Richard Nadler’s article “At What Cost?” grossly mischaracterized the 2008 election. The piece stated that “Republican enemies of immigration reform [i.e., amnesty] took a shellacking,” but Democrat candidates who faced serious challenges by Republicans inevitably responded by running on pro-enforcement, anti-amnesty immigration platforms themselves. Interpreted correctly, congressional elections showed that amnesties and other open-borders proposals are still widely unpopular among voters. The freshman class is full of pro-enforcement, anti-amnesty members.
Republicans are often presented with a false choice—that we can either oppose amnesty or appeal to Hispanic voters, but not both. Nadler’s piece presents this case by arguing that “conservatives have been obtuse to the depth of Hispanic resistance to the removal of illegals,” and that Hispanics “demand legal status for most of America’s 12 million illegal residents.”
In fact, a 2006 Zogby poll found that 64 percent of Hispanic likely voters believe that another amnesty would encourage more illegal immigration, 47 percent believe that efforts in the past to enforce our immigration laws have been grossly inadequate, and 40 percent prefer the House Republican approach to immigration reform (reducing the illegal-immigration population over time through increased immigration enforcement). Similarly, the William C. Velasquez Institute’s exit polling that found that only 1.6 percent of Hispanic voters in 2008 considered immigration as the most important issue in deciding for whom to vote for president.
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Just as opposition to amnesty is not a deal-breaker for Hispanics, support for amnesty is not a panacea for Republican appeal in the Hispanic community. Only 23 percent of Hispanics voted for House Republican candidates in the 1986 election, after a Republican president signed into law the largest amnesty for illegal immigrants in American history. When it comes to amnesty, we will always be outbid by the Democrats. Why do the Democrats want amnesty? Tom Barry, a left-wing commentator at Americas Policy Program, states it plainly: “The legalization of 11 million new immigrants would likely cement the [Democratic] party’s position as the majority party for decades to come. . . . This possible infusion of millions of new Latino voters is central to the long-term political strategy of [the New Democrat Network] and its associates in the Democratic Party.”
We don’t need to sacrifice our core values to appeal to Hispanics. Republicans should focus on fundamental American values of patriotism and freedom and family, on support for small businesses and on jobs, education, and the American Dream. This is exactly what President Bush did when he received an impressive 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. His Spanish-language-media ads focused on values and small-business issues, not immigration. This is the kind of Hispanic outreach that will work and reinforce conservative values.
Nadler also fails to understand the detrimental impact of illegal immigration on disadvantaged, low-skilled American workers. Immigration by illegal immigrants and other poorly educated aliens has had a serious depressing effect on the standard of living of low-skilled American workers. The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by the late civil-rights pioneer Barbara Jordan, found that “immigration of unskilled immigrants comes at a cost to unskilled U.S. workers.” The Center for Immigration Studies has estimated that such immigration has reduced the wages of the average native-born worker in a low-skilled occupation by 12 percent, or almost $2,000. Harvard economist George Borjas has estimated that immigration in recent decades has reduced the wages of native-born workers without a high-school degree by 8.2 percent. Even Alexander Aleinikoff—Clinton administration INS official and Obama administration DHS transition official—calls it a “myth” that “there is little or no competition between undocumented workers and American workers.”
Nadler’s study on the supposed economic benefits of mass low-skilled immigration,
“Immigration and the Wealth of States,” makes the kind of fundamental economic errors that economists like George Borjas long ago unmasked. First, we can’t measure the negative impact of mass low-skilled immigration on the unemployment rates or incomes of American workers by simply comparing the unemployment rates or income levels of persons in high- and low-immigration states. This is because the negative impact of immigration is spread throughout the country when natives leave high immigration states in response to the influx. Second, immigrants are usually attracted to high growth regions—they follow the growth; the growth does not follow them.
America has the most generous legal-immigration system in the world. We admitted over a million immigrants in 2007, far more than any other country. But we cannot admit everyone in the world who wants to come to America, even if we empathize with their desire to come.
Lamar Smith (R., Texas)
Ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee
