Washington Post (Monkey Cage)
By Patrick Egan
August 24, 2015
In
one word, here’s why Donald Trump’s candidacy has gone from sideshow to
serious problem for the Republican Party: immigration.
Coverage
of the party’s 2016 nomination battle early last week was dominated by
Trump’s call for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Then it
shifted to his claim
that the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee
citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to parents who are here
illegally, an argument that ignores precedent established by the Supreme
Court in 1898.
[Trump thinks that being born in the U.S. shouldn’t make you a citizen. Changing that would be very hard.]
With
positions like these, Trump is carving out a space on the far right
wing of the immigration policy debate. Every recent G.O.P. presidential
nominee—from Ronald Reagan
to Mitt Romney—has stayed far away from that spot. But several
candidates in the crowded Republican field compete directly with Trump
for conservative voters, and they spent the week going toe-to-toe with
him on immigration. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker characterized
his immigration proposal as “similar” to Trump’s, and said he might
support ending birthright citizenship—a call echoed by Ted Cruz, Bobby
Jindal, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, among others. Even Jeb Bush, who
supports continuing to grant citizenship to all those
born in the U.S., unapologetically invoked the controversial term
“anchor baby” to describe the issue.
The
media’s discussion of why this kind of talk spells trouble for the
Republican Party in the 2016 presidential election has focused on
Latinos. Obama trounced Romney
by 71-27 percent among Latinos, a bloc that made up 10 percent of the
voters in 2012. The gap was even larger (73-26 percent) among
Asian-Americans, who were 3 percent of the electorate. Since most recent
immigrants hail overwhelmingly from either Asia or
Latin America, campaign weeks like this make it less likely that
Republicans will make gains with either group in 2016.
Do Americans think undocumented immigrants should be able to become citizens?
But
what’s gone largely unnoticed is that Republicans’ tough talk on
immigration is at odds with a majority of Americans considered as a
whole. Over the last decade, American
public support for immigrants—and specifically, for allowing
undocumented immigrants to obtain U.S. citizenship if they meet certain
requirements—has been remarkably strong.
As
shown above, in every survey since 2006, approval of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants has never dipped below 50
percent—and in many polls it’s been
consistently much higher than that. (Wording for these questions and
the data can be found at PollingReport.com.) That support persisted
during the Great Recession and its aftermath—and it’s stronger now than
at any time in the recent past.
[Here’s what Donald Trump gets wrong about immigration]
Heck,
even a majority of Republicans favored immigration reform that would
allow long-term undocumented immigrants to become citizens, according to
Gallup’s poll earlier
this summer. And yet none of the leading candidates for the GOP
nomination has expressed support for such a proposal.
Does immigration help or hurt the U.S.?
Americans
are more divided over this question, which has been asked in surveys
going back to 2005. But even here, all the polls conducted since 2012
show that “helps”
leads by a slim plurality over “hurts.”
Overall,
U.S. opinion on the issue of immigration has been remarkably stable and
supportive over the past decade. It would be a mistake to interpret the
recent Republican
presidential candidates’ rhetoric as a sign that Americans have
suddenly soured on immigrants. Trump and his rivals are appealing for
the votes of a narrow—if fervent—slice of the G.O.P primary electorate.
But in doing so, they are taking positions that are
far out of step with the majority of Americans who will be voting in
November 2016.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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