Article published Jul 19, 2007
The politics of amnesty

From the Washington Times

July 19, 2007

By Ian de Silva – Despite the ignominious fall of the Senate immigration bill a couple of weeks ago, a lot of amnesty supporters remain incorrigibly misguided about things.

In the postmortem assessments by some of them, we are told that Republicans would suffer the most in the election next year due to a backlash from Hispanics. But the bill was squashed not only by Republican hands — joining them were 15 Democrats and one Independent, without whose opposition the bill would have passed.

In any case, it is worthwhile to examine the claim that Republicans would lose large numbers of the Hispanic vote. The simple fact is that there is no evidence to support the idea that a majority of Hispanics — or any other nonwhite ethnic group — would vote Republican in the first place. You do not need a Ph.D. in political science to expose such a fallacy — you only need a basic understanding of why most minorities, including immigrants, vote the way they do.

Such an understanding comes to me rather easily since I myself am an immigrant — and a naturalized American voter who takes the franchise seriously. I am also an unabashed conservative. Given my Third World provenience, most observers would expect me to cast my lot with America’s liberals, the putative guardians of minorities. But I knew early on that liberalism could not answer even some basic questions about reality.

If all cultures were equal, as many liberals claim, then why would immigrants need to come here to improve their lives? If Third World cultures are not inferior to Western civilization, then why are those cultures failing to produce economic opportunities for their young? Liberals have no clear answers to such questions, instead choosing to blame the West for everything that is wrong with the rest of the world. This is much like blaming a cheetah for a tortoise’s failure to run fast.

Liberals’ claim of multicultural equality is endearing to most Third World immigrants and disaffected native minorities. After all, such a claim boosts the immigrants’ image of their own country, often to the point of forgetting why they left it in the first place. Liberal support for practices such as bilingualism further cements immigrants’ pride in their native culture. And for those immigrants and minorities who lean on government help to get ahead — via affirmative-action programs, etc. — there are no better friends than big-government liberals, i.e., Democrats.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are rather unabashed in their defense of the Western civilization, and they view the Third World for what it really is — a cultural backwater. (Such intellectual honesty is usually too much for the effeminate sensibilities of liberals — many of whom have been educated beyond their intelligence and have lost all common sense.) There is no easy way for conservatives to attract a majority of immigrant or minority votes. The notion of American exceptionalism — which is the cynosure of American conservatism — is fundamentally at odds with the liberal notion of multicultural equality.

The claim that Republicans will suffer a backlash from Hispanics in future elections implies that if the Senate amnesty bill had become law, then Hispanics would vote in droves for Republicans, since some of the most visible supporters of the bill have been Republicans (President Bush, Sen. John McCain, etc). But history tells us otherwise. There is no better instance of that than the 1996 general election.

Why 1996? Well, it has to do with the 1986 amnesty — the largest amnesty in U.S. history, which legalized almost 3 million illegal aliens, most of whom were Hispanic. Under that amnesty, most of the applicants got green cards in the years 1988 through 1991. After the green card, a five-year residence was required for U.S. citizenship; therefore, the erstwhile illegal aliens became eligible to vote for the first time in the 1996 election.

Keep in mind that the 1986 amnesty was championed by a Republican, Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, and signed into law by a Republican, President Reagan.

Well, how did the vote turn out in 1996? Only 21 percent of Hispanic voters voted Republican — whereas 72 percent voted Democratic.

If that is not enlightening enough, consider this — the Republican running for president that year, Bob Dole, voted for the amnesty in 1986, when he was the Senate majority leader.

So much for the supposed gratitude of minorities toward Republican acts of goodwill. So much for the expectation that the newly naturalized citizens would bring large numbers of fellow Hispanics to vote Republican.

Nevertheless, some myopic Republicans still argue that it would be politically advantageous for Republicans if they had embraced the recent amnesty bill. The trouble with that argument is that it is predicated on perpetual pandering. Let us assume the unlikely scenario that the Senate amnesty bill passed and a lot of Hispanics voted Republican as a result. But what would be the next concession to Hispanics to keep them voting Republican? A Republican platform supporting Spanish as the official language of the United States?

The death of the amnesty bill can only be an asset to Republicans. There is no doubt that the 10 million to 20 million illegal aliens (i.e., future Democrats) that the bill would have legalized would push the Republican Party into extinction.

Ian de Silva is an engineer who has side interests in politics and history.