Thursday, February 07, 2008

Immigration Politics   [Mark Krikorian]

As I point out in my piece on the homepage today, the open-borders cackling that Amnesty John's victory shows immigration to be politically irrelevant is wishful thinking. In fact, it would seem that support for lax immigration policies is not the silver bullet for Hispanics that so many would have us believe. Sailer makes the point that "In the California primary, Hillary won big among Latinos in California by running as a tax and spend Democrat, while Obama ran as a pro-illegal immigrant." The lesson for Republicans is that we need to reach out to our fellow Americans of Hispanic origin as Republicans, not to adopt the positions of the other side — those Hispanic voters who want tax-and-spend policies aren't going to change their minds because we offer illegal aliens driver's licenses, and those who are attracted to our message of lower taxes, moral traditionalism, and strong defense are likely to be demoralized when we start aping Ted Kennedy on immigration.

02/07 01:55 PMShare