Immigration: The Albatross around the GOP's Neck

It may have taken the U.S. Supreme Court just an hour to complete its discussion of illegal immigration this past week, but American politicians cannot seem to get enough of the subject. It will be months before the Court rules on the case in question, which of course concerns the infamous Arizona state law, but Democratic leaders in the Senate are already developing a strategy designed to overturn the decision if the Arizona law is upheld. That vote, would presumably fail, thanks in large part to Republican opposition, but it would allow the Democrats to keep immigration as an election issue in the public eye. Democrats are also attacking Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, for supporting the law. In response, Mr. Romney has dismissed the attacks from the left as an effort to distract Hispanic voters from President Obama’s failings as steward of the economy. The outcome of this presidential race it seems, could conceivably hang on voter’s perception of the state of the economy or laws like Arizona’s that generate indignation among most Hispanics and many Americans across the country.

Just to refresh your memory, Arizona’s bill passed in 2010 was designed to discourage illegal immigration by making it a crime under Arizona law as well as federal law and by instructing state authorities to proactively be on the lookout for illegal immigrants. Civil liberties groups are alarmed by the law’s proclivity to encourage racial profiling resulting in anyone with brown skin being subjected to undue harassment since there is no simple or obvious way for law enforcement to determine a person’s citizenship status without multiple stops and checks.

The prospect of unwarranted checks seemed to particularly concern several justices during the oral arguments on the law before the Supreme Court. But the Obama administration’s solicitor-general explained he was not challenging the law on the grounds that it would discriminate against Latinos. Instead, he argued that the law pre-empts the federal government’s power to set and enforce immigration policy.

The Supreme Court’s verdict will determine the fate not just of Arizona’s law, but of similar measures in five other states. As successive presidents have promised but failed to resolve the question of America’s 10 million or so illegal immigrants, frustration at the federal government’s failure has increased, especially among conservative politicians and the conservative voters who put them in office. Consequently, various Republican controlled state legislatures around the country have attempted to take matters into their own hands, The need for a crackdown on illegal immigration seems to have become a point of faith among Republican primary voters and the presidential bid of Rick Perry¸ the governor of Texas, collapsed into ruin partly because he had signed a law allowing certain undocumented students to pay the same rates as other state residents at state universities.

Even as the debate regarding illegal immigration has become shriller, as debate surrounding so-called social issues tend to become in this country, the phenomenon itself has become less and less of a reality. Our recession has almost more than anything else, helped to stem the tide of job-seekers across America’s borders. This has also been manifested in lower numbers of people caught trying to steal into our country because there are simply fewer people making the attempt. Ironically, as the Supreme Court wrapped up its arguments on the case this week, the Pew Hispanic Center, a research institute, released a report showing that Mexicans, once the largest group of illegal immigrants in the United States are now leaving the country in greater numbers than they are entering it.

Nonetheless Mr. Romney cheerfully joined in the denunciation of Mr. Perry for his breach of party doctrine. By the same token, when Newt Gingrich, another candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, suggested that illegal immigrants of good character and long standing should be allowed to stay, Romney attacked him too. He argues that life should be made so difficult for illegal immigrants that they will choose, in a horrible phrase, to “self-deport”. Democrats hope that all this will dent Mr. Romney’s prospects among Hispanic voters, many of whom see Republican foaming at the mouth against illegal immigration as stony-hearted, if not racist. In a survey conducted last year on behalf of the Pew Hispanic Centre, two-thirds of Hispanic registered voters said they favored the Democrats. Just 20% identified themselves as Republican. In March a FOX News Latino poll found that, in a head-to-head match-up, Mitt Romney would carry just 14% of the Hispanic vote. Earlier polls had found Romney doing better than that, but still considerably worse than the 31% John McCain managed to amass, even while losing in 2008, or the whopping 40% the Spanish-speaking George W. Bush posted in 2004.

Hispanics made up 16% of the population in 2010, according to that year’s census. They are a fast-growing group, although a relatively large proportion of them are below voting age and even those eligible to vote are less assiduous about it than Anglos are. But they account for over 20% of the population in several swing states, including Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. Democrats hope to make Arizona a swing state this year, thanks both to the 30% Hispanic share of the local population and to the acrimony inspired by the state’s immigration law. A recent poll put President Obama within two points of Mr. Romney in the state, which has been a Republican stronghold recently—not least because of John McCain’s candidacy for the US Senate in 2010 which because of a hotly contested Republican primary drove John McCain further to the right than he has ever been.

Republicans have long tried to find common cause with Latino voters. They point out that, in some respects, Hispanics seem natural conservatives: religious, hard-working and with close family ties. There is even talk that presidential candidate Mitt Romney might bolster his standing among Latinos by picking one as a running-mate—Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, say, or Susana Martinez, the governor of New Mexico.

Since the immigration debate has such a nativist tone, however, Democrats are doubtful that Republicans can win over many Hispanic voters. “You can’t do it when at a very baseline level you make American citizens feel unwelcome in their own country,” says Joaquin Castro, a Democratic state representative from San Antonio, Texas. It will not help that in the middle of the campaign the Supreme Court will draw attention once again to the Republicans’ conservativism on the issue by ruling on the Arizona law.