The GOP's Immigration Quandary

With the Supreme Court striking down three sections of Arizona's racially motivated immigration law, the GOP is faced with the quandary of where to go next on an issue that is not going away and which pits the GOP's aging racist base with the fastest growing demographic segment of the nation's population.  Pretending that America can return to some fictional version of the 1950's plays well with elderly whites and psychologically disturbed Christianists, but it is long term suicide for the GOP.  An article in the Washington Post looks at the situation now facing the GOP and would be liar-in-chief, Mitt Romney.  Here are excerpts:

Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on Arizona’s tough anti-illegal-immigration law stirred a growing debate among Republicans over how to navigate an issue that has energized the conservative base and turned off Hispanic voters.

Some on the right were taken aback to see Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., an iconic figure to many conservatives, side with the court’s liberals to reject several key provisions in the law and even declare that as a “general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States.”

The ruling came as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been struggling to connect with Hispanics after courting conservative primary voters with sharp rhetoric against illegal immigration. A survey published Monday showed him ­favored by just one-fourth of Hispanics.

The quandary for Romney and the GOP is clear from recent polling. The Arizona law is very popular with whites and independent voters, according to data from the Pew Research Center, while many GOP strategists think their party has little chance for success in battlegrounds such as Colorado, Nevada and Virginia if Romney doesn’t win close to 40 percent of Hispanics.

In recent weeks, President Obama has increased the pressure on Romney, announcing that he would halt deportations of hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants — action that Hispanic activists had been urging for a long time.

And some leading Republicans, including former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, have publicly expressed concern that Romney’s positions allow Democrats to portray the GOP as anti-Hispanic.

Romney appeared to be walking a careful line after the ruling.  Though he once called Arizona’s approach to immigration a “model” for the country and vowed to reverse the Obama administration’s challenge to the law, his support for the measure seemed more muted Monday.
 
Even the GOP’s biggest Hispanic star, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, has struggled to find the right balance, jousting in Spanish over his past support for the Arizona law with the country’s most important Hispanic newsman in an interview that aired Sunday.  Jorge Ramos, an anchor on Univision, the widely watched Spanish-language network, told the senator that he “took the side of the victimizers who are persecuting Hispanics.”

It will be interesting to watch to see whether more in the GOP come to grasp that long term, the party's less than subtle racism is going to push the GOP toward permanent minority status as elderly whites literally die off and its anti-gay mantra drives away younger voters.