Immigration And The New Majority

We are being told by advocates of more immigration that the Republican party has scared off Hispanic voters. What underlies this argument is that opposition to illegal immigration has no net political plus. That is, immigration enforcement is only an issue to immigrants (primarily Hispanics). The more we talk about enforcement, the more votes we lose.

My experience in the last decade prosecuting civil RICO cases exposed me to the other side of this political Hobson's choice. Illegal immigration is upending the lives of virtually all Americans with high school educations, the bottom 20% of the socio-economic pyramid. I'll call them the Bottom Quartile Americans.

They have very limited employment options to begin with, and this becomes more acute each year as the economy moves toward higher skilled service sector workers. The Bottom Quartile Americans, about 45% black, 45% white and the rest legal Hispanics, gravitate toward the same job opportunities as illegal immigrants: hourly-paid labor in construction, poultry processing, cleaning crews, agriculture, etc. Until the early 1990's the Bottom Quartile Americans found employment in these industries at wages that enabled them to make a lower-middle class income.

Today, not only do they have to compete with illegal immigrants for these same jobs, but the Bottom Quartile Americans compete for jobs that pay less in real terms than they did 15 years ago. They see employers accepting bogus social security cards from illegal immigrants who cannot speak a word of English, employers who hire illegals off the books as "independent contractors," employers who threaten to deport illegals who vote to unionize in NLRB elections, and they become justifiably enraged. In one of my cases an HR director told a group of mostly illegal Hispanic workers who had staged a walkout after dutifully opposing unionization in exchange for management's promise to raise wages (which management then refused to do), "I know you people need your papers fixed. I can send you back to Mexico just like I brought you in here.") Another HR worker hired the same illegal immigrant three times under three different names and social security numbers. (Each time Social Security caught up with the illegal worker, he purchased a new fake card, and then was issued a new state I.D.)

These employers are, in my experience, solid George W. Bush Republicans, often showing up on lists of big donors to the party. They are also flagrantly violating immigration laws and RICO, which Congress amended a decade ago to include the employment of illegal immigrants as "predicate offenses."

Which party to these employment practices should be the object of Republican indignation? To Mr. Bush, it was the legal workers, which he consigned to a life of declining wages and unemployment with his refusal to acknowledge that the economy leaves them little alternative but to take jobs "that Americans won't do." This just isn't the case. Not only will they do them (I represent many of them), but increasingly can't get them. Who does George Bush think worked construction and poultry plant assembly lines in the 1980s?

Now back to the premise of the immigration advocates: that Republican immigration policy should be driven by the desire to get Hispanic votes. No Republican presidential or congressional candidate has ever won the Hispanic vote. George Bush's alleged 40% in 2004 is a myth. Here in Illinois he won 17% in the state's majority-Hispanic congressional district. The numbers are equally dismal in New York. But our aggrieved Bottom Quartile Americans vote and are increasingly wedded, as they should be, to candidates who will save their jobs.

They are part of our future coalition.