GOP Must Reclaim the Immigration Issue from Lou Dobbs
Mickey Kaus alerts us to the latest Greenberg-Carville's Democracy Corps poll suggesting that 6% of likely voters might vote for Lou Dobbs in a Romney-Obama race in 2012. Even tossing a hypothetical Green party candidacy by Ralph Nader into the mix, their numbers raise the possibility that a Dobbs candidacy might well take a serious bite out of the Republican vote.
As a third-party candidate, Dobbs does bear some resemblance to Ross Perot in 1992: he's focused on nationalism issues (trade, immigration) rather than moral issues; his style is secular rather than religious; he speaks in specifics that create the impression of knowledgeability; and he channels his anger in highly telegenic ways. The perfect candidate for the unemployed southern California engineer.
The threat from Dobbs underscores a point I made in Comeback: immigration is to the 2000s what crime was to the 1960s. The risk that racists might exploit the issue did not make the issue inherently racist. Just as Nixon took the crime issue from Wallace, Republicans have to begin planning now to take the immigration issue from Dobbs.
Some guidelines.
1) The issue is not just illegal immigration. The problems associated with current immigration policy - very large numbers, very low skills - are associated with the legal dimensions of current policy too.
2) It's time for Republicans to revisit the actual economics of immigration rather than the slogans. It's often assumed that immigration is economically beneficial. That's no longer true, anyway it's not true for the host population. (Obviously immigration is beneficial to the immigrants themselves, or they would not do it.) The gains to the U.S. economy from current policy are vanishingly tiny. The costs to state governments are surprisingly huge: last I checked, immigration costs every California household $1200 a year in higher state and local taxes.
3) Immigration should be conceived not as an "ethnic" issue, but as a human capital issue. Inadequate schools and low-skilled migration are together pointing the U.S. to a future workforce (as the ETS has warned) of dramatically lower skills and even literacy.
4) Here's the toughest nut for Republicans to swallow. We're going to have to discard the old language that the Bush economy was the "greatest story never told" and squarely face up to how bad the economic record of 2001-2007 was for most Americans. We can't put immigration as one cause of the disappointment while denying that the disappointment existed in the first place.