AMNESTY: Bad Policy, Even Worse Politics

Political leaders make decisions constantly. They’re about either policy or politics; doing things to benefit the nation, or doing things to gain and keep power. The former is policy, the latter is politics.

Amnesty, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently stated Republicans are now open to supporting, is bad on both fronts: bad for the country, and bad for the GOP. Partly because the policy argument against amnesty has been covered so well elsewhere, and partly because Republicans so often place politics above the good of the country, I’ll focus on amnesty’s bad politics. In sum, if the GOP truly wants to gain the respect (and votes) of Hispanic-Americans, they can do so, but only by not giving in on this issue.

If the past nine general elections are anything to go by, Republicans will not be rewarded for getting behind the latest amnesty bill introduced last month by House Democrats — Lindsey Graham and Dick Durban have since introduced their own Senate version. The Hispanic electorate won’t shower them with their votes, nor will the amnesty-beneficiaries themselves after they naturalize.

Ever since the first Reagan election, when Hispanic exit-polling began, Hispanics have voted fairly consistently for Democrats on an over 2-to-1 basis. Even after President Reagan signed a sprawling (and fraud-ridden) congressional amnesty in 1986, that ratio didn’t change. When George H.W. Bush was elected in 1988, he received only 30 percent of the Hispanic vote; 7 points lower than what Reagan got in 1984 before the amnesty. Moreover, the provision of an additional amnesty in 1990 only led to more demands from Hispanic and open-borders activists; a theme that continued with six more amnesties that followed and now seems to get louder every year.

young Hispanics, many of whom have been incubated in schools where the dominating narrative is that the ‘South west was stolen’ and that ‘immigration is justice.’

That 2-to-1 ratio might even worsen for the GOP. Many of those GOP-voting Hispanics are third-plus-generation Mexican-Americans; an aging and increasingly small demographic among the broader Hispanic electorate. In their place will be young Hispanics, many of whom have been incubated in schools where the dominating narrative is that the ‘Southwest was stolen’ and that ‘immigration is justice.’ As education writer Ernesto Caravantes has said, “[universities] have become havens of a reverse-racism in which the white Anglo-Saxon establishment is always seen in an unflattering light… [this makes Hispanic students] feel sorry for themselves for perceived wrong-doings in the past [and] perpetuates an activist and negative mentality in [them]…”

Read the rest from Bradley Betters HERE.