Centerfield

The Immigration Perception Gap

In The Messy Politics of Illegal Immigration, Victor Davis Hanson declares that would-be winners in the fall better take care to come in line with popular sentiment:

To the extent Democratic candidates ignore illegal immigration, or demonize those who worry over hundreds of thousands of new illegal aliens each year, or talk of guest workers and amnesty before they mention closing the borders, it is a losing issue that could alienate millions of voters.

Democratic candidates can't really claim that redneck racists are rushing to the border to clash with poor campesinos just crossing to better their lives, because many poor Democrats also resent how illegal labor drives down their own wages. It is mostly the American poor and middle class who worry about the sudden influx of thousands who don't speak English and often need public assistance.

But the Republican candidates have to watch it, too. If blanket amnesty is a losing issue, so also is mass deportation -- the practicality and morality of which are rarely considered by those rightly calling for an end to illegal immigration. Busing every illegal alien back to Mexico right now might resemble the past messy partition of India and Pakistan, and reopen the issue in a way that Democrats can legitimately exploit.

Hanson suggests that the conventional take (that sides on the immigration issue cleave neatly along party lines) on immigration is an oversimplification. I'm with him there. He goes on to suggest a whole platform of positions wise candidates ought to adopt (Read the whole thing, scroll down...). While the platform sounds reasonable to me, it's still the point where I go agnostic on Hanson. Even if the conventional wisdom is wrong, it still has vast power to cast politicians into the roles that their parties dictate.

Here's the thing: Davis is right that popular unhappiness over our dysfunctional immigration policies crosses party lines and a bunch of other related demographics. But what he's wrong about is his contention that politicians MUST respond by trying to give the people what they seem to want. Make no mistake, many pols are getting piles of cash from powerful folks who do not want any sort of interuption in the flow of cheap labor. And that means that many pols are going to embrace the CW roles as a way to give the appearance of stalemate, and just run out the clock.

In other words, they might look at a list like Hanson's as a menu, and ask themselves, "what's the least we can do?" And one big reason why they'll do this is because there's a pretty big gap these days between what a lot of everyday Americans want, and what our naton's power brokers want.

And to be fair (in my inaugural reincarnation outing as the Cranky Critter), everyday folks do need to acknowledge that making substantial changes in immigration policy carries the risk of the unknown. It's human nature to look to such changes only for the benefits they can bring, while dismissing worries about the likelihood of negative side affects as apologism.