Well to a degree that was Bush's plot all along. Asure the new Mexican-Americans flock to the Republican Party rather than the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. will probably never regain the trust of the black voters it lost to LBJ and their own "southern strategy" back in the 1960s. They have a stranglehold on Cuban-American votes due to Kennedy's handling of the Bay of Pigs and both group's tendency towards reactionary anti-communism.

The problem here is that it's easier for the party's pols to cater to the "American first!" crowd by stirring up anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican prejudices.

So even if Bush gets this done, it'll get done in a way that pisses off Mexican-Americans, and leads towards more new Mexican-American citizens voting Democratic than Republican.

Even if this bill worked like what Bush originally asked for, the rest of his party continues to fan the flames of bigotry, as such this won't help them any more than Condi Rice and Colin Powell helped the G.O.P. amongst black voters.

Not really. Keep in mind that the Republican Party hasn't always been a "conservative party." The constant is that they've been the party of the "haves" whilst the Democratic Party has been the party of the "have-nots."

The Republicans were the "WASP party" while the Democrats were the "everybody else." Which included Jews and Catholics in the Northeast, southerners, etc. Blacks used to vote very Republican, given that it was the "Party of Lincoln" while the Democrats had the taint of the Civil War on their record.

There used to be quite a few conservative Democrats (largely in the South) and liberal Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller, Prescott Bush, etc. The two parties didn't get into a serious right/left split until the 1960s, I'd say.

Not to mention that one of the main objections from Republicans to any form of amnesty granted by other Republicans over the last few decades, has been its foolhardiness. As in "why offer amnesty to millions of people who are just going to vote Democrat?"

A lot of Republican pundits have seemed to have no doubt over the years that more immigrant voters meant more Democratic voters.

Here ya goes.

It's really long. If I get a few minutes I'll try to dredge up a decent summary.

Man, you all are ascribing so much more forethought to a political machine which I would characterize, first and foremost, as incredibly short-sighted. In everything it does. (And I'd make the same criticism of our instant-gratification culture in general, too.)

Who ever thinks about the past, or much less the future? My impression is they're just thinking about this week, and MAYBE the upcoming election cycle...and that's part of the problem. No long-term thinking. (Or compromising the long-term in favor of the short-term Band Aid.)

(Unless you're going to call Toffleresque psuedo-social science and Wired magazine type optimisistic trend predictions "forethought.")

Not at all. That's just what pundits always trot out when they object to any such "amnesty" proposals.

There are four choices : pro- or anti-amnesty commentator, opposed to, or allied with the politician in question. Amnesty will either increase the politician's own base, or that of their opponents. I've seen both flavors of pundit use the argument both ways - depending on who they're talking about.

In this case, where the Republican President and Democratic members of Congress support it together? It's a whole new ballgame.

the whole "don't reward people for breaking the law," argument brings to mind prohibition. didn't the repeal of prohibition reward people for breaking the law, too? and wasn't that done for similar reasons? it was impossible to enforce and created an unruly underworld that strained societal resources.

That's true. That never really crossed my mind. Irish, Italian, Polish, etc... immigrants were mainly Catholic no? I dunno. My grandfather lives in an area which when he was young was pretty much all first generation and whenever I try to ask questions like are most of the ______ Catholic (or whatever), it's never a simple yes or no. But yeah, I can see where you're getting that.

Just thought I'd repost this as somewhat addresses the more central question of whether or not Mexican immigrants would be more pro one party or another. Magic 8 Ball says "cannot predict now".

I wish I had more citations on this, but I'm just gonna go down and respond to some of the misinformation on this thread. I don't mean it as insult.

It's not a matter of doing jobs that people don't want to do; it's a matter of doing jobs at wages unliveable by citizens. The vast majority of illegal immigrants work temporary or seasonal jobs in the agricultural sector. Now, it may have changed since I was there, but back when I was a farmkid looking for extra money in Idaho, the going rate was a block payment of $2k or so at the end of summer after doing roughly 40 hours per week moving 100 pound pipe up and down the potato fields. Now I hadn't graduated high school at this point, but I knew exploitation of labor when I saw it, and that was just when I was looking for spare cash. If you can imagine raising a family on that kind of income, bully for you, because I sure as shit can't. It is a wage geared specifically for those who don't have permanent bills to pay like rent or power (or have to pay a very small amount), and therefore don't settle for very long. Ergo, it's geared for people like migrant workers. Maybe?

It is no small consideration, but it's not quite as serious as you suggest, for two reasons: first, Hispanic voters hardly vote as a bloc because of distinctions in geographic origin, and secondly despite their religious affiliation they don't tend to vote in a manner consistent with American voters. That isn't to say that it isn't a hope of Bush to get Hispanics to vote Republican, only that it is by and large unlikely.

In the first consideration, we need to remember that illegals would hardly vote as a bloc if they were made citizens, because they have differing needs based on where they come from. Cubans get citizenship pretty easily because of exile and refugee laws, so they don't really benefit from any change in the law; in fact, it dilutes their existing political strength. So Bush's efforts may well actually cost him support in the Cuban community, assuming a basic rat choice approach to voting behavior (granted, this is a big if I don't necessarily assume, but most of the literature on this subject is rat choice literature afaik). Same thing with Puerto Rican immigrants, who are already citizens. By contrast, Mexican or Guatemalan or Salvadoran immigrants tend to benefit, but they also tend to seperate into segregated communities, and those cleavages naturally produce divisions in voting patterns over time, same as it would people who live, say, on opposite sides of 8-mile in Detroit or different burroughs in New York.

In the second case, most Hispanic voters don't vote in a manner consistent with religious conservatives who are native citizens. Instead, they tend to vote based on economic interests, and if for no other reason than the liberalization in Mexico and El Salvador and Guatemala is what drove them to America in the first place, they look at Republican's economic policy as more of the same and vote accordingly. Yes, they don't like abortion, but they're smart enough to recognize their precarious economic position as new immigrants and know what's what when it comes to voting priorities. In short, like unionization, recent immigration seems to be an innoculant against the sheer foolhardiness of the recent Backlash politics that have dominated Republican political strategy in the last 30 years.

As a side note, immigrants are not drains on the social welfare system, Baron. In point of fact, they are net positive, because they never go for services for fear of deportation, yet they pay payroll taxes (you know, the taxes that get automatically deducted from your paycheck). I'll have to dig for the actual studies, but everything I've read suggests they pay more into the system than they draw out.

I don't totally dsagree. which is what makes the issue so tricky on both sides of the aisle. i think fiscal conservatives support the bill because it potentially provides cheap labor to business and may drive wages down across the board. what makes it difficult for bush is his party's aggressive courting of the nationalist, xenophobic, social conservative vote to gain and stay in power. and even though liberals must realize the threat so many willing to work for so little presents to wages and unions, perhaps the hope is that legitimizing these people could empower them to seek better conditions under the law. or simply, as i believe, since there is virtually no way to prevent immigrants from entering illegally to meet a market demand, the morally correct thing to do is acknowledge them as human beings, bring them out of the shadows and then try to address the industry/labor situation with the understanding that these people are a fact of life.

Mmm. Not entirely sure. Farmers have never been easy to organize and unionize, and they haven't really voted as a bloc since the 1890's. So I don't know that illegal immigration is really killing unionization per se, but it is certainly making it more difficult to organize and unionize farm workers, which is a necessary prerequisite for getting farmers living wages.

It must also be noted that fiscal conservatives benefit from the status quo: they still get their labor, and the locus of enforcement is on stopping immigrants at the border rather than tracking down who owns the front companies that employ them and fining them within an inch of their fiscal lives. It may be that this bill's great benefit to business is that it makes the whole process legit: workers who have to leave every two years can't very well organize into unions, so wages stay fairly low, but they are now also legal workers, so the companies no longer have to worry if political winds shift.

I do agree though, that this bill is going to split the Republican party between border states that actually have to deal with immigrants, and Dixie where most of the anti-immigrant venom is coming from. I also agree it splits the multicultural and economic liberals, but I get the feeling po-mo and multicultural liberals are (thankfully) and increasingly rare and disappearing breed, so the seam is much less significant.

well said. i was thinking more abstractly about wages and labor and not specifically about farmworkers, even though i agree those are the majority of the jobs under discussion. i think what makes issues like this so interesting is how they challenge the notion of a single, inviolate orthodoxy in american political parties. the simplicity of blue-red, liberal-conservative makes for nice, simple branding at election time but belies the complexity of most issues and the need for better than a coke or pepsi approach to solving them. sadly, i think we've already been too well-trained to seek our government like everything else, drive-up window style.

Po-mo?--??

i believe this is short for post-modern.