to change, no matter where its own grandparents may have come from.

You can value immigration and still want to keep it limited, of course. If you asked the Republican candidates to explain their views, this is where almost all of them would say they come down. They want immigration, it just needs to be more tightly controlled.

I have no reason to doubt that this is what they sincerely believe. But they also know that their constituents don’t all feel the same way. Lots of them just want to shut the door.

A Pew poll from last month asked people whether they thought that “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care,” or that “Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” Republicans preferred the first statement by 63-27, while Democrats chose the second statement by 62-32.

If that’s an accurate reflection of a fundamental distaste for immigrants — not just undocumented immigrants, but all immigrants — among the Republican electorate, it means the politicians who lead their party aren’t reflecting their views. That’s true even if the policy solutions Republican candidates propose are extremely hard-line.

Then along comes Donald Trump, who is willing to say forthrightly what a lot of people believe, that Mexicans (currently the largest immigrant group) are a bunch of no-good dangerous criminals, and we need to just keep them out, full stop. The fact that so many corporations are treating him like he has the plague shows that it’s one thing to advocate conservative policies on immigration, but rejecting the fundamental premise that immigration is good is something few want to associate themselves with.

But more than a few Republican voters like what they hear. Knowing Trump, he probably won’t stop saying it.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Week, July 6, 2015

July 8, 2015 Posted by | Donald Trump, Immigrants, Immigration | , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“Conservative Voters Are Going To Get Mighty Picky”: Marco Rubio’s Problem Isn’t Gotcha Stories. It’s Still Immigration

Conservatives have risen up in defense of Marco Rubio over two mini-scandals that appear to call his character into question. That’s a good sign for Rubio’s chances in the GOP primary. These little contretemps may help to create loyalty between the candidate and primary voters, who apparently aren’t going to let Rubio pay for these supposed mistakes or indiscretions.

But if Rubio thinks a spat with the mainstream media will cause Republican voters to forget his past positions on immigration, well, he may be in for a surprise.

First was a silly report in The New York Times about his traffic violations. He had earned four in nearly two decades of driving around Florida. Politicians tend to be late and in a hurry, so Rubio probably rates better than average on this score. And the fact that the same report didn’t uncover any uncouth workarounds that were made available to him because of his political life actually speaks well of him. His supporters tweeted jokingly about Rubio going on rampages of trivial offenses, with the hashtag #RubioCrimeSpree.

The second story, about his personal finances, is a bit more complicated. Rubio has made a campaign virtue of the fact that debt — including college debt — has occasionally crimped his family budget. He admitted forthrightly in his biography that he was a sloppy accountant. The Times reported on his missteps but dropped in some facts that would make you question Rubio’s judgment. He was unusually bad at saving from his income. He even liquidated a retirement account, presumably at huge expense, to cover expenses. He also, after receiving a huge contract for his book, bought an $80,000 boat.

Conservatives downplayed it as a #MarcoBoat, and pointed out that $80,000 is a tiny fraction of the six- and seven-figure conflicts of interest that populate stories about Hillary Clinton.

But I noticed that it was flogged a bit by immigration hawks like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. It’s a reminder that Rubio’s problem may not be his character, but his position on immigration reform. The hardcore immigration hawks in the Republican Party have not bought into the image Rubio is trying to sell, of a politician who was chastened by his failure in securing comprehensive reform. And that can cost him.

Mitt Romney neutralized Rick Perry on this exact issue four years ago, saying that Perry had created magnets for illegal immigrants by providing their children with in-state tuition. He baited Perry into repeating the liberal’s criticism of immigration hawks, with Perry claiming that they “don’t have a heart.” More than anything — even the “oops” moment — this is what brought down Perry’s campaign.

Ann Coulter’s book Adios America! contains blistering arguments against Rubio’s preferred immigration policies, including the numbers and rhetoric he has used to sell it. While lots of people claim that the polling on immigration is ambiguous, sometimes the results surprise. A 2007 California Field poll stated the question in the most provocative way possible: Would you prefer a policy of “having federal immigration agents round up, detain, and deport immigrants found to be living here illegally?” The “yes” camp scored 46 percent, and the “no” answer won 43 percent.

It should be said that no politician supports this policy for dealing with the country’s more than 10 million illegal immigrants.

Coulter’s arguments include shocking numbers that indicate those on a path to citizenship wouldn’t be net contributors on income taxes, but would become eligible for federal aid and assistance:

[A] more detailed breakdown of the costs and benefits shows that college-educated Americans pay an average of $29,000 more in taxes every year than they get back in government services, according to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector. By contrast, legal immigrants, on average, get back $4,344 more in government services than they pay in taxes. Those with only a high school degree net about $14,642 in government payments, and those without a high school degree collect a whopping $36,993.27. Contrary to the claims of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s press secretary, Marco Rubio, making illegal aliens citizens will not result in the U.S. Treasury being deluged with their tax payments. The vast majority of illegal aliens — about 75 percent — have only a high school diploma or less, so legalization means they will immediately begin collecting an average of $14,642–$36,993 per year from the U.S. taxpayer. [Adios, America!]

You may say, I don’t trust those numbers, because Ann Coulter is using them. But how would GOP voters feel about them? Do you think that if Ted Cruz’s campaign started flagging, he wouldn’t try to do to Rubio what Romney did to Perry?

In a primary race crowded with so many candidates, conservative voters are going to get mighty picky about their champion. And this is an issue that can cost deviationists a lot. If Cruz or any other candidate chooses to do so, they can make Rubio pay much more dearly for immigration than for four traffic tickets — or even a nice boat.

 

By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, June 11, 2015

June 17, 2015 Posted by | Conservatives, Immigration, Marco Rubio | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Despicable She”: Coulter Hates ‘The Browning Of America’

When it comes to Ann Coulter—the conservative blonde avenger, the loud-mouthed provocateur, the human hot-button of mass-media notoriety who is forever tossing turds into liberals’ punch bowls—people always want to know: Is she for real?

Even the title of her latest book, ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, is guaranteed to raise many folks’ blood pressure and strain their credulity.

Does Coulter actually believe the tendentious claim in that title or other incendiary things she has said in the past—for example, that the 9/11 widows are greedy, fame-obsessed “witches” and “harpies”; that the United States should invade Muslim countries, “kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity”; that her Christian co-religionists are “perfected Jews”; that she only wishes that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had targeted The New York Times instead?

Or is she merely engaging in perverse, albeit attention-getting, performance art?

Apparently the answer is: a bit of both.

“I don’t know why liberals find this idea about me comfortable,” Coulter tells me over dinner, “but I just had lunch with a law school friend of mine, and I had forgotten—and he reminded me—that at law school I wore mink coats and took up smoking just to annoy liberals, so apparently I’d been like this for awhile. He said, ‘You’re exactly like you were in law school.’

“But I have summer-camp friends—who, when they see people say ‘this is just an act, she doesn’t really believe it’—they would write indignant letters and say, ‘No. She would march up to me on the hiking trail and explain that Nixon was being lied about.’ ”

We are sitting near the kitchen in a quiet Italian restaurant, a favorite haunt in the Upper East Side neighborhood in which she keeps an apartment; her other two homes are in Beverly Hills, California, and a wealthy enclave of Florida (unnamed here, at Coulter’s request, so as not to encourage stalkers), where she established official residence years ago to avoid state income taxes.

She has done very well for herself; she gets seven-figure book advances, and while her lecture fees are not in the Hillary Clinton range, Coulter has little cause for complaint.

She has arrived for dinner with the panache of a prom queen, making a grand entrance, graciously accepting the elaborate greeting of the maître d’ and stopping by a front table to trade kisses with talk radio host Mark Simone and Fox Business Network personality Charlie Gasparino on the way to her interview with The Daily Beast.

She is, as usual, dressed against type—that is, if one thinks her type is “matronly Republican Women’s Club activist from New Canaan,” Coulter’s gilded, suburban Connecticut hometown.

Instead, she wears tight, seemingly painted-on jeans, a hint of midriff showing beneath her blouse; at 53, she still rocks that “Vixen of the Right” thing that once prompted Playboy to ask her to take it all off. In a rare display of caution, she declined.

“I’m fanatical,” Coulter confides—describing not her ideology but her work habits. “I have no life. No friends. No family. No vacations. Nobody has seen me.”

She’s kidding, of course—Coulter has plenty of friends (including those, like Bill Maher, who find some of her political views objectionable; I’ve written about and occasionally socialized with her for years.) “I did take a break to watch Forensic Files,” she adds, mentioning the true-crime television series for which she admits an obsession.

Coulter has been a virtual shut-in, staring at her laptop, writing and Googling, Googling and writing, since the height of Florida’s hurricane season. The occasion for her reemergence in Manhattan—and her ramped-up appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel program—is the publication of her 11th book (the previous 10 have made the New York Times best-seller list), an often-inflammatory, usually clever, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny screed against immigration, illegal and otherwise.

Coulter’s near-life-size portrait gazes unsmilingly from the book jacket of ¡Adios America!—looking very much like a hard-eyed, flaxen-haired border guard getting ready to send an unfortunate family of refugees back to wherever they came from.

“In order to change this country to one more favorable to crazy liberal policies, Democrats passed—and Republicans were hoodwinked into passing—this crazy 1965 immigration law that has changed the country in shocking and dramatic ways,” Coulter says, explaining her book’s premise and referring to legislation—sponsored by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy—that abolished long-implemented preferences for immigrants from Northern and Western Europe over Africans, Asians and other third-world natives.

“This has been our law for 50 years now, and I blame the Republicans for idiotically continuing it,” she continues. “The Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986 [creating an easier path to citizenship for foreigners who illegally entered and settled in the United States] was a mistake. As for these idiot Tea Partiers or whichever conservatives are idol-worshipping Ronald Reagan, he was great for his time, but it was a different world. I don’t think he’s going down as the greatest president when he signed an amnesty law.”

Coulter—whose own ancestors arrived here from the Netherlands, England, Ireland, and Germany starting in the 17th century, she says—argues that teeming hordes of new immigrants, especially from Mexico, vote overwhelmingly Democratic, so current immigration policy is really “an evil-genius plan to change the country. That’s what the Democrats get out of it. Obama never could have been elected in this country but for Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act. Never, never, ever, ever!”

Coulter’s politically quixotic prescription: a 10-year moratorium on all legal immigration; a complete dismantling of the immigration bureaucracy, not only government agencies and sympathetic elected officials but also outside advocacy groups; the erection of an impassable fence along the entire U.S.-Mexican border (in her book, she praises the Communist East Germans for effectively, sometimes lethally, preventing their citizens from breaching the Berlin Wall); and a return to pre-1965 policies that give preference to highly educated, usually white Europeans.

“I wouldn’t care if they were white or not; I’m talking about peasants who come from backward cultures,” she says, although she expresses alarm at predictions that by 2050 Caucasians in this country will be a minority. “There are white people from backward cultures. They just don’t happen to come from a country contiguous to the United States. It’s backward cultures that are providing cheap labor and Democratic votes.” (Coulter, however, is unfailingly friendly to our waiter, who identifies himself as “Luis,” an immigrant from Ecuador who came here 10 years ago and is working his way toward U.S. citizenship.)

Coulter argues that U.S. immigration policies were demonstrably better a hundred years ago. “There was no mollycoddling of immigrants back then. With the Irish and the Italians, and even the Germans—especially the Germans—we were allowed to boss them around,” she says. “We could say, ‘No. No. You can’t do this anymore. You are an American now. Knock it off!’ The only problem with the fact that they [recent immigrants] are brown—well, you’re saying they’re brown, I’m saying they’re peasants—is that they’re piggy-backing on the black experience, and saying ‘That’s racist’ if you tell them to do things our way, and ‘You can just assimilate to us,’ not the other way around.

“Can you imagine the Irish or Italians or Germans saying that to our country back at the turn of the century? ‘No! Fuck you! You came to our country. Learn our ways!’”

Using language that many doubtless will find hair-raising if not downright offensive, Coulter speaks of the “browning of America”—a term she says she adopted as a negative after seeing it bandied favorably on MSNBC—and how the country is being ruined by an influx from Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, Vietnam, Nigeria, and other benighted locales.

“In Nigeria, everyone is a criminal,” Coulter claims. “But we take more immigrants from Nigeria than we do from Britain. Don’t react casually to that! That’s madness. The British are just going to other countries. And a lot of these countries, like Spain, are just shitholes now. Young, smart people are emigrating to Germany and they won’t be collecting Social Security immediately. Perhaps we should consider them rather than a Nigerian terrorist.”

Coulter adds that among the victims of Latino immigration, especially, are African Americans. “Hispanic groups will move into neighborhoods and say, ‘We don’t want any blacks here,’ and start physically attacking blacks,” she says. “It’s kind of wild. In most race relations, it’s never blacks who are victims of terror, it’s whites. Now blacks are being terrorized.”

So, Ann Coulter is the voice of African Americans now?

“I know they’re never going to adopt me, so you don’t have to say it in that sarcastic way,” she parries. “If they still hate me, I don’t care. They’re being totally screwed by this whole diversity and integration imperative, and they really are part of America. They are so important culturally in America—I mean the humor, the actors…they have the comedians and the music. I love Dave Chapelle, and my close personal friend Sherrod Small. I love Eddie Murphy, although he doesn’t do anything anymore. And Chris Rock.”

In ¡Adios, America! and over dinner, Coulter expands on her belief that when new arrivals from foreign climes are not busying themselves with “browning” the country, collecting welfare payments and swarming to the polls to vote Democrats into office, they are committing Medicare fraud, child rape, gang rape, honor killings and a host of other un-American activities.

She blames politically correct U.S. government census-taking and crime statistic policies—and the media establishment’s reluctance to identify the countries of origin of the alleged perpetrators—on the fact that she doesn’t have generally accepted stats to back up her assertions, merely horrific anecdotes and back-of-the-envelope guesses.

In her assertions about the allegedly low average intelligence of various “undesirable” immigrant groups, she relies on the studies of Jason Richwine, whose work on IQ and immigration was too controversial even for the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, which dismissed him from his staff job there after his Harvard doctoral dissertation came to light.

Meanwhile, Coulter blasts the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls—with the exception of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—as “bozos” and “morons,” and heaps special contempt on Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (whom she accuses of favoring amnesty), and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who lately pays lip service to tough policies, Coulter says, “but I don’t trust him.”

Coulter’s beau ideal is a two-time presidential candidate who insists he isn’t running this time around: 2012 Republican standard-bearer Mitt Romney.

He is the only politician whose immigration policies—including his much-derided notion from the 2012 campaign that illegal residents should be incentivized to “self-deport”—are closely aligned with Coulter’s, and she hopes that GOP primary voters will ultimately beg him to get into the 2016 race.

Calling herself a “one-issue” voter, Coulter excuses Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion rights (from pro-choice to pro-life) because “he flipped on it our way” and when he was pro-choice, it was 1994 and “he was trying to take out Teddy Kennedy” in the Massachusetts Senate race.

“Look,” Coulter tells me, “if he had to be Adolf Hitler but managed to take out Teddy, I would salute him to end that menace.”

 

By: Lloyd Grove, The Daily Beast, May 26, 2015

May 27, 2015 Posted by | Ann Coulter, Immigration, Racism | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Hillary Clinton Has Already Crushed Republicans On Immigration”: It’s Heads She Wins And Tails They Lose, Regardless Of What They Do

You can question Hillary Clinton’s political scruples. But don’t doubt her political smarts.

There is no better proof of either quality than her U-turn decision last week to go all out in embracing amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Clinton’s gambit is a major flip-flop — one that will put Republicans in a bind that they’ll have a hard time extricating themselves from. It’s heads she wins and tails they lose, regardless of what they do.

Clinton stunned everyone — even Latino activists — when she boldly called for a “path to full and equal citizenship” for all of the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants in the country. Speaking at a gathering of handpicked young immigrants in a high school in Nevada, a Latino-heavy swing state, she rejected the notion of a mere path to legalization — like the sort Jeb Bush and some of the more immigrant-friendly Republicans have skittishly backed. “That’s code for second-class status,” Clinton declared. She promised to go much further than even President Obama’s recent executive action and “defer” deportation proceedings not only against some illegal immigrants, but virtually all of them, while working toward comprehensive immigration reform that included citizenship.

This was a remarkable shift for someone who has not only maintained a studious silence for months about Obama’s executive action, but also previously opposed drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. Indeed, her flip is so dramatic that instead of raising questions about her credibility, it has changed the conversation so much that we’re immediately asking what Republicans need to do to catch up.

No doubt her proposal, which she offered no realistic plan for pushing through an unfriendly Congress, is designed to deflect attention from “Emailgate” and any number of other scandals that might yet derail her candidacy. But that’s not all its aimed at doing.

Its chief purpose is to compound what pollster Whit Ayres calls the GOP’s “daunting demographic challenge” in 2016.

Ayers points out that Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote in 2012, the highest percentage of any Republican challenging an incumbent president, and still lost because he got only 18 percent of the overall minority vote and 27 percent of the Latino vote. However, the white share of the national electorate is on track to drop by three percentage points (from 72 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2016) — and the minority share, likewise, to rise by the same amount.

This means that the GOP candidate has to do one of two things to win against Clinton: Improve his or her performance with whites to about 65 percent, a feat only Ronald Reagan has accomplished in the last 50 years, or boost his or her minority vote to 30 percent, which would require drawing about 45 percent of the Latino vote — as George W. Bush did.

But here’s the thing: While Democrats’ white and minority supporters are united on the issue of immigration (or at least not hopelessly divided), the GOP’s are not. This means that the more Republicans question and condemn Clinton’s support for “amnesty,” the more they’ll dig themselves in a hole with Latinos and make her more popular. On the other hand, it they stay mute — which is what most of them have done (with the exception of Lindsey Graham) — they’ll risk alienating the anti-amnesty white base that they have spent the last decade riling up.

In other words, if Republicans fight Hillary’s call for amnesty, they’ll lose Latinos, which will benefit Hillary. But if they don’t, they’ll lose whites, which will also benefit Hillary.

The dilemma is particularly acute for Jeb Bush, whose broad support for immigration (along with his Mexican-American wife and Spanish fluency) has made him perhaps the best-placed Republican to do well among Latinos. Yet even he doesn’t come anywhere close to the 45 percent mark yet. He has been rather equivocal in his support for a path to citizenship and has been assuring GOP voters that whatever course he charts for the undocumented, it will require them to jump through all kinds of hoops, such as paying fines and passing English tests and possibly “touching back” to their home country. Still, a recent Bloomberg poll found that 41 percent of likely Republican voters in New Hampshire, far from the most restrictionist state in the country, considered his immigration views a “deal-killer.”

By positioning herself as even more pro-immigration than the most pro-immigration GOP candidate — and potentially picking as her running mate Julian Castro, secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the former mayor of San Antonio who is wildly popular with Latinos — she will basically lock up the Latino vote. This will mean that the Republican nominee, even Jeb Bush, would have to go whole-hog for the white vote by hardening his or her opposition to amnesty and immigration, further cementing the GOP’s reputation as the anti-minority, white man’s party.

Some pundits pooh-pooh this problem, noting that like all voters, Latinos list jobs and the economy as their top concerns, not immigration. That’s true. But, also like all voters, Latinos won’t put their economic faith in someone they don’t trust politically. They will have much more confidence in Clinton solving those problems, not because they necessarily buy into her liberal tax-and-spend plans, but because they have more confidence in her personally, thanks to her appeal for them on immigration issues.

What’s more, life will get only more miserable for Republicans once Clinton enters the White House and makes comprehensive immigration reform her signature issue. That’s because if Republicans go along with her plans to extend full-fledged amnesty, they will basically be handing her a whole new block of Democratic voters. But if they don’t, Democrats will be able to milk this issue in subsequent elections, when the electorate is even more Latino.

Regardless of where one stands on the merits of the issue, the political reality is this: Republicans’ harsh anti-immigration rhetoric has left them no good options. They have created their own vulnerability. And Hillary Clinton has just zeroed in on it.

 

By: Shikha Dalmia, The Week, May 22, 2015

May 23, 2015 Posted by | Amnesty, Hillary Clinton, Immigration | , , , , , , | 4 Comments