YESTERDAY, President Bush proposed a far-reaching, innovative and compassionate revision of American immigration policy. It instantly drew predictable howls from those who fear the economic and social costs of immigration, and inadvertently comic howls from Democrats and moans of disappointment from liberal Hispanics who reacted with barely concealed rage at the prospect of Bush making profound inroads into the 2004 Latino vote.
The specifics and their efficacy (or lack thereof) will be debated over the coming weeks by policymakers and advocates on both sides of the issue. But there’s no question that, by planting his flag firmly in the pro-immigration camp, Bush has once again sought to transform not only the political debate in the United States but the Republican Party as well.
In the 20th century, the Republican Party was not, to put it mildly, the party of immigrants. The key pieces of legislation limiting immigration and the rights of foreign-born peoples were designed and championed by Republicans.
In 1924, “an act to limit the migration of aliens to the United States” proposed by GOP Sen. Hiram Johnson of California was signed into law – an incredibly restrictive piece of legislation that ended nearly 40 years of open immigration. This attitude fit in nicely and precisely with the isolationism for which the Republican Party became known in the 1930s and 1940s.
Jump forward in time now to 1986, when another Republican senator, Alan Simpson of Wyoming, shepherded through the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. This sought to penalize employers who hired illegal aliens. And in 1994, another California Republican, then-Gov. Pete Wilson, helped push through Proposition 187, which denied state benefits to illegal aliens.
At the same time that Proposition 187 was becoming law, a sustained argument against immigration was being waged by certain conservative intellectuals – ranging from the respectable precincts of National Review to the hatemongering nativism growing like fetid algae in the Pat Buchanan fever swamps.
One of the most peculiar elements of the anti-immigrant intellectual movement is just how many of its members are themselves immigrants – John O’Sullivan, John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow from England, and George Borjas from Cuba. I once found myself in an argument with a few of these gentlemen at a conference and realized that I was the only person speaking with an American accent.
The combination of the historic Republican political opposition to immigration with the growing conservative intellectual passion about it became a major political problem for the GOP in the 1990s. The Latino population in the United States was on the verge of planting roots in the Democratic camp as decisively as previous immigrant groups – especially Jews and those from Ireland. And given the emergence of Latinos as the largest minority group in the United States, that alignment portended ill for the GOP.
One of George W. Bush’s key selling points as a candidate for president was that, in his races for governor of Texas, he had demonstrated that a Republican could indeed garner Latino votes despite the shadow of Proposition 187.
Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it appeared that President Bush was going to dedicate a significant amount of his foreign-policy time to building ties and economic relationships with Mexico – so that he would have a partner in trying to deal with the costs of illegal immigration here at home and the possibilities of a trans-border economic approach to the problem.
Those foreign-policy ambitions were put on ice by the War on Terror. But it should surprise no one that Bush has returned to the issue of immigration. He believes what he said yesterday: “Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans are not filling. We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane.”
And he believes deeply, and correctly, that a Republican Party that continues to lean toward a position of hostility toward immigrants and immigration is a party that will not prosper and prevail in the 21st century.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
