How The "Today We March; Tomorrow We Vote" Attitude Among Immigrant Groups Helped Pulverize The Republican Party

Yes, different from suburban South Carolina

A year ago we spent some time discussing the politics of immigration reform with Josh Hoyt, head of Illinois' largest immigrants' rights organization, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). Yesterday Josh helped readers of the Chicago Tribune understand how the Republican Party's stumbling and bipolar immigration agenda helped doom John McCain's race for the White House. It goes even deeper than the 2/3 of America's fastest growing, and largest, minority bloc breaking for Obama (and remember, just 4 years ago Bush gave the Democrats a real run for their money with Hispanic voters, winning 44%). This year, Hispanics were key to flipping formerly red states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida to the Democrats-- and in defeating xenophobic GOP congressional incumbents in each one of them. Hispanics also helped Obama win hard fought contests in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Indiana.

Even more frightening for Republicans is the strong possibility that Latino voters could soon deliver Texas and Arizona to the Democrats. If this happens, Republicans can turn out the lights on their presidential hopes, lock the door and go on vacation for a decade or three.

It turns out that the hysteria from the Republican Party's Know Nothing base, with their xenophobia and racism, trumped the plan Rove had constructed to bring Latinos into the Republican coalition by harping on religious values, homophobia, abortion, and a whole crazy quilt of right-wing talking points that appeal to "family values" voters. Once it became painfully apparent that for Republicans, the "families" in "family values," only includes white, native born families (and the obscenely wealthy, of course), their message looked less and less appetizing to all immigrants.

In December 2005, Dennis Hastert, then House speaker, pandering to the hard right of the GOP, allowed Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) to push through the House a truly draconian piece of legislation that would have turned all undocumented immigrants and the priests and nuns who serve them into felons.

The Sensenbrenner legislation triggered the historic immigrant marches in the spring of 2006, where millions chanted, tellingly, "Today we march; tomorrow we vote!" Nativist-haters and talk-radio demagogues who don't like to "Press 1 for English" mobilized their cultural conservative base, and cynics in the Republican Party thought they had a beautiful little "wedge" issue. They would paint Democrats as pandering to Mexican-Americans by supporting "amnesty for lawbreakers." Republican tax activist Grover Norquist warned of the consequences, saying, "We can't afford to do to the Hispanics what we did to the Roman Catholics in the late 19th Century: tell them we don't like them and lose their vote for a hundred years."

Ignoring his warning, the Republican National Committee covered the nation during the 2006 elections with mailers and TV commercials painting the Democrats as soft on illegal Immigration, to no avail. The GOP lost the House and Senate, and many anti-immigrant hard-liners were defeated.

A small handful of Know Nothing Democrats like Heath Shuler and a few too frightened to take principled stands took heed of the clueless warnings shouted by a tone deaf Democratic leader, Rahm Emanuel, who warned that the immigration issue would defeat Democrats, just as he had warned that being against the Iraq War would defeat Democrats in 2006. He was rewarded for his double dose of brilliant strategy by being named Chief of Staff to president-elect Obama, who, I'm afraid, has sown the seeds for eventual catastrophe in his own administration. Back to Josh, who pointed out that by the time we were getting to know him in 2007, GOP anti-immigrant hysteria from the bigoted wing of the party-- your Inhofes,Tancredos, Bachmanns, DeMints etc-- had "boomeranged and provoked a Republican civil war."

The hard-liners opposed Bush and Sen. John McCain when they tried to pass Immigration reform. The hard-liners, like Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), crowed loudly after defeating the effort, but the net effect politically was to further weaken Bush.

Bush tried to unite his party in late 2007 and 2008 by unleashing a brutal series of high-profile raids that deported 349,000 illegal immigrants. The raids sowed fear and anger in the Mexican-American community and broke apart thousands of families. But a less-noticed result of the ugly debate was that the Latino community naturalized in record numbers. In the last year, 1.4 million immigrants became American citizens, legally eligible to vote.

The limited appeal of Immigration demagoguery and the lasting toll it is going to take on the GOP became clear early this year. Mitt Romney tried to win Iowa and New Hampshire as an anti-immigrant hard-liner. He was beaten by Mike Huckabee and McCain. Then Hastert's seat was lost in the humiliating defeat of Illinois' leading Immigration demagogue, ice cream magnate Jim Oberweis—in part because Latinos voted overwhelmingly against him.

On Nov. 4, more than 10 million Latinos cast ballots, almost three times as many as had voted 16 years ago. Latinos subjected the GOP to a convincing act of collective punishment, despite McCain's efforts to turn back the nativists in his party. An exit poll in Illinois found 68 percent of Latino voters consider the Republican Party not favorable toward immigrants. And, as Republicans are finally noticing, Latinos are voting in great numbers in critical presidential swing states. In a recent Newsweek column forlornly titled "A Way Out of the Wilderness," Rove dryly noted: "An anti-Hispanic attitude is suicidal."

We're not hearing much from North Carolina twerp Heath Shuler, who sought to embarrass the Democratic House leadership and force them into a disastrous compromise with the far right on this issue, anymore either. In fact, thankfully, a byproduct of Shuler's xenophobic activism in Congress has been to sideline his career and glue his fat reactionary ass to a backbench forever.

REP GUTIERREZ (RE: RAHM AND STENY): 'WE MIGHT AS WELL PUT REPUBLICANS IN CHARGE"

Rahm Emanuel represents Chicago's North Side, Illinois' 5th CD, historically one of the premier immigrant destinations in the entire United States. Even today, the district has several large and vibrant immigrant populations. In fact, when Emanuel's predecessor, Rod Blagojevich, was elected governor it was expected that the 5th would be re-districted out of existence-- until the 2000 census showed huge population increases in the immigrant neighborhoods, saving the district, which the Daley Machine and the Clinton Administration gave to Emanuel as a reward for his work on passing NAFTA. Even with a concerted attempt to put as many Hispanic neighborhood as possible into the 4th CD, almost a quarter of Emanuel's constituents are Hispanic. The district also has a huge Polish population and a very large Korean population.

Emanuel likes to boast that as the son of an Israeli immigrant himself, he's the best friend the immigrant community has ever had. And he well may be a good friend of immigrants-- from Israel. Others... not so much. Two weeks ago he sent a DCCC-connected candidate training a video of himself haranguing congressional candidates to "move right" on immigration or risk defeat at the hands of Republicans. This is similar to the terrible advice he shoved down candidates' throats last year, although then he was demanding they move to the right on Iraq, dooming the candidacies of Lois Murphy, Francine Busby, Ken Lucas, Tammy Duckworth, Diane Farrell and several others who went along with his demands. Yesterday Markos asked a blaring question at DailyKos: Is Rahm racist, or merely scared?. While walking the picket line at the WGA strike at Fox today Jane and I came up with the idea of inviting Emanuel over to FDL to ask him why he thinks adopting Tom Tancredo's immigration ideas is a good idea and why he's unleashed Heath Shuler to do just that. But then we thought a far better idea would be to invite one of Emanuel's constituents over.

Surf over to Firefoglake and meet Josh Hoyt (1pm Chicago time), someone whom both Pach and John Laesch told me is the go-to guy for all things regarding immigrants rights in Illinois. Josh has been in the activist/organizing "business" for over 30 years, much of it in the immigrant communities. He's known Emanuel since 1980 and more recently he's been testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee and debating on both O'Reilly's and Glenn Beck's GOP propaganda shows. He runs the largest immigrants' rights organization in Illinois (130 groups and organizations)-- the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Last April ICIRR sponsored a townhall meeting with Emanuel and Luis Gutierrez on the issue of immigration that was attended by over 1,500 people-- in Emanuel's district. There were lots of Koreans and Muslims and Koreans and Poles and Latino immigrants. "He got up," Josh told me last night, "and said he was with us and he signed on as the lead co-sponsor of the Gutierrez STRIVE Act. He plays both sides of the issue. We had him for 5 minutes. When it became clear that this was a difficult issue-- that it would take some political courage-- he became a rubber chicken. The thing that we don't like is that he runs around calling himself Rahmbo but he's a coward when it comes to standing for progressive constituencies and progressive values... He's completely two-faced."

Blue America is working with several groups in Chicago to help hold Emanuel accountable. We don't want to show our hand; just let me say that Jacquie has been busy, busy, busy doing her thing while writers write and designers design and vocalists vocalize. This looks like it will be the biggest Blue America campaign ever. And we have a $5,000 matching fund from a patriotic FDL community member who has asked to remain anonymous. She will match every dollar up 'til five grand donated this weekend to the Blue America PAC. Hint, but only a hint


HOW BAD IS THE TANCREDO-EMANUEL-SHULER ANTI-IMMIGRANT BILL?

It's a xenophobic bill one expects from the Know Nothing wing of the GOP, not from a party dedicated to solving problems. Any Democrat supporting this should be ashamed to ever face voters again. Sentido over at Daily Kos has an excellent analysis. In short:

As expected it makes the flawed assumption that harsh law enforcement aimed at a targeted group of people will make them simply disappear.

This bill also lacks any indication that undocumented immigrants should be treated as human beings... there is no family reunification, no relief for kids who spent their whole lives here.

Cruelty has always failed as a social policy... and this bill is more evil than most.

Tancredo, Emanuel and Shuler are targeting churches,humanitarians, friends, relatives, bolstering a scary policy state, and militarizing the border, while doing nothing to solve the real and inherent problems that have multiplied and festered with the Bush Regime's callous support of encouraging cheap labor for their Big Business allies.


UPDATE: COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM? CONGRESS PROBABLY COMES AT THE END OF THE PROCESS, NOT THE BEGINNING. FIRST WE NEED LEADERS

We pay congressmembers to come up with solutions to problems that face the country. They do a damn bad job of it-- but they set their own rules and salaries. They should all be docked and maybe we should just send their checks bloggers like Duke1676 and Stephen at Daily Kos, who have come up with far more salient ideas for immigration reform than anything coming out of the cowards and slackers and demagogues in Congress.