Clift: Bush Is Right on Immigration

The immigration deal worked out between Senate leaders and the White House is an unwieldy compromise nobody much likes. Democrats will mostly support it because the liberal lion, Ted Kennedy, is leading the charge. And the fact that right-wing Republicans are worked up into such a lather about the bill may give some Democrats enough reason to back it.

President Bush is at war with his own party, tearing it apart over an issue that was supposed to be the GOP's ticket to an enduring governing majority. In his Rose Garden press conference Thursday, he pleaded with lawmakers to recognize that the way they deal with the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants is about "the heart and soul of America," a country founded by immigrants. "I would rather they come here legally than stuffed in the back of an 18-wheeler," Bush said.

Bush has the right instincts when it comes to immigration policy. He was elected governor four years after Pete Wilson took the statehouse in California and made national headlines with his punitive approach to the state's burgeoning immigrant population. Wilson was consigned to the dustbin of history while Bush rode the politics of compassionate conservatism and Hispanic outreach to the White House. Between 2000 and 2004, Bush doubled his share of the Hispanic vote from 21 percent to 40 percent, and Karl Rove's dream of a Republican realignment for the 21st century that would rival FDR's long run for the Democrats seemed within reach.

Instead we're looking at what could be called the Wilsonization of America. Just as Wilson's anti-immigrant policies turned California into the bluest of Blue States, the angry, racist and xenophobic rhetoric emanating from the Republican right is turning the fastest-growing voting bloc in America against the GOP. The Republican brand has taken a hit with all voters, but the strategic consequences of the disaffection among Hispanics could turn enough states Blue to shift them into the Democratic column. "The way the Republicans are handling the immigration issue is handing the Democrats the presidential election in '08," says Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network.

Immigration is a case study in what's gone wrong with the Republican Party's attempts at becoming a permanent majority. Rosenberg was a college freshman in 1981, the beginning of the era of conservative ascendancy. Ronald Reagan was the defining political figure of his coming of age, and his age cohort—he's in his early 40s—is the most Republican group. Now the Republican coalition is coming apart, conservative is almost as unpopular a word as liberal, and Rosenberg, a progressive, says, "There is more wind at our back than in my entire adult lifetime."

The collapse on immigration is remarkable, considering the issue never came up in the 2004 presidential election. Even Hispanics, when asked to list the issues most important to them, ranked immigration reform as No. 8, according to post-election exit polling. Then, in the spring of '05, with the war effort foundering and Bush's push for Social Security privatization flopping on Capitol Hill, talk radio didn't have a happy story to tell. Enter the Minutemen. They showed up at the border with their cell phones and filled the void with interviews about how illegal immigrants were taking over America. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was sidetracked by scandal, and Bush was in a war-weakened state—and so this message began to take hold on the conservative end of the dial.

Seeing a way to rally the base and respond to the growing anti-immigrant sentiment, House Republicans pushed and passed legislation that was racially divisive and punitive, cracking down on those who aided illegal immigrants—even church groups. The bill sparked massive rallies across the country against the Republican Congress. Rosenberg's New Democrat Network monitored ads in 25 states picturing a Mexican immigrant side by side with an Islamist terrorist. Very little attention was paid by the mainstream media, but Spanish-language stations and newspapers everywhere made sure their audience knew what was being said and by which party.

Hispanics are the fastest growing segment of the population and now live in nearly every corner of the country. The greatest growth has been in Georgia and North Carolina, which have been Republican strongholds in recent years. For a political party to be on the wrong side of such a major demographic trend is a strategic mistake of the first order. Bush and Rove understood this and tried to orient their party to the new reality. Nothing in politics is irredeemable, of course, but thanks to Republican blunders, the Democrats have a historic opportunity to regain the kind of sustained power they enjoyed before the Reagan Revolution. They could blow it, but with these demographics, it will be hard.