"Amnesty" may have been his undoing.
The 2013 "Gang of Eight" immigration deal arguably killed Marco Rubio's presidential run.
"Build the wall," is Donald Trump's sole consistent policy — besides his proposed moratorium on Muslim immigration.
How did immigration become the dominant issue in the Republican primary?
It's a question that's baffled Republican elites and Beltway conservatives who were caught off guard by the issue's salience. While Washington politicians debated child tax-credits, Obamacare replacements and ethanol mandates, Trump went out and called for a wall to keep out the rapists that Mexico was supposedly sending north.
If immigration sank Rubio, it wasn't because voters agreed with Trump's policies — exit polls actually show most Republican primary voters favoring Rubio's approach to illegal immigrants, which includes a path to legalization.
Instead, the issue was seen in a much rougher sketch by voters: Rubio tried to cut a deal for amnesty; Trump wants to keep out the illegals.
Immigration matters so much first, because it touches on all important policy areas.
Immigration, for instance, is about jobs and wages. "I'm a Trump supporter because I agree that mass immigration, both legal and illegal, has been a detriment to the average American citizen," Bob Garrett Jr. told me at a January Trump rally in Upstate South Carolina.
"There's a flood of people, and a minimum amount of jobs," Garrett argued resulting in "lower wages."
Immigration is also a national security issue.
"Syrian refugees" as a search term peaked in the week of November 15-21. That's also the week when Donald Trump's national poll average began its quick climb from 25 percent (where it had been for two months) to the 35 percent where it has remained since.
Trump called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration, arguing that we have no way of ensuring that terrorists aren't entering the U.S. as refugees. The mass shooting in San Bernardino, carried out in part by a Muslim immigrant, fueled this view. All 19 September 11 hijackers were foreign born.
Immigration is a law-and-order issue. An illegal immigrant is, by definition, a lawbreaker. Conservatives' sense of fairness often means: everyone should play by the same rules. If illegal immigrants are simply forgiven and accepted, that's unfair to many Americans, and it erodes their sense of an orderly society.
Immigration is also a national-debt issue in the eyes of many voters. Illegal immigrants are seen as tax dodgers who use up our emergency rooms. Many voters also see immigrants, legal and illegal, as drains on the welfare state.
But immigration goes deeper than that. It's not merely a big, multifaceted issue. It's almost a foundational issue.
When politicians want to import tens of millions of new immigrants it can look like Washington is trying to remake the electorate. This isn't pure fantasy. In 1996, Bill Clinton's White House instructed the Immigration and Naturalization Service "to streamline the naturalization process and greatly increase naturalizations during 1996." Sure enough, Hispanics more than doubled as a portion of the electorate for Clinton's 1996 reelection, according to exit polls.
Conservatives won't win any fights — over guns, marriage, taxes, spending, health care, or anything — if the U.S. electorate is remade in the image of California.
Deeper than the issues, and even deeper than the structural political questions, is the nearly existential question that Trump raises. "IF WE DON'T HAVE BORDERS," Trump tweeted in November, "WE DON'T HAVE A COUNTRY!"
This directly attacks the elite worldview. The borderless world John Lennon sang of – "Imagine there's no countries" – is the dream that inspired the idea of the European Union, and which fills the fantasies of multinational corporations.
That borders make a country clashes with the view of "country" that's held in elite circles. John McCain used to say the U.S. is a " nation that isn't just land and ethnicity, but an idea and a cause," that anyone who believed in the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution was thereby an American.
Many strains of conservatism reject this America-the-Abstraction view. White identity politics mixes very easily with a blood-and-soil conservatism, and Trump is playing to that expertly.
All politics, it often seems, are identity politics. And just as there is working-class-white identity politics, there's also cosmopolitan-elite identity politics.
Voters' decisions often boil down to "who are you fighting for?" Rubio was seen as fighting for amnesty and more immigration. To many voters that meant he was fighting for non-Americans against Americans; he was fighting for the consumers of labor (big business) against the suppliers of labor (workers); he was fighting for the lawless against the law-abiding.
Too many Republican voters never gave Rubio's very conservative positions due consideration because supporting an advocate of amnesty was a line they wouldn't cross.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment