We have been thinking about the Republican Party and how it can come back—worthily, constructively—after the splits and shatterings of recent years. The GOP is relatively strong in the states but holds neither the White House, House nor Senate and in presidential elections struggles to win the popular vote. Entrenched power centers are arrayed against it, increasingly including corporate America. But parties have come back from worse. The Democrats came back from being on the wrong side in the Civil War.
Some thoughts here on Republicans and immigration.
From Pew Research’s findings on U.S. immigrants, published in August 2020: America has more immigrants than any other nation on earth. More than 40 million people living here were born in another country. According to the government’s 2020 Current Population Survey, when you combine immigrants and their U.S.-born children the number adds up to 85.7 million. Pew estimates that most (77%) are here legally, including naturalized citizens. Almost a quarter are not.
Where are America’s immigrants from? Twenty-five percent, the largest group, are from Mexico, according to Pew. After that China at 6%, India just behind, the Philippines at 4%, El Salvador at 3%.
America hasn’t had so many first- and second-generation Americans since the great European wave of the turn of the last century. The political party that embraces this reality, that becomes part of it, will win the future.
Here I jump to a political memory. A few weeks before the 2012 election I was sitting on a step watching Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, walk by. It was their annual street fair. The whole world was there. I’m from Brooklyn and had parts of my childhood there; much of the world was there back then, too. It really is the place where America keeps getting made. But that day in 2012 just seeing everyone—young Asian kids, Arab teenagers, people from Russia, Ukraine, Central America, Mexico—I had, not for the first time, an epiphany. “The entire political future of America is on this street,” I wrote. In part because so many were young, I felt they were politically up for grabs. The Democrats were trying harder, though. There was a political booth, with a sign that said “Democrats for Change.” There was no Mitt Romney booth, because Brooklyn is New York and New York wasn’t in play. But I felt then and feel more strongly now that in 21st-century America everything is in play. You have to have imagination, and confidence, to see it.
It’s my belief that the immigrants of America the past 40 years are a natural constituency of the Republican Party. When I say this to Republican political professionals they become excited or depressed. The excited say yes, we made progress in the last election with Hispanics; if we could become more liberal on illegal immigration, we could start to clinch the deal. The depressed say no, Republicans can’t win them because we’re too tagged as the anti-immigrant party.
To them I say when a whole class of people think you don’t like them, they are probably picking up a signal you don’t know you’re sending. Which leads us to Donald Trump, and the signal he did know he was sending. In opposing illegal immigration he opposed—he insulted and denigrated—immigrants themselves. His supporters didn’t mind because they recognized it as burn-your-bridges language: It meant he wouldn’t go to Washington and sign some big, lying, establishment-driven comprehensive reform like all the rest.
What he said did a lot of damage and caused a lot of just resentment. But he’s gone right now, and something new, day by day, is being built in his place.
The GOP should continue as the anti-illegal-immigration party, because illegal immigration is a violation of law and sovereignty, takes jobs, depresses wages, and is an abuse of all who came here legally. It will continue as a grinding crisis and in time be appreciated as a burden that cannot be forever borne locally or nationally. But the Republican Party’s attitude toward illegal immigrants themselves—toward all immigrants—should be sympathy and respect: They’re looking for a job and a better life. So was your great-grandfather!
A friend of mine, a businessman in New York, a big taxpayer, a moderate conservative, always smiles when he talks about illegal immigration. He’s against it. Then again his grandfather 100 years ago, an Italian seaman, found himself in a ship off America, liked what he saw, and jumped. He made his way to Brooklyn. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime, Balzac said. No, but in America a lot of fortunes started with a jump from a ship in the night.
The approach of the Republican Party should be one not of distance and guilt but of affinity and identification. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are tough. They’ve often had hard lives. They left everything, even the sound on the street of their old lives, to come to this different place. “I made myself lonely for you” is something almost all of them can say to their children.
No one who comes here from El Salvador really wants it to become El Salvador. People don’t flee Nicaragua so America can turn into Nicaragua. This is where Republican policies come in. There’s no reason to believe the bulk of immigrants to America the past 40 years want to tax people to death or see an economic system they risked so much to enter radically altered. They don’t want small businesses to be subject to the endless shakedowns of state and local government. They don’t want to defund the police, they depend on the police. The riots of 2020 would have shocked and repelled them, and may prove to have been a turning point.
Identity politics is powerful but not as powerful in the long term as here’s-where-we-stand politics. Republican officials ought to be going to America’s immigrants and saying: We might have had a rocky road but we are seeing the world the same way. The appeal must be to the brains and wisdom of their audience, not some patronizing babble on Republican Hispanic Voter Night.
The GOP donor class hasn’t liked restrictions on illegal immigration. More workers keep wages down. But great parties know who their base is. The GOP’s should be the working and middle class of all colors. Workers already here need backup. It’s better to lose campaign contributions than voters.
The Democratic Party is increasingly in thrall to a progressive left whose most impressive accomplishment has been communicating an air of its inevitable triumph. Under their pressure Democrats will make a lot of mistakes. They already are.
During the Bush immigration debates, when the base of the party rebelled against his comprehensive reform bill, a mostly unspoken accusation emanated from the president’s operatives. It was that the new Americans, including illegal immigrants, were kind of better than the existing American working class, harder-working. This was situational snobbery: The operatives themselves had left the working class behind, but daily rubbed shoulders with newer Americans at home and at the club. That snobbery helped break the party.
But I’ll tell you what is true. We do have the best immigrants in the world. I so want the Republican Party to know this, embrace it. Embrace them.