Congratulations to my Critics Five: Glynn Custred, John Fonte, Mark Krikorian, Heather Mac Donald, and Rep. Lamar Smith. Each responded to my National Review article describing the consequences of a Republican policy of mass deportation without using the words “deportation” or “removal”; without discussing a single problem associated with rupturing 6.6 million “illegal” families containing 15 million individuals, 4.9 million children, and 3.5 million American citizens; without explaining how the pro-life movement will survive the mass alienation of its fastest-growing demographic; or why the employers of 7 million illegals would willingly rat them out.
Instead, I have been treated to lectures on the evils of lawlessness, balkanization, and unrestricted mass migration, none of which I advocate.
So I’ll restate my thesis. If conservative Republicans continue to advocate the mass removal of resident illegals, our candidates will lose Hispanic vote share — to the point where our performance among Hispanics mirrors that among African Americans. If conservative Republicans continue to advocate the mass removal of resident illegals, our business support will erode — not to levels typical of a congressional minority, but to levels reflecting a fundamental shift of interests favoring the Democrats.
Hispanics and business groups do not reject Republican immigration policy because they are open-border fanatics. They reject it because it threatens them directly. “Enforcement only,” even gussied up as “enforcement first,” has two immediate targets: the illegals themselves, and their employers. Eighty percent of resident illegals are Hispanic. The place where the illegal world of border jumping intersects the legal world of contractual employment is the workplace. “Enforcement only” means mass expulsion of illegals, with their employers — the people who want them here — enlisted under duress as deportation cops.
HISPANIC VOTE SHARE
Some of my critics evidently believe that I have overstated the GOP’s recent Hispanic losses, and/or the relation of such losses to Republican immigration policy.
How obvious does a fact have to be? When you lose 30 votes per 100 cast by a major demographic in a single presidential cycle, that is a political earthquake. And that is what happened to Republican vote share among Hispanics, 2004 to 2008.
The massive Pew Hispanic Center poll on “Hispanics and the Transformation of American Religion” found that 41 percent of Hispanic citizens (who outnumber illegals three to one) fear a deportation procedure against a friend or family member.
How do my critics think such a prospect would play in their churches? The 2008 Zogby post-election poll for the Federation for American Immigration Reform showed that 61 percent of the new Hispanic supermajority voting Democratic “agree with Senator Obama that illegal immigrants should be granted amnesty and a pathway to citizenship, and it was one of the factors that led me to vote for him.”
Additional statistics are abundant. But do my critics really need them? I have yet to meet a conservative who doesn’t understand the dynamic of the Elián González incident in 2000 — how a SWAT team, on orders from a Democratic attorney general, invaded an ordinary Cuban home and tore a screaming child from the arms of his protector. That sight, revisited nightly in Little Havana, carried Florida (and the presidency) for George W. Bush.
Today, Hispanics are treated to dozens of Elián González incidents on the nightly newscasts of Univision, Telemundo, and Azteca. Only now, the villains are Republicans rather than Clintonistas.
Given this bombardment, it is irrelevant that Hispanic opinion on immigration levels, benefits for illegals, and official English are fairly similar to those of the general public.
Mass deportation is a deal breaker. The linked prospects of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, persecuted clergy, ruptured families, and mass profiling spooks the legal, working-class Hispanic. It is the GOP platform plan to remove the 12 million illegals among them that turns the Hispanic vote from “leans Democratic” to Democrat-dominated.
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