YOU'LL MISS THAT 1% WHEN THEY'RE GONE:

Bordering on Defeat: Immigrant bashing is for losers (Stephen Moore, 06/28/2004, Weekly Standard)

When Ben Nighthorse Campbell unexpectedly announced his retirement from the Senate and popular GOP governor Bill Owens announced he would not run, many people assumed Rep. Tom Tancredo--by far the best-known member of Colorado's congressional delegation and a solid fiscal conservative--would coast to an easy win in the primary. But Tancredo, the leading anti-immigration voice on Capitol Hill, pulled out. It turns out that while Tancredo's crusade against immigration has gained him a loyal following among like-thinking conservatives, his political negatives are also in the stratosphere. [...]

So Republicans are now torn between divergent ideologies on immigration--a nativist stand represented by Tancredo and a welcoming one represented by Bush. The tensions are palpable. Pat Buchanan, who wants to bar as many people and goods from coming into the United States as possible, predicts "another Goldwater moment in the Grand Old Party, like 1960, when the grassroots began to rumble and rise in rebellion. . . . Immigration is the most explosive [issue], as is seen in the stunning recoil to Bush's amnesty early this year."

But if conservatives are "recoiling" from what Buchanan calls the "immigrant invasion," where is the electoral evidence? (Buchanan himself, recall, mustered a grand total of 1 percent of the presidential vote in 2000.) The answer is that there is none. In virtually every congressional race in recent years where the issue came up, it has been the candidate who wants to drape a "No Admittance" sign over the Statue of Liberty who lost the election--even in Republican primaries.

Restrictionist themes have been tried many times over in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (as if denying visas to Mexican migrant workers were going to protect us from al Qaeda). On almost every occasion the seal-the-border candidates have fallen. Last year, it was state representative Carl Isett in Texas's 19th congressional district, running in a special election. This March, it was hard-charging, dynamic state senator Rico Oller in the GOP primary in the third district of California who hammered Dan Lungren mercilessly for supporting "amnesty" in the mid-1980s. Lungren won.

Most recently, in the Republican primary in Illinois, Senate candidate Jim Oberweis spent millions of dollars on immigrant-bashing TV and radio ads but still finished a distant second place, to Jack Ryan, who is pro-immigration.

Buchanan touts upcoming GOP primaries in Arizona and Utah in the coming weeks, where anti-immigration zealots backed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) are hoping to oust pro-immigration incumbent congressmen Jeff Flake, Jim Kolbe, and Chris Cannon. Their alleged sins: endorsing the Bush "amnesty" and alleged political indifference to the tide of illegal immigration. Despite all of the hullabaloo, all three are expected to win their races with relative ease.

The problem is that even to the extent that anti-immigrationism is politically popular, those politicians who are obsessed by it are too off-putting to succeed in America. You can't win elections wearing your pathologies on your sleeve.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2006 3:36 PM