Immigration Reform

My favorite conservative reads are National Review, the Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. Of these, only the WSJ Ed page is pro-immigration.

Jason Riley is right in an editorial today, WSJ.com - Ignore the Anti-Immigrant Right. Bush Did. I had not seen these amazing numbers anywhere else:

Partisans typically use spin to burnish a bad outcome. But since the election, some on the right have attempted to downplay or divert attention from a positive development -- the GOP's historic gains among Latino voters.

Exit polls put the president's share of the Latino vote at around 45%, an increase of nine percentage points from the 2000 election and far surpassing the previous record of 37% for a Republican presidential candidate set by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Yet conservative spinmeisters tell us this is no cause for jubilation.

Riley goes on to make a powerful and principled pitch for reform along the lines of President Bush's guest worker program.

In January, President Bush floated the idea of a guest-worker program that would free up border agents to pursue terrorist threats instead of spending their time chasing down Mexicans who come here to work. The base went bonkers. Some on the right just can't bear the thought of a border policy that focuses less on militarization and more on balancing security with the needs of the economy.

But there's another reason why these conservatives are downplaying this newfound Hispanic affinity for the GOP. Having insisted for years that Latinos are lost to Republicans -- that time spent courting our largest ethnic minority group is time wasted -- the editors at National Review, the commentators at Fox News and their anti-immigrant amigos at the Center for Immigration Studies are all loath to admit they were wrong.
[...]
As my colleague Michael Gonzalez pointed out in this space recently, Election Day taught the GOP that Latinos can be turned into a viable swing voting bloc. Unlike blacks, who continue to pull the Democratic lever monolithically, Hispanics now stand poised to reap the spoils of our two-party system like other minority groups who split their allegiance.

And along the way, he punctures the Malthusian myth with the temerity to call it by name:

Yes, keepers of the Malthusian flame at places like the Federation of American Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA have been insisting for years that the U.S. is overpopulated. The economist Thomas Sowell has challenged these alarmists to "name just one country that had a higher standard of living when its population was half of what it is today."

I like the guest worker program. Allow workers to enter the country legally then it is economically and morally viable to keep undocumented workers out.

Yet another chance for bold reform in a second Bush term.

Posted by jk at November 22, 2004 08:52 AM